Reflections of Healing Narratives

This narrative discusses research illustrating how writing assists patients in healing from both emotional and physical pain. An English professor and physical therapist collaborated to design a survey that uses writing prompts to assess goal setting for physical therapy patients. Advice for patients, such as keeping a pain journal of symptoms to share with a medical professional, demonstrates how writing helps the healing process while leading to collaboration between a patient and the medical team.

Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic

Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic is a public writing course that was developed in response to an institutional call for a Public Pandemic Teaching Initiative in Summer 2020, which asked faculty to consider how this moment of radical disruption might inform our teaching and deepen our understanding of the relationship between writing, resilience, and response. The course provides a set of complementary, public-facing modules that offer teachers, community partners, and writers the tools to both write about and respond to writing about trauma. The resources, writing prompts, and activities draw from activities we have used in our undergraduate and graduate writing classrooms as well as our interdisciplinary research interests. Together, they support participants in addressing trauma from three perspectives: composing personal healing narratives; framing their personal inquiries within a larger research context; and positioning themselves within the larger community response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Public writing courses, such as Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic, demonstrate how interdisciplinary collaboration and accessible platforms can provide meaningful institutional responses during times of public health crises.

Being an Addict and Healing: Narratives and Practices in A Gospel Rehabilitation Center

As a social problem, addiction is especially troublesome in the southwestern border areas of China. This research explores how they became addicts and how to deal with it based on six months of ethnographic research in a gospel rehabilitation center in Yunnan. In rationality analysis and discussion, personal choices of drug users arc often held accountable. However > it is necessary to take the geographic factor and historical background into consideration when reflecting on their way of being addicted. Besides? this study would > through personal narratives of drug addicts? attempt to introduce the irrationality factor of desire to analyze from the perspective of the subjects how their drug use experience is related to the society through desires. And then, by using participant observation of their daily practices in the center, this study makes an in-depth exploration of how such desires arc handled through healing treatment at the Gospel Rehabilitation Center. And how they through healing practices to realize rebirth.

Becoming a Yam: Healing Narratives as Political Resistance in the Time of COVID-19

COVID-19 created a crisis that forced people to deal with the social, emotional, personal, and interpersonal impact of the virus in the United States. Simultaneously, Black people continued to be murdered and victimized by systemic racism and social injustice. Choosing wellness, self-recovery, and self-care during the global pandemonium surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic serves as an act of political resistance in the face of oppression and violence. The purpose of this essay is to explore the authors’ embodied uses of personal narratives centering the work sisters of the yam: black women and self-recovery, feminist theory, and African-centered social work paradigms as coping strategies and healing work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

How We Heal: Genealogical Narratives of Healing among San Lázaro Devotees

Healing is the basis of belief in San Lázaro, a popular saint among Cubans, Cuban-Americans, and other Latinx peoples. Stories about healing, received through faith in San Lázaro, are typically passed on through family members, rendering them genealogical narratives of healing. In this photo essay, the author draws on her maternal grandmother’s devotion to San Lázaro and explores how other devotees of this saint create genealogical narratives of healing that are passed down from generation to generation. These genealogical narratives of healing function as testaments to the efficaciousness of San Lázaro’s healing abilities and act as familial avenues through which younger generations inherit belief in the saint. Using interview excerpts and ethnographic observations conducted at Rincón de San Lázaro church in Hialeah, Florida, the author locates registers of lo cotidiano, the everyday practices of the mundane required for daily functions and survival, and employs arts-based methods such as photography, narrative inquiry, and thematic poetic coding to show how the stories that believers tell about San Lázaro, and their experiences of healing through faith in the saint, constitute both genealogical narratives of healing and genealogical healing narratives where testimonies become a type of narrative medicine.

Disability Liberation Theology

This chapter considers the ways images of disability liberation might reimagine the question of how we should live as people with disabilities. To do so, it offers a version of disability liberation theology that draws together the visual iconography of the mid-twentieth-century civil and human liberation movements and the theological tradition of the Catholic Marian tradition. To support this explication of disability liberation theology, the chapter reviews the history of liberty as a sociopolitical concept, the cultural work of images, the disability theology critique of Biblical healing narratives, the critique of a medical model of disability, disability liberation theology, and care ethics. The chapter concludes by putting forward images of interdependent bodily care in the early Marian tradition as potentially liberatory and a possible guide to disability justice. By portraying acts of bodily care as sacred rituals, these images suggest a theoretical armature to consider intimate body care as an affirmation rather than a diminishment of human dignity.