From "Small Stories" to "Communities of Care" With/In Narratives of Illness and Death

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SMALLCOMM explores how narratives of illness, death and bereavement are located at the intersection of community networks and narrativized by communities. How do communities narrate experiences of illness and death? What does community mean in this context-who and what is involved, and how? What narrative forms, structures and practices emerge? How do these narratives engage with and depart from larger cultural scripts? What are the wider cultural and theoretical implications of approaching illness and death narratives as a community practice? Focusing on the notion of 'communities of care' -complex human and non-human networks based on relational, reciprocal and emancipative affective practices- SMALLCOMM seeks to understand not only how these communities are built and how illness, dying and death may be mis/understood through narrative, but also how narrative shapes and mobilises practical responses to experiences of pain, loss and grief. SMALLCOMM contributes to a growing body of scholarship on illness narrative that seeks to account for greater complexity (of experience as well as of narrative form and context): (i) bringing death studies in to dialogue with critical medical humanities; (ii) focusing on the narrative products and practices of communities; (iii) developing a new analytical framework for collective narratives. It employs a mixed-method approach: (a) A hermeneutical-phenomenological study explores social and affective interactions, and the tension between experientiality and interpretation, in a selection of literary and visual narratives of illness and death (2014-2022); (b) A qualitative study using reading/writing workshops (built on narrative medicine and participatory design methods) addresses the ways in which people have come collectively to articulate difficult experiences of illness and death. Two groups will be recruited across different communities in Durham and Paris to bring a comparative and cross-cultural dimension to the research.