Vital Sites: Ecologies of Crisis in Narratives of Illness

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The advent of COVID-19 saw the public rapidly coming to terms with illness as a spatial andenvironmental matter. Access to greener environments became desirable, and our porous, permeablelives were exposed to new conditions of viral intimacy. Aligned with such thinking, this project aims todeepen our understanding of how contemporary illness narratives might shed light on this connection.The key questions that underpin this inquiry are: what difference would it make if the medicalhumanities thought of health crises in ecological, rather than individual, terms? How would the studyof illness narratives be different? How would the study of trauma be different? How do narrativesrespond to crisis as well as express crisis? These questions shake up current thinking systems thatdeclare a fixed separation between illness and the wider world. Some secondary questions include: howmight illness narratives offer interpretive frameworks for reading crisis as something that implicatesboth human and nonhuman life-worlds? What can human crisis narratives tell us about nonhumancrises? What does a "prismatic" health space look like?