Vital Sites: Ecologies of Crisis in Narratives of Illness

新冠肺炎的出现让公众很快将疾病视为一个空间和环境问题。进入更绿色的环境变得令人向往，我们漏洞百出的、可渗透的生命暴露在病毒亲密的新条件下。与这种思维相一致，这个项目旨在加深我们对当代疾病叙事如何揭示这种联系的理解。支撑这一研究的关键问题是：如果医学人文学科从生态而不是个人的角度来思考健康危机，会有什么不同？对疾病叙事的研究会有什么不同？创伤的研究会有什么不同？叙事者在表达危机的同时，如何应对危机？这些问题动摇了当前的思维体系，这些体系宣称疾病与更广泛的世界之间存在着固定的区别。一些次要的问题包括：疾病叙事如何提供解释框架，将危机解读为既涉及人类生活世界，又涉及非人类生活世界的东西？关于非人类的崛起，人类危机的叙述能告诉我们什么？一个“棱柱状”的健康空间是什么样的？

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?