Imagining New Normals

How can individuals live well in the midst of inescapable trauma and illness? What symbolic and material resources foster resiliency among individuals facing vulnerable circumstances?

Imagining New Normals: A Narrative Framework for Health Communication engages these questions and positions narratives as central to human survival and social change. Storytelling reflects the narrative impulse and is a powerful form of experiencing and expressing suffering and loss. Acute and chronic illnesses represent corporeal and social threats to a person's previously imagined life course. Patients, healthcare providers and activists alike rely on storytelling to make sense of expectations gone awry and imagine new normals.

Imagining New Normals:

• Is not about sickness, although many people who populate its pages have experienced treatment and what remains in the aftermath.
• Uses narratives from an explicitly broad vantage point, casting a wide net that incorporates autobiographical stories, cultural scripts, institutional plots, and the process of storytelling to examine health communication.
• Frames storytelling as a relational, poetic and political process of identity construction
• Embraces the storytelling capacities of various aesthetic forms (e.g. visual imagery, choreography, music)
• Explores the intermingling of narrative and scientific logics in diagnostic work
• Highlights innovative clinical communication practices
• Tracks personal narratives in public health-related information, entertainment and activist rhetoric
• Juxtaposes the therapeutic potential and limits of storytelling in virtual and face-to-face communities
• Raises ethical considerations for narrative practice and research