Brave Space-Making

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