(Co)Figurations of Care: Experience and Infrastructure in the Medical Humanities

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The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the notion that only medical knowledge is conducive to health, foregrounding the urgent necessity to rethink the entanglements between body, environment, infrastructure, culture, and governmentality. In this biopolitical environment, public medical knowledge should include and prioritize patients’ lived experiences of illness at different scales (familial, national, global) and intensities (death, loss, long-term effects of an unprecedented disease). Thus, patient vulnerabilities bring into consideration the complex web of relations between humans and built/natural environments & spaces. As vulnerabilities in medical access and treatment become more visible, so does the importance of architecture in facilitating health. There emerges a need to break down the scale of design in response to the mobility of sick bodies and to environmental elements such as air and light.

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Thursday, April 7th: Virtual Roundtable

When: 4:00 – 5:30 p.m. Eastern

Where: via Zoom

What: One of our principal events this spring, this roundtable will discuss care and its multiple and diverse configurations. In the context of this event, care ranges from looking after a patient, to being attuned to the needs of the self and its surroundings, to reorganizing the built medical environment. We invited speakers whose work reflects on the biopolitical management of health, medical spatial organization, and personal or fictional narratives of care. Our roundtable will discuss how visual art, architecture, and medical technologies can produce, contest, configure and disseminate spatial and embodied forms of knowledge, and call attention to care.

This roundtable brings together healthcare, architecture, literature and visual arts in an interdisciplinary approach. Some topics we hope to cover include:

  • Forms and technologies of care
  • Vulnerability
  • Health and/or medical humanities
  • How literary imagination informs care and health
  • Cure vs. Care
  • Health and Architecture
  • Geographical and/or local inputs in design

Our Speakers:

Anna Ulrikke Andersen

Anna Andersen headshotAnna Ulrikke Andersen is a Norwegian architectural historian and filmmaker, currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Disobedient Buildings project University of Oxford and junior research fellow at Wolfson College. She holds a PhD in architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture, where she looked at the window in the life and work of Christian Norberg-Schulz resulting in the book Following Norberg-Schulz: An Architectural History through the Essay Film (2022) published by Bloomsbury Publishing. In 2018/2019 she held a Fellowship at Harvard Film Study Center, where she began exploring filmmaking, sculpture, and essay writing as methods to investigate the architecture experienced by people living with chronic illness. The project was recently selected for a fellowship at Future Architecture, European Architecture programme 2021, leading to the exhibition Chronic Conditions: Body and Building (October 12th – December 11th, 2021), commissioned and organised by Lisbon Architecture Triennale. In 2022-2023, Andersen will continue to develop this project within the institutional framework of ROM for kunst og arkitektur in Oslo.  Find out more on her website: https://annaulrikkeandersen.com/

Abstract: “An A to X of Chronic Illness: patients’ architectural histories (an incomplete guide)” is an ongoing a research project by filmmaker and architectural historian Anna Ulrikke Andersen (University of Oxford), consisting of a series of short films and written essays looking at the way people who live with chronic illness experience place and buildings. With a starting point in a governmentally funded rehabilitation programme for Norwegian people living with chronic rheumatic illness, this project travels through a series of spaces involved in treatment: from exercise bike in western Norway, through an inflatable bathtub in London, a medical library at Harvard, a beach in Puerto Rico, a port in Italy and a treatment facility in Montenegro.

The project builds on the theoretical framework of Jos Boys, who in Doing Disability Differently (2014) argues that the disabled body should be the starting point, rather than an afterthought in architectural design and discourse. She argues that the disabled body itself has a critical potential, in the way that people who lives with disabilities constantly navigate a built environment filled with hurdles. Framed by a personal narrative shaped by chronic conditions, and first-hand accounts from other patients, Andersen uses the essay form in film and writing to write an architectural history that challenges the idea that the architecture of chronic illness is something fixed, sterile, and stable.

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MK Czerwiec

MK Czweriec heashotMK Czerwiec, RN, MA is a nurse, cartoonist, educator, and co-founder of the field of Graphic Medicine. She is the creator of Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 (Graphic Mundi, 2021), a co-author of Graphic Medicine Manifesto (PSU Press, 2014) and editor of the two-time Eisner Award winning Menopause: A Comic Treatment (Graphic Mundi, 2021). MK is also the comics editor for the journal Literature and Medicine. MK regularly teaches graphic medicine at Northwestern Medical School, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois Medical School, and the University of Chicago. She is an Artist-in-Residence at Northwestern’s Center for Medical Humanities and Bioethics. She has served as a Senior Fellow of the George Washington School of Nursing Center for Health Policy and Media Engagement, and a Will Eisner Fellow in Applied Cartooning at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT. You can see more of her work at www.comicnurse.com.

Abstract: “Graphic Medicine” is a term that has come to have many meanings in the past ten years. Initially it was coined to refer to the intersection of the medium of comics and the discourse of health, illness, disability, and caregiving. But beyond that, especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, graphic medicine has emerged as a vibrant, diverse, supportive, and far-flung community of support and care. MK Czerwiec, a founding board member of the Graphic Medicine International Collective and co-manager of the Graphic Medicine website, will discuss the ways in which comics can function as a medium of care.

Resources:

Victoria Lupascu

Victoria's headshotVictoria Lupascu is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her research interests comprise 20th and 21st century Chinese, Romanian, and Brazilian literature and film, medical humanities, and visual culture. Her work explores how writers, directors and artists engage with and produce medical narratives to unveil hidden histories of cultural, economic and social disposability.  She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals, such as Humanities, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), and in edited collections such as The Portrait of an Artist as a Pathographer: On Writing Illnesses and Illnesses in Writing.

Abstract: Where do we go when hospitals and care facilities are closed? What do we do when sick during a state of emergency that makes medical care extremely limited? These two questions will guide my presentation as it analyzes visual representations of care availability or lack thereof during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. My analysis is comparative in thinking about medical infrastructures from North America to Eastern Europe to Asia at the intersection of traditions of health care and biopolitics.

As hospitals across the world became overcrowded and went above capacity, patients with less severe forms of illness caused by the corona virus had to isolate at home for 14 days or more. While care is a relational concept and, according to most definitions, manifests itself through and within multilayered networks, the two-week period of quarantine at home (with or without family) during the first few waves of the pandemic without professional medical support challenges our theoretical, material and ethical understanding of this concept. I explore personal and fictional visual narratives of care that brought about these challenges and argue that isolation, as a political and medical concept and reality, is an integral, yet negative, part of our conceptualization of care, despite its discursive absence.

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Moderator:

Merve Şen is a dual-title Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature and Visual Studies. Through different media, her research is focused on thinking about health, specifically hospitals, beyond biopolitical machines, as a practice of becoming with and worlding (health) and as a landscape of care (hospital) across species. She is also a member of the Liberal Arts Collective (LAC) and the Vice President of Graduates in International Languages and Literatures (GILL).