Stories of Health/Care ‘from the Field’

The RIT Center for Engaged Storycraft invites you to the first in a series of events addressing Stories of Health/Care in Practice.  Featured guest lecturers– comics artist and massage therapist, Kriota Willberg, and public health humanities and narrative medicine researcher, Rebecca Garden, Ph.D – will each give a lecture/reading on their expansive research and creative thinking about stories of health/care ‘in the field.’  Kriota Willberg will read from her latest graphic narrative, Silver Wire, exploring the entangled history of sewing and surgery for women, as discovered in the New York Academy of Medicine Library during her 2017 fellowship there, and she will discuss her interdisciplinary practices as a comic artist and years as a massage therapist at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NYC.Rebecca Garden, Ph.D. will give a talk on “Field Work: Deaf Refugee Farmers, Literature, and Public Health Humanities,” which explores the ways that insights from literature—specifically Kao Kalia Yang’s autobiographical writing on her own and her family’s experiences as refugees—can illuminate understandings of public health and health/care. She discusses the ways these insights impact both her teaching, as Associate Professor of Public Health and Preventative Medicine at SUNY Upstate Medical Center, and her advocacy within her community, including working on a farm at the urban edge with deaf Bhutanese New Americans.Lectures will be followed by discussion and a Q & A session.  Interpreters will be on site for the event.