Stories of Sport, Disability, Rehabilitation, presentations by Brett Smith, Arthur Frank

Toronto Rehab and Toronto Rehabilitation Institute Research Department
and Spiritual Care Services

PRESENT

Dr. Brett Smith, PhD
Qualitative Research Unit
School of Sport and Health Sciences
University of Exeter

Dr. Brett Smith’s research interests revolve around the
psycho-social dimensions of spinal cord injury and
stories of disability. He is the co-editor of the journal
Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise, and has
published extensively in a variety of medical, psychology,
and sociology journals.

Encountering Chaos: Exploring Responses to
a Spinal Cord Injury Narrative

Monday, April 27, 2009

12:00 - 1:00pm
Class Room A and B
Lyndhurst Centre
520 Sutherland Drive, Toronto

When Bodies Need Narratives: The Case of Becoming
Disabled Through Sport

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

12:00 - 1:00pm
Lecture Theatre
University Centre
550 University Avenue, Toronto


Dr. Arthur W. Frank
Department of Sociology
University of Calgary

Arthur Frank is a Professor of Sociology at the University of
Calgary and during 2008-09 has been visiting Professor
in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at University
of Toronto. The core of his work is the study of illness
experience. His first book, At the Will of the Body, is the
story of his own illnesses and won the annual writers’
award from the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship
in the US. His second book, The Wounded Storyteller,
sets out a framework of illness narratives that has been
taken up by many researchers, including Brett Smith and
Andrew Sparkes. His most recent book, The Renewal of
Generosity, won the 2008 annual medal in bioethics from
the Royal Society of Canada. His current projects include
SSHRC-funded research on people’s use of information
and communications technology in doing health work,
and also a CIHR-funded project on moral distress among
workers in pediatric intensive care units.

Wounded Storytellers and Since: Lessons from the Last
Fifteen Years, Especially about Rehabilitation

Friday, April 24, 2009

12:00 - 1:00pm
Lecture Theatre
University Centre
550 University Avenue, Toronto

If you have any questions, please contact Jim Huth, Ethics and Spiritual Care at
416-597-3422, ext. 3716.Toronto Rehabilitation Institute

Nutritional Science, Educator/Dietitian Ventures Across Borders with New Book

We were pleased to receive news today about Jacqui Gringras, Ph.D, RD and her recently released book "Longing for Recognition", York, UK: Raw Nerve Books.

"Longing for Recognition offers a radical new way of understanding nutritional health practices. In contemporary food culture, the work of dietitians has accrued new and urgent meaning, and "Longing for Recognition" is addressed to that group of practitioners. The author, herself a dietitian, crafts an autoethnographic fiction that presents a critical and thought-provoking argument for a more self-reflexive, relational, and embodied profession. Her compelling narrative draws the reader into its timely call for rethinking what counts as knowledge in
dietetic education. "Longing for Recognition" will be invaluable for dietitians and other health care professionals who wish to enhance their practice as one that considers first and foremost what it means to be human."

Jacqui's progressive research engages autoethnographic, phenomenological and arts informed methods as a means for understanding dietetic theory, education and practice. She has also taught courses at Ryerson University School of Nutrition, among them, "The Art of Storytelling: Advances in Nutrition Counselling Practice." CM




Information about this book

OnTheRoadMedia Penetrating Journalism, Stunning Simplicity, Stories for Change

Photo from OnTheRoad Media site C. McLean

Yesterday I received an email from Laura Lo Forti requesting a subscription for The Canadian Creative Arts and Health Training and Education Journal. As I often do, I checked out the website information provided and found myself at the site of "OnTheRoadMedia" the multi media production and storytelling team founded by Lo Forti and photojournalist Justin Mott.

Laura Lo Forti is an Italian freelance journalism and multi media producer based in New York and is involved in several compelling digital storytelling projects designed to empower

disadvantaged communities. Justin Mott is a photojournalist who currently resides in Hanoi Vietnam. His personal assignments have been featured in "Time", "Newsweek" and "The New York Times". Also part of this progressive media team is Ehrin Macksey who helps handle multi media design for OnTheRoadMedia.

There are three powerful examples of projects available to view at the website;

"Third Generation Agent Orange", "4 Monks and a Baby", "Facing a Wall Nu's Story".

Breaking through the modern day "info overload" with raw and stunning simplicity, this talented team of young and progressive artist journalists have brought to light those stories that seldom have a voice. Moving black and white photography, superb sound production quality reflecting the sounds of the people places and environments, simple facts and statements in white print against a black backdrop drive the story powerfully forward....clean outstanding communicating, cuts to the heart of it. This work can be painful to witness but it is hopeful work. Digital storytelling at its best opening the road for social change. CM

Check out the website here:

See Justin Mott's photoblog .

Narrative and Story Featured in Canadian Creative Arts in Health, Training and Education Journal

Photo by C. McLean "Reclamation"

Cheryl McLean

Dr. Rita Charon, Director of Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, an internist and literary theorist, writes; “I realized that the narrative skills I was learning in my English studies made me a better doctor. I could listen to what my patients tell me with a greater ability to follow the narrative thread of their story, to recognize the governing images and metaphors, to adopt the patients’ or family members point of view, to identify the sub-texts present in all stories…any doctor, any medical student can improve his or her capacity for empathy, reflection and professionalism through serious narrative methods of study in reading, writing, reflecting and bearing witness to one another’s ordeals.”

We published an article in the September 2006 issue of The Canadian Creative Arts in Health, Training and Education Journal "The Poetry of Practice" written by Maureen Rappaport MD FCCFP, McGill University, Montreal Quebec. She writes about the creative writing course she teaches as an elective to fourth year medical students. The group was created to help offer a safe place for students to express their feelings about their experiences with patients in the hospital. In the article Rappaport writes, "one cannot watch death and suffering and not be touched but these feelings are hard to express, hard to articulate and many times impossible to acknowledge as students run around the hospital not quite sure of what they're supposed to do as student doctors. Poetry offers a language to express the inexpressible. For those who wrote, shared and listened in this context, these moments of bearing witness became medical acts."

In the book “Grief and the Healing Arts” and the chapter, “To Know of Suffering and Teaching of Empathy” by Sandra Bertman and Melvin J. Krant, it is also suggested that creative literature such as fiction and poetry may help “promote a humanistic or empathetic grasp of the hurt and pain that often accompanies illness”.

Narrative and story can offer a place to communicate those difficult thoughts and feelings that may have few other channels for expression. This also holds true for the stories of the caregiver or patient advocate. In our September 07 issue of CCAHTE , we featured an article written by Jadranka Novosel (CCAHTE Publisher's Student Support Program Feature Story pg. 26 - 32).

Jadranka Novosel was 29 when her husband David, 33 years old, died of terminal cancer. She expresses her feelings in the article;

"My entire identity as "the wife of a terminal cancer patient" was gone. My other "selves" as student and employee I had let slip long before. I was an empty shell without the luxury of being dead."

Through this powerful narrative Jadranka Novosel chose to share her personal story with the world as an act of love, recounting her personal experience, as she had lived it, to help others.

She closes with the words,

"in the end, the joy, hope and exuberance I credited to my husband remains alive in me. That I choose to remain is my legacy and the greatest love story of all."

Hope lives through the power of story. Through our work with The Canadian Creative Arts in Health, Training and Education Journal there is perhaps no greater goal than to provide an opportunity for a worldwide community to join in the circle and bear witness to the universally human stories we publish, to offer these stories a place and to help in our way to make the inexpressible, expressible.

Full article is available to read at:

http://cmclean.com

September 06 CCAHTE issue

Subscribe free at ccahte@cmclean.com "please subscribe"

Life Writing and Translations theme for International Auto/Biography Association Conference

IABA International Auto/Biography Association Conference

Honolulu, Hawaii

June 23 to 26, 2008

Life Writing and Translations

Call for Papers Deadline November l, 2007

The Center for Biographical Research and the International Auto/Biography Association invites scholars from around the world to attend the sixth IABA conference, which will be held at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu.

The theme for this conference is Life Writing and Translations, in the widest sense of the term. We welcome papers dealing with the following kinds of translation, and others as well

• Linguistic­-Accounts of language acquisition, and their relation to senses of identity, of relations with others, of community, of separateness.

• Immigrant life writing narratives, Indigenous peoples and life writing, Poly-lingual texts, polyphonic and heteroglossic, texts, the translation of life writing texts from one language to another.

• Generic­-Life writing texts from one literary, artistic,disciplinary, technological, or rhetorical form to another.

Papers can deal with representing peoples’ lives in any medium­...film, graphic, text,writing, image, performance. They can examine the adaptation of one representational form to another ­from book to film, from film to musical, from orature to literature, from page to stage to page, from popular confession to autoethnography, multi-generic works, ­online life writing, incorporating visual, aural, and textual dimensions, or performance works, combining presence and representation in several media.

Papers should be limited to fifteen minutes in length, to insure time in all sessions for questions and full discussion. Panels on a single topic and submitted together are welcome.

Abstracts can be submitted by mail or fax to:

IABA Conference Call for Papers , c/o The Center for Biographical Research, Department of English, 1733 Donaggho Road, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822 USA Fax number: 1-808-956-3774

e-mail: biograph@hawaii.edu

Organizer: Professor Craig Howes
Department of English
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
1733 Donaghho Road, Honolulu
Hawai'i 96822, USA
Email: craighow@hawaii.edu or biograph@hawaii.edu
Tel: 808-956-3774
Fax: 808-956-3774

Website: http://www.iaba.org.cn/conference.htm

Narrative Matters Conference 08 Call for Papers and Presentations

Narrative Matters 2008: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Narrative Research, Perspectives, Practices and Issues

"Storying our World"

May 7-10, 2008

University of Toronto

Call for Papers and Presentations

Deadline: September 30, 2007

"As humans we continually story our experiences. We construct our world through our personal, community, institutional and political narratives. The 2008 Narrative Matters conference theme aims to explore all of these narrative sites. Narrative continues to gain recognition as something people do, use and research. The Narrative Matters conference provides a meeting place for people interested in doing, using and researching narrative in diverse contexts and fields. The blurring and crossing of boundaries catalyzes discussion and inquiry at Narrative Matters conferences. We invite proposals for papers, presentations or participatory sessions on a variety of topics around the practice, use and research of narrative."

For more information see website: http://www.narrativematters.com/

(info. above excerpt from website)