Drawing on my experiences at a teaching-focused university, I show how locating the health humanities in first-year or introductory composition courses improves learning and offers an economical, flexible, and far-reaching approach to bringing a health humanities education to all baccalaureate-level learners, regardless of whether they aspire to careers in the health professions. In terms of improving learning, health humanities composition courses support the disciplinary aims of both fields. Accessible, relevant issues in the health humanities, such as interventions in health debates or representations of illness and healthcare settings, nourish the cognitive and social conditions needed to develop college-level writing skills. The health humanities' emphases on interdisciplinarity and suspending judgment also inform students' writing abilities. Composition trains students to write rhetorically by considering purpose, context, genre, mode, and other factors when addressing an audience. This approach to writing helps pre-health humanists communicate intentionally and compassionately about health topics as well as the larger issues they call into question. Because students enroll in health humanities composition courses at an early, formative moment in their studies, they are poised to carry or "transfer" their knowledge to other courses, including those that might prepare them for the workforce.
In this essay, I call on scientific persona and autobiographical discourse theory to examine Dr. Sara Josephine Baker’s 1939 autobiography Fighting for Life. Through this framework, I consider how Baker and other U.S. women health professionals conceived of individual identity and collective persona during the early twentieth century. Baker helped to revolutionise well-baby and well-child care in the U.S., and in Fighting for Life, she relates the genesis and evolution of her pathbreaking work. Like her contemporaries, Baker was engaged in the research, practice, teaching, and administration of medicine and public health. Presently, scientific persona has been theorized as a conglomerate of dispositions, practices, and characteristics that are associated with scholar-practitioners of the human and natural sciences; it therefore offers a novel lens for the individual and collective fashioning of women health professionals like Baker whose work traversed disciplines and institutions. By considering how Fighting for Life, as autobiography, facilitates Baker’s conception of self and persona, I show that Baker adopts prevailing personae for women health professionals as well as women working in other fields. At the same time, she also emphasizes why and how these models transform in actual practice. Thus, scientific personae tend to emerge as subtle variations of previous forms, but Baker’s autobiography also bears witness to the rise of new personae for women health professionals, as demonstrated by her radical reconfiguration of expert knowledge and scientific motherhood.
Tettegah, S. Y., & Garcia, Y. E. (Eds.). (2016). Emotions, Technology, and Health. London: Elsevier. Sharon Y. Tettegah and Yolanda Evie Garcia's collection Emotions, Technology, and Health surveys how technologies "old" (e.g., photographs, the telephone) and "new" (e.g., mobile apps, robots, sensors) "mediate" patients' emotions within the context of processes, individuals, and spaces part of, adjacent to, or outside of the clinical healthcare setting (p. xvii). The collection also explores technology's mediation of practitioner and caregiver emotions. Overall, Tettegah and Garcia hope to expand the notion of "telehealth" beyond the remote or virtual delivery of health services to something that also encompasses "technology-based interventions in hospitals and other treatment settings that do not include distance as a necessary component" (p. xv).
Using social media to construct a digital, professional presence for the job search is a necessity in today's labor market. Millennials are skilled in using social media for personal purposes but cannot immediately intuit how to use familiar social media outlets in professional contexts. Writing instructors can guide students in enacting an online, professional presence through digitally mediated communication practices that increasingly are seen as valuable in the workplace. Instead of training students away from using “textese,” instructors should help students develop an abbreviated writing style that is strategic, consistent, and responsive to the needs of their audience. Twitter is the best social media platform in which to help students achieve these learning goals. This chapter provides readers with a description of a capstone, problem-based learning assignment in which students use Twitter to market their professional selves, network, and improve their digital workplace writing skills.
American Studies is an interdisciplinary field that has ties to literary studies and other disciplines, notably history, anthropology, sociology, and religious studies. Health humanists use American Studies methods to explore how representations of illness, health, and healthcare construct and are constructed by notions of nation, national character, and citizenship, not only as they relate to the US nation-state, but also to other conceptions of America. For this reason, health humanist projects guided by American Studies can identify the processes through which embodied selves exert or are subject to power. While American Studies methods encourage intervention in matters of social injustice, they also may reduce the individual, subjective experience of embodiment to a means to an interpretive end.
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