Week 1
Notes on Chapter 1 of “The Wounded Storytellers”
"Colonization was central to the achievement of modernist medicine."
Modernist instead of modern medicine
“the diversity of suffering be reduced by a unifying general view, which is precisely that of clinical medicine.” ”created a benevolent form of colonialism."
"benefits were immediate and its cost was not yet apparent. The colonization of experience was judged worth the cure, or the attempted cure. But illnesses have shifted from the acute to the chronic, and self-awareness has shifted."
"Feminist health activists are a major exception. Susan Bell writes about the attempts by members of the Cambridge Women’s Community Health Center (WCHC) to change the role played by women who were recruited by Harvard Medical School to serve as paid “pelvic models” for medical students to learn to perform gynecological examinations."
"Anthony Giddens describes the contemporary self “as a reflexive project, for which the individual is responsible.”23 The notion of the self as a reflexive project echoes Socrates’ advocacy of the examined life, but Socrates was speaking to an elite, and how far he advocated changing one’s life as a result of self-examination is debatable. The modernist responsibility that Giddens refers to has its epigram in the famous line of the poet Rilke, “You must change your life.”24 Modernity is premised on people’s capacity to change their lives; philosophical self-examination becomes a practical challenge. Giddens’s “reflexive project” describes people taking up Rilke’s challenge."
"In postmodern times the reflexive project of self can yield two different sorts of identities, contrasted by Zygmunt Bauman to suggest developments that are either more or less responsible. The line of self-development that I understand as less responsible gives rise to what Bauman calls “‘momentary’ identities, identities ‘for today’, until-further-notice identities.”25 Such a self is primarily responsible to itself; its responsibilities are limited to the sphere of its own perceived self-interest. This sphere may include others, but these others are included “until further notice.” The alternative form of postmodern self—though it is hardly unique to postmodern times—is described in Bauman’s summary of the moral philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas: “I being for the Other, I bearing responsibility for the Other.”26 Since defining the self in terms of responsibility for the other is the core ethical impulse in most religions, the parable of the Good Samaritan being one of the most succinct examples, what news is there"
"Parsons’s sick role articulated the modernist requirement that ill persons delegate responsibility for their health to physicians;" " According to modernist universalism, the greatest responsibility to all patients is achieved when the professional places adherence to the profession before the particular demands of any individual patient."
"Ill people still surrender their bodies to medicine, but increasingly they try to hold onto their own stories." "The status of personal responsibility is a central moral issue for postmodernity."
Telling stories of illness is the attempt, instigated by the body’s disease, to give a voice to an experience that medicine cannot describe.
As a post-colonial voice, the storyteller seeks to reclaim her own experience of suffering.
"A constant theme of social theory is contingency, interpreted as the problem of how stable a course of action can be when this action depends on, but cannot control, some other action."
"My project in clinical ethics is to move ethicists and practitioners in the direction of thinking with stories: to help professionals to recognize ill persons’ stories and all they represent." "I seek to situate both clinical ethics and social science within a more general ethics of the body."
" Thus I retell stories and then, like a good modernist, place them into analytical frameworks. My defense for this procedure is that in times when we have lost the premodern feel for stories, heuristic frameworks can help to hear them. Frameworks can disentangle types of narratives; they can help in recognizing what basic life concerns are being addressed and how the story proclaims a certain relation of the body to the world. The frameworks are not the truth of the stories, which is how modernism often presented its typologies. The frameworks I present are only a means of heightening attention to stories that are their own truth."
" One of our most difficult duties as human beings is to listen to the voices of those who suffer."
Week 2
Click on the snail to start listening.
Not functional anymore - go to week 3
Week 3
Click on the snail to start listening.
Week 4
Emailed the professor the written response.
Week 5
Realtime sound design on the web to allow for an dynamic sound sculpturing system.
Cookies not working in the i-frame. Go to https://peusodre.github.io/HourlyPulses/ to be able to save your pulses and play then back.
Use the selector to pick a sound and save to a specific time. Do it a couple times and then play the piece of your day.
Week 6
Lynda Barry’s Drawing Workshop - Two examples:
Draw yourself as a fruit
Draw yourself as an astronaut
Week 7
Inspired by the graphic novel “Anxiety Is Really Strange” I decided to create a tool that would help me connect to the sensations of anxiety in a new way while using the computer.
The system is a sequential guided breathing practice in which shapes, colors and text get chosen by chance as a tool to create a safe and engaging environment for grounding practice.
“An emotion is basically your brain’s way of making sense of the sensory changes that are going on inside your body in relation to what is going on around you in the world” - Lisa Feldman Barret
“Grounding is the first tool, put down some roots and wake your body up”
“Try to make your out-breaths long, slow and gentle. The key to grounding is not trying to breath deep. Ignore the in-breath and try to breathe slow. Add a low humming sound as you breathe out to help you feel more.”
Design choices:
The elements change in random intervals - max of 30 seconds - which functions as a way to reestablish focus on the exercise.
The system was designed with the intention to promote a sense of awareness in the user experience of their on body and the surroundings
The breathing pattern is a pretty slow one. By changing shapes, color and text over time the user is able to experience unique sequences that lead into different bodily sensations