The illness narrative might arguably be the most prominent genre within medical and health humanities research, and the “narrative turn” of the 1990s certainly contributed to the rise of scholarship on stories of illness (e.g., Kleinman 1988, Frank 1995, Toombs 1992, Hunsaker Hawkins 1999). In recent years, however, the link between illness and narrative, and therefore the approach to the genre of the illness narrative, have been challenged by several scholars (e.g., Jurecic 2012, Woods 2011, 2014, Bolaki 2016, Mattingly 2000, Wasson 2018) – the so-called second wave of, or critical medical humanities research. The focus of these works has been on questioning the “chronological causality and unity” (Bolaki 2016, 6) of narratives that continue to privilege “the individual journey of a self-authoring patient” (Wasson 2018, 106) and that downplay the interpersonal, the social context, and the structural. What opens up if, instead, we turn away from this individual performance to address the communal, the collective? Continuing in the vein of a critical approach, this seminar examines the discursive landscape of illness to understand how, as communities, we narrate illness experience and to gauge how such narratives are able to “repair the relationship of individuals to their communities and to revive a commitment to citizenship” (Jurecic 2016, 18). The seminar does not suggest a prefixed understanding of what constitutes a collective illness narrative and, indeed, it welcomes a plurality of theoretical approaches to think the “collective” – we-narrative, multiperson narration, communal narration, polyphony, assemblage –; of methodologies (literary and qualitative, collaborative, and participatory); of medium and genre – textual, visual, fiction, documentary. Taking on such a multifocal approach, this seminar wishes to attend to the politics of the collective illness narrative, both stylistically and conceptually, and to think beyond exclusionary visions of “us” vs “them”, “human” vs “non-human” divides.  

Contributions could address, but are not limited to, questions such as: How do communities narrate experiences of illness? What narrative forms and practices emerge when we focus on plurality and collectivity in narrative? How does the collective narrative relate to collective action and other forms of resistance to neoliberal conceptions of illness and health? How does the collective narrative attend to non-verbality? What can decolonial and intersectional frameworks contribute to the theorization of the collective narrative? What tensions and frictions emerge within a collective narrative? How do these narratives nurture a critique of the anthropocentric bias of storytelling?

The selected presenters will be invited to submit their papers to a special issue.