Monday, January 14
Reading: Ward, Jesmyn. Chapters 1-4 from Sing, Unburied, Sing. New York: Scribner, 2017.
To commemorate One Book, One Philadelphia--The Free Library of Philadelphia's signature event--the Health Humanities Reading Group will be discussing this year's chosen book: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. One Book, One Philadelphia is an annual event that promotes literacy, library usage, and citywide conversation by encouraging the entire greater Philadelphia area to come together through reading and discussing a single book. The 2017 National Book Award winner Sing, Unburied, Sing is an American road novel about a family's journey from their Gulf Coast town to the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
Our January 14 discussion will pay special attention to Chapter 4 (Leonie). This chapter addresses the following themes: the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, prison violence, the use of plants and herbs for healing.
Monday, January 28, 12-1 p.m.
Reading: Ward, Jesmyn. Sing, Unburied, Sing. New York: Scribner, 2017.
To commemorate One Book, One Philadelphia--The Free Library of Philadelphia's signature event--the Health Humanities Reading Group will be discussing this year's chosen book: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. One Book, One Philadelphia is an annual event that promotes literacy, library usage, and citywide conversation by encouraging the entire greater Philadelphia area to come together through reading and discussing a single book. The 2017 National Book Award winner Sing, Unburied, Sing is an American road novel about a family's journey from their Gulf Coast town to the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
Our January 28 discussion will cover the book, broadly, with special attention to Chapters 12 and 15. Chapter 12 (Richie) explores Richie’s vision of the land and follows Leonie into the graveyard. The novel’s title takes on its full meaning in this haunting and lyrical final chapter, Chapter 15 (Jojo).
Monday, February 4, 12-1 p.m.
Reading: Scranton, Roy. (2015). Introduction: Coming Home. In Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (pp. 13-28). San Francisco: City Lights Publishers.
Coming home from the war in Iraq, U.S. Army private Roy Scranton thought he'd left the world of strife behind. Then he watched as new calamities struck America, heralding a threat far more dangerous than ISIS or Al Qaeda: Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, mega-drought—the shock and awe of global warming.
Discussion questions:
1. Scranton describes the term and concept of the "Anthropocene." What does it mean to you to live during this (proposed) era in geological and human history? How does the idea of this era change your perspective on anything?
2. Scranton’s discussion of "learning to die" echoes our conversations last semester on death and dying, although he extends discussion of death to fossil fuel civilization as a whole. How does climate change and a changing planet affect how we might collectively understand and approach death?
Monday, February 11, 12-1 p.m.
Reading: Lemery, Jay & Auerbach, Paul. (2017). Excerpts from Enviromedics: The Impact of Climate Change on Human Health (pp. 1-5, 47-51, 133-137). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
By weighing in from a physician’s perspective, Jay Lemery and Paul Auerbach try to clarify the science, dispel the myths, and help readers understand the threats of climate change to human health. No better argument exists for persuading people to care about climate change than a close look at its impacts on our physical and emotional well-being.
Discussion Questions:
1. What do you think is (or could/should be) the role of health care practitioners in preventing and preparing for the impacts of climate change on human health?
2. Mental health: What do you think is the role of trauma-informed care in response to severe weather events, and to climate-induced migration/refugees?
Monday, February 25, 12-1 p.m.
Reading: Atwood, Margaret. (2015, July 27). It's Not Climate Change — It's Everything Change [animations by Carl Burton]. Medium.
Atwood revisits a piece of speculative writing from 2009 entitled “The Future Without Oil.” Six years later, she reflects on the potential for changing cultural values to prepare for such a future. [This piece is accompanied by pictures and animated graphics.]
Monday, March 4, 12-1 p.m.
Reading: Clare, Eli. (2017). Notes on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure. In Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory (pp. 242-267). Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press.
Writing from a disabled and genderqueer perspective, Clare draws parallels between ways that bodies are categorized as normal, abnormal, natural and unnatural, and attitudes toward the environment and biodiversity.
Monday, March 18, 12-1 p.m.
Reading 1: D’Souza, Radha. (2017). Listening to the Elders at the Keepers of the Water Gathering. In Downstream: Reimagining Water (pp. 197-206). Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Discussion question:
What do you make of the following passage from the article. How does this relate to discussions of autonomy and rights in health and health care?
“When they spoke about water, the Elders were clear that water could not be separated from land or people because their emphasis was on the relationship. Strictly speaking, therefore, they were not speaking about ‘right to water’ at all but rather about their right to reproduce the conditions of life, which was neither reducible to water or land nor separable from them.” (p. 202)
Reading 2: Robbins, Jim. (2016, March 28). Is Climate Change Putting World’s Microbiomes at Risk? Yale Environment 360.
Discussion question:
In clinical settings and in popular media, except for recent attention given to the positive role of the human intestinal microbiome, we have tended to focus on the harm of “germs” to human health. What are ways that we might reframe discussions of these unseen microbial lifeforms to emphasize the benefits—to human and other life—of a shared world that supports microbial diversity?
Monday, March 25, 12-1 p.m.
Reading: Nixon, Rob. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (pp. 1-16)
Nixon outlines his concept of “slow violence,” an incremental form of destruction that characterizes environmental degradation, economic extraction and other forms of harm that unfold gradually over time. Nixon explores how slow violence often claims impoverished communities as its victims and is perpetrated by corporate and human actors of relative wealth and power. He considers how slow violence can be made more visible through acts of representation including writing and media production.
Monday, April 1, 12-1 p.m.
Reading: Van Dooren, Thom. (2014). Mourning Crows: Grief in a Shared World. In Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (pp. 125-144). New York: Columbia University Press.
Van Dooren intimately explores what life is like for those who must live on the edge of extinction, balanced between life and oblivion, taking care of their young and grieving their dead […] No longer abstract entities with Latin names, these species become fully realized characters enmeshed in complex and precarious ways of life, sparking our sense of curiosity, concern, and accountability toward others in a rapidly changing world.
Discussion question:
Van Dooren challenges us to “come to inhabit a meaningfully shared world” (p. 140) with more-than-human life. In this article, he illustrates an example of this by exploring how “we are invited to mourn not just for crows, but with them” (p. 143). What do you make of van Dooren’s challenge and of the passage below; what role do you think grief and mourning play in the ability to connect with and care for others (both human and more-than-human life)?
“Mourning with crows is about more than any single species, or any number of individual species, but must instead be a process of relearning our place in a shared world: the evolutionary continuities and the ecological connectivities that make our lives possible at all” (p. 143-44).
