Health Humanities Grand Rounds: “I am Not My Disease”: Visual Storytelling in South Africa and Eswatini

Please join HHIVE and Carolina Seminars for our first Health Humanities Grand Rounds event of the semester.

Health Humanities Grand Rounds with Paul Blom: “I am Not My Disease”: Visual Storytelling in South Africa and Eswatini

Paul Blom is a third-year PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. His research focuses on twentieth-century American literature and its intersection with health humanities, especially literary trauma studies. He is currently a TA for ENGL268: Medicine, Literature, and Culture, serves as a fiction editor for The Carolina Quarterly, and writes scripts for promotional videos and short narrative or documentary films.

About the Talk: The medium of visual storytelling has always been a powerful catalyst for change. In this talk, Paul Blom will discuss his work from this past summer (and previous summers) co-teaching a Yale University study-abroad course in South Africa and Swaziland (now renamed Eswatini). This interdisciplinary course combines traditional epidemiological methods with visual storytelling (with a healthy sampling of public health concepts and a touch of literary theory), culminating in the production of short narrative and documentary films. These films aspire to prioritize hopeful messages of personhood, transcending traditional medical narratives of disease and illness, and the principles behind the course aspire toward more positive and person-focused messaging to empower individuals and catalyze change.