The health humanities research group is united by a shared interest in the embodied human experience of health and illness. Our aim is to collaborate across our disciplines to grow our understandings of the scope and importance of the health humanities. We seek to better understand not only the discipline, but BYU’s unique role in it. As an institution sponsored by the restored Church of Jesus Christ with faculty and students who believe God speaks to us still, that the embodied human experience is essential to our eternal purposes, and with a prophet who teaches us that the body is a “priceless gift,” that “the aging process is also a gift from God, as is death” and that “we should ever revere the worth of human life, through each of its many stages,” this should mean that the health humanities look different at BYU than anywhere else, and we will spend the year exploring how.
Both health professionals and other people with bodies must learn to communicate and to cope with the experience of being embodied. One area worthy of focus at a university already known for its deep language expertise is the need for improved intercultural and multilingual communication between healthcare professionals, patients, families and others. Finally, we will look at the resources offered by creative expression and the appreciation of others’ expression. What can we learn and how can we be enriched by narrative medicine and other arts?
For more information or to join this group, please contact Angela Wentz Faulconer (Philosophy).