“In this article, I would like to propose a format that is halfway between a reflective essay on “total institutions” (E. Goffman) from the perspective of a visiting artist, and a practical guide for future guest artists in those institutions.”
Category: Arts and Creativity
Finnegan Shannon’s crip time reimaginings
Finnegan Shannon’s crip time reimaginings Every 60 minutes a clock’s hand travels around its face. One hour follows another, and then another and another. 24 times over to make a day. Our bodies are bound by clocks—by their ceaseless onslaught of seconds, minutes, hours—imposing hegemonic notions of movement through time and space. Rigid schedules without…
From Interval to Image: Carson, Mann, and the Art of Clinical Reasoning
In attempting to explain how physicians in my field of geriatric medicine think through clinical cases, I have come to realize over the course of my training that, although the prevailing schemas of clinical reasoning are often presented as algorithmic, the interval between observation and a formal diagnosis feels less like a straightforward thought process…
Disability, Empowerment, and Art: On Hospital Aesthetics with Amanda Cachia
Amanda Cachia’s Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism was published by Manchester University Press last September. Cachia is a curator and art historian with a joint appointment as Professor of Practice in Museum Studies at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, where she is also Affiliate Faculty in Disability Studies….
Lies and Goodbyes: Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (2019)
In an early shot from Lulu Wang’s 2019 film The Farewell, the camera focuses on the movie’s elderly protagonist in what is clearly a medical setting. In Wang’s script, the acting directions state that “Nai Nai sits alone in a hospital gown awaiting her X-ray.” There, “she has a coughing fit.” Although a disconnected arm…
Eli Clare’s Notes to Disability Studies: On the Access Practices of “Unfurl”
Eli Clare’s new book, Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming (2025), presents a challenge to disability studies. The most impactful challenges to this field over the past few decades have critiqued its narrow focus on whiteness, the West, and physical disability, with more recent work attempting to understand disability through intersectional and global frameworks as well…
Book Review: Liminal Spaces and the Moral Imagination in “Our Long Marvelous Dying” by Anna DeForest
Anna DeForest’s first novel, A History of Present Illness (2022), follows an unnamed medical student through tension-filled classroom and clinical years among more privileged classmates in New York City. DeForest’s follow-up novel seems a segue from the first. Our Long Marvelous Dying (2024) also features an unnamed narrator–one further along in their medical career– seeking…
Sweetness and Light: A Cooperative’s Effort in a Medical School
The ethical life is not first about decision-making but about discernment. It is concerned with the long and often painful work of coming to understand oneself within a world of obligations, histories, and relationships (Williams 308). This understanding of ethics was an animating conviction behind the Columbia Character Cooperatives—a professional and moral formation initiative for…
Thresholds of the Body
This spring, when I was recovering from a double mastectomy, I consumed a lot of media. Propped up on a wedge pillow as family and friends filtered through with food and news of the world outside, I binged season after season of television and read through some of this year’s buzzy novels. As the weeks…
Homemade Remedies and DIY Care in The Flame Alphabet
“I think of language as being tremendously potent. It causes deep feelings in us, so much so that its effects would seem nearly chemical, medical.” In his interview with journalist Adam Boretz for The Millions, author Ben Marcus explained the genesis of his 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet with the words above. Imagining language as…