On Wednesday, September 27th, MPH candidate Deren Pulley gave the first Grand Rounds talk of the 2017-2018 school year entitled “A Conversation on Curing Ulcerative Colitis.”
Besides a brief overview of the technical side of the disease and the work he did with patients who shared his disease experience, Deren read a personal illness narrative to a full house in the HHIVE lab. His autoenthnographical creative work compellingly deconstructed Deren’s identity in disease as a person who wears many hats–researcher, surgical emissary, and patient–and subsequently reconstructed them to give a rich picture of the complex and oftentimes contradictory world not only of living with Ulcerative Colitis after cure, but the larger topics of illness experience and autoethnographer as well.
Thank you for your work and your willingness to share, Deren!
The next Grand Rounds lecture will be given on Wednesday, November 1 in the Health Sciences Library Room 527 by Dr. Dori Berger.
Information from the slide in the picture:
Discussion Questions:
1. How do we conceptualize notions of cure?
-How might cure be in tension with embodiment, phenomenology, and the performance of illness?
-How do our notions of cure differ based on different forms of illness?
2. What is Ulcerative Colitis? When is Ulcerative Colitis?
3. How reflective is illness narrative of illness?
-What are the costs of illness narratives?