Assignment Overview

This is a writing research assignment that allows you to practice your critical thinking skills by analyzing medical and healing experiences and narratives of people who are close to you or whom you know already. Should you decide to write about your own experience (autoethnography), reach out to your instructors (professor and TA) so they can approve your topic.

The assignment asks you to be an active listener to a person’s experience of illness and healing, identifying the systems of healing mentioned in the interviews, including those activities and practices of self-care that take place within families or communities. In other words, be open-minded about health processes that occur outside the clinic and may not be medicalized.

To complete the assignment, you will decide on one of the pre-approved topics and work with your TA and peers to prepare a short list of questions to guide your semi-structured in-depth interviews.

Questions should point to information about systems of healing consulted, including practices of diagnosis and prevention of illness, etiologies (causes of illness), treatments of symptoms, pain management, provider/patient relationship, and the person’s reflection on the healing practices and/or medical treatments received.

You can find a set of questions to get you started here https://www.mcgill.ca/tcpsych/files/tcpsych/mcgill_illness_narrative_interview.pdfLinks to an external site.

The assignment aims to present an organized narrative of a people’s experiences and how they reflect on the significance of each medical encounter or healing journey in their life.

For your reflection, keep this question in mind: How do these healing/medical experiences relate to larger concepts related to health and illness that we have reviewed in class?

Your essay needs to be structured and needs to include reflection and analysis, as well as details (or quotes from the interviews) to illustrate your points.

To give a larger scope to your hands-on research, you must connect your observation to at least two (2) class concepts. It can be any of the many concepts we review in class! You will also need to search for at least two (2) scholarly sources in medical anthropology – reach out to our Librarian for assistance.

After week 6, your TAs and I will help you find other scholarly sources that describe your findings.

 For example, suppose the person collaborating with you tried neo-shamanism to help with mental health suffering. In that case, you can search for said system of healing and include those sources in the discussion, putting the narrative in a broader context.

Remember: the paper is NOT about a specific type of disease diagnosis, or a particular treatment. We are writing about the illness experience of a person and their healing journey.  While it is expected that you include a brief description of the overall system of healing or its history, that is only a part of the assignment, and should not be more than 5% of your paper.

Research ethics and informed consent:

When collaborating with human subjects we need to be extremely careful in always presenting to them the purpose of our research (in this case course work) and let them know that it is ok to pause, interrupt, or stop the interview if it is producing discomfort or distress.

Request permission before recording your interview and let your collaborator know that you will take notes to write your report and present your findings to the class by the end of the quarter.

To protect the confidentiality of our collaborators and minimize any associated risk we usually opt to use pseudonyms and remove all identifiable information collected.

We won’t need a signed informed consent this time. Oral authorization to proceed with the interview is ok.

Submitting your work

Your submission (analysis and reflection based on interviews) must include the following:

• Description and analysis of the therapeutic journey that includes library research focusing on one of the healing systems consulted by your collaborator.

** Avoid long quotes from scholarly work; they will only take up space that you need to highlight your collaborator's therapeutic journey. You can select quotes from the interviews or notes from your conversations and include those in your paper.

• Data collection information paragraph that tells the reader the context of the interviews (place, time, language, duration) and a list of the questions asked (no need to transcribe the full interview).
• A diagram or map where you show the healing systems involved in the therapeutic journey of your collaborator.
• You are welcome to include maps, images, or any other materials illustrating the healing system(s) described. If using images other than your own, always cite the source.

Format

• In-text citations and a full list of references in Chicago (author-date) format.
• The length of your final paper should be between 7-9 pages following the format detailed in the syllabus.
• Check that you are submitting a word file for this class (.doc or .docx).
• Online modifiable documents like google doc won’t be accepted.
• Corrupted files or files that can’t be opened will result in a Zero (0).
• Check the rubric posted on canvas