Blending Humanistic and Rhetorical Analysis to Locate Gendered Dimensions of Kenyan Medical Practitioner Attitudes About Cancer

ABSTRACT

Medical humanities and the rhetoric of health and medicine apply different methods to healthcare documents and discourses. This methodological reflection of a project studying cancer attitudes in Kenya describes how researchers combined practices from these disparate fields to produce more sensitive and ethical methods for studying cross-cultural contexts. By extending humanistic methods into social-science data collections, researchers were better able to ask precise questions and to perceive context-specific cues for consent and non-consent.

KEYWORDS:

• Action research
• gender research
• health/medical communication
• intercultural communication
• research methods

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge and thank the Fulbright Scholar Program and the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars (CIES) for their support, without which this project would not have been possible.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Miriam Mara

Miriam Mara is an associate professor at Arizona State University. Her research interests include Irish literature & film, medical rhetorics, and globalism. Her publications appear in venues such as International Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, & Globalization, New Hibernia Review & Feminist Formations, and she is currently at work on a book about gendered representations of cancer in fiction and biomedicine in the US and Kenya.

Andrew Mara

Andrew Mara is an associate professor at Arizona State University. Mara is an associate professor in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts. He is a user experience researcher who investigates individual, institutional, cultural, and systems motivations for actions and activity. He is currently expanding his work on posthumanism and Irish diasporic identity to question how indigeneity is created and differentiated in digital spaces.