Expanding the Health Narrative Frame

ABSTRACT

How might we expand the frame of health narratives so as to avoid genre calcification and more effectively harness these stories’ transformative potential? This essay builds on the continued success of the “Defining Moments” forum while responding to Harter et al.’s 2020 call for “new stories shaped and shared in novel ways.” Drawing on interdisciplinary research and theorizing, I suggest three narrative strategies for storytelling based on, respectively, the extended duration of a health context, the agentic power of nonhuman kinds, and the implicit collectivity of polyphonic narratives. Brief examples precede my discussion of each strategy. I invite others to join me in shaping innovative narratives that further challenge tacit assumptions of embodied health.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In using these names as originally printed, it is important to note that they are already available in a publicly accessible archive. Identifying information had been redacted by the archivist prior to my engagement with the newspapers.

2. Importantly, when approached as co-production the process requires significant resources (Boyle & Harris, 2009) and, particularly when working with historically excluded communities, radical reevaluations of research processes (de Andrade & Angelova, 2020; Phillips et al., 2018).

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Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.