‘Things that matter’: poetic inquiry and more-than-human health literacy

ABSTRACT

In this article, I combine the arts-based methods of story completion and poetic inquiry to work towards a more-than-human approach to health literacy. In doing so, I seek to surface the affective, multisensory and relational dimensions of health information practices. My use of poetic inquiry is innovative in several ways. First, I used materials generated in my story completion project to create the poetic representations presented in this article. Second, I addressed a topic that has not previously been investigated using either story completion or poetic inquiry. Third, I adopted a more-than-human and post-qualitative theoretical perspective in designing the study and analysing and presenting the findings. Thus far, this theoretical approach has received little attention in story completion and poetic inquiry. Material from narratives written by participants in response to three story openings about fictional characters facing a health-related dilemma was re-invented as a form of found narrative poetry to condense and effectively communicate the key elements of the stories. In so doing, I identified the affordances, affective forces and relational connections in the human-nonhuman assemblages described in the narratives, and the agential capacities that were opened or closed off when these elements and agents came together. The article ends with some remarks about the value of arts-based methods to develop a more-than-human health literacy.

KEYWORDS:

• More-than-human theory
• health literacy
• poetic inquiry
• story completion method
• poetic representations

Acknowledgments

I thank the storytellers who generated the narratives from which the poetic representations in this article were created.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deborah Lupton

Deborah Lupton is SHARP Professor in the Vitalities Lab, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and holds an Honorary Doctor of Social Science awarded by the University of Copenhagen. She is the author/co-author of 17 books, the latest of which are Digital Health: Critical and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (2017), Fat, 2nd edition (2018) and and Data Selves: More-than-Human Perspectives (2019).