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CHCI Medical Humanities Network

Research Projects

Focus Project: Aging

  • Age and the Body

    University of the Witwatersrand, Wiser

    Goal: Exploring attitudes toward aging and researching a range of medical responses to the facts of aging and death, by collecting narratives from the elderly that record and reflect on 20th century sexual practices, organ and transplant histories, chronic illness, neuro states, and pathographies, all the while including ordinary South Africans and analyses of two notable South Africans—Christiaan Barnard and Nelson Mandela.

  • Aging and its Tropes

    Columbia University

    Goal: The Columbia University project on aging “Aging and its Tropes” focuses on the study of “aging” as a concern brought together at the interface of elderly experience, care, and questions of social justice, as it brings together the medical and the carceral. Our research and discursive sites comprise both “complete and total institutions” and non-institutional settings: the hospital, the prison, the arts, the street.

  • Border Crossing, Piloting, Aging

    Chinese University of Hong Kong

    Goal: Questioning the received notion of Chinese culture as particularly reverent toward the elderly through a rigorous examination of the historical record, while studying how attitudes and behavior toward the elderly have changed over the past fifty years.

  • Culture and the Reproduction of Myths About Aging

    King's College London

    Goal: Surveying the extent to which recent memoirs concerned with old age contest Western stereotypes and how far they reinforce them. How can social innovation help redress institutionally ingrained patterns? And how might Western society use memoir more effectively to engage with the realities of old age?

  • Falls Narrative Study

    University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

    Goal: Examine how older adults narrate falls by collecting and analyzing narratives about falls written by older adults.

  • Medical Humanities: Diverse Inquiries

    Dartmouth College

    Goal: To emphasize collaborations between the liberal arts, medical education, and clinical care.