\u27Because Cowards Get Cancer Too’: Autopathography and First-Person Profiling in John Diamond’s Columns for The Times

The UK journalist and broadcaster John Diamond chronicled his diagnosis and treatment of throat cancer over a period of almost four years in regular columns for The Times newspaper. His revelations did not employ the traditional tropes of ‘fighting’ and ‘battling’ cancer, and he actively resisted wearing any mantle of valorised courage. In fact, he requested that The Times change the original title of his entries which they had called ‘Diary of Courage’. In his first-person confessions, Diamond’s embodied sense of an abject and mortal self indexes one of the central threats that illness poses because it potentially represents the antithesis of what society traditionally values: productivity and active participation. Instead of his body enacting the utilitarian story of efficiency and continuity, Diamond’s illness narratives typically portrayed disruption and disorientation. Ironically for a former broadcaster on BBC radio, the progression of cancer saw the removal of his tongue, heightening the performative role writing played in voicing his candid thoughts to an engaged public audience. As sociologist Arthur Frank notes in his influential text The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics: ‘The illness story begins in wreckage, having lost its map and destination’ (1995: 164). Publishing regular newspaper columns did not ultimately offer Diamond the opportunity to defy physical death through the act of writing, but the profiling of his disease enabled an insight into the value of narrating the ‘wrecked’ self while dying

When Rock Becomes Fire: Heart-centred Work and the Holy Ground of Teaching

This chapter explores the role that relationships play in revealing Jesus in the learning environment

Swimming in a Sea of Death: Reviewers Respond to a Journalist\u27s Work of Mourning with Humour

In an article for the New York Review of Books entitled ‘For sorrow there is no remedy’, author and critic Julian Barnes (2011) makes this astute observation: ‘In some ways, autobiographical accounts of grief are unfalsifiable, and therefore unreviewable by any normal criteria.’ While Barnes is largely referring to Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story: A Memoir (2011), his statement highlights a reticence that can inhibit critical reviews of works of mourning. Other texts exploring less personal and poignant themes are subjected to analytical and exacting commentary; the burgeoning field of memoir recounting the death of a family member is publicly quarantined from this. After his mother, the American writer and film maker, Susan Sontag (1933- 2004), died, David Rieff – an acclaimed investigative journalist, author and literary editor – turned to memoir to reflect on the final months of her life. Rieff, whose literary reputation had long been established through polemical prose on humanitarian issues, war and politics appearing in high profile publications such as The New York Times, Le Monde, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, typically received reverential regard for his autobiographical work, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (2008). This chapter draws attention to a range of dissenting critiques featured in selected newspapers and online publications that refused to be constrained by either Rieff’s literary lineage or the pathos of his prose. Instead, these selected reviews employed unanticipated humour and wit to appraise and question the motivation and merit of his memoir

My Body/My Calamity. My Body/My Dignity: The Role of Autobiographical Writing as a Therapeutic and Ethical Strategy for Dealing with a Cancer Diagnosis.

This paper interrogates how autobiographical texts narrating the trauma of a cancer diagnosis and its subsequent treatment might be read as sites of therapeutic and ethical intervention. When writing about the physical and psychic injury caused by a potentially life-threatening disease, an author often performs imaginative acts of reclaiming and retelling her or his own story, and in so doing challenges and resists culturally reductive and unethical readings of the ill body as medicalised, marginalised or stigmatised

Real-World Design Team Activity: What is Poetry for?

Shared understanding is often the ultimate goal driving any communication exchange. In an industry-based context where Multi-Disciplinary Design Teams are commercially employed to deliver timely and concrete outcomes, establishing a common understanding amongst team members is imperative for achieving this end. One of the challenges faced by Multi-Disciplinary Design Teams is the clear communication of discipline-specific information to colleagues who may not share the same technical or procedural frame of reference. It is not uncommon for senders of expert-specific messages to find that intended recipients do not comprehend the message’s original meaning. In such instances where a message fails to Participatory Innovation Conference 2015, The Hague, The Netherlands http://sites.thehagueuniversity.com/pinc2015/home create common knowledge, a sender might choose to renew and re-communicate it by employing language from another domain as a strategy for generating greater clarity and alignment amongst team members. In this negotiated understanding, technical language may be replaced by figurative or poetic language as a way of overcoming previous gaps in transmission and comprehension of design thinking. While linguistic concepts such as analogy and metaphor are often associated with literary domains, this paper explores the ways in which messages that were previously constrained by the precision of technical terminology might be transformed into a more effective medium by the use of connotative and creative language in design contexts

Analogy As a Means of Communicating

The issue which impacts most significantly on the process of reaching shared understanding, through the design discussion in the team, is the ability of team members to communicate their design ideas and technical concepts with other members of the team. The ability to effectively participate in the forum of a design team unquestionably requires an ability to communicate design ideas and discipline specific information. The study, reported in this paper, considers one of the communication strategies available to the designer, which contributes to effective communication within the design team context, the paper will focus on analogy or the metaphor. In research,to date, on problem solving in scientific research teams [Dunbar,1995] two levels of analogy have been identified. In this study of Multi-disciplinary Design Teams it was established that the team members used a third level of analogy, this relating to the use of “metaphors” drawn from outside the specific design domain the team is working within. The industry based research identified both the importance and complexity of the role of analogy has as a communication practice, but what do our students know about its use and do they know how to use it effectively? This paper looks at the use of analogy and considers ways of introducing our graduates to an understanding of analogy as an effective part of their range of communication strategies

Supervisor\u27s Perspectives on the Ethical Supervision of Long Form Writing and Managing Trauma Narrative within the Australian Tertiary Sector

The focus of this paper is to share various perspectives from experienced academics gathered during a qualitative research project where a range of scholars supervising trauma narrative Higher Degree Research (HDR) candidates within Australian universities were interviewed regarding what their needs are in relation to the ethical supervision of their candidates. It is also anticipated that this paper may also contribute to a better understanding of the supervisory relationship pertinent to candidates undertaking their own personal trauma narrative research and the ways in which academics might provide a safer space for both themselves and their Higher Degree Research students

Something to Hang my Life on: The Health Benefits of Writing Poetry for People with Serious Illnesses

Objective: We aimed to explore the effect of a poetry writing program for people who had experienced a serious illness. Method: For this study we randomly assigned 28 volunteer participants with a history of serious illness, usually cancer, to one of two poetry writing workshops. Each group met weekly for 2 hours for 8 weeks. The second group was wait-listed to enable comparison between the two groups. We used the Kessler-10, a measure of wellbeing, before and after the workshops and also interviewed the participants at these times. Results: Participants responded enthusiastically and each group demonstrated an increase in wellbeing over the course of their workshop, moving them from medium to low risk on the K10. Participants enjoyed the challenge of writing and the companionship of other group members. Conclusions: Psychiatrists, especially those working in liaison psychiatry, are in a position to encourage patients who have experienced a serious illness to explore writing as a way of coming to terms with their experiences

Beyond Telling: Narrating Trauma in the Wartime Writings of Great War Chaplain William McKenzie

In a centenary period of Anzac celebration that is often given to the valorising of soldiers’ heroic experiences of the First World War, this article introduces teachers to a case study of William McKenzie. Once a house-hold name, the legendary Salvation Army Chaplain of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) McKenzie documented his responses to the trauma of war in his prolific letters and diaries. Drawing heavily on primary sources, this article suggests that McKenzie’s story recaptures the essence of what it means to be Christian educators: being engaged in the midst of suffering, disarray and confusion. In the variety of human experiences encountered in the classroom and the playground, the presence of Christian educators must leave a legacy and provide a model for being salt and light