Pedagogy at the Borderlands

Abstract

Teaching and learning are fundamentally political acts. This is no less true in health humanities classes than in any other. Teaching and learning are predicated on intersubjective meaning-making between not only listener and teller but also professor and student, and what happens in the health humanities classroom is a parallel process to what happens in the clinic, modeling the sorts of relationships that can happen there between professional and patient. However, health humanities must recognize that it is not enough simply to read stories with medical students or have nurses write and share narratives together: this work must be done with careful attention to power and privilege, for power and privilege operate not only in our decisions about what texts to read and write together but also in the relational texts we live, breathe, and create in our classrooms and workshop spaces. Without recognizing and addressing this, humanities work in healthcare risks replicating the self-same hierarchical, oppressive power dynamics of traditional medicine that the field is designed to address. Teaching health humanities from the borderlands implies embracing marginality even as we seek spaces beyond the oppressive binaries of borders themselves. This essay explores why health humanities pedagogy needs diasporic and cultural studies—and how teaching can help students, colleagues, and the teachers themselves recover oppositional histories of embodiment and health.