About the project
The Polyphony Meets China is a collaborative project between the Narrative Medicine Research Centre (NMRC) at Southern Medical University (SMU) and Durham University’s Institute for Medical Humanities. The project is spearheaded by associate editor Nicole Xuan Chen.
This project aims to provoke and catalyse reflections on core critical humanities concepts and ideas in both English
and Chinese contexts and to stimulate cross-cultural exchanges.
Specifically, the project produces two forms of engagement:
The project also produces a “World Health Day and Disease Day” column on The Polyphony main site. This column publishes articles that highlight the Chinese philosophy in narrative medicine and stories that bring insights into Chinese healthcare and societal wellbeing.
Vision and Ethos
The Polyphony Meets China is driven by the goal of raising awareness in China of specific diseases and bodily conditions that are stigmatised or poorly understood in Chinese society. Through this project, we hope to challenge stereotypes of marginalised voices and identities in dominant discourses and contribute to breaking the silence around taboo health concerns.
The project supports health humanities researchers and healthcare practitioners from or working on under-represented cultures in building their own voice and increasing their visibility in the international arena of medical humanities. It does this through its contribution to The Polyphony’s broader “Intercultural Dialogue Dispatch” emerging theme. The Intercultural Dialogue theme invites guests from different cultural and national backgrounds to critically examine the centrality of medical humanities in the UK and North America.
The Polyphony Meets China upholds The Polyphony’s ongoing vision to challenge the predominance of English-language scholarship as the key positioning of the medical humanities discipline.
31/07/2022: The Polyphony Meets China Launching News article
03/08/2022: Graphical medicine and medical education
13/08/2022: End-of-life care
21/08/2022: Illness narrative
24/08/2022: Disability narrative
02/09/2022: Neurodiversity and autistic narrative
19/09/2022: The ethics of listening in clinical encounters
22/09/2022: Alzheimer’s disease and narrative care
08/10/2022: Medical Humanities Writing: On Close Reading
13/10/2022: Perinatal loss and narrative care
28/10/2022: How can medical humanities make you a better doctor?
04/11/2022: Medically unexplained symptoms
19/11/2022: Graphic Medicine and Chronic Illness
05/12/2022: Visual Representations of Old Age
23/12/2022: Learning How to Listen in Clinical Encounters
11/02/2023: Medical Humanities Writing: Attending to Humanities in Nursing Education
27/02/2023: MSc in Medical Humanities: Analysis of Medical Humanities Teaching Module
11/03/2023: Using stories to break the cycle of stigma and silence
25/03/2023: Grief, Reading and Narrative Time
Yoshiko Okuyama explores the emerging genre of comics in Japan, tōjisha manga, and discusses how these comics illuminate and humanise the otherwise “faceless” people’s invisible tribulations caused by mental disability. Manga, or Japanese comics, is
Brigitte Steger explores how an earthquake and tsunami disaster threatens sleep in many ways and what we can learn about sleep health by paying attention to extreme situations.
Reflecting on their pandemic life living in communal halls as a PhD student at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Cat Chong considers their practices involved in continually negotiating a chronic illness within the context of Singapore’s circuit breaker measures.
How may individuals with sensory acuity and struggling with fear and anxiety be encouraged to participate more in social activities? Dawn-joy Leong reimagines conducive spaces for all, inspired by natural Autistic ways of coping with and responding to hypersensitivity.
Xiao-Yang Gu explores the tension between two different diagnosis methods of diabetes in 1920s China and the consequent changes in the power dynamics in the clinical context.
Nicole Xuan Chen and Xiao-lin Yang explore the importance of narrative medicine and hospice doula care for experiences of death and dying.
Antje Richter explores the illness narratives in the informal correspondences of Wang Xizhi, the most celebrated of Chinese calligraphers. This essay is adapted from her journal article “The Trouble with Wang Xizhi, Illness and Healing in a Fourth-Century Chinese Correspondence”, co-written with Charles Chace and originally published in T’oung Pao.
PhD student Jin Meng writes about her experience of developing pre-eclampsia during first child-birth, and reflects on how cultural differences affect her pregnancy experience as a Chinese expat living in the UK.
