Narrative trajectories of disaster response: ethical preparedness from Katrina to COVID-19

While COVID-19 brings unprecedented challenges to the US healthcare system, understanding narratives of historical disasters illuminates ethical complexities shared with COVID-19. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina revealed a lack of disaster preparation and protocol, not dissimilar to the challenges faced by COVID-19 healthcare workers. A case study of Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina reported by journalist-MD Sheri Fink reveals unique ethical challenges at the forefront of health crises. These challenges include disproportionate suffering in structurally vulnerable populations, as seen in COVID-19 where marginalised groups across the USA experience higher rates of disease and COVID-19-related death. Journalistic accounts of Katrina and COVID-19 offer unique perspectives on the ethical challenges present within medicine and society, and analysis of such stories reveals narrative trajectories anticipated in the aftermath of COVID-19. Through lenses of social suffering and structural violence, these narratives reinforce the need for systemic change, including legal action, ethical preparedness and physician protection to ensure high-quality care during times of crises. Narrative Medicine—as a practice of interrogating stories in medicine and re-centering the patient—offers a means to contextualise individual accounts of suffering during health crises in larger social matrices.

Schopenhauer, Horkheimer e o sofrimento social

Há atualmente um debate interdisciplinar profícuo sobre a noção de sofrimento social (social suffering). Pensadores e pensadoras como Barrington Moore Jr., Emmanuel Renault e Rahel Jaeggi desenvolvem o assunto a partir de um pressuposto elementar: sofrimento social diferencia-se de sofrimento individual na medida em que as causas do primeiro não são naturais (desejos básicos insatisfeitos, doenças, catástrofes naturais), mas resultam do agir humano; e, mais ainda, não resultam tanto de relações interpessoais imediatas, mas de relações sociais mais amplas, como a guerra, a pobreza, a exploração etc. No artigo Schopenhauer e a sociedade, Horkheimer afirmou que “no intransigente nominalismo de Schopenhauer em relação à sociedade estriba a raiz de sua grandeza” (p. 47). Para o pai da Teoria Crítica, a acepção schopenhaueriana de que apenas os indivíduos e o curso de suas vidas são reais, enquanto os povos são meras abstrações, não implicaria contrapor a sociedade e o Estado à pessoa singular ou esta àqueles. A sociedade se origina e se transforma a partir de indivíduos socialmente vinculados; o indivíduo não é uma ilha. Com essa chave de leitura, Horkheimer, como discípulo herético, consegue destacar e valorizar em Schopenhauer o aparato social da noção metafísica de sofrimento. O objetivo deste artigo é (i) mostrar em que medida a diferenciação entre sofrimento individual e social estaria implicitamente indicada em Schopenhauer e (ii) até que ponto a leitura de Horkheimer sobre o nominalismo de Schopenhauer em relação à sociedade permitiria sugerir elementos schopenhauerianos para os debates contemporâneos sobre sofrimento social.

Connections, Identity and Resilience Amongst International Students at Victoria University

<p>This study used a re-storying methodology to develop narratives of 13 Asian students who came from overseas to study in New Zealand at Victoria University. These narratives considered connections the students made both on and off campus and their reflections on how these connections shaped cultural identity. The research also explored students’ experiences of resilience and agency. Their stories revealed strong connections made with other international students but less well formed relationships with domestic students, where ties are superficial despite programmes designed to facilitate these connections. The exception was the stronger connections students developed with domestic minority learners, such as Pasifika and Maori students. Volunteering, rather than paid work or homestays, were contexts that offered community connections. Student narratives suggest that the experience of studying at VUW refreshed home country identity but also encouraged a flexible identity with a growing awareness of cultural diversity, which for some students, constituted a global citizen perspective. While all students reported struggles, they maintained resilience in the face of challenges, using their networks to sustain them, rather than formal support services. They demonstrated agency in making moves to improve their situation and that of prospective students. Micro-aggressions encountered did cause social suffering but students confronted racism, in their own way, trying to enlarge cultural space at university. Leadership opportunities taken, along with the difficult social encounters they navigated, lead to personal change and growth. Implications of these findings, for policy makers and providers of support services, are discussed.</p>

Connections, Identity and Resilience Amongst International Students at Victoria University

<p>This study used a re-storying methodology to develop narratives of 13 Asian students who came from overseas to study in New Zealand at Victoria University. These narratives considered connections the students made both on and off campus and their reflections on how these connections shaped cultural identity. The research also explored students’ experiences of resilience and agency. Their stories revealed strong connections made with other international students but less well formed relationships with domestic students, where ties are superficial despite programmes designed to facilitate these connections. The exception was the stronger connections students developed with domestic minority learners, such as Pasifika and Maori students. Volunteering, rather than paid work or homestays, were contexts that offered community connections. Student narratives suggest that the experience of studying at VUW refreshed home country identity but also encouraged a flexible identity with a growing awareness of cultural diversity, which for some students, constituted a global citizen perspective. While all students reported struggles, they maintained resilience in the face of challenges, using their networks to sustain them, rather than formal support services. They demonstrated agency in making moves to improve their situation and that of prospective students. Micro-aggressions encountered did cause social suffering but students confronted racism, in their own way, trying to enlarge cultural space at university. Leadership opportunities taken, along with the difficult social encounters they navigated, lead to personal change and growth. Implications of these findings, for policy makers and providers of support services, are discussed.</p>

Case Studies in Social Death: The Criminalization and Dehumanization of Six Black and Latino Boys

To fully grasp the systems of oppression youth of color must navigate, educators must consider their experiences outside as well as inside the classroom. This paper adds to the small but growing body of literature across fields highlighting how Black and Latinx youth are simultaneously positioned by schools and the justice system as criminals that must be contained and removed from school and society. This paper argues that the concept of social death, which refers to social suffering as a result of criminalization and dehumanization, helps contextualize the process by which carceral oppression manifests in students’ lives. Based on an interview study with thirty adults who were first incarcerated as adolescents, this paper focuses on three Black and three Latino male participants’ experiences with social death in schools and their neighborhoods.

La expresión del malestar en Chile: cultura, esfera pública y luchas sociales

This article develops the concepts of the public sphere, cultural malaise and social suffering in critical theory to think of social struggles as forms of social protest and political protest that occurred since October 2019 in Chile. The article explores the thesis on social discontent, which maintains that recent social struggles are a public expression of the unrest cultivated by processes of social modernization. According to the author, beyond the normative justification in reasons and arguments regarding the conditions of injustice that affect the agents in struggle, the social critique emerges from the social suffering that finds its place in the materiality of the discourses, images and bodies in the public sphere.

“The adventure is not easy.” The Discretionary Politics of Social Suffering and Agency in Post-Deportation Narratives in Southern Mali

Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in the West African state of Mali (2014–2016), this article delves into the local, national, and transnational effects of (externalized) European and North African deportation regimes and reactions to them by civil society actors and deportees themselves. This work aims to contribute to a better understanding of how geographical, physical, social, and psychological spaces are reshaped through interactions with bordering practices. Deportation generally takes the form of (il)legal, bureaucratic measures and violent interventions that are perceived as deeply unjust. They generate anger, alienation, and uncertainty among those deported and their families and associates. By seeking patterns in the accounts of social suffering in deportees’ narratives, the article seeks, empirically and analytically, to unravel multilevel bordering practices through examining localized, agentic forms of bordering power. The post-deportation context involves southern Mali, an area subject to dramatic desertification and loss of sustainable livelihoods.