Description: Understanding how people suffer, why they suffer, the ways sufferin

Description:
Understanding how people suffer, why they suffer, the ways suffering is embodied, how suffering unfolds through social interaction, how it is encoded and represented culturally, and most importantly, what suffering does to people is critical in physical cultural studies (PCS). What PCS calls attention to is how we need to better attend to how people embody suffering in their lives and choose to narrate their experiences. For this assignment, students will individually choose a focussed, specific population of their interest and explore how a narrative approach to health care might improve a clinician’s phenomenological understanding of how to better interact and develop working relationships with patients in the population.
The Task:
Extensive searching is not required to find someone who has gone through a significant ordeal related to health, physical activity, or broader physical cultural experiences. What I want you to do is find someone who you believe would be a suitable case study to explore the parameters of how people suffer in physical cultural ways: for example, what it is like to be ill, to recover from injury, or to be labeled as a ‘outsider’ due to physical differences. We often engage in deep case study analysis with one sole person as a means of fully fleshing out how suffering works in arranging or rearranging a person’s life. This is ultimately conducted, of course, to better inform social theories (of suffering) and explain how suffering is comprised of physical, emotional/cognitive, and social components. I would, therefore, encourage you to consider following these steps in completing this task:
Think about what form of suffering you would like to study — and this might be based almost exclusively on someone you already know who suffers from something;
Locate the person and describe to them the nature of this exercise;
Read as much as you can (in the time you have been given) from the academic literature on the specific kind of suffering you are studying;
Decide on some strategy for talking with the person (likely at least a couple of times) about their experiences with suffering;
Analyze the narrative and what it is telling you about the nature of suffering and what it does to people;
Reflect back on what the literature tells you about this form of suffering and how your case study might better develop/inform how we explain suffering more; broadly as clinicians.
** Please use course materials and lectures in the paper to keep it related
** The instructor emphasized on in-depth analysis of the issues with the chosen population
** Aim of the paper is to show how a narrative approach to health care can improve a clinician’s understanding of better interacting with a patients in this specific population
Comments from Customer
Discipline: Physical cultural studies (PCS)