UCF Department of Writing and Rhetoric faculty members Blake Scott and Nathan Holic discuss their project "Strengthening Hospital Nurses’ Mental Health Resilience Through a Peer Support Training Program Using Comic Testimonials" which focused on introducing comic therapy to healthcare professionals. This won the 2021 Pabst Steinmetz Foundation Arts and Innovation Award.
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Greetings and welcome to D.W..
Are discussions on writing and rhetorica space for informal conversations
around research and practice in the fieldat the university level.
A place inclusive for curious novices,blossoming scholars and seasoned academics
to consider and sharetheir inquiries, experiences and passions
surrounding writing and rhetoric.
(00:29):
We are your hosts, professorsMeghan Faulkner and Nicholas
Garcia, Presswith the University of Central Florida.
Thank you for joining us.
Now let's get this conversation started.
Today, we're
joined by two members of UCF faculty, Dr.
(00:49):
Blake Scott and Nathan Hollick.
Dr. Scott has an array of researchexpertise, including rhetoric
and medicine, professionaland technical writing, scholarship
on writing, program development, designand support of student learning.
He's a founding coeditorof the scholarly journal
Rhetoric of Health and Medicine,winner of the CFA.
(01:09):
LJ 2019 Best New Journal
Awardand has published multiple book chapters
and in academic journalsrelated to writing and rhetoric.
Professor Hollick is the creatorof fiction, nonfiction and comics
that have been widely publishedin print and online.
With his most recent publication, BrightLights, Medium Sized City,
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and serves as the graphic narrative editorat the Florida Review.
Together, they created strengtheninghospital nurses, mental health resilience
through a peer supporttraining program using comic testimonials,
which focused on introducing comic therapyto health care professionals.
This won the 2021 Pabst SteinmetzFoundation Arts and Innovation Award,
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which grants two proposalseach year, combining programs
in the College of Arts and Humanitieswith other UCF colleges.
Thank you for joining us today.
Thank you. Thank you.
So to start out
for those who may not seethe immediate connection, how do you
bridge writing and rhetoricwith medicine and health care?
(02:18):
What is the connection for you?
Well, I'll start with Kenneth Burke's
famous definition of rhetoric as
the use of symbolic communicationto induce cooperation
in other humanswho by nature respond to symbols.
So if we think about rhetoric expansively,
we can we can imagine
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that kind of communication happeningacross various kinds of contexts.
And we can imagine that communicationinvolving language, but perhaps
other media too,like visual communication,
spatial communication.
And what led you to have that connectionpersonally?
Was there something that interests you?
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And you have a large amountof research and publication on it.
What led you to that?
I think coming of age and the HIV AIDS
epidemic in thelate eighties, early nineties
made me
curious about how I could connectwhat I was doing in the community
with activism, with preventive education.
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Eventually, with HIV testing, I was a testcounselor while I was getting my Ph.D.
with what I with what I wanted to dowith my scholarship and my scholarship.
Was there a need or a lackor something that you found
that would make that application,
you know, so importantfor that particular community?
(03:42):
Yeah.
So what we were seeing with both
public policy, public health policy
and public health campaignsand also preventive education
at smaller and smaller contexts, was
the emphasis on particular identities
as being at risk or even risky and
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that had the potential to
stigmatize certain groups.
It had the potential to detractfrom the actual behaviors
that were causing HIVand keep other people
who didn't identify in those groupsfrom recognizing their own risk.
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I think of medical writing as
always, being,
I guess, lofty or highbrowwould be the way that I think of it.
And I think I mean, we can see thatin the last few years, what happens
when there's a national and a nationalor global pandemic or health crisis,
the ability to communicatewhat what we just
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the ability to communicateis so important, to talk to people.
So I was just curiousif you were also seeing,
you know, a disconnectbetween the medical jargon
and how it was impacting communitiesand if if that particular epidemic
maybe was where we could start to seethat shift towards things being more
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user friendly or,you know, more common language
being used to make the messagemore deliverable or impactful?
Absolutely.
I think with any kind of education,drawing on community norms is is crucial.
And so what we sawwhen activists started to get involved
in developing education and
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programing and materials is
an abundance of
safer sex and harm reduction strategiesthat maybe clinical folks
and epidemiological researchers
didn't identify previously.
So I want to ask then,how does the connection
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between those kinds of questionsand what you do with comics
and comic therapy,how do those then sort of come together?
So I'm also thinkingabout your previous project
winner from 2019,which was about HIV stigma specifically.
And then, you know, usingsome of those methods to kind of talk
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about what some of those situationsmight be for different stigma.
So now I wonder if you could talkabout the role of comics in
and then maybe both of you talk abouthow those two kind of came together.
Well, the idea of comics as art therapy,
I wish I could
say, like Blake,that I've had this experience
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with something like thatthat goes back decades.
But it's relatively new to me.
I don't know if it's new to Blake,
but a lot of the things that he and Ihave done together over this grant project
and over our previous grant project,I think are
a case studyin how research projects are put together.
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And by that I mean incredibly messy.
I say that because notnot in a negative way, but I say that
in a way where like I'm ableto talk about these things
for my students in first year writingclasses as being incredibly illustrat
for how research works for Blakeone day running into me in the hallway
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because he deals with health, healthand medicine and health rhetoric,
and knowing that I draw comicsand just asking me a question about it.
And then a month laterI'm sitting down in a coffee shop
with Blake and with our colleaguefrom Nursing to talk about up
a research project that's going one way.
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And then at the end of the conversationgoes in a completely different way,
and then two years later,talking about other avenues for research.
And so none of this, though,I think it's all written up very well.
The titles of our grant, of our grantsand our research projects
certainly sound lofty,and they sound really, really well done.
(08:04):
Well put together from the starttheir coffee shop conversations,
and they proceed with a sense of curiosity
about somethinglike in the case of our first project,
which was about stigmawith people living with HIV,
the idea of of what we called
data elicitation storyboards.
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That was something that didn't really evenhave a name when we started our project.
Though the idea had existed as early as,you know, a child's workbook
that will ask you to draw somethinginto a blank panel.
But but Blake essentially coined
that that term forfor what we were working with, which
which again, was just, just a brainstormas we were high on espresso, you know
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and and with with the projectthat that you introduced here
for this podcast with the
strengthening nurses wellbeing,I forget the entire title but you know
your listeners have they have phonesthey can they can rewind
with that the idea of of art therapy.
I don't even know, you know,who first posed that idea
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because our,our research team has gotten pretty large.
There's quite a few peoplethat are a part of it,
and I'm not sure who posed the idea,
but but when whoever did pose it,our first step was to just
learn more about that.
And I think all of us on the team,none of us were experts
with art therapy.
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I draw comics and I read a lot of comics.
So if that if that gives you expertise
in something, I've got comics expertisebecause I read a lot of them
and I spend a lot of time drawing,but I never really
been too in depth with comics being used
to help somebody who's experiencing trauma
to to help them writeabout and draw about their experiences.
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So so we read, we read a lot.
We did a pretty lengthy,I think, literature review.
And the more we learned about it,the more we thought
this could be applied to a programthat is preexisting
at UCSF, which we canwe can talk about more in a moment.
So again, just to kind of sumall of that up, it's a messy response,
but it's a messy overall processto get to where you have an actual project
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with real people involved, real questionsthat you're asking, and then real
research tools and real workshops.
Yeah, just a couple more examplesof the serendipitous
nature of these kinds of researchprojects.
The original project came about
first when I
read something in USA or UCF todayabout Christa Cook's research.
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She's an associate professorof nursing around HIV stigma,
and I had previously worked on that topicand I invited her to coffee.
She there talked about a research group
she was part of statewide that identifiedprovider enacted HIV stigma.
So stigma that patients experiencewith providers as a priority area
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because it was keeping patients out ofcare was leading to poor health outcomes.
And so we wanted to create,
you know, impactful, shorter
creative training materials for providers.
And at that point, you know,
we were thinking videos,we were thinking variety of media.
(11:30):
And then it struck melike we have this gold mine
in her department named Nathan Hollick.
And I knew that Nathan was an accomplished
graphic novelist and memoirist.
He had published a number of shorter formcomics as well
aroundissues of health and medicine, including,
you know, the community traumawe experienced after the Pulse shooting.
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So we invited him and it became quicklyapparent as he was talking
with us about the power of comicsthat this was the way we wanted to go.
We didn't need to make videos,we didn't need to make podcasts.
We needed to make these comics.
Another example was when we were planningto start collecting data
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from area patients about, you know, howthey experience stigma with providers.
And, you know,the pandemic made recruitment
and conducting the focus groupsand interviews complicated.
So we
we went on pause.
And at that point, I think it was Nathanwho who came up with the idea, well,
why don't we experiment with using comicsas data collection tools themselves,
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these kind of minimal comics
storyboards that so that they could drawtheir experiences
and interesting, symbolic waysas well as tell us their experiences.
And so we thought, well, why don't we testsome of these data collection tools out?
Because, as Nathan said,this hasn't been done very often.
And that's when we developed a pilot studywith a subset of participants
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who gave us incredible feedbackthat we then turn around and use
to make our study better when we actuallydid the full fledged thing.
Are you able to tell us who
you know, what communities were involvedin that pilot of testing?
In terms of participants?
Are you able to disclose that? Okay. Sure.
So what we decided to do was Kristaand I both had some longstanding
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relationship ups
with HIV service organizations in the areafrom previous work we had done.
And so we worked through the patientsupport groups
that were sponsored by these organizationsbecause they were already patient led.
And so we gauged their interestin helping us with this.
They were very interested
and we had toget creative in how we collected the data.
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I remember one focus group where we
we were meeting remotely via Zoom,
but the patient group was all together
in a garage and the technology crashedand eventually
the facilitator on their endhad to use an iPad to interface
with our team and then translatesome of what we were asking them
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to do with the comic storyboardsand with the discussion.
So we had some interesting encounterswith gathering data around that.
But most of ourmost of our participants were
people of color.
Most of them were over 30,
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and most of them were already engagedin helping their peers
manage life.
Living with HIV.
And then when you transitionedinto working directly
with health care providers, with nurse,it was nurses, correct?
How to what what communities locally wereyou gathering from in that in that way?
(14:52):
Well, we were already collaboratingwith nursing faculty in the first project
and we were in thinking about stigma.
We began thinking about
other kinds of stigma too,including the stigma around mental health
that nurses
and other providers were facing,especially during the COVID 19 pandemic.
When they were getting it from community,they were getting it from patients.
(15:16):
They also felt
like they weren't being supported
by the institutions themselves,not enough PPE equipment.
So our nursing faculty
kind of let us downthat as another potential way
to engage
these vulnerable populations
with art therapy,comic therapy in our case.
(15:40):
And then we had this connection to ClintBowers,
who was part of the leadershipover at the Clinical Research Center.
UCSF restores fact.
He was a former
chair,interim chair of the English Department,
for we became our own department.
And he that clinical research
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center helps first first responders
and they're branching into health careproviders deal with trauma.
He told us that they already had a
a branch of what they were doing
that focused on prevention
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of mental illness
that was geared aroundhelp training nurses to be peer supporters
for one another,to identify different levels of stress,
different types of stress,
to engage in better conversationsaround stress with their peers,
and then to connect theirpeers with help when needed.
(16:43):
Yeah, and
interesting, like some facet of the COVID
19 pandemic was illustrating what a
an absolute drought there is in termsof mental health support.
You know, therapistsare suddenly finding themselves,
you know, no one's taking new patients,There's not enough therapy and enough
providers of mental healthsupport for the amount that is necessary.
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And I know, you know, in the beginningit was what can we do to show our support?
Well, in a place like Manhattan,you know, where you live a little more
in a congested area, people are bangingpots and pans every day at 5 p.m.
to try to, like, cheer everybody on.
But, you know, here in Orlando,we're a little more isolated.
And in that, just the way that our
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our we're the way that we functionin the way that we are, we are set up.
So I could see where
for nurses
in particularthat are doing a lot of the heavy lifting,
that some type of outlet for mental health
would be so helpfuland really needed and necessary.
So what was that?
What was the responsefrom that group like?
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I mean, were they didthey resisted all that?
The idea of comics or what
did they really embracethat Were they were they, you know,
where they overwhelmed in generaland not really looking to
to expend any more energy or were theyreally looking for that outlet?
I think they're very much looking
for outlets to help them process
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the traumathey were living through, to help them
tell their story of what they experienced
and even in some casesto use art and comics in particular
as advocacy tools
to advocate for what they neededin the workplace,
what they needed from the hospitalsin which they were working.
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I think what we sawin looking at the response to the pandemic
was a combination ofwe had these big organizations,
professional organizations,nursing organizations, for example,
that were starting these initiativesaround, helping
nurses write about their experiences,
helping nurses drawand make art about their experiences.
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But there was this gap with with comics.
And on the other hand,we saw individual nurses
start making comicsabout their experiences.
So we wanted to createan institutional space
where they could get training around this.
They could have they could tell us,they could imagine for themselves, like,
what do we want to do with these comics?
(19:19):
A question about
I want to go back to the comicsas as sort of data collection tools.
And I wanted to throw a question to Nate.
When you are, you know, and obviouslyyou have experience of this, you know,
in teaching comics as well,but what's your approach to people?
You know, when you first pitchedthe idea of expressing themselves
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or writing experiential, you know, typesof things through comics where you know,
those authors may not
have that experience with withdrawing or,you know, you know, panels,
all the things that kind of go into,you know, the the genre of of comics.
Like what's your approach forfor those kind of folks?
(20:02):
And I'm thinking,you know, imagining my own self,
like being in that situation,I would be very, you know, self-conscious
about my my drawing abilityor my ability to produce something.
What are the ways in which youyou kind of yeah.
You should have been a part of our facultydrawing club I saw a couple of semesters
ago, which was ended thanks to COVID.
(20:23):
But yeah, the,I think one of my main goals
when I first started to teach a coursecalled Rhetoric of Comics back in 2015,
was that how do I sort of bridgethat gap between writers and artists?
Because most of the students that would betaking my course would be writers.
They would be in in our department.
And we had and I've had a numberof students from visual arts, students
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from animation that have taken my course,but I can't depend on that.
I have to depend on the fact that they'regoing to be writers first and foremost.
And a lot of them would be taking my class
and interested in the book listand reading comics.
But then on the first day I had toI had to expect that
the majority of them would freak outwhen I asked them to draw anything.
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And I don't think that you can takea course in comics without drawing
something.
I think that it helps you to understandthe medium,
understand what writers and artistsgo through when they create it, understand
how it's put together in a waythat you just can't get from just looking
at it alone.
So my my first step, really
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in thinking about what they wouldexperience was that
I tried to make the syllabus into a comic
and I drew as much of the syllabusas I could in comic form.
And the same goes for my web courseas I started to create that,
as much of that as is drawnas I could, that assignment sheets are all
they all have sort of like comic coversto them, and some of them are like process
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comics where I try to illustratethe steps of an assignment.
It's time intensive,so I can't do it for everything, but
I try to do a lot of itand building the course
and specifically and showing students
that these things can be done bysomeone who's not primarily an artist.
I draw a lot of comicsnow, but but back then, you know,
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the early 20 tens,I wasn't drawing as much because
I wasn't teaching comicsand I was just reading them
and I didn't think I had much talent,and so I just didn't.
And so I figured if I draw the syllabusand they see bad art,
that will make them more,more comfortable.
And I still useeven though I think I've improved,
I've put a lot of time into my craftover the last
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5 to 7 years. Eight years.
I, I stilluse a lot of that original illustration.
Just, just to create a comfort levelfor for students.
But I've also borrowed a lot of strategiesfrom a artist and graphic novelist
and teacher named Lynda Barry,who wrote a book called Syllabus
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about teaching comics againto primarily writers.
And even as young as high school students.
And she's up in Wisconsin.
But she shebasically had has this idea of of
teaching students to love
comicsfirst and foremost and love creating them.
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And I think that you can't do thatwith high stakes work
like draw 20 pagebut realistically illustrate it.
You know, like the nobodys
you get you get that task as a writerand you're like, I'm out, I'm done.
You try to create tasks that
that are goingto make everyone bad in a way.
And so she will create tasksand she writes about this
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that are, you know, draw Batmanin 30 seconds and nobody's going to do it.
Well,you know, even somebody who draws Batman
professionallyis going to struggle with that.
So it kind of putseveryone on the same level.
My my variation of that in my coursesare to make everyone or to help
everyone become more comfortablethrough what I call note card tasks.
And so
part of my book list for my students isthey all have to buy a stack of note cards
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and then we'll start every class with thesometimes it's the 5 minutes,
sometimes it's a two minute,sometimes it's a one minute drawing task
where they'll have to draw something.
It could be a skylineand it could be a tree.
But it's just it's just a way toto force them to practice and force them
to be comfortable with their own voiceand and force them to to have fun.
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And most of them really do.
And I think that through doingtasks like that, students are able to see
what they can actually accomplishand what what their version of a face
looks like or their version of a treelooks like, and then work with that
on the larger projects.
And in terms of in terms of the nursesthat that were working through
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and I would actually maybe the backtrackto the the HIV project,
I think that's similarto the way that the storyboards work
when we're asking a participant to,to draw something on the storyboard.
I think while I don't thinkthat the conversation is necessarily
I don't want to use the word fun,but the act of drawing
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is something that I can say universally.
We all loved at one point in our lives.
We were all bad at it at one pointin our lives, but we all loved it
like everybody.
I could give everyone a cranand they would
they would enjoy doing somethingwith a cran right now
might just be like coloring something,but you have fun drawing.
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And I think that there isa disarming quality to that of like
feeling like you're like sixor seven again, you know,
with a coloring book in front of you.
And so I think that the storyboards dothat as well.
It's a small, constrained space.
You don't have much time to to worryabout drawing something realistically.
And in a lot of our storyboards,you know, we had pre drawn material
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and they might just drawin extra things into the panels.
So it wasn't high
stakes for, for most of the participants
with a nursing study,
the first thing that we actually wound updoing was Dr.
Cook gave me the name of a former studentwho is a nurse
and a nursing administratorin Indianapolis, and I won't use her name
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because the piece that we createdhasn't been published yet,
and she was initially hesitantabout doing it and about
putting her experiences out into the worldand having them linked to her hospital.
But enough time has passednow that that the pieces is out
will be published soon.
But I'll just wait till that
is out there so that I'm not the onebreaking that news for her.
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But we communicated over several months
back and forth interviewsabout her experiences during the pandemic.
And I don't I'm trying to remember whenthis was it must have been early 2021.
So when I say her experiences in thepandemic, I guess what I mean was like
the pandemic was still happening.
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And so the experiences that she wasspeaking about were incredibly raw.
They weren't reflectiveby several years of like, well,
remember when this happened,it was like this happened last week
and she's a nursing administrator,so the experiences were hers,
but also the experiencesof those working with her
and under her,those that she was responsible for.
(27:17):
So it was kind of likeshe was a collection of stories
on a collection of trauma, really.
And she was, I think initially,I don't want to say resistant,
but skeptical about about comics and
and I had to kind of look
at the experience of the
of the interviewas being my opportunity to disarm
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someone else who didn't have experiencewith the medium.
And so we took the we took the comics andour we took the interviews, rather, and
I tried to form
them into storiesand then form them into storyboards.
And every step along the way, I workedwith with this nursing administrator
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and tried to show her what it could looklike and what it could become.
And in the end, we have aI think it's about an 8 to 9 page comic.
It's black and white,and I'm pretty proud of what it became.
And it's incredible.
Yeah, I hope people are able to see it,but that kind of that was sort of our
(28:21):
how do I say this?
That was like our not an experiment,a beta test of what
this this larger projectwith with art therapy could be.
You know,
if we could work with one person,how could we work in a, in a larger group?
And, and while this project was, wasjust me working with this one, one person,
the hope is that through this, this largerart therapy project and workshops
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that will give a lot of peoplethe opportunity to draw for themselves,
not just communicate with somebody elsewho will draw their experiences.
Because the the idea of arttherapy isn't just talking, but it's also,
you know, writing and drawingas a way of thinking through the
through the, the events themselves.
Have either of you encounteredany initial pushback
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when the idea or the word comic isintroduced?
Because I think
outside of maybe
people who study these types of things,you know, the general I'm
just guessing here,but the general understanding of comics
would be what you think ofin the newspaper versus things like Mouse
or Persepolis that are very intensegraphic than the introduced.
(29:28):
The idea of graphic novels gets introducedinstead of the use the word comic.
So I'm curious about those kind of terms.
And have you receivedany kind of initial pushback
when you introducethe idea of comic as art therapy?
I don't I don't remember.
I, I think with with this
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with this nurse that I was working with,
I think it was more along the lines of
I mean, maybe the same way that someonewould would react when you said,
I want to make a TV show about thator a movie where you're like, I have
I mean, do I want Hollywood coming in and,
you know, like that kind of thing of like,I don't know if it can really capture
(30:11):
how terrible this is or was or whatever.
So I don't think it was necessarily
that that skepticismwas about the comics medium.
But I think that there's a long history of
looking down at the comics medium.
I think that if you talk to most comicscholars and even most comics creators,
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they've kind of moved pastthat to the point where
they kind ofjust don't even talk about it.
Like there used to be this kind of
trope in scholarly articles about comics
that they all had to start withor have some literature review about.
Like nowwe all know what people think about comics
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and and it's the newspapersand it's the superheroes.
And it would go there would be athis like, obligatory page about it.
And then there's this almost.
Now if you read a piece about,about some sort of scholarship
about comics now there's the likethe backlash paragraph to that.
The reactive paragraph about thisarticle will not have an apology about it.
(31:16):
So I do wonder now, what's the next tropethat's going to come along in five,
ten years to react to that?
But but, but I would say for formost people who are serious about this,
they kind of they've kind of justnow taken this this medium
and want to say it for granted.
But they they recognize
its power and its
potential and they kind of don'thave to make apologies for it anymore.
(31:38):
I think in the broader public,I don't know.
I think I think that there isthere is a connotation
that you can change the languageof what comics
is as the same thing,but people react differently.
If I said an Instagram storyabout a health related topic,
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even if it's the Instagramstory, is is sequential art
and it is a comic,people will react differently.
I think in a couple of yearspeople will probably react differently.
If I say Instagram story because peoplealready react differently now.
If I say a Facebook post,then they would have five years ago.
So I think that our our,our views of these mediums are constantly,
(32:20):
constantly changing.
I'm that graphic narrativeeditor at the Floor Review.
That term was coined at a timewhere we were, I don't want to say
afraid, but kind of afraidto call me the comics editor.
And I'm not afraid anymore.
But I just also don't feel like changingthe masthead, you know?
(32:40):
So I think that the terms are evolving.
I think that the public perceptionof them,
you know, there will always bethere will always be something,
because so much of comic art is I mean,
is kind of childishlooking like a talking animal
or something,and you have to fight through it.
But I think that you don't have to spendas much time fighting through it as maybe
(33:00):
you did 20 years ago. 30 years ago.
Yeah.
And even in the studies, you know,we were worried about that very question.
Would people feel like we weretrivially trivializing or asking them
to trivialize their experiencesby representing them in comic form?
And we didn't see a lot of that,but we did see some
reaction of I'm not a writer.
I mean, I'm not a draw.
(33:20):
I can't create these things.
And, you know,Nathan is very good at making this seem
approachable and accessible.
So that was helpful.
And, you know, there weresome people who preferred to use
the comics
storyboards as props to thentell their story or write their story.
Other people jumped into the drawing.
(33:42):
Other people wanted to kind of collaboratewith us on the drawing.
Almost like an offshoot of just
the amount of multi modalitythat we all incorporate into our lives.
Now, the idea that, you know,nothing is a static as it once was, like,
you know, some people still scoff attik-tok and I'm one of them and sometimes
(34:02):
but there's also a lot of really valuableinformation that you can get
through TikTok or Instagram reels or,you know, any of these things that are,
I think, you know, the immediate kneejerk reaction is that of like
I would think of like my parents like,oh, really?
That's some Instagram videothat can't be legitimate.
But I think those of us that know
that multi modality playssuch a huge role in the way
(34:24):
that we both express ourselvesand get information
and can disseminate information,I think that might be an offshoot of that.
Yeah,and I think it can be a wonderful way for
because I think sometimes, you know,there's the same apprehension about
just being a writer.
People will say, Well, I'm not a writer,you know, I can't write
my experiences or that'sjust not my thing or whatever.
(34:45):
So I think the combination of comics,well, yeah,
there may be a barrier for people saying,I can't draw whatever, You know,
I thought, Nathan,your point was great about
it does tap into to this sort of memorywe have of, of a time
where we would pick up a crayonand just do something without,
you know, selfcritiquing too much or anything like that.
(35:05):
So I think the combinationof like telling a story
and having a differentway of telling that story
is something that
I think can be really accessibleand and powerful.
I wanted to ask question about it.
When reading about this nursing project,
I was reading about the creationof these workshops or the workshop
(35:26):
or as mentioned in the articleprototype workshop
as something that I think is, you know,
what is meant to come out of this program
to be sharableand just involve more and more people.
So my question is howhow did you go from all of this research,
all this data,all these experiences to try and create
(35:48):
like a workshopthat could be replicated and
and involve more and more people?
Well, it's a messy process.
I thought you say that.
And, and and a a
it's a it's a work in process as well.
(36:08):
Like, I don't I don't know that we havea mostly finalized workshop right now
but it
I think we're still going to be makingsome revisions to it in the months ahead
to have our first major real workshopand probably July ish.
Yeah.
(36:29):
So the I think that there there aresort of two there were two things.
It's like you remember that old commercialwith like white bread and wheat bread,
you know, it was like why, why, why.
We, we, they're like two trains, you know,and then they smash together.
It goes we.
Yeah. So I mean, you got to,you got to look it up.
But there's sort of two different trainshere, two different breads, if you will.
(36:51):
And one was the preexisting reacttraining,
which, which is put on by Ukef restoresthat already exists
and it was already therefor for first responders ers.
And as a part of their training,there are video testimonials
or sort of like reenactedvideo testimonials that participants would
(37:14):
sort of interact with.
And then on the other hand,there are my own comics workshops and,
and the sort of thingsthat I do in my class and,
and maybe what you were referring
to, Nick, about a sort of prototypeworkshop that that I put on
for my, my colleaguesin nursing and writing and rhetoric.
(37:34):
And, andso we have sort of two different things.
And our our project is kind ofabout merging those things.
How do we take this preexisting training,which is for first responders,
not necessarily for nurses,and how do we take comics workshops
and how do we put them togetherinto something that speaks to nurses
and that incorporates the bestof both worlds and that and that was that.
(37:59):
That's like probably about a yearlong challenge that we had.
Like we don't want to lose anythingfrom the current React training.
We want to enhance it and augment itand give further opportunities
to participants.
But the training itselfand we went through the training
as a part of as a part of this process.
It's already longlike it was already a full day.
(38:19):
And a lot of our discussionshave been about length
How do we get this materialinto the preexisting structure?
What can be cutfrom the preexisting structure?
You know, how do we how do we get a
a nurse to sign up for this to beginwith, knowing that it's going to be long?
How do we ensure that they're
kept active throughoutand that this isn't a drag for them?
(38:44):
And so so yeah.
So I'm sure Blake could speak more toto our to our revision process.
And but I think thatthat that's the first thing that, that
we have to understand is that there arethere are two different,
two different workshopsand we had to smash them together
and then hopefully come awaywith, with something better.
And we're verywe're very close to that right now.
(39:06):
Yeah.
I think in additionto incorporating comics into the already
existing training, you know,Nathan developed a series of workshops,
follow up workshops after thatbig long training day
to both
help nurses think about the powerof comics for their own
(39:29):
purposes as art therapy,but also to reinforce the training itself.
So in this multidisciplinary fieldcalled graphic medicine, one of the uses
of comics is with provider training,and one of the uses in that is to help
you know,
nurses and training doctors in training,you name it,
(39:50):
reflect on and processwhat they were learning.
And so that's what we're doing withsome of these follow up
workshops is helping them
think about, okay, if I'm going to startimplementing these peer support
skills and having these hard conversations
with my skillswho are clearly under mental stress,
how can I better anticipate that?
(40:10):
How can I better practice it?
How can I better processwhat I learned in this workshop toward
doing it?
I think you're kind of alreadygetting there, but I was curious
what kind of rhetorical frameworksare you trying to expose them to?
I don't know if expose is the right word,but to
to allow them to approachthis rhetorically as opposed to, say,
(40:34):
artistically or creatively necessarily,but that that focus more
on, you know, the messageand the delivery of that.
Yeah. So one
one rhetorical
concept that rhetoricians who've studiedstigma and mental health stigma
which is what we're working onwith the nurses training in part
(40:56):
HIV stigma, other forms of stigma,
is this idea of rhetorical disability
that sometimes stigmaand in the case of mental health
with nurses,I guess the resistance to being vulnerable
and in asking for help,
you know,we have this cultural perception of nurses
as superheroes, and they arethat's a good thing.
(41:18):
But at the same time,it prevents them from
being vulnerable.
So I think with this ideaof rhetorical disability, it's getting at
how these kinds of stigma
can affect
both, howyou might be perceived by other people,
(41:40):
but also how you might perceive yourselfand your own sense of self agency
and rhetorical agency, your abilityto communicate about these things.
And so that's one of the,you know, the negative effects of stigma.
It shuts that ability down.
Another term
that rhetoricians have used to describethis is
Kako ethos, which meansjust sort of the negative antipathy
(42:02):
ethos being sort of one'scredibility or character,
and so rhetoricians of sort of study.
How do people reclaim that?
How do people
reclaim their rhetorical agency,their ability to communicate
about things that are really difficultand they may need help with?
(42:23):
Is that something that, you know,you saw from
some of the data collected,some of the experiences shared where,
you know, people involved in nurseswere talking about dealing with this
maybe like public perceptionof of their role in their jobs
and their own like personal experiences.
Absolutely. Maybe.
(42:43):
I mean, you you've studied had nurseshave already been doing this
outside of our study. Yeah.
So I think if you go to just Instagramand you just start making up hashtags,
I mean, making up you just typing
in combos of words, you're going to finda lot of covered related comics.
I mean, COVID comics, I'm sure,is a hashtag that's got at least 75,000.
(43:07):
But there are two two separate bookswith the title of COVID Chronicles
by different publishers that are inpretty much the same thing, like they're
they are comics are withand about nurses during the pandemic
and in some sortof civilians is as well. So
(43:27):
the materials is out there.
And I feel likewhen when the pandemic hit,
I don't want to sound crass about this,but I you know, some of my earliest
thoughts were like, there'sgoing to be a lot of a lot of comics
written during this time.
I was already at that time, in my firstyear writing classes, showing examples
(43:48):
of like Instagram posts for emergencypreparedness during hurricanes.
And I was like, That's going to bea big thing during COVID as well.
Like very illustrated looks at,
you know, what you should do, how to washhands.
You know, all of this. It wasit was everywhere.
And it continued through
through the pandemic itself.
(44:10):
And the stories
that are publishedare are pretty extensive.
I think what Blake is, is referring toalso was that there were at least
initially and I think, Megan,you referred to the the
the moments in New Yorkwhere people are cheering on
the first respondersand cheering on the medical staffs.
(44:31):
And I think everybody remembersthat moment in time where we all kind of
and I say DFI,but we all were like trying to prop up
health careworkers during an incredibly tough time.
And one of the ways that we did this,
Marvel Comics actually published this,I think is called Vital Signs.
(44:52):
It was a it was a comic.
And the coverI mean, you just you can Google this.
I know this is not a visual mediumwe're talking on right now, but Google,
Marvel Comics, Vital Signs, and you'll seeexactly what Blake is talking about,
where it's well-meaning, but there arethese nurses that look like superheroes,
and they might even be like incrediblywell muscled like Marvel artists.
(45:14):
They're not good at drawing anythingbut well muscled people
and like, you look at that,
and for a nurse,I would think that for like a day or two
you have that and you're like, Well,that's cool, that's nice.
Then think they that of me.
But then a few days later,when you're struggling, you're like,
(45:35):
I was
about to swear, but you're like, I don't.
I don't like that.That's My that's my G-rated version.
I don't like that anymorebecause I'm going through something
and every dayI have to look like, like that.
And some of my favorite days in teachingare the days
when I'm sick and I can go in.
I'm just like, Hey, all right,we're not going to do a whole lot today.
(45:56):
Like, you know, I could just
I could just like,kind of let it let it out, you know,
like every other day to put on the mask,you have to put on the armor.
But that day I can be like,I just don't you guys,
we have to talk today or whatever.
And I think that I think that like,I'm sure that that nurses and first
responders had that that feeling as well.
Like, the more you tell me how awesomeI am, like I'm getting
(46:20):
sicker and sicker and sickerof having to to to pretend.
And so I'd say thatthere's there's a lot of work
that's out therealready that depicts kind of
that sort of fragility
and and mental health
and Yeah.
And we're hoping that that that'sI think that things might have changed
(46:42):
a little bit by nowsince we have a little bit more distance.
So I think if we
if we were putting on the workshops in2021 would get a lot more of that mindset.
I'm curious to see where it goes. And
in 2023 and 2024
what the mindset is and how maybe the more
reflective nature of of the the pieces
(47:04):
and even the conversations that we have,what that's going to look like.
And to add a couple examples
from the HIV study,you know, Nathan had this great idea
to just give our participantsa blank panel and say,
draw what stigma looks likeand feels like to you didn't actually.
Come from one of the participants, though.
It might have. Yeah.
(47:25):
I mean, we put it into two words,but I think it was one of one of them
that was drawing somethingand somehow anyway, but messy again.
So a couple examples of what they drew.
One drew
as the providerwas asking them, stigmatizing questions
or whatever was happening,like melting into a puddle.
(47:47):
So and another participant drew
this this figure of
being in this valley
with these big boulderscoming down on both sides.
And at the bottom of the valleywere these broken stones
that said happiness and self-love.
So you can see how powerful
(48:10):
this medium can be at conveying that
that loss of sense of self efficacy,rhetorical agency ability
to communicate what they needand who they are
to a provider.
Well, I don't think that
necessarily this is the only reason,
but I think this is a big part of thisthis grant and this work that you've done.
(48:32):
Our department is now going to be havinga certificate
in medical writing and rhetoric.
And I mean, I, I applaud youfor doing this and helping us.
I mean, like I said,I think it's a collaborative thing,
but I think your work has beena large part of that.
And for the first time, I thinkthis coming spring, you're teaching
graphic medicine.
This fall as. Well. Yeah. Okay.
(48:53):
So 28, fall of 2023.
Yes time has gone all kinds of elastic.
It is a special topics course.
It's EMC 3480 to
talk to us a little bit how what is that
class going to look and functionlike versus what you did for this?
So I think.
I, I could be wrong, but so the coursehas been permanently approved.
(49:16):
So it's it'sa real part of the curriculum.
Okay.
But I don't know if we're still waitingon the course number.
So that might be one of the reasons.
So put an asterisk next. Yeah.
I'll go back in and edit the right number.
No, that's fine.
If you're a student listening to this,you've made it this far.
You can you can easily do the wholemy ECF thing and search my last year.
(49:40):
Academic advisor.
Yeah, yeah.
So graphic medicine this fall are it'sI think a pretty cool book list.
We also have it structuredthat we will be teaching it
in spring of 2025 as a team talk course
and Krista Cook in nursing and we'll bedoing that through the honors college
(50:00):
so that will be even more special,I think.
But yeah, I'm looking forwardto bringing in
a number of, of guestspeakers, graphic novelists.
I just I want it to bea really special course, too, to see how
how different writers and artistshave have have
put their stamp on ongraphic medicine will be reading
(50:21):
scholarship but we'll also bedrawing pictures in the course too.
And I will have a daywhere I bring in crayons.
Thinking about the certificate
more broadly,you know, Nathan has helped us
teaching some of the other coursesin the certificate,
like writing about health and medicine,which I sometimes teach.
Think about how to incorporate comicsin those courses
too, even though that might not bethe primary focus.
(50:42):
It's an exciting thread and I thinkyou'll see that in another course.
I'll plug that Dr.
Stephanie Wheelerdeveloped called Disability Rhetorics.
I took that course with heras a grad student.
Fantastic. Yes, it was wonderful.
I think she's teachingit undergrad this coming academic year.
So to me I still am
(51:04):
wrapping my mind around.
You mentioned like the ideaof how much graphic interface
is involved in medical professionson a day to day basis.
Like you mentioned, hand-washing,like a graphic for how to wash your hands.
So is this going to be a combinationof considering
all the waysthat graphics are involved in medicine,
(51:25):
or is it going to be more comicfocused or.
Yeah, so well, so
for any listenerswho might not have the years and years of
of of academic focus in comics,I should just say
when we talk about comics,we're really just talking sequential art.
So even though the word comics is usedand that brings to mind things
(51:47):
like newspapers, that brings to mindthings like comic books
or even graphic novelsand really sequential art
could just be two images side by side,or it could be one image
that is meant to be read as a storylike my
my go to example would be something like aWhere's Waldo page.
Like I could look at that as being comics,not because it has multiple panels,
(52:11):
but because there are storiesbeing told as you move from left
to right across the page and back again,it's there.
There is a sequence to itand there are multiple things happening.
All that to say, though,I think I used the example earlier of like
Instagram stories or Instagram postingsand and so we'll definitely look at
(52:33):
graphic public health in the courseand how during the pandemic
and during other public healthcrises, emergency is
comics or sequential art has been usedin social media,
like my example for hurricanesemergency preparedness.
If you've ever movedthrough a posting on Instagram,
(52:55):
that's multiple images with textin those images.
I mean, that's the kind of thingthat we'll be looking at.
How do you communicatethose sort of tough health
related concepts through sequential art,whether it's a booklet,
whether that's an Instagrampost with multiple images,
or whether that's something,just something else completely online.
(53:16):
I will also look at public
public art displays too,as being examples of sequential art.
So really the possibilities are endless.
And in this field called graphic medicine,you're already seeing,
you know, as I mentioned before,comics being used in provider training
not just for reflection, but skillbuilding, like empathy with with patients.
(53:39):
It's being used for patient and caregivertestimonials and, you know, broader
public education around those experiencesbeing used to guide clinical practice.
So there's a comic called
Working with Trauma
or something like that,looking at looking at trauma.
And it's it comics are being used
(54:00):
for patient instructionsand patient education as well.
I immediately thought of the patientinstructions and education
because I know there is an issuewith breakdown
in communicationbased on language or cultural mores.
That is a big issue about where suddenlywhen you were talking at the at the start
about how rhetoric encompassesthe symbols that we're using
for discussion, thatthat would be a real big part of that.
(54:24):
What weare closing in our time for this episode.
So I just wanted to askif there if there's anything
you want to talk about or mentionedthat's on the horizon.
And Nate, you were just talking about youryour course that's coming up.
But perhaps what are the next stepsfor that for this particular
nursing projectthat you've been doing and workshops
or anything that you want to mentionthat you're excited about?
That's that's coming up for you both?
(54:46):
Yeah.
This makes me wish we hada dedicated website for the project.
So yeah, so,
so we could point listeners somewhere
and they could learn moreand see our progress.
We don't have that yet,but we'll, I don't know,
we'll start an Instagram page in July.
We'll just sayI don't know what it's going to be.
I wish I could give you the, the, the tag,but that that might be useful
(55:09):
at some point.
But yeah, we're just full steamahead on the on the four day workshops
and excited to see where they go,the effect they have
and then whatsort of materials produced for sure.
Yeah, I think with the HIV workshop
it's going to be exciting to see thatgetting implemented and different forms
of provider training and we're alreadyhave we already have partnerships
(55:30):
with the Florida Department of Healthand other entities to do that.
And I think one next step withthat would be to start
thinking about how stigma worksin faith based institutions
with the nurses training.
As Nick mentioned before,after we collect data
and we refine
(55:50):
what that looks like,we can start thinking about
how to make that scalable throughmaybe online modules and other forms.
Remote engagement.
Personally, I, you know,Nathan has inspired me to combine
my work on that journal.
You mentioned rhetoric of healthand medicine
and, you know, work in that areawith graphic medicine and comics.
(56:11):
And so I'm going to be editinga digital column
for that journal with a colleagueat West Virginia, Catherine Gouge.
And Nathan.
Do you want to tell them about, you know,your current long project with comics?
Well, yeah.
So it's again,I wish I had something to point
listeners to, but you could alwaysfollow me on my Instagram.
(56:32):
The real Nathan Hollick.
Check Mark certified by.
My my Twitter is at the fake.
Nathan Hollick So yeah, justI want it to have a contrast.
Yeah, I've been working for about a yearon a series of comics
about parenting a sonwith with pretty severe ADHD
(56:53):
and the search for a diagnosis
and what that looked like the
and the search for medication
and how how to deal with with,
with the issuesin someone who can't communicate yet.
I think there are a lot of storiesnow about ADHD in high school and college.
(57:15):
There's a lot of stories about adultsdiscovering that they have ADHD
and there are a lot of memoirs about ADHDand what someone's gone through.
But I wanted to tell the experiencefrom the perspective of a parent
who has no idea what's happening.
And I think for a lot of parents,when they have a child,
they know they don't have any ideaof what's happening with anything, right?
I had both the fortune and misfortuneof having three children.
(57:40):
So I had I had.
Lots of data points there.
Let's go ahead and back that upand cross out the misfortune part
just in case they hear this someday.
But but but I wasI had a basis, a comparison.
And, you know,my son with ADHD has a twin.
So so we could easily there's alwaysyou're putting two people together.
I'm like there'sso different going on here.
(58:02):
And so we're able to
to constantly figure to constantlylook at that and say that
that something is something is wrong,but we can't put our finger on it.
And the tentative titleof what I'm working on is just something
is wrong, comma, nothing is wrong,like the sort of internal battles you have
and you have with your spouseor your partner.
(58:22):
And even the use of the wordwrong is wrong, right?
Like there's nothing wrong.But but something's wrong.
How do we say this
and how do we identify it insomebody who's five, six, seven years old
and you don't want to derail education,you don't want to use medication.
There's a lot that goes into to it,but you want that person to succeed.
And when your son is
(58:46):
in dangerof not making it through kindergarten
because he lays on the floor and stabs
holes in his papers and, you know,it's war, you've got to do something.
You can't just keep saying there'snothing wrong.
So anyway, so that's the that's the piecethat I'm that I'm working on.
I'm trying to create short installmentsthat hopefully I can put online.
(59:08):
I'm still kind of looking for venuesat this point, but
but hopefully also ultimately collectinto into something larger.
And that can speak to two other parentswho are working through these issues.
That comics is going to doa lot of good in the world.
Yeah, I think there's definitelyan audience for it.
I feel like the same way that we've begunto reexamine and redefine autism
(59:30):
and and the spectrumand how it impacts people at every age.
I think there's a similar trendnow happening with ADHD and A.D.D.
that it's just a little more I think it'sa more more common than we ever realized.
All those things we wrote off as Quirks
and people years ago are now like,Oh no, there's actually a reason for that.
(59:50):
And then not to completely undermine thatbecause that's really fantastic.
And as a parent, I identify with that.
You're also teaching Blake,you're teaching
rhetoric and fantasy footballthis fall, is that right?
Yeah.
So that came out of a versionof our rhetoric in popular culture,
of course, that has rotating topicsrelated to popular culture.
So in playing fantasy footballfor a long time,
(01:00:14):
you know,I have a church league that I run.
And so a few years backI thought, well, why don't I try this?
And we can get in leagues and we can play.
And we had national,you know, analysts Skype into our class
and offer my studentsinternships and crazy things happen. But,
you know, the way we
connected to writing is first wewe think about,
(01:00:35):
well, how do you learn how to participate
and argue in a new discourse community
or even a familiar discourse,Of course, community.
How do you learnhow to make better arguments
about in this case, who to draft,who to trade, who to start that week?
And so that'sthat's one transferable nugget.
And I think the other one is aroundthis idea of communities of practice.
(01:00:56):
How do people new at somethinglearn how to learn it better?
And so we in groups and we
we share resources and we share
struggles and challenges and then we thinkabout, well, how how can that translate?
If I knew in a job or I knew in a majoror I knew it, something else.
(01:01:18):
Well, it's always so inspiringgetting to speak with our colleagues
and their incredible ideas
and their applicationand what they're doing in the world.
So thank you so much for taking the timeto share that with us today.
Well, your podcast is inspiring.Thank you. Oh, yeah.
Thank you for having us. Definitely.
Yeah. Thanks for being here.
And thanks for listening, everybody.
Greetings and welcome to D.W..
Are discussions on writing and rhetorica space for informal conversations
around research and practice in the fieldat the university level.
A place inclusive for curious novices,blossoming scholars and seasoned academics
to consider and sharetheir inquiries, experiences and passions
surrounding writing and rhetoric.
(00:29):
We are your hosts, professorsMeghan Faulkner and Nicholas
Garcia, Presswith the University of Central Florida.
Thank you for joining us.
Now let's get this conversation started.
Today, we're
joined by two members of UCF faculty, Dr.
(00:49):
Blake Scott and Nathan Hollick.
Dr. Scott has an array of researchexpertise, including rhetoric
and medicine, professionaland technical writing, scholarship
on writing, program development, designand support of student learning.
He's a founding coeditorof the scholarly journal
Rhetoric of Health and Medicine,winner of the CFA.
(01:09):
LJ 2019 Best New Journal
Awardand has published multiple book chapters
and in academic journalsrelated to writing and rhetoric.
Professor Hollick is the creatorof fiction, nonfiction and comics
that have been widely publishedin print and online.
With his most recent publication, BrightLights, Medium Sized City,
(01:31):
and serves as the graphic narrative editorat the Florida Review.
Together, they created strengtheninghospital nurses, mental health resilience
through a peer supporttraining program using comic testimonials,
which focused on introducing comic therapyto health care professionals.
This won the 2021 Pabst SteinmetzFoundation Arts and Innovation Award,
(01:55):
which grants two proposalseach year, combining programs
in the College of Arts and Humanitieswith other UCF colleges.
Thank you for joining us today.
Thank you. Thank you.
So to start out
for those who may not seethe immediate connection, how do you
bridge writing and rhetoricwith medicine and health care?
(02:18):
What is the connection for you?
Well, I'll start with Kenneth Burke's
famous definition of rhetoric as
the use of symbolic communicationto induce cooperation
in other humanswho by nature respond to symbols.
So if we think about rhetoric expansively,
we can we can imagine
(02:39):
that kind of communication happeningacross various kinds of contexts.
And we can imagine that communicationinvolving language, but perhaps
other media too,like visual communication,
spatial communication.
And what led you to have that connectionpersonally?
Was there something that interests you?
(02:59):
And you have a large amountof research and publication on it.
What led you to that?
I think coming of age and the HIV AIDS
epidemic in thelate eighties, early nineties
made me
curious about how I could connectwhat I was doing in the community
with activism, with preventive education.
(03:21):
Eventually, with HIV testing, I was a testcounselor while I was getting my Ph.D.
with what I with what I wanted to dowith my scholarship and my scholarship.
Was there a need or a lackor something that you found
that would make that application,
you know, so importantfor that particular community?
(03:42):
Yeah.
So what we were seeing with both
public policy, public health policy
and public health campaignsand also preventive education
at smaller and smaller contexts, was
the emphasis on particular identities
as being at risk or even risky and
(04:06):
that had the potential to
stigmatize certain groups.
It had the potential to detractfrom the actual behaviors
that were causing HIVand keep other people
who didn't identify in those groupsfrom recognizing their own risk.
(04:27):
I think of medical writing as
always, being,
I guess, lofty or highbrowwould be the way that I think of it.
And I think I mean, we can see thatin the last few years, what happens
when there's a national and a nationalor global pandemic or health crisis,
the ability to communicatewhat what we just
(04:49):
the ability to communicateis so important, to talk to people.
So I was just curiousif you were also seeing,
you know, a disconnectbetween the medical jargon
and how it was impacting communitiesand if if that particular epidemic
maybe was where we could start to seethat shift towards things being more
(05:09):
user friendly or,you know, more common language
being used to make the messagemore deliverable or impactful?
Absolutely.
I think with any kind of education,drawing on community norms is is crucial.
And so what we sawwhen activists started to get involved
in developing education and
(05:31):
programing and materials is
an abundance of
safer sex and harm reduction strategiesthat maybe clinical folks
and epidemiological researchers
didn't identify previously.
So I want to ask then,how does the connection
(05:53):
between those kinds of questionsand what you do with comics
and comic therapy,how do those then sort of come together?
So I'm also thinkingabout your previous project
winner from 2019,which was about HIV stigma specifically.
And then, you know, usingsome of those methods to kind of talk
(06:16):
about what some of those situationsmight be for different stigma.
So now I wonder if you could talkabout the role of comics in
and then maybe both of you talk abouthow those two kind of came together.
Well, the idea of comics as art therapy,
I wish I could
say, like Blake,that I've had this experience
(06:38):
with something like thatthat goes back decades.
But it's relatively new to me.
I don't know if it's new to Blake,
but a lot of the things that he and Ihave done together over this grant project
and over our previous grant project,I think are
a case studyin how research projects are put together.
(06:58):
And by that I mean incredibly messy.
I say that because notnot in a negative way, but I say that
in a way where like I'm ableto talk about these things
for my students in first year writingclasses as being incredibly illustrat
for how research works for Blakeone day running into me in the hallway
(07:20):
because he deals with health, healthand medicine and health rhetoric,
and knowing that I draw comicsand just asking me a question about it.
And then a month laterI'm sitting down in a coffee shop
with Blake and with our colleaguefrom Nursing to talk about up
a research project that's going one way.
(07:40):
And then at the end of the conversationgoes in a completely different way,
and then two years later,talking about other avenues for research.
And so none of this, though,I think it's all written up very well.
The titles of our grant, of our grantsand our research projects
certainly sound lofty,and they sound really, really well done.
(08:04):
Well put together from the starttheir coffee shop conversations,
and they proceed with a sense of curiosity
about somethinglike in the case of our first project,
which was about stigmawith people living with HIV,
the idea of of what we called
data elicitation storyboards.
(08:27):
That was something that didn't really evenhave a name when we started our project.
Though the idea had existed as early as,you know, a child's workbook
that will ask you to draw somethinginto a blank panel.
But but Blake essentially coined
that that term forfor what we were working with, which
which again, was just, just a brainstormas we were high on espresso, you know
(08:52):
and and with with the projectthat that you introduced here
for this podcast with the
strengthening nurses wellbeing,I forget the entire title but you know
your listeners have they have phonesthey can they can rewind
with that the idea of of art therapy.
I don't even know, you know,who first posed that idea
(09:15):
because our,our research team has gotten pretty large.
There's quite a few peoplethat are a part of it,
and I'm not sure who posed the idea,
but but when whoever did pose it,our first step was to just
learn more about that.
And I think all of us on the team,none of us were experts
with art therapy.
(09:39):
I draw comics and I read a lot of comics.
So if that if that gives you expertise
in something, I've got comics expertisebecause I read a lot of them
and I spend a lot of time drawing,but I never really
been too in depth with comics being used
to help somebody who's experiencing trauma
to to help them writeabout and draw about their experiences.
(10:00):
So so we read, we read a lot.
We did a pretty lengthy,I think, literature review.
And the more we learned about it,the more we thought
this could be applied to a programthat is preexisting
at UCSF, which we canwe can talk about more in a moment.
So again, just to kind of sumall of that up, it's a messy response,
but it's a messy overall processto get to where you have an actual project
(10:24):
with real people involved, real questionsthat you're asking, and then real
research tools and real workshops.
Yeah, just a couple more examplesof the serendipitous
nature of these kinds of researchprojects.
The original project came about
first when I
read something in USA or UCF todayabout Christa Cook's research.
(10:47):
She's an associate professorof nursing around HIV stigma,
and I had previously worked on that topicand I invited her to coffee.
She there talked about a research group
she was part of statewide that identifiedprovider enacted HIV stigma.
So stigma that patients experiencewith providers as a priority area
(11:10):
because it was keeping patients out ofcare was leading to poor health outcomes.
And so we wanted to create,
you know, impactful, shorter
creative training materials for providers.
And at that point, you know,
we were thinking videos,we were thinking variety of media.
(11:30):
And then it struck melike we have this gold mine
in her department named Nathan Hollick.
And I knew that Nathan was an accomplished
graphic novelist and memoirist.
He had published a number of shorter formcomics as well
aroundissues of health and medicine, including,
you know, the community traumawe experienced after the Pulse shooting.
(11:53):
So we invited him and it became quicklyapparent as he was talking
with us about the power of comicsthat this was the way we wanted to go.
We didn't need to make videos,we didn't need to make podcasts.
We needed to make these comics.
Another example was when we were planningto start collecting data
(12:14):
from area patients about, you know, howthey experience stigma with providers.
And, you know,the pandemic made recruitment
and conducting the focus groupsand interviews complicated.
So we
we went on pause.
And at that point, I think it was Nathanwho who came up with the idea, well,
why don't we experiment with using comicsas data collection tools themselves,
(12:38):
these kind of minimal comics
storyboards that so that they could drawtheir experiences
and interesting, symbolic waysas well as tell us their experiences.
And so we thought, well, why don't we testsome of these data collection tools out?
Because, as Nathan said,this hasn't been done very often.
And that's when we developed a pilot studywith a subset of participants
(13:00):
who gave us incredible feedbackthat we then turn around and use
to make our study better when we actuallydid the full fledged thing.
Are you able to tell us who
you know, what communities were involvedin that pilot of testing?
In terms of participants?
Are you able to disclose that? Okay. Sure.
So what we decided to do was Kristaand I both had some longstanding
(13:24):
relationship ups
with HIV service organizations in the areafrom previous work we had done.
And so we worked through the patientsupport groups
that were sponsored by these organizationsbecause they were already patient led.
And so we gauged their interestin helping us with this.
They were very interested
and we had toget creative in how we collected the data.
(13:47):
I remember one focus group where we
we were meeting remotely via Zoom,
but the patient group was all together
in a garage and the technology crashedand eventually
the facilitator on their endhad to use an iPad to interface
with our team and then translatesome of what we were asking them
(14:10):
to do with the comic storyboardsand with the discussion.
So we had some interesting encounterswith gathering data around that.
But most of ourmost of our participants were
people of color.
Most of them were over 30,
(14:31):
and most of them were already engagedin helping their peers
manage life.
Living with HIV.
And then when you transitionedinto working directly
with health care providers, with nurse,it was nurses, correct?
How to what what communities locally wereyou gathering from in that in that way?
(14:52):
Well, we were already collaboratingwith nursing faculty in the first project
and we were in thinking about stigma.
We began thinking about
other kinds of stigma too,including the stigma around mental health
that nurses
and other providers were facing,especially during the COVID 19 pandemic.
When they were getting it from community,they were getting it from patients.
(15:16):
They also felt
like they weren't being supported
by the institutions themselves,not enough PPE equipment.
So our nursing faculty
kind of let us downthat as another potential way
to engage
these vulnerable populations
with art therapy,comic therapy in our case.
(15:40):
And then we had this connection to ClintBowers,
who was part of the leadershipover at the Clinical Research Center.
UCSF restores fact.
He was a former
chair,interim chair of the English Department,
for we became our own department.
And he that clinical research
(16:02):
center helps first first responders
and they're branching into health careproviders deal with trauma.
He told us that they already had a
a branch of what they were doing
that focused on prevention
(16:22):
of mental illness
that was geared aroundhelp training nurses to be peer supporters
for one another,to identify different levels of stress,
different types of stress,
to engage in better conversationsaround stress with their peers,
and then to connect theirpeers with help when needed.
(16:43):
Yeah, and
interesting, like some facet of the COVID
19 pandemic was illustrating what a
an absolute drought there is in termsof mental health support.
You know, therapistsare suddenly finding themselves,
you know, no one's taking new patients,There's not enough therapy and enough
providers of mental healthsupport for the amount that is necessary.
(17:07):
And I know, you know, in the beginningit was what can we do to show our support?
Well, in a place like Manhattan,you know, where you live a little more
in a congested area, people are bangingpots and pans every day at 5 p.m.
to try to, like, cheer everybody on.
But, you know, here in Orlando,we're a little more isolated.
And in that, just the way that our
(17:29):
our we're the way that we functionin the way that we are, we are set up.
So I could see where
for nurses
in particularthat are doing a lot of the heavy lifting,
that some type of outlet for mental health
would be so helpfuland really needed and necessary.
So what was that?
What was the responsefrom that group like?
(17:50):
I mean, were they didthey resisted all that?
The idea of comics or what
did they really embracethat Were they were they, you know,
where they overwhelmed in generaland not really looking to
to expend any more energy or were theyreally looking for that outlet?
I think they're very much looking
for outlets to help them process
(18:11):
the traumathey were living through, to help them
tell their story of what they experienced
and even in some casesto use art and comics in particular
as advocacy tools
to advocate for what they neededin the workplace,
what they needed from the hospitalsin which they were working.
(18:32):
I think what we sawin looking at the response to the pandemic
was a combination ofwe had these big organizations,
professional organizations,nursing organizations, for example,
that were starting these initiativesaround, helping
nurses write about their experiences,
helping nurses drawand make art about their experiences.
(18:55):
But there was this gap with with comics.
And on the other hand,we saw individual nurses
start making comicsabout their experiences.
So we wanted to createan institutional space
where they could get training around this.
They could have they could tell us,they could imagine for themselves, like,
what do we want to do with these comics?
(19:19):
A question about
I want to go back to the comicsas as sort of data collection tools.
And I wanted to throw a question to Nate.
When you are, you know, and obviouslyyou have experience of this, you know,
in teaching comics as well,but what's your approach to people?
You know, when you first pitchedthe idea of expressing themselves
(19:41):
or writing experiential, you know, typesof things through comics where you know,
those authors may not
have that experience with withdrawing or,you know, you know, panels,
all the things that kind of go into,you know, the the genre of of comics.
Like what's your approach forfor those kind of folks?
(20:02):
And I'm thinking,you know, imagining my own self,
like being in that situation,I would be very, you know, self-conscious
about my my drawing abilityor my ability to produce something.
What are the ways in which youyou kind of yeah.
You should have been a part of our facultydrawing club I saw a couple of semesters
ago, which was ended thanks to COVID.
(20:23):
But yeah, the,I think one of my main goals
when I first started to teach a coursecalled Rhetoric of Comics back in 2015,
was that how do I sort of bridgethat gap between writers and artists?
Because most of the students that would betaking my course would be writers.
They would be in in our department.
And we had and I've had a numberof students from visual arts, students
(20:46):
from animation that have taken my course,but I can't depend on that.
I have to depend on the fact that they'regoing to be writers first and foremost.
And a lot of them would be taking my class
and interested in the book listand reading comics.
But then on the first day I had toI had to expect that
the majority of them would freak outwhen I asked them to draw anything.
(21:09):
And I don't think that you can takea course in comics without drawing
something.
I think that it helps you to understandthe medium,
understand what writers and artistsgo through when they create it, understand
how it's put together in a waythat you just can't get from just looking
at it alone.
So my my first step, really
(21:29):
in thinking about what they wouldexperience was that
I tried to make the syllabus into a comic
and I drew as much of the syllabusas I could in comic form.
And the same goes for my web courseas I started to create that,
as much of that as is drawnas I could, that assignment sheets are all
they all have sort of like comic coversto them, and some of them are like process
(21:51):
comics where I try to illustratethe steps of an assignment.
It's time intensive,so I can't do it for everything, but
I try to do a lot of itand building the course
and specifically and showing students
that these things can be done bysomeone who's not primarily an artist.
I draw a lot of comicsnow, but but back then, you know,
(22:12):
the early 20 tens,I wasn't drawing as much because
I wasn't teaching comicsand I was just reading them
and I didn't think I had much talent,and so I just didn't.
And so I figured if I draw the syllabusand they see bad art,
that will make them more,more comfortable.
And I still useeven though I think I've improved,
I've put a lot of time into my craftover the last
(22:35):
5 to 7 years. Eight years.
I, I stilluse a lot of that original illustration.
Just, just to create a comfort levelfor for students.
But I've also borrowed a lot of strategiesfrom a artist and graphic novelist
and teacher named Lynda Barry,who wrote a book called Syllabus
(22:56):
about teaching comics againto primarily writers.
And even as young as high school students.
And she's up in Wisconsin.
But she shebasically had has this idea of of
teaching students to love
comicsfirst and foremost and love creating them.
(23:17):
And I think that you can't do thatwith high stakes work
like draw 20 pagebut realistically illustrate it.
You know, like the nobodys
you get you get that task as a writerand you're like, I'm out, I'm done.
You try to create tasks that
that are goingto make everyone bad in a way.
And so she will create tasksand she writes about this
(23:38):
that are, you know, draw Batmanin 30 seconds and nobody's going to do it.
Well,you know, even somebody who draws Batman
professionallyis going to struggle with that.
So it kind of putseveryone on the same level.
My my variation of that in my coursesare to make everyone or to help
everyone become more comfortablethrough what I call note card tasks.
And so
part of my book list for my students isthey all have to buy a stack of note cards
(24:02):
and then we'll start every class with thesometimes it's the 5 minutes,
sometimes it's a two minute,sometimes it's a one minute drawing task
where they'll have to draw something.
It could be a skylineand it could be a tree.
But it's just it's just a way toto force them to practice and force them
to be comfortable with their own voiceand and force them to to have fun.
(24:23):
And most of them really do.
And I think that through doingtasks like that, students are able to see
what they can actually accomplishand what what their version of a face
looks like or their version of a treelooks like, and then work with that
on the larger projects.
And in terms of in terms of the nursesthat that were working through
(24:44):
and I would actually maybe the backtrackto the the HIV project,
I think that's similarto the way that the storyboards work
when we're asking a participant to,to draw something on the storyboard.
I think while I don't thinkthat the conversation is necessarily
I don't want to use the word fun,but the act of drawing
(25:06):
is something that I can say universally.
We all loved at one point in our lives.
We were all bad at it at one pointin our lives, but we all loved it
like everybody.
I could give everyone a cranand they would
they would enjoy doing somethingwith a cran right now
might just be like coloring something,but you have fun drawing.
(25:27):
And I think that there isa disarming quality to that of like
feeling like you're like sixor seven again, you know,
with a coloring book in front of you.
And so I think that the storyboards dothat as well.
It's a small, constrained space.
You don't have much time to to worryabout drawing something realistically.
And in a lot of our storyboards,you know, we had pre drawn material
(25:49):
and they might just drawin extra things into the panels.
So it wasn't high
stakes for, for most of the participants
with a nursing study,
the first thing that we actually wound updoing was Dr.
Cook gave me the name of a former studentwho is a nurse
and a nursing administratorin Indianapolis, and I won't use her name
(26:12):
because the piece that we createdhasn't been published yet,
and she was initially hesitantabout doing it and about
putting her experiences out into the worldand having them linked to her hospital.
But enough time has passednow that that the pieces is out
will be published soon.
But I'll just wait till that
is out there so that I'm not the onebreaking that news for her.
(26:34):
But we communicated over several months
back and forth interviewsabout her experiences during the pandemic.
And I don't I'm trying to remember whenthis was it must have been early 2021.
So when I say her experiences in thepandemic, I guess what I mean was like
the pandemic was still happening.
(26:56):
And so the experiences that she wasspeaking about were incredibly raw.
They weren't reflectiveby several years of like, well,
remember when this happened,it was like this happened last week
and she's a nursing administrator,so the experiences were hers,
but also the experiencesof those working with her
and under her,those that she was responsible for.
(27:17):
So it was kind of likeshe was a collection of stories
on a collection of trauma, really.
And she was, I think initially,I don't want to say resistant,
but skeptical about about comics and
and I had to kind of look
at the experience of the
of the interviewas being my opportunity to disarm
(27:40):
someone else who didn't have experiencewith the medium.
And so we took the we took the comics andour we took the interviews, rather, and
I tried to form
them into storiesand then form them into storyboards.
And every step along the way, I workedwith with this nursing administrator
(28:01):
and tried to show her what it could looklike and what it could become.
And in the end, we have aI think it's about an 8 to 9 page comic.
It's black and white,and I'm pretty proud of what it became.
And it's incredible.
Yeah, I hope people are able to see it,but that kind of that was sort of our
(28:21):
how do I say this?
That was like our not an experiment,a beta test of what
this this larger projectwith with art therapy could be.
You know,
if we could work with one person,how could we work in a, in a larger group?
And, and while this project was, wasjust me working with this one, one person,
the hope is that through this, this largerart therapy project and workshops
(28:46):
that will give a lot of peoplethe opportunity to draw for themselves,
not just communicate with somebody elsewho will draw their experiences.
Because the the idea of arttherapy isn't just talking, but it's also,
you know, writing and drawingas a way of thinking through the
through the, the events themselves.
Have either of you encounteredany initial pushback
(29:06):
when the idea or the word comic isintroduced?
Because I think
outside of maybe
people who study these types of things,you know, the general I'm
just guessing here,but the general understanding of comics
would be what you think ofin the newspaper versus things like Mouse
or Persepolis that are very intensegraphic than the introduced.
(29:28):
The idea of graphic novels gets introducedinstead of the use the word comic.
So I'm curious about those kind of terms.
And have you receivedany kind of initial pushback
when you introducethe idea of comic as art therapy?
I don't I don't remember.
I, I think with with this
(29:48):
with this nurse that I was working with,
I think it was more along the lines of
I mean, maybe the same way that someonewould would react when you said,
I want to make a TV show about thator a movie where you're like, I have
I mean, do I want Hollywood coming in and,
you know, like that kind of thing of like,I don't know if it can really capture
(30:11):
how terrible this is or was or whatever.
So I don't think it was necessarily
that that skepticismwas about the comics medium.
But I think that there's a long history of
looking down at the comics medium.
I think that if you talk to most comicscholars and even most comics creators,
(30:34):
they've kind of moved pastthat to the point where
they kind ofjust don't even talk about it.
Like there used to be this kind of
trope in scholarly articles about comics
that they all had to start withor have some literature review about.
Like nowwe all know what people think about comics
(30:54):
and and it's the newspapersand it's the superheroes.
And it would go there would be athis like, obligatory page about it.
And then there's this almost.
Now if you read a piece about,about some sort of scholarship
about comics now there's the likethe backlash paragraph to that.
The reactive paragraph about thisarticle will not have an apology about it.
(31:16):
So I do wonder now, what's the next tropethat's going to come along in five,
ten years to react to that?
But but, but I would say for formost people who are serious about this,
they kind of they've kind of justnow taken this this medium
and want to say it for granted.
But they they recognize
its power and its
potential and they kind of don'thave to make apologies for it anymore.
(31:38):
I think in the broader public,I don't know.
I think I think that there isthere is a connotation
that you can change the languageof what comics
is as the same thing,but people react differently.
If I said an Instagram storyabout a health related topic,
(31:59):
even if it's the Instagramstory, is is sequential art
and it is a comic,people will react differently.
I think in a couple of yearspeople will probably react differently.
If I say Instagram story because peoplealready react differently now.
If I say a Facebook post,then they would have five years ago.
So I think that our our,our views of these mediums are constantly,
(32:20):
constantly changing.
I'm that graphic narrativeeditor at the Floor Review.
That term was coined at a timewhere we were, I don't want to say
afraid, but kind of afraidto call me the comics editor.
And I'm not afraid anymore.
But I just also don't feel like changingthe masthead, you know?
(32:40):
So I think that the terms are evolving.
I think that the public perceptionof them,
you know, there will always bethere will always be something,
because so much of comic art is I mean,
is kind of childishlooking like a talking animal
or something,and you have to fight through it.
But I think that you don't have to spendas much time fighting through it as maybe
(33:00):
you did 20 years ago. 30 years ago.
Yeah.
And even in the studies, you know,we were worried about that very question.
Would people feel like we weretrivially trivializing or asking them
to trivialize their experiencesby representing them in comic form?
And we didn't see a lot of that,but we did see some
reaction of I'm not a writer.
I mean, I'm not a draw.
(33:20):
I can't create these things.
And, you know,Nathan is very good at making this seem
approachable and accessible.
So that was helpful.
And, you know, there weresome people who preferred to use
the comics
storyboards as props to thentell their story or write their story.
Other people jumped into the drawing.
(33:42):
Other people wanted to kind of collaboratewith us on the drawing.
Almost like an offshoot of just
the amount of multi modalitythat we all incorporate into our lives.
Now, the idea that, you know,nothing is a static as it once was, like,
you know, some people still scoff attik-tok and I'm one of them and sometimes
(34:02):
but there's also a lot of really valuableinformation that you can get
through TikTok or Instagram reels or,you know, any of these things that are,
I think, you know, the immediate kneejerk reaction is that of like
I would think of like my parents like,oh, really?
That's some Instagram videothat can't be legitimate.
But I think those of us that know
that multi modality playssuch a huge role in the way
(34:24):
that we both express ourselvesand get information
and can disseminate information,I think that might be an offshoot of that.
Yeah,and I think it can be a wonderful way for
because I think sometimes, you know,there's the same apprehension about
just being a writer.
People will say, Well, I'm not a writer,you know, I can't write
my experiences or that'sjust not my thing or whatever.
(34:45):
So I think the combination of comics,well, yeah,
there may be a barrier for people saying,I can't draw whatever, You know,
I thought, Nathan,your point was great about
it does tap into to this sort of memorywe have of, of a time
where we would pick up a crayonand just do something without,
you know, selfcritiquing too much or anything like that.
(35:05):
So I think the combinationof like telling a story
and having a differentway of telling that story
is something that
I think can be really accessibleand and powerful.
I wanted to ask question about it.
When reading about this nursing project,
I was reading about the creationof these workshops or the workshop
(35:26):
or as mentioned in the articleprototype workshop
as something that I think is, you know,
what is meant to come out of this program
to be sharableand just involve more and more people.
So my question is howhow did you go from all of this research,
all this data,all these experiences to try and create
(35:48):
like a workshopthat could be replicated and
and involve more and more people?
Well, it's a messy process.
I thought you say that.
And, and and a a
it's a it's a work in process as well.
(36:08):
Like, I don't I don't know that we havea mostly finalized workshop right now
but it
I think we're still going to be makingsome revisions to it in the months ahead
to have our first major real workshopand probably July ish.
Yeah.
(36:29):
So the I think that there there aresort of two there were two things.
It's like you remember that old commercialwith like white bread and wheat bread,
you know, it was like why, why, why.
We, we, they're like two trains, you know,and then they smash together.
It goes we.
Yeah. So I mean, you got to,you got to look it up.
But there's sort of two different trainshere, two different breads, if you will.
(36:51):
And one was the preexisting reacttraining,
which, which is put on by Ukef restoresthat already exists
and it was already therefor for first responders ers.
And as a part of their training,there are video testimonials
or sort of like reenactedvideo testimonials that participants would
(37:14):
sort of interact with.
And then on the other hand,there are my own comics workshops and,
and the sort of thingsthat I do in my class and,
and maybe what you were referring
to, Nick, about a sort of prototypeworkshop that that I put on
for my, my colleaguesin nursing and writing and rhetoric.
(37:34):
And, andso we have sort of two different things.
And our our project is kind ofabout merging those things.
How do we take this preexisting training,which is for first responders,
not necessarily for nurses,and how do we take comics workshops
and how do we put them togetherinto something that speaks to nurses
and that incorporates the bestof both worlds and that and that was that.
(37:59):
That's like probably about a yearlong challenge that we had.
Like we don't want to lose anythingfrom the current React training.
We want to enhance it and augment itand give further opportunities
to participants.
But the training itselfand we went through the training
as a part of as a part of this process.
It's already longlike it was already a full day.
(38:19):
And a lot of our discussionshave been about length
How do we get this materialinto the preexisting structure?
What can be cutfrom the preexisting structure?
You know, how do we how do we get a
a nurse to sign up for this to beginwith, knowing that it's going to be long?
How do we ensure that they're
kept active throughoutand that this isn't a drag for them?
(38:44):
And so so yeah.
So I'm sure Blake could speak more toto our to our revision process.
And but I think thatthat that's the first thing that, that
we have to understand is that there arethere are two different,
two different workshopsand we had to smash them together
and then hopefully come awaywith, with something better.
And we're verywe're very close to that right now.
(39:06):
Yeah.
I think in additionto incorporating comics into the already
existing training, you know,Nathan developed a series of workshops,
follow up workshops after thatbig long training day
to both
help nurses think about the powerof comics for their own
(39:29):
purposes as art therapy,but also to reinforce the training itself.
So in this multidisciplinary fieldcalled graphic medicine, one of the uses
of comics is with provider training,and one of the uses in that is to help
you know,
nurses and training doctors in training,you name it,
(39:50):
reflect on and processwhat they were learning.
And so that's what we're doing withsome of these follow up
workshops is helping them
think about, okay, if I'm going to startimplementing these peer support
skills and having these hard conversations
with my skillswho are clearly under mental stress,
how can I better anticipate that?
(40:10):
How can I better practice it?
How can I better processwhat I learned in this workshop toward
doing it?
I think you're kind of alreadygetting there, but I was curious
what kind of rhetorical frameworksare you trying to expose them to?
I don't know if expose is the right word,but to
to allow them to approachthis rhetorically as opposed to, say,
(40:34):
artistically or creatively necessarily,but that that focus more
on, you know, the messageand the delivery of that.
Yeah. So one
one rhetorical
concept that rhetoricians who've studiedstigma and mental health stigma
which is what we're working onwith the nurses training in part
(40:56):
HIV stigma, other forms of stigma,
is this idea of rhetorical disability
that sometimes stigmaand in the case of mental health
with nurses,I guess the resistance to being vulnerable
and in asking for help,
you know,we have this cultural perception of nurses
as superheroes, and they arethat's a good thing.
(41:18):
But at the same time,it prevents them from
being vulnerable.
So I think with this ideaof rhetorical disability, it's getting at
how these kinds of stigma
can affect
both, howyou might be perceived by other people,
(41:40):
but also how you might perceive yourselfand your own sense of self agency
and rhetorical agency, your abilityto communicate about these things.
And so that's one of the,you know, the negative effects of stigma.
It shuts that ability down.
Another term
that rhetoricians have used to describethis is
Kako ethos, which meansjust sort of the negative antipathy
(42:02):
ethos being sort of one'scredibility or character,
and so rhetoricians of sort of study.
How do people reclaim that?
How do people
reclaim their rhetorical agency,their ability to communicate
about things that are really difficultand they may need help with?
(42:23):
Is that something that, you know,you saw from
some of the data collected,some of the experiences shared where,
you know, people involved in nurseswere talking about dealing with this
maybe like public perceptionof of their role in their jobs
and their own like personal experiences.
Absolutely. Maybe.
(42:43):
I mean, you you've studied had nurseshave already been doing this
outside of our study. Yeah.
So I think if you go to just Instagramand you just start making up hashtags,
I mean, making up you just typing
in combos of words, you're going to finda lot of covered related comics.
I mean, COVID comics, I'm sure,is a hashtag that's got at least 75,000.
(43:07):
But there are two two separate bookswith the title of COVID Chronicles
by different publishers that are inpretty much the same thing, like they're
they are comics are withand about nurses during the pandemic
and in some sortof civilians is as well. So
(43:27):
the materials is out there.
And I feel likewhen when the pandemic hit,
I don't want to sound crass about this,but I you know, some of my earliest
thoughts were like, there'sgoing to be a lot of a lot of comics
written during this time.
I was already at that time, in my firstyear writing classes, showing examples
(43:48):
of like Instagram posts for emergencypreparedness during hurricanes.
And I was like, That's going to bea big thing during COVID as well.
Like very illustrated looks at,
you know, what you should do, how to washhands.
You know, all of this. It wasit was everywhere.
And it continued through
through the pandemic itself.
(44:10):
And the stories
that are publishedare are pretty extensive.
I think what Blake is, is referring toalso was that there were at least
initially and I think, Megan,you referred to the the
the moments in New Yorkwhere people are cheering on
the first respondersand cheering on the medical staffs.
(44:31):
And I think everybody remembersthat moment in time where we all kind of
and I say DFI,but we all were like trying to prop up
health careworkers during an incredibly tough time.
And one of the ways that we did this,
Marvel Comics actually published this,I think is called Vital Signs.
(44:52):
It was a it was a comic.
And the coverI mean, you just you can Google this.
I know this is not a visual mediumwe're talking on right now, but Google,
Marvel Comics, Vital Signs, and you'll seeexactly what Blake is talking about,
where it's well-meaning, but there arethese nurses that look like superheroes,
and they might even be like incrediblywell muscled like Marvel artists.
(45:14):
They're not good at drawing anythingbut well muscled people
and like, you look at that,
and for a nurse,I would think that for like a day or two
you have that and you're like, Well,that's cool, that's nice.
Then think they that of me.
But then a few days later,when you're struggling, you're like,
(45:35):
I was
about to swear, but you're like, I don't.
I don't like that.That's My that's my G-rated version.
I don't like that anymorebecause I'm going through something
and every dayI have to look like, like that.
And some of my favorite days in teachingare the days
when I'm sick and I can go in.
I'm just like, Hey, all right,we're not going to do a whole lot today.
(45:56):
Like, you know, I could just
I could just like,kind of let it let it out, you know,
like every other day to put on the mask,you have to put on the armor.
But that day I can be like,I just don't you guys,
we have to talk today or whatever.
And I think that I think that like,I'm sure that that nurses and first
responders had that that feeling as well.
Like, the more you tell me how awesomeI am, like I'm getting
(46:20):
sicker and sicker and sickerof having to to to pretend.
And so I'd say thatthere's there's a lot of work
that's out therealready that depicts kind of
that sort of fragility
and and mental health
and Yeah.
And we're hoping that that that'sI think that things might have changed
(46:42):
a little bit by nowsince we have a little bit more distance.
So I think if we
if we were putting on the workshops in2021 would get a lot more of that mindset.
I'm curious to see where it goes. And
in 2023 and 2024
what the mindset is and how maybe the more
reflective nature of of the the pieces
(47:04):
and even the conversations that we have,what that's going to look like.
And to add a couple examples
from the HIV study,you know, Nathan had this great idea
to just give our participantsa blank panel and say,
draw what stigma looks likeand feels like to you didn't actually.
Come from one of the participants, though.
It might have. Yeah.
(47:25):
I mean, we put it into two words,but I think it was one of one of them
that was drawing somethingand somehow anyway, but messy again.
So a couple examples of what they drew.
One drew
as the providerwas asking them, stigmatizing questions
or whatever was happening,like melting into a puddle.
(47:47):
So and another participant drew
this this figure of
being in this valley
with these big boulderscoming down on both sides.
And at the bottom of the valleywere these broken stones
that said happiness and self-love.
So you can see how powerful
(48:10):
this medium can be at conveying that
that loss of sense of self efficacy,rhetorical agency ability
to communicate what they needand who they are
to a provider.
Well, I don't think that
necessarily this is the only reason,
but I think this is a big part of thisthis grant and this work that you've done.
(48:32):
Our department is now going to be havinga certificate
in medical writing and rhetoric.
And I mean, I, I applaud youfor doing this and helping us.
I mean, like I said,I think it's a collaborative thing,
but I think your work has beena large part of that.
And for the first time, I thinkthis coming spring, you're teaching
graphic medicine.
This fall as. Well. Yeah. Okay.
(48:53):
So 28, fall of 2023.
Yes time has gone all kinds of elastic.
It is a special topics course.
It's EMC 3480 to
talk to us a little bit how what is that
class going to look and functionlike versus what you did for this?
So I think.
I, I could be wrong, but so the coursehas been permanently approved.
(49:16):
So it's it'sa real part of the curriculum.
Okay.
But I don't know if we're still waitingon the course number.
So that might be one of the reasons.
So put an asterisk next. Yeah.
I'll go back in and edit the right number.
No, that's fine.
If you're a student listening to this,you've made it this far.
You can you can easily do the wholemy ECF thing and search my last year.
(49:40):
Academic advisor.
Yeah, yeah.
So graphic medicine this fall are it'sI think a pretty cool book list.
We also have it structuredthat we will be teaching it
in spring of 2025 as a team talk course
and Krista Cook in nursing and we'll bedoing that through the honors college
(50:00):
so that will be even more special,I think.
But yeah, I'm looking forwardto bringing in
a number of, of guestspeakers, graphic novelists.
I just I want it to bea really special course, too, to see how
how different writers and artistshave have have
put their stamp on ongraphic medicine will be reading
(50:21):
scholarship but we'll also bedrawing pictures in the course too.
And I will have a daywhere I bring in crayons.
Thinking about the certificate
more broadly,you know, Nathan has helped us
teaching some of the other coursesin the certificate,
like writing about health and medicine,which I sometimes teach.
Think about how to incorporate comicsin those courses
too, even though that might not bethe primary focus.
(50:42):
It's an exciting thread and I thinkyou'll see that in another course.
I'll plug that Dr.
Stephanie Wheelerdeveloped called Disability Rhetorics.
I took that course with heras a grad student.
Fantastic. Yes, it was wonderful.
I think she's teachingit undergrad this coming academic year.
So to me I still am
(51:04):
wrapping my mind around.
You mentioned like the ideaof how much graphic interface
is involved in medical professionson a day to day basis.
Like you mentioned, hand-washing,like a graphic for how to wash your hands.
So is this going to be a combinationof considering
all the waysthat graphics are involved in medicine,
(51:25):
or is it going to be more comicfocused or.
Yeah, so well, so
for any listenerswho might not have the years and years of
of of academic focus in comics,I should just say
when we talk about comics,we're really just talking sequential art.
So even though the word comics is usedand that brings to mind things
(51:47):
like newspapers, that brings to mindthings like comic books
or even graphic novelsand really sequential art
could just be two images side by side,or it could be one image
that is meant to be read as a storylike my
my go to example would be something like aWhere's Waldo page.
Like I could look at that as being comics,not because it has multiple panels,
(52:11):
but because there are storiesbeing told as you move from left
to right across the page and back again,it's there.
There is a sequence to itand there are multiple things happening.
All that to say, though,I think I used the example earlier of like
Instagram stories or Instagram postingsand and so we'll definitely look at
(52:33):
graphic public health in the courseand how during the pandemic
and during other public healthcrises, emergency is
comics or sequential art has been usedin social media,
like my example for hurricanesemergency preparedness.
If you've ever movedthrough a posting on Instagram,
(52:55):
that's multiple images with textin those images.
I mean, that's the kind of thingthat we'll be looking at.
How do you communicatethose sort of tough health
related concepts through sequential art,whether it's a booklet,
whether that's an Instagrampost with multiple images,
or whether that's something,just something else completely online.
(53:16):
I will also look at public
public art displays too,as being examples of sequential art.
So really the possibilities are endless.
And in this field called graphic medicine,you're already seeing,
you know, as I mentioned before,comics being used in provider training
not just for reflection, but skillbuilding, like empathy with with patients.
(53:39):
It's being used for patient and caregivertestimonials and, you know, broader
public education around those experiencesbeing used to guide clinical practice.
So there's a comic called
Working with Trauma
or something like that,looking at looking at trauma.
And it's it comics are being used
(54:00):
for patient instructionsand patient education as well.
I immediately thought of the patientinstructions and education
because I know there is an issuewith breakdown
in communicationbased on language or cultural mores.
That is a big issue about where suddenlywhen you were talking at the at the start
about how rhetoric encompassesthe symbols that we're using
for discussion, thatthat would be a real big part of that.
(54:24):
What weare closing in our time for this episode.
So I just wanted to askif there if there's anything
you want to talk about or mentionedthat's on the horizon.
And Nate, you were just talking about youryour course that's coming up.
But perhaps what are the next stepsfor that for this particular
nursing projectthat you've been doing and workshops
or anything that you want to mentionthat you're excited about?
That's that's coming up for you both?
(54:46):
Yeah.
This makes me wish we hada dedicated website for the project.
So yeah, so,
so we could point listeners somewhere
and they could learn moreand see our progress.
We don't have that yet,but we'll, I don't know,
we'll start an Instagram page in July.
We'll just sayI don't know what it's going to be.
I wish I could give you the, the, the tag,but that that might be useful
(55:09):
at some point.
But yeah, we're just full steamahead on the on the four day workshops
and excited to see where they go,the effect they have
and then whatsort of materials produced for sure.
Yeah, I think with the HIV workshop
it's going to be exciting to see thatgetting implemented and different forms
of provider training and we're alreadyhave we already have partnerships
(55:30):
with the Florida Department of Healthand other entities to do that.
And I think one next step withthat would be to start
thinking about how stigma worksin faith based institutions
with the nurses training.
As Nick mentioned before,after we collect data
and we refine
(55:50):
what that looks like,we can start thinking about
how to make that scalable throughmaybe online modules and other forms.
Remote engagement.
Personally, I, you know,Nathan has inspired me to combine
my work on that journal.
You mentioned rhetoric of healthand medicine
and, you know, work in that areawith graphic medicine and comics.
(56:11):
And so I'm going to be editinga digital column
for that journal with a colleagueat West Virginia, Catherine Gouge.
And Nathan.
Do you want to tell them about, you know,your current long project with comics?
Well, yeah.
So it's again,I wish I had something to point
listeners to, but you could alwaysfollow me on my Instagram.
(56:32):
The real Nathan Hollick.
Check Mark certified by.
My my Twitter is at the fake.
Nathan Hollick So yeah, justI want it to have a contrast.
Yeah, I've been working for about a yearon a series of comics
about parenting a sonwith with pretty severe ADHD
(56:53):
and the search for a diagnosis
and what that looked like the
and the search for medication
and how how to deal with with,
with the issuesin someone who can't communicate yet.
I think there are a lot of storiesnow about ADHD in high school and college.
(57:15):
There's a lot of stories about adultsdiscovering that they have ADHD
and there are a lot of memoirs about ADHDand what someone's gone through.
But I wanted to tell the experiencefrom the perspective of a parent
who has no idea what's happening.
And I think for a lot of parents,when they have a child,
they know they don't have any ideaof what's happening with anything, right?
I had both the fortune and misfortuneof having three children.
(57:40):
So I had I had.
Lots of data points there.
Let's go ahead and back that upand cross out the misfortune part
just in case they hear this someday.
But but but I wasI had a basis, a comparison.
And, you know,my son with ADHD has a twin.
So so we could easily there's alwaysyou're putting two people together.
I'm like there'sso different going on here.
(58:02):
And so we're able to
to constantly figure to constantlylook at that and say that
that something is something is wrong,but we can't put our finger on it.
And the tentative titleof what I'm working on is just something
is wrong, comma, nothing is wrong,like the sort of internal battles you have
and you have with your spouseor your partner.
(58:22):
And even the use of the wordwrong is wrong, right?
Like there's nothing wrong.But but something's wrong.
How do we say this
and how do we identify it insomebody who's five, six, seven years old
and you don't want to derail education,you don't want to use medication.
There's a lot that goes into to it,but you want that person to succeed.
And when your son is
(58:46):
in dangerof not making it through kindergarten
because he lays on the floor and stabs
holes in his papers and, you know,it's war, you've got to do something.
You can't just keep saying there'snothing wrong.
So anyway, so that's the that's the piecethat I'm that I'm working on.
I'm trying to create short installmentsthat hopefully I can put online.
(59:08):
I'm still kind of looking for venuesat this point, but
but hopefully also ultimately collectinto into something larger.
And that can speak to two other parentswho are working through these issues.
That comics is going to doa lot of good in the world.
Yeah, I think there's definitelyan audience for it.
I feel like the same way that we've begunto reexamine and redefine autism
(59:30):
and and the spectrumand how it impacts people at every age.
I think there's a similar trendnow happening with ADHD and A.D.D.
that it's just a little more I think it'sa more more common than we ever realized.
All those things we wrote off as Quirks
and people years ago are now like,Oh no, there's actually a reason for that.
(59:50):
And then not to completely undermine thatbecause that's really fantastic.
And as a parent, I identify with that.
You're also teaching Blake,you're teaching
rhetoric and fantasy footballthis fall, is that right?
Yeah.
So that came out of a versionof our rhetoric in popular culture,
of course, that has rotating topicsrelated to popular culture.
So in playing fantasy footballfor a long time,
(01:00:14):
you know,I have a church league that I run.
And so a few years backI thought, well, why don't I try this?
And we can get in leagues and we can play.
And we had national,you know, analysts Skype into our class
and offer my studentsinternships and crazy things happen. But,
you know, the way we
connected to writing is first wewe think about,
(01:00:35):
well, how do you learn how to participate
and argue in a new discourse community
or even a familiar discourse,Of course, community.
How do you learnhow to make better arguments
about in this case, who to draft,who to trade, who to start that week?
And so that'sthat's one transferable nugget.
And I think the other one is aroundthis idea of communities of practice.
(01:00:56):
How do people new at somethinglearn how to learn it better?
And so we in groups and we
we share resources and we share
struggles and challenges and then we thinkabout, well, how how can that translate?
If I knew in a job or I knew in a majoror I knew it, something else.
(01:01:18):
Well, it's always so inspiringgetting to speak with our colleagues
and their incredible ideas
and their applicationand what they're doing in the world.
So thank you so much for taking the timeto share that with us today.
Well, your podcast is inspiring.Thank you. Oh, yeah.
Thank you for having us. Definitely.
Yeah. Thanks for being here.
And thanks for listening, everybody.
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