Art and Healing in the Wake of COVID-19: A Health Humanities Perspective

How have artists contributed to healing during the COVID-19 pandemic? How does art shape or express diverse cultural understandings of health and illness, medicine and the body, death and spirituality, in response to crisis? How do such understandings directly impact the physical healing but also the life decisions and emotions of individuals, from caregivers to patients? And finally, how do these affect social transformation as part of healing?

This course examines the art of COVID-19, from a contemporary and historical perspective, using the tools of Health Humanities, a relatively new discipline that connects medicine to the arts and social sciences. Materials for this course include art from different media (from poetry and fiction to performance and installation), produced during COVID-19 in mostly Western contexts, in diverse communities and with some forays into the rest of the world and into other historical moments of crisis. They also include some non-fiction readings from the disciplines Health Humanities draws from, such as history of medicine, anthropology, psychology, sociology, cultural history, media studies, art criticism, and medicine itself. We will thus be introduced to basics of Health Humanities and its methods while addressing the pandemic as a world-changing event, aided by the unique insights of artists. The course will culminate in final projects that present a critical and contextual appreciation of a specific art project created in response to COVID-19; such appreciations may be creative art projects as well, or more analytical, scholarly evaluations.