Hannah Bellwoar

Digital health and feminist (re)visionings of healing

This web installation theorizes by creating three parallel narratives that re-mediate the methods traditionally associated with theory. Using CHAT to re-situate the work of feminist, science and technology studies, and visual studies theory, this web installation is intended to point to the mediated, fragmented, and often disjointed experiences of the relationships between text, space, bodies, culture, and histories in navigating the medical encounter. Thus, the navigation of the web installation is also mediated, fragmented, and disjointed. As they navigate the installation, readers will want to remain aware of the ways that this mediated journey mimics the struggle involved in navigating one's medical experiences through the different institutions and structures (i.e., personal, medical, social, etc.).

Abstract: Feminist (re)visionings addresses the call of feminist scholars such as Treichler, Cartwright, and Penley (1998) to theorize vision, medicine, and the patient/female’s relationship to disease by using the call of Writing Studies scholars and placing critique side by side with images that reinvent the spaces where digital health is represented. In this web installation, these calls are taken up through three parallel narratives: an academic narrative that takes up academic sources, a personal narrative that explores the writer’s relationship with her own medical experiences and medical records, and a reflective narrative, found in audio files throughout the installation, that reflect on the choices made in the other two narratives to convey those perspectives.

Hannah Bellwoar is a PhD candidate in the Center for Writing Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research explores the interfaces between public and private and official and unofficial discourses in medical spaces. She has taught several courses at the University of Illinois in business and professional writing, rhetoric and composition, and most recently, writing with video. In her own research and teaching, she is exploring how we write and are written in multimodal contexts.