Title: Associate Professor of English
University: West Virginia University
Email: cgouge@wvu.edu
Twitter: CatherineGouge
Website: http://english.wvu.edu/faculty-and-staff/faculty-directory/catherine-gouge
Description of Work:
I teach medical writing, editing, multimedia writing, professional writing, and rhetoric and science courses in the English Department at West Virginia University, where I recently just completed the process of creating a “Medical Humanities and Health Studies” interdisciplinary minor. My current research considers the ways that various texts, technologies, and rhetorical practices enact assumptions about what care is, can be, and should be.
I have written about improving patient discharge instructions and about assumptions built into arguments regarding the role of communication in designing care practices. I am currently working on a book, Divergent Paths: Paying Attention to Non/Compliance in Health and Medicine, which analyzes documentation of patient non-compliance or -adherence as artifacts of an on-going interdisciplinary conversation about designing ethical and effective care practices. With my frequent collaborator, John Jones, I have also recently published essays and coedited a couple of journal special issues about wearable technologies (and rhetorical practice, communication design, etc.).
Finally, I have a several other projects in the works: I am in the early stages of a creating “Care Lab,” for which I will collect, curate, and display humanities projects that explore ways of improving care in health and medicine. I am working on some original drawings and “comics” (not the funny kind) that I will submit to medical journals that publish such things. And last but certainly not least, I partner with community non-profits and WVU’s Health Sciences Center to do writing workshops and to help with the writing and editing related to various public health projects.
Symposium Submission:
Health Humanities Baccalaureate Programs and Writing Studies: History, Disciplinarity, Best Practices
“Health Humanities Baccalaureate Programs and Writing Studies” explores the relationship between the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) and Technical Communication and Writing Studies (TCWS) to the Health Humanities via a timely curricular development: the involvement of RHM and TCWS in the rapidly growing presence of Health Humanities Baccalaureate Programs (HHBPs). Health Humanities Baccalaureate Programs in the United States (2016) 1, a report issued by the Hiram College Center for Literature and Medicine and forthcoming with discussion in the Journal of Medical Humanities (Fall 2017), documents a significant increase in the number of HHBPs in the last 25 years (from just a few to 55 and several more at the proposal stage). According to the Hiram report, these programs offer several longitudinal benefits for students—among them, improved interpersonal and communication proficiencies and other related leadership and professional skills—competencies deeply connected to the work we do as scholars of RHM and TCWS. Because of this, the history of the design and development of HHBPs is rich with opportunities to consider several disciplinary and curricular questions that impact the kinds of learning opportunities such programs are facilitating: Namely, how can RHM scholars participate in and contribute to the medical/health humanities, and vice versa? And how has RHM scholarship impacted TCWS curricula, and vice versa? In so doing, “Health Humanities Baccalaureate Programs and Writing Studies” also explores a critical junction in our relationship to public health: How are RHM and TCWS contributing to curriculum designed to teach students (many of whom plan to go into public health and other health-oriented professions) about the social and cultural contexts of health and illness? And how might we (re)consider our curricular endeavors in light of this contribution?
Drawing on scholarship from RHM2, the Health Humanities3, Disability Studies and related TCWS scholarship4, my contribution addresses these questions by providing a comprehensive history of the role of writing studies in HHBPs since 1975 (when the first HHBP program was established)—including critical context for and exploration of the disciplinary intersections and tensions between RHM, TCWS, and the Health Humanities and their impact on writing studies curricula. Derived both from recent experiences shared by others included in the Hiram Report and from my experiences coordinating the effort to establish a “Medical Humanities and Health Studies” interdisciplinary minor at West Virginia University, the final part of my contribution includes an annotated set of “best practices” for designing, implementing, and participating in such programs at this historical moment—including strategies for negotiating the disciplinary and institutional challenges of HHBPs such as, decision-making at each stage of the process, naming and approval negotiations, and working with curriculum committees at the department, college, and university levels.