We started season five by talking to Dr Michelle Chiang (Assistant Professor of English, Nanyang Technological University). We had a fascinating conversation with Michelle about her work on the value of illness stories, and how they could potentially inform or challenge our existing understanding of health, illness and dying. Michelle also discussed her experience as a literary scholar and a medical humanities researcher in the Singapore research landscape, which is still trying to wrap its head around medical humanities as an interdisciplinary and collaborative field of inquiry.

Here are some messages we took away from this thoughtful conversation – and some key reasons to tune into the podcast!

Research and life

Michelle talked to us about her research around the exploration of embodied lives and absolute systems that persistently fail to account for lived experiences. For her, the plays of Samuel Becket form an entry point to making such lived experience of illness vividly accessible. We were struck by how Michelle explained to us that as a Becket scholar, she nonetheless felt very unprepared to deal with a situation of terminal illness in the family – which prompted her turn to the study of illness narratives. This gap between research and real life forms an interesting tension in the field of medical and health humanities.

Stories about interdisciplinarity

We spoke of the joys and challenges of interdisciplinary working, and also how our regional cultures can influence these. Michelle grounded her work in careful scholarship and methodology, still carefully linked to individual stories and the deep and transforming value of narrative. Talking to Michelle made us further appreciate how our five seasons of Conversations have themselves become an ongoing series of personal stories and a growing string of reflections from people working in this interdisciplinary space between arts & humanities and health & medicine.

Our Conversation with Michelle touches on and deepens many of the recurring topics of the series. We hope you find listening to the podcast as rewarding as it was for us to host Michelle.

Dieter and Ian