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0:23
EMILY HARRISON: Welcome. I'm Emily Harrison, a historian and an instructor in epidemiology here at the Chan School of Public Health. I'll be your moderator today. Joining me today are Annie Brewster, a practicing physician and the founder of the Health Story Collaborative, Vidya Krishnan, practicing journalist and author of The Phantom Plague-- How Tuberculosis Shaped History, and Predrag Stojicic, the community organizer and adjunct lecturer at Harvard Chan School.
0:55
This event is being presented jointly with the Center for Health Communication at Harvard Chan School. So today, we'll have a chance to talk about the power of storytelling to raise awareness of urgent public health issues and to make meaning of our own roles in relation to them. But let's start with some definitions-- storytelling and narrative. What distinguishes them from all the other kinds of information that around us? So let's go around and give each panelist
1:26
a chance to share their take on what makes a story a story, and the relationship between story and narrative. Predrag, do you want to start us off? PREDRAG STOJICIC: Yeah, I can definitely. It's great to be here. And it's a simple question. But for me, the stories and narratives are like magic. They turn moments into meaning. Like, it's not just about describing facts, it's about creating the feeling that can describe, like, fully what it means to be a human being.
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And like, a good narrative can kind of suck you in, can give you good laughs, good cries, and sometimes outrage you, but it leaves you with this feeling, oh, we went deep. We have to do something about it. And that's what, for me, is narratives and stories in many ways. VIDYA KRISHNAN: Yeah, I have a very journalistic approach to it. So we in the newsroom use these two words interchangeably. And the word story itself is not pejorative, but I look at it as a raw material
2:30
on which we bring our ethical or our narrative on it. So how you put the story in order, who you center, who gets to narrate, whose story is told, what is the vantage point that you are going to inflict on your readers? And I feel like narrative kind of tells the writer's politics and those kind of ethical questions. That's how I differentiate it, but I use them interchangeably too. ANNIE BREWSTER: So for me, I'd say a story, what makes a story a story is something that's
3:13
character-driven or based on human beings or human-like characters in that story. And I think of it as sort of having a beginning, middle, and end, although the ending, I'd say, is always evolving-- there's never really a hard end-- and that there's a turning point or some change in the story. Movement is key for me in the characters in that story and I'd also say movement in the audience who's receiving the story, touching people in an emotional way.
3:42
In terms of the different words, I use them interchangeably. I know not everyone agrees, but I like to think of it differently in terms of personal story or narrative and collective story or narrative. And that's the distinction in my head. EMILY HARRISON: Thank you. Well, as a historian, I also work in the realm of stories and narrative, and one key job of a historian that I like to think about is to interpret change. And so if a story is a description of an event
4:10
or an issue or a problem, the narrative is the interpretation of it. And the critical work of historical scholarship is sort of to recognize and articulate the specificity of those problems or events or issues, how they present differently in different contexts, whether that context is defined by a time or a place or a community who's involved, who's a stakeholder or implicated in the issue that we're studying. So I really think that this is really positive work
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and has a lot of potential when paired with powerful storytelling. It's what our colleague Paul Farmer called a resocializing discipline, right? It has the power to change values, to change beliefs and understandings. But that power comes from having some kind of organization for the knowledge, and I think of stories as the organizing structure that can sort of turn understanding or knowledge or scholarship into power for change. Vidya, one of the amazing things you
5:16
did in your book, The Phantom Plague, was to resource a tremendous amount of historical scholarship, from histories of medicine to political histories of post-colonial India and the nationalist movement and to pull them together through storytelling techniques. Can you tell us more about your storytelling techniques and how you put all of them to use in The Phantom Plague? VIDYA KRISHNAN: Thank you for that question. I wish I had-- I wish I had a manual step by step thing.
5:46
It was mostly what I was reporting on. I needed to make sense of it, and what you read in the book is the only way I could make sense of it. So it began for me with this court case on Bedaquiline, but to understand why an Indian kid cannot have access to tuberculosis medicine which are being manufactured in India, I had to go all the way back to Dracula. And it's a weird tangent, but I feel this effort of putting things in the right order where we live in a time where I respect my reader,
6:28
and I have to earn their time. And TB is not a fun subject. So I wanted to start with a lot of pop culture and Dracula and Victorian fashion, Sherlock Holmes. And I wanted to-- I think of them as gold coins. Like, you need something shiny for a reader to pick the book up. And then every chapter, you need to give them something, give the reader something. It has to either be you support the-- I had fun going around owning Dracula as a public health book,
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and it was just-- it was interesting and then Sherlock Holmes. And then Victorian fashion was like-- all you see is like, I wanted it to be feminist, and I wanted to center my protagonist to be a young girl. But then the chaos in my mind has to make sense to the reader when they pick it up. So the book was ordered very differently. I look at it as either when you pick a story, you can either go chronologically or thematically. So either you can be like, first this happened
7:36
and then this happened. Or you can just pick a feeling or like an emotion and then keep that as a driving force. And I had a lot help from my publisher, and I don't know if I'm rambling. But I wish storytelling had a simple, straightforward answer. I do think anyone who thinks about how to put it in the right order invariably gets the right order. It's one of those self-actualizing things in writers. EMILY HARRISON: Yeah, I think that that's really
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one of the key points about storytelling is like, what order do you put things in? Where do you start the story? Where does the story end? Like, when have you finished telling the story you want to tell? And the order can really bring meaning to the story you're trying to tell as well. It sounds like from what you were saying that some of your choices about the order in which you told the story of The Phantom Plague started with what felt like it would attract the kind of reader
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you wanted to bring. And you had a really specific audience you wanted to reach with this book. VIDYA KRISHNAN: Yeah, I did not write it for the public health community because I was alarmed that my friends in Bombay, educated friends-- it's like living in South Africa in the '90s and not knowing there was an HIV epidemic. That's the situation in Bombay right now. So of course, I'm really glad that it has helped bring together these kind of conversations, but I wanted to write it for someone
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who has no horse in the race, who was not interested in health or TB or anything. And how do you get someone like that into a conversation? You have to start with something they know. In this case, it was Dracula, or if they are an Indian reader, it starts with Mumbai's history. And then you bring them in, and then you kind of subvert what they know. And almost like as a dare, because some people just stay in to be like, oh, you're wrong--
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I'm going to read through this just so my critique of this is informed of how wrong you are. But even in that process, I feel like I won because you gave me your time and you read about what's happening in the slums of Mumbai and from a completely subaltern point of view which is not about science. And throughout the process, I wanted to slip the science in like broccoli in a meal, and-- EMILY HARRISON: Science is broccoli. PREDRAG STOJICIC: It always is. EMILY HARRISON: Always.
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That's a really fantastic opportunity, I think, to transition to Predrag and the work that you do at the School of Public Health to teach students about collective action, building collective action through storytelling. Can you talk about why you see storytelling as such a powerful tool and how you teach students to turn sort of these vague ideas into something active, something that can be practiced? PREDRAG STOJICIC: Yeah, yeah. First of all, like, I don't think anyone
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comes to public health and School of Public Health or medicine without having a why. But what we usually get when we ask people why you're here, they will say like, oh, I always knew I'm going to be a doctor or nurse, or oh, I was always caring for people. The problem with that is that there's something about the system and we set it up that doesn't allow people to express their whys. And I can give you an example. A couple of years, I had a student, and he was really interested in addressing
11:09
structural causes of homelessness and kind of figuring things out why and in particular, like, actually allowing, especially in Boston, having people having clothes, like, during the winter-- now we know when you go outside. And he was a surgeon. So there was no connection. It was kind of like, what's going on here? So we keep asking him questions and coaching him. That's what we do in the class. And it turns out-- this is really interesting.
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It turns out that when he was younger, he was in loved family, but like, his parents divorced. And he had a bag that every time he would go from one home to another, he will pack things in that bag. And for him, that bag was a sense of safety and security. And he didn't want anyone in the world not to have that sense of safety and security. And that was his why. And once you create that, why, once you create that space for people to express the why,
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the motivation, then, to take action and to do things comes out of that. And if you think about-- we teach a lot of great skills here at the School of Public Health and at Harvard in general. We teach about policy, epidemiology, a lot of great skills. I believe that we also need to create space for people to share their why, to ground themselves in that why, because public health is not a medicine. It's not just a profession. It's a calling. And once you allow the why to become part of you,
12:40
then what you do becomes who you are. And that's how usually the people transform themselves and honestly transform the communities as well that they're part of. So I don't know if that makes sense, but that's the story. EMILY HARRISON: Yeah, it's a great story, and I really think that what you highlighted from the story of the surgeon who points to this bag, this tangible thing as the why, that's a really amazing technique in storytelling to draw on,
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to think about how can we take a feeling or an emotion and find a tangible thing that really helps with the story. It helps other people connect to it. PREDRAG STOJICIC: And usually, it's in a lived experience because we all have it. Like, it's not something distant, or these big vague concepts sometimes are distant from us or distancing. In social movements, what you do is take a big concept and make it really practical. If you think about civil rights movement,
13:38
big concepts of racism and segregation made practical in everyday experience of people getting on the buses. EMILY HARRISON: Right. PREDRAG STOJICIC: And then you go and desegregate the buses because that's the first step from something that is vague to make it really practical and useful for people. EMILY HARRISON: Yeah, there's this-- I mean, in early modern England, there was a thing, a word, for the buttons that button sellers sold in their boxes.
14:07
And the word for those buttons and clasps and little things they sold was a notion. And now I think we can look for the notions that we use in our stories, the things that travel around, the things that we can attach to. And I like to think of them as these buttons, the little parts where we clasp together around our stories. So I'll be thinking of that bag as an important notion. To drive a little more specifically, in your own biography, Predrag, you use storytelling
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in your campaign against corruption in the health care system in Serbia. Can you tell us about that, how narrative was pivotal in making change there? PREDRAG STOJICIC: Yeah, that's a really interesting story. For those who don't know, like Serbia, the country in the Balkans, former Yugoslavia, we had this issue, like many countries, where corruption is widely spread. If you're kind of like in the Global South, there's these issues that are-- and especially, the health corruption was--
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people would ask me like, why do you care about health corruption? That's not a public health issue. And I would say like, yes, except that only poor people have to experience that, and they don't have access to health. There's no difference. It's an access issue. But what was really striking in that campaign was the conversations we had with doctors and nurses. And I remember talking to my colleague one night. And he would say, like, he was not taking bribe. He was not corrupted.
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And there was a huge majority of people, doctors and nurses, who were not corrupted and small minority who were. But the system was labeled as this is corruption. And he said every day, I come home. I work for a really small salary. Every day I come home, I have to explain to my kids that I'm not that kind of doctor. And that was like, when I saw that, that was the actual origin of our movement and the work that we did because that transformation of making
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the good people visible when they are invisible, that was the way to actually crack the system that was cracking them in many ways. And what we did was started by recruiting and training people who felt like they are not corrupted to actually wearing buttons and saying like, we don't care, but also tell their stories and tell their stories to each other, like, in smaller groups and then on a scale. And it ended up changing the policy in Serbia of the equivalent of American Medical Association.
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They changed their ethical code and the stuff that we did. And it's fascinating how the stories can go from this personal experience to a collective experience to actually change in the society. So yeah. EMILY HARRISON: Yes, and you have helped us move from thinking about telling stories to others to telling stories about ourselves to others. And I'd like to take this opportunity to shift to Annie. You started the health story collaborative to help people experiencing trauma, illness,
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other forms of suffering to tell stories about their experiences. Can you tell us about the work of the Health Story Collaborative? VIDYA KRISHNAN: Sure. So I think at the outset, it's important to say that it grew out of my lived experience or my story. So, a practicing doctor, I was in primary care at the time, seeing the shortcomings of the medical system. Not time and space for storytelling, which is odd because what are medical providers if not interpreters of stories?
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That's sort of what we do. But I'd say more importantly, it was my own illness journey. So I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2001 and sort of bumped up the shortcomings of the health care system in that way as a patient. And it really changed my whole way of thinking about the system and recognizing that medicine might be set up to give people a diagnosis and a treatment plan, but we are not set up as providers to help people with this process of sort of identity shift
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that happens when you have an illness, a trauma, a loss, some major life event and then this process that's necessary for healing of integration. And narrative or story is really helpful in helping us with that process of integration. So I lived that personally and then started thinking, how can I bring this to my patients or to patients in general? And so I started collecting patient stories, creating a library recognized the power of the individual
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in engaging in their story, reflecting it outwards, having it reflected back to them, just that psychological process, and then the sharing, being witnessed by others, and seeing all the healing that can go on. And then really met my academic colleague, who is a research psychologist in the health benefits of narrative. Jonathan Adler is his name and sort of resonating with that science. Initially, I was sort of-- when I started to try to bring my work to the hospital
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and it was coming from this sort of intuitive, experiential place, and everyone kept saying, like, where's the science? Where's the science? Show us the data. And that frustrated me at first because I thought, not everything can be measured. And I am trying to create an applied program for patients to heal and for their loved ones and for health care providers and to shift the medical system, not measure it. But then when I met Jonathan Adler, and this whole science
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of story actually is grounded in the stories of people's lives and then builds upward. So he calls it like a bottom up science. And it really resonated with me. And so our work is really about trying to create time and space for storytelling in health care with a therapeutic intent. And most simply, it's about just diligently, trying to create that space. And it sometimes is an uphill battle in the health system. You wouldn't think so, but you really have to just be persistent and deliberate
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and try and create it. EMILY HARRISON: Thank you for that, and thanks for the work you're doing in it. ANNIE BREWSTER: Thank you. EMILY HARRISON: So if we can think a bit about the question of who the stories are for, among ourselves, we've talked about the importance of thinking intentionally about audience. I've heard how these stories work for the people who are telling the stories, or who are being coached to tell their stories. Can you talk about the power or the function of these stories
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that you're being collected, that you're collecting, that you're putting into libraries for bringing people together? ANNIE BREWSTER: Yeah, and one of the things we do is live events where we have one model, for instance, where it's a patient provider side by side. So right there, there's the individual, but it ripples out. There's an audience in a room. And I find something magic happens when people are sharing vulnerable stories in a room in that it creates an opening for everybody
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to tap into. And I think there is a lot of research on sort of the health benefits of listening to narratives too and receiving them. And I think it's like, the personal is political really resonates with me from when I first learned it in college and in women's studies class. But to me, that really resonates, that we can make change, and the research supports this from starting with individual stories and sharing them as sort of the building
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blocks and the collective narratives that we're sharing. EMILY HARRISON: Thank you. PREDRAG STOJICIC: Yeah, there's something powerful about that. And I think, like, the very notion of going from actually sense making your individual story and how do you process that, and what you choose is what gives us agency. EMILY HARRISON: Yes. PREDRAG STOJICIC: So, and I see people coming into-- because we have so many stories. Like, everybody has them. Like, it's widely distributed.
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It's one of the most democratic things that you can think about because they're grounded in the lived experience. Everybody lived through something-- like, sometimes pain, sometimes hope. Like, and those things exist out there. But the idea of sense making, giving yourself a space to actually connect the dots, is what gives you agency. It's not just the existence of story. It's the actual process of-- and once you start doing that individually, then in the movements, what happens
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is you start doing that collectively. EMILY HARRISON: Yes. PREDRAG STOJICIC: That process of sensemaking making, I would say, sometimes, it's even much more valuable than the actual act of propagating narratives or telling stories. It's like, how do we get together to make sense of the world, to make sense about what's going on right now in the world? And once we start doing that collectively, then we can collectively have agency to address it or do something about it or hide ourselves,
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whatever you choose to do. It's a choice, then. Like, it's not something that happens to us. It's what we make of it. We do some choices there. EMILY HARRISON: If I can pick up on that again, what I'd like to ask is for some illustration of how this works in your classroom space, Predrag. So it's one thing to say we find our stories, and then we find our collective stories. But how does that actually look in a classroom space, which is time that's devoted?
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A classroom space is actually a very special space because it is time set aside from the normal routines we have in everyday life where we can do particular kinds of work. So how does that classroom space-- like, what happens in that space to find those collective stories? PREDRAG STOJICIC: There are some people in the audience who are the TFs are participating in a class. It is really, like, structurally thinking about how do you-- like, the way we structure the class
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is there's a big classroom where we make sense of things collectively. Then there are sections, like, usually divided in three sections, like a smaller unit. And then the smallest unit where people share-- to begin to share their narratives is four people. It's like a small group. And you start there. You build the trust and capacity. You build agency. Like, because look. It's so weird. I can tell you, like, one of the things that I find fascinating is I'm always surprised.
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Every year, I'm surprised by the fact that people will come to me. Students will come. We never had the space for this. How is it possible that within their education, graduate education, medical school, School of Public Health-- we care about people. We do healing a lot in different shapes and forms. And yet we don't allow ourselves to heal or find spaces to share those stories. That, for me, is really hard. But like, it starts in small groups. People build confidence it's clumsy.
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It's like messy. Stories are messy. They're never simple. But then we go to the bigger rooms, and by the end of the class, I hope that many-- I always say the purpose of this class is not to teach you how to tell the story. The purpose is hopefully to give you a chance to discover your agency in this calling that we call public health. EMILY HARRISON: Yeah. Vidya, you look like you have something to say, and I have a question if you don't. VIDYA KRISHNAN: It reminds me of in Tamil,
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there is a saying that stories put life into life. And whether you write it or whether you just convince yourself of the need of it, like, why you need to be a mother or why you need to be a banker or whatever in the world, why you are, where you are and where you're going, once you-- I do feel it's such a-- it does accurate-- it's so vague, but it's still accurate about what it does, that it puts life into life. And I feel-- I've seen so many--
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like, everywhere I go tell stories, be it in the refugee camps or be it in India or in a hospital, all we need is for someone to say, I see you. I'm sorry you're going through this, and I see you. And it's such a-- it's a decent thing to do, especially in this moment in time where all of us are-- yeah. Yeah. EMILY HARRISON: I want to pick up on this idea that you shared earlier with me about writing being sort of an endurance sport. And for you, the writing of Phantom Plague
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started as a solo endeavor. You were alone, and it's turned now into something that has a collective. It has a public involved. Can you talk about that? VIDYA KRISHNAN: It's like magic because when I got an email saying oh, this book, there was a ballot, and Phantom Plague was chosen, and I was like, I was reporting on something else. And I tend to not focus a lot on that because the reason-- now the story is out in the wild, and it's doing its own thing, and I don't have control over it.
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Once you put a story out, it belongs to the community that it's about. But it's magic that wherever-- I feel like my books are like my legs. They take me to places where I find people who are like me and who are trying to process the world and trying to make meaning at a time where there is so much heartache that you're on a daily basis trying to process. So yeah, there was-- no one commissioned it. No one was interested in this book. And also, it's TB, and everyone was like,
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why are you writing about it? But I am so glad that since then, Nandita, who got in touch with me to tell me that she got married, and she went to Oxford. She studied public policy. And it brought-- for me, the Bedaquiline case was one. And it's so nice to now see someone else who comes after me and tells the next chapter of what happens in tuberculosis. We'll not have to do this hard work of figuring out the colonial history and how people were living in tenements,
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and we shouldn't have to do that over and over again. And I hope it helped the story along the way. It's like, I look at it as a relay race where I've done my job and-- PREDRAG STOJICIC: [INAUDIBLE]. VIDYA KRISHNAN: Yeah. EMILY HARRISON: Yeah, I like the idea of a relay because people have been trying to tell these stories, right? And it's sort of on us as a public health community, as a public, to not drop the ball. We have this ball now to go with. VIDYA KRISHNAN: Yeah.
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EMILY HARRISON: As you're talking, I was thinking you're describing, as you say, sort of it's magical. It's you're describing part of the feeling of realizing you are part of a public, realizing you're part of something bigger than yourself. But of course, publics are very diverse, and not everyone will have the same viewpoints in them. Has your book encountered, like, controversy? Has anyone not felt the same as you? VIDYA KRISHNAN: Yeah, the Indian government, to start with. I take this book--
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I feel really sad. I take this book to many places, and I speak on podcasts. And there is so much of health that is political, and there is so much of TB that's-- I center a woman. Then I talk about lower caste people who suffer from TB, who live in ghettos. And in the east, we use different words, but I see the exact same things happen here as well where there are certain pockets where it just ricochets before it kind of springboards out. And I don't think the Indian government currently
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is in a position to have a conversation. We came out of COVID with the government having a very acrimonious fight with the WHO, which might sound familiar, about the total mortality because WHO said India had the highest TB mortality. And the government just reduced it by like 5x. And the fact that you can-- we lived through it. During the second wave in Delhi, there were bodies rotting outside crematoriums, and there were funeral pyres just burning for days.
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And it happened in front of us, and there's so much gaslighting that happens. And I feel some of it is just-- I don't frankly, care whether what the government says or doesn't say. I just want to find a little space for someone who lived through those days to look at it and not be gaslit and be like, yeah, this is what happened. And I feel like with my journalism as well as my writing, I don't want-- when I pick up a story, I don't want to leave an opportunity for the reader to later say,
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oh, we didn't know. We all saw, and we all knew. So all you are left with is this option. Are you complicit or are you helping? And those are the unethical, very personal choices that I particularly don't care which way you go. But you need to have all the information. EMILY HARRISON: Mm-hm, yeah, and bringing up the counter stories or the alternative stories I think is an important thing for us to surface in a conversation about storytelling, that we can talk about the positive change that
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can come from storytelling. But stories can also reinforce biases. They can reinforce stigmas. They can reinforce divisions between people. And I thought that in your book, Vidya, The Phantom Plague, that there is-- the opening story about Dracula, Dracula was actually a story that metabolized society's anxieties about a disease and sort of recapitulated biases, xenophobias, racism, and immigrant anxieties. And what did that story do? How can we make sense of stories that reinforce
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reinforced division rather than bringing us together for action? VIDYA KRISHNAN: That is such a-- that's such an important question. As a post-colonial writer, I look at the entire western canon, especially Kipling, Jungle Book, and these kind of very-- like, if I ask someone, do you know Jungle Book? And of course, you know. But if I asked you when was the first time you knew it, I'm not sure anyone will have a specific answer. And it's been reduced to this world of--
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it's such a masterpiece of propaganda doing its work as a children's book. But how Indians see Jungle Book is so different. And I look at it as a writer. I look at Western canon, and I feel it is my job to correct the narrative injustices because if I don't do it, what I'm essentially doing is kicking the can further down for someone else. Unless we deal with this particular thing, unless in public health, we deal with what Dracula is in this very subtle way priming you for,
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unless you put a red flag there and say that, be careful not to mix xenophobia-- or during the pandemic, there was so much hate towards Asian-Americans. And we keep repeating the same-- at the end, I feel like the human software is still at a very caveman level where you're like angry and hungry, and they're like basic things. And when a crisis comes to us, we feel it gives us a reason to behave badly. And I want to believe it's literature and poetry and stories that then ground us.
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And the reason why I wanted to address Dracula was to just not let that go on and live its own life, you know? EMILY HARRISON: Yeah, thank you. PREDRAG STOJICIC: There's a-- yeah, as a Serb, we invented the word vampire, by the way. That is the only word that is from Serbian used in a-- I can say something about how to deal with that. No, I'm kidding. But, like, it's so interesting what you're saying. I always think that sometimes actually in public health, we confuse the facts with meaning.
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The truth in stories is usually meaning. And at least I'm kind of-- in community organizing, there's one rule, that you want to try to reach out and gather so many people, as many people as possible. The division doesn't work when you need to change the system. You actually have to work like across the aisle, whatever you want to call it. Like, you need to find a way to-- and then usually, it goes down to understanding, like, that truth, that meaning that they're deriving from that story.
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What is it actually representing? And Annie, you talked about your own experience with health system. I as a physician also had an experience with that system. But many times, I've heard, oh, you're not feeling that. You go to a doctor. You feel pain or something, and they say, oh, no, no, no. That's not happening. And you hear that twice or three times. And if you have a child and something is happening and somebody is telling you nothing is happening, it's just in your imagination, of course,
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you will go somewhere where you will feel heard, seen. And unfortunately, that is like an anti-vaccine misinformation story, what we call. But it's not about the details of that story. It's about the meaning that it provided to that person to cope with everyday life. If we take it from that perspective, then we need to start thinking about, what's at the core of that? It's mistrust. EMILY HARRISON: Yes, yes. PREDRAG STOJICIC: If the core of that is mistrust, that's what we need to address.
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We cannot fighting the misinformation or disinformation. We can give data and information as much as we want. P unless we address mistrust in institutions, we are not doing nothing. We are probably not going to change anything. VIDYA KRISHNAN: Yeah, yeah. Just to add too, with Dracula, I feel like it was an easy way because the book progressively becomes intense. And with Dracula, it's a test for I'm bringing you in with a story that you know. But then even from the start, I am
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kind of shifting some of the ideas of what you know about it. And it's a very subtle way to challenge whether as a reader, how do you stomach critical thinking. Because any literature, you know-- books are pointless if they don't make you go inwards and reassess your own biases, or at least the books that speak to me. And I felt like Dracula was like a, oh, dip in dip your toes into this gently. And then before it, I'm like, oh, patent laws are so racist. You know? EMILY HARRISON: This is a--
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I want to thank you for these amazing comments and ideas you've laid out for us, and I want to take this and move to Annie because when I hear this talking about sort of facing your own self as you read, as you do your critical reading, or Predrag, as you talk about this vaccine story, a parent looking at a child who something has happened-- they want an explanation for it. And they say, I think it's a vaccine. And the doctor says-- like, gives no attention to that concern.
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There's sort of a flight from-- there's an attempt to sort of flee from the pain and the fear that something is happening to my child. So you look for something else. And, Annie, I know that I've heard you speak to the reality of that some stories are painful or that in some stories, there is pain. And can you talk about what your storytelling collaborative does to help us make sense of that space between story pain and flight? ANNIE BREWSTER: Yeah, thank you. I'd say, well, first of all, there
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is sort of a science of stories, and it's sort of how we're wired neurologically to make sense of the world. So we're always looking for story to connect us. But the sort of central concept that we look to at Health Story Collaborative is individually called narrative identity, sort of the belief that who we are, our identity, is shaped by the stories that we tell about ourselves. And it's continually evolving, of course, and shifting. And then there's also these broader,
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sort of dominant cultural narratives that we all live in-- they're called master narratives in the research-- that we all have multiple, the master narrative of our family, our workplace, our ethnicity. And we're constantly engaging with that. So it's sort of this dialogue between our individual narratives and the societal narratives. And how do we move those societal narratives? Some of them can be very limiting and constraining in terms of the stories that we have available to us.
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So from a social change or a public health point of view, the way we can move those societal narratives is by elevating more individual narratives that push against it. So, like, one story at a time, you can change that. The other thing I'll say that we do at Health Story Collaborative, it's when you look at story and how people tell stories to make sense of things, not all stories are really equal in terms of how they impact our mental health or our physical health.
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And it turns out that it's not about sort of the events of our lives that matter. It's more about the meaning that we make out of the events that happened to us. And there are actually themes that have been studied quite a bit in this field of research, agency being a key one, that are very clearly linked to positive mental health. So the more themes of agency in your story-- but just going through the process of sharing your story and giving it out to others isn't in itself an act of agency.
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So we're always looking for those themes and helping people move and then, from a broader social change perspective, trying to elevate more stories that push against those dominant narratives. And then I'll say, like, there is this special, like connectedness. It builds bridges. And I think it is-- and tapping into that meaning, the vulnerability, the things that sort of transcend fear or distrust, if we really can go to those human situations and get people in a room, bridges can be built.
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I mean, there's a lot of research showing that in terms of changing people's minds or telling an argument that is convincing to someone, stories do a much better job than facts and statistics, right? So like, with hot button issues, there was one study that showed when people were telling stories, they were much more likely to see their opponent as having a rational point of view and be respectful in those dialogues. So I think those stories can really level us.
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And in our current time, I think we need that more than ever to really create space for that so that we can build those bridges. And it's about really humanizing. VIDYA KRISHNAN: Yeah. EMILY HARRISON: Yeah, yeah. PREDRAG STOJICIC: Yeah, that's right. VIDYA KRISHNAN: You were talking about misinformation as well, right? How do you-- it's like Harry Potter saying, oh, the other side has magic too. But like, with science, the trouble is anti-science stories have strong legs, as again stories
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that are good faith, they need an army of storytellers and an infrastructure to tell the story. But I do feel if you center it in, like, this emotion where-- if the reader can feel what you are-- if you can take them on a journey, they loosen up along the way. And I wonder what you think of how you combat misinformation. PREDRAG STOJICIC: Well, it's so interesting when you mentioned agency and this idea. I was thinking about we cannot talk in good consciousness about
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storytelling in public spaces without talking about power and who has it and who doesn't have it. Because if you think about it, the way stories are propagated to become dominant, narratives are by the virtue of who is choosing which story will be told. And it's what it is. That's how it is. Steven Lukes described, like, three faces of power. First one is who wins. It's an obvious one. Like, what is the policy? The second one is, like, who sets the agenda?
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And the third one is whose stories we are telling and why. And when you do that analysis, when we teach the narrative leadership, we teach about storytelling as a practice. But a mentor and a professor that I've learned this practice from, Marshall Ganz, he created a framework that we are using in a class of story of self, us and now, and it's a really useful. There's so many traditions of storytelling, but this one is particularly useful for movement building.
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He would always say, and I agree with him, you cannot talk about stories without talking about power. EMILY HARRISON: Absolutely. Yes, and some of those dominant narratives, they privilege the people that fit neatly into them. And those that don't fit neatly into them are outside and have to constantly either reject it or try and assimilate into it in a way that doesn't feel right. So to push against that, like, to elevate more narratives that are outside-- like, one concrete example would be
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a program we have that's around the opioid epidemic, where we are trying to counter that dominant narrative of sort of like what is an addict by, like-- I work with a visual artist. People come and collage. These are people in recovery, people who've lost someone to overdose. And then I audio record them. And we have community art shows where people can listen to the audio, look at the art. But the goal is, like, humanize these individuals,
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either the ones that are being honored, that have been lost, or the people that are in recovery. And they're not necessarily even talking about their addiction. They're talking about who they are. And so to push against those narratives by changing and bringing different narratives to light. PREDRAG STOJICIC: Because the nature of power is relational. EMILY HARRISON: Yes. PREDRAG STOJICIC: If I have something that you need, and then I have the power-- like so if we recognize that, that is like--
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once you recognize movements, when you figure that out, like in Serbia, when we figured out that Milosevic was not having all the power, but actually as humans, as Hobbits of the Serbia, we had some power as well. It's not just the Sauron. Like, we could shift that relationship. And narrative is extremely helpful in shifting that relationship because it does provide a connection sometimes that was invisible, that was invisible before or not possible before. EMILY HARRISON: And when we're talking
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about this kind of social change or public change through narrative, we're talking about power. We're talking about affect. I was reminded of a line from the Welsh novelist's book How Green Was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn's book. There's a line in it where one character says to another after a mining disaster, bad news has good legs. When you tell a story that triggers people's affect, it can move pretty quickly. And I think that the work we're talking about,
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we want to tap into this mine of affect, this valuable line of affect, but use it to change what people expect the story to be. And that is really intensive, time intensive or touch intensive work, right? You can do it across communities at a distance for sure. Or you can do it within a classroom space, where you have the time to work with people and build confidence, build trust, to work in a patient relationship where you have time to build that trust. But in whatever way you're doing it,
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it requires us to sort of create a space for that change to happen. And that is not easy. I think all of us have felt it in our own different endeavors, whether you need to create time to write. You need to push aside other commitments and obligations. Whether you want to organize, you need to create the time for people to talk to each other and disagree, to surface the disagreements. You need to create time to go to that place that hurts, which is not the first place you go.
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And so how do we-- if we're sort of coming towards the end of our time, what can we say about how to create the spaces that seem to be necessary for doing this kind of transformative storytelling and not simply letting the bad news on its good legs travel first and fastest? Who wants to take that one? ANNIE BREWSTER: I mean, I think the people in power need to make room for it. It is very time-intensive, but I think there's a hunger for it. I think that in this day and age of media soundbites
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or whatever, there's not a lot of real narrative, like, with a true story arc out there. But there's a rise in interest in that through lots of different podcasts and programs. So I think people are yearning for that, but it's about how to make it feel worthwhile. And certainly in medicine, it's been pushing a boulder up a hill to commit because people are thinking more about money and the economics and the corporate side of things and less about the relational.
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But I think we need to go to the relational, and we need to just individually persist in our work. I don't know. What would you guys say? PREDRAG STOJICIC: No, I agree with that. It's interesting. While you were talking, I was just like reminding myself of the story. We were teaching-- Marshall Ganz and I were teaching a class at the medical school which was about organizing. And organizing is a lot about relationships. And we did this activity where students will start calling,
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pick up the phone, and call people so they can recruit them to event through a-- and like, the insights out of that were, oh, I've never thought I can actually call someone. And I didn't expect that somebody will pick up the line. Like, it's really interesting how in many ways, if there's a message that I want to-- like, yes, we need to continue fighting disinformation. And we cannot just do that. We need to start fighting for connection.
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And fighting for connection is really creating these spaces wherever we can where people can actually connect with each other. If that means, like, picking up the phone and calling someone, and on the other side, you will see, is everything OK? That would be the first answer because they're not used to get a phone call. They get a text from you. Like, that is the first step towards the connection. And I haven't seen change in a society
49:30
happening without that initial step, sometimes on the margin. It's not easy. Let's not make it super easy. It requires fighting. Every fighting will hurt. But then eventually, we can actually change things if we go for that. So-- EMILY HARRISON: I'm going to bring that forward-- fighting for connection. PREDRAG STOJICIC: Fighting for connection. VIDYA KRISHNAN: I mean, it's an optimistic view. PREDRAG STOJICIC: Well, I-- it's a hopeful view. VIDYA KRISHNAN: It's hopeful.
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I feel that there is no way-- I'm a freelancer. I'm a Brown woman. I had to quit my job. Again, we are in the 11th, third term of a right wing government which allows for very specific kinds of stories to go out there. And at some point, I just-- it was not even-- what I was thinking was not even how to-- I'm very grateful for finding a community, but I didn't plan for it. I just knew that I can't be a part of the thing. And it circles back to what Predrag was saying
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earlier about finding your why. And there is no way I am going to stop doing what I'm doing and join the other side. So this is all I know. It's a Sisyphean boulder I'm here to push and, you know? Yeah. EMILY HARRISON: Good. Thank you. Thank you, Predrag, Vidya, and Annie for this wonderful and thoughtful conversation. If you missed any part of this program, you can view it on demand on the Harvard Chan School's YouTube channel. Have a wonderful afternoon. ANNIE BREWSTER: Thank you, Emily.
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