Arts, Culture, and Museums TIG Week: Listening/Creating Healthful Narratives: What else can we be? by Shanaé Burch

I am Shanaé Burch, an artist, public health creative, and cultural worker. I believe in the power of storytelling to revive health and reconcile hearts, so I study health justice and equity through the lens of better leveraging arts and culture for wellbeing with contemplative arts-based research methods. This blog begins with a statement of breath before sharing a brief story and a word of encouragement.

Alexis DeVeaux said, “The future is your next breath”

Inhale for 4.               

Hold for 4.                 

Exhale for 4.              

Hold for 4.                 

Let’s do two more rounds.

For Grounding During Unsettling Times

A few years back, a call was launched for an Arts in Public Health Special Supplement Issue for an academic journal, Health Promotion Practice. As a doctoral student makeshifting my own arts in health academic path from acting and art in education to public health education, I was ecstatic, but also feeling weary. Some of my artistic experiences had been healing, but some rather harmful. I saw myself as a champion for the arts’ capacity to heal, but wondered the extent of its global healthfulness without a commitment to tend to the embedded racism at the nexus of the arts and health sectors. Prompted by a mentor to begin my writing from this reality, I penned a commentary offering an idea of what we could be listening and looking for when creating healthful narratives together. It’s my first articulation of healthful narratives to the public and an artifact. In recent months, I’ve come to accept that much could be copy and pasted for 2024 with an emphasized concern for the people of Palestine, Yemen, Sudan, and the DR Congo, but also: Tigray, Myanmar, Armenia. For grounding, I take a moment to evaluate: Who are the artists and culture workers sharing stories of struggle and resistance about home? I am encouraged. As someone of the Global Majority, my mind journeys to places such as Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, Guam, Haiti, and the entirety of Turtle Island where I call home. What does South Africa want to teach us about breath and the future? What does non-performative support to these places look like in the workplace and in my questions?

Will we and the world transform?

I hear the echo of my own words: “Who are we and who are we for?”

Over and over, I am compelled to think deeply about solidarity, and wonder, “How do we measure on global scales cultural equity, health justice, community euphoria, and power-sharing with respect for historical memory and contemporary realities that facilitate ethical storytelling for all?” Where can we stretch imaginations towards public health dreaming? And by public health dreaming, I mean activating a practice of seeing our collective imagination as a public health issue. I wonder, is the story the answer and the question?

You’ve Got Soul

In Sarojini Nadar’s “Stories are data with Soul – lessons from black feminist epistemology”, the author writes of our value driven scholarship, and outlines benefits of stories for researchers:

• Suspicion of master narratives of knowledge;
• Tools of knowledge gathering and dissemination;
• Objection to objectivity;
• Reflexivity of the positioning of researchers; and
• Yearning for and working for transformation and change.

Nadar writes, “Stories are not just told for the sake of telling a story, but for their power to invite us all to call deep on our courage to transform. The research we do is never solely for the sake of theory building but for the sake of community building.”

We must always believe there is time, space, and page for solidarity and a story.

What else can we be? Healthful Narratives.

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The American Evaluation Association is hosting Arts, Culture, and Museums (ACM) TIG Week. The contributions all week come from ACM TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.