Basler Chair of Excellence for the integration of Arts, Science and Rhetoric

Wayne G. Basler Chair of Excellence for the Integration of the Arts, Rhetoric and Science

East Tennessee State University

Hosted by East Tennessee State University, this semester long residency-Visiting Scholar position has nurtured many rich interdisciplinary collaborations and deepened my current research on critical pedagogies at the intersection of Arts and Health, Disability Culture, and Art Mediation.

In collaboration with the Center for Interprofessional Collaboration from the Medical School, we have designed “Arts in Health,” a three-event series aimed at nurturing ecologies of (Health) care that sustain medical practice, foster interdependence and communication skills, and extend healing practices as interdependent ecologies of care.

In collaboration with the Theatre and Dance, Women, Gender and Sexuality, and Art and Design Departments, I have curated the “Rehearsing Care Lab”, a series of art-based study sessions with invited guest artists- grounded in disability justice, that aim to explore how else can we extend practices of Care.

I am teaching two classes: a devising methods class for Art Mediation in Health (crosslisted Arts and Design and Theatre and Dance), and a class on Performance and Medicalized Bodies, that looks at how artists with disabilities and authors in disability justice resist the medicalization of body-mind experiences.

To complete the experience, the department of Art and Design, in collaboration with the Sherrod Library, have curated the exhibit “What if we treat cancer as creative research” (2011-2024) that includes videos, images, texts and documentation materials from more than a decade of tending to cancer as an intense research-creation process.

The Basler Chair has been an opportunity to condense my recent research on cancer performance and extend it into the field of Arts in Health, understanding the use of creative process as a tool for social Healing in medical and cultural settings.