Arts-Based Health Comm

In this class, we will learn about and practice arts-based ethnography, digital storytelling, and comics-based research drawing from the fields of fine arts, public health, anthropology, graphic medicine, and medical Humanities/narrative medicine. We’ll study strategies for using story in all its forms to improve health outcomes at individual, community, and structural levels, the evidence for arts-based praxes in the social sciences and beyond, and we’ll collect and examine work from fine artists, disability activists, poets, painters, graphic novelists, and wherever else health-driven narratives exist—including those you will make in this class. Come prepared to read and create across many genres and explore how story is the vehicle for transformation: of us, of our systems, and of our wellbeing.



Jessamyn Smyth is a writer, digital artist, and professor of interdisciplinary Humanities and public health. She has particular interest in medical Humanities, arts-based ethnography, and public health communication./