Begin end-of-life conversations today | Michelle Chiang | TEDxNTU

Upon hearing a terminal diagnosis, people often fall back to the question ‘Why is this happening to me?’. There is an unsettling sense of absurdity in which things become increasingly outside our control—there is a sudden stop. Patients describe this feeling as life being ‘turned upside down’, and a life which was full of potential is now turned into a potentially meaningless one. In this talk, Michelle uses literature and the memoirs written by terminally ill authors to encourage us to embrace imperative conversations about the end of life. Her literary research intersects with her medical humanities interest in narratives of loss in healthcare settings: the loss of physical control, the witnessing of loss, and the experiences of dying. Michelle Chiang, inspired by Samuel Beckett, started the exploration of embodied lives in absolute systems that persistently fail to account for lived experiences. After the publication of Beckett’s Intuitive Spectator: Me to Play (Palgrave, 2018) where she examines how the artist’s dramatization of loss appeal more to the audience’s intuition than the intellect, she turns to a more in-depth consideration of loss in absurdist literature which she observes had anticipated the impact of medical and technological systems on lives today. Her literary research intersects with her medical humanities interest in narratives of loss in healthcare settings: the loss of physical control, the witnessing of loss, and the experiences of dying. Interdisciplinary projects, including a qualitative stroke study funded by the Rehabilitation Research Institute of Singapore (RRIS), contribute to Michelle’s central work The Posthuman in Literature, Medicine and Technology. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Видео Begin end-of-life conversations today | Michelle Chiang | TEDxNTU канала TEDx Talks