Coming Back Home to Live and Not Die: A Human Geography of a Working-Class Black Gay Male Navigating the Local Higher Education Pipeline

The purpose of this study is to illustrate how in the span of three decades, a working-class Black gay male college student residing in a post-industrial city navigated college. Through a postcolonial geographic epistemology and theories of human geography, we explore his narrative, mapping the terrain of sexual, race and class dialects, which ultimately led to Marcus’s (pseudonym) completion of graduate school and community-based policy research. Marcus’s educational human geography reveals the unique and complex intersections of masculinity, Blackness and class as identities woven into his experiences navigating the built environment.

Introduction

The introduction argues for recognition of specific Native American aesthetic and literary cultures prior to European arrival and highlights their ongoing influence and significance during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During a period of American literary development known for white appropriation of Native American content, Native resistance to Euro-American settler colonialism involved aesthetic practices such as narrative mapping, visual art, storytelling, figurative representation, and adornment. These practices contributed to both Native and non-Native literary production, despite Euro-American authors’ assertions that sophisticated artistic traditions were a European import to the North American continent. Bringing the concepts “literary,” “aesthetic” and “representation” to bear on analysis of cross-cultural encounter, the introduction posits new modes of understanding points of connection or distance between Native and non-Native aesthetic practice.

Narrative mapping as cognitive activity and as active participation in storyworlds

Ever the devil’s advocate, Richard Walsh argues in a 2017 article that drawing maps based on narrative fiction is a meaningless activity, because (1) narrative cognition is temporal and not spatial; (2) narrative fiction does not project worlds in any experiential sense of the term (i. e. worlds as immersive environments) but only “worlds” as textual constructs, as products of écriture; and (3) reading should lead to meaningful interpretations, and inferences should be limited by a principle of relevance. His example of futile map-making is the floor plan which is included in the English editions of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie but is absent from the original French edition. In this article, I argue that narrative cognition is not a specialized ability distinct from the forms of cognition that we use in practical life, but rather, the product of these abilities; and I defend the validity of narrative mapping as way to engage the imagination with – yes – a storyworld. This is not to say that narrative understanding requires the drawing or mental contemplation of a comprehensive representation of the storyworld; usually the formation of partial mental maps is sufficient to follow the plot. But for some readers (among them Nabokov) drawing graphic maps is a way to engage the imagination with the storyworld and to enhance comprehension. This map-making activity can go far beyond making sense of the text and become an autonomous activity comparable to writing fan fiction. To support this view, I invoke the numerous maps found on the Internet for narratives ranging from Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. While the strictly “textualist” aesthetics of orthodox literary theory would regard these maps as frivolous, a world-oriented approach regards the urge to map and diagram as a legitimate form of active participation in narrative, because, while you can imagine too little to appreciate these texts, you cannot imagine too much.

Survivors’ stories are the teacher: Narrative mapping and survivorship care plans as educational innovation for pre-clerkship medical students.

90 Background: The IOM’s recommendation for Survivorship Care Plans (SCPs) has met slow adoption, further hampered by growth in survivorship. Inviting patients into SCP creation supports individualized care goals. Narrative mapping is a visual tool to navigate challenging communicative landscapes. We describe an educational innovation that values SCP completion, engages physicians & trainees to solicit patient narrative, and allows emergence of collaborative care. We hypothesized it is feasible to: provide preclerkship medical students “legitimate peripheral participation” via meaningful use of the electronic health record (EHR) to review an individual patient’s cancer history; engage survivors and learners through narrative mapping to improve the SCP process; provide a student-prepared, clinician/survivor vetted SCP, leveraging UME in support of survivors’ needs. Methods: 170 second-year students at the Uniformed Services University were invited to enroll in a pilot curriculum on cancer survivorship. Oncology providers identified patients without an SCP and interested in sharing their stories since time of diagnosis. Survivors and students (in separate 90 min workshops) created and shared drawn maps of personal health stories. Students received EHR training to inform use of the ASCO SCP template for an assigned survivor. Following student-survivor review of survivors’ narrative maps, triads (student-survivor-oncologist) met to finalize SCPs for EHR upload. Results: Over three months, 18 medical students drafted an SCP on behalf of an assigned survivor. 19 survivors received an SCP following creation and sharing of their narrative map. Post-pilot, 95% of participating students submitted written reflections (uniformly positive) and survivors requested to remain involved in UME, finding meaning in sharing their stories. Conclusions: Survivors are enthusiastic educational partners in complex care environments. It is feasible to engage medical students with cancer survivors to create SCPs, with narrative mapping as a contextualizing approach. UME learning needs dovetail with those of survivors to address the call for SCP adoption.