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Eivind Engebretsen

Professor of Interdisciplinary Health Science

Chapter 2: Narrative Rationality and the Logic of Good Reasons

This chapter provides a theoretical basis for examining the tension between scientific and lay rationality that continues to undermine attempts to address such vital healthcare issues as vaccine hesitancy or lack of compliance with regulations and test regimes during a pandemic. It outlines the main tenets of the narrative paradigm, acknowledges critical scholarship relating to its applicability in some cases and settings, and demonstrates its usefulness through a variety of examples from different cases of medical controversy relating to recent epidemics such as SARS and HIV. The chapters that follow do not only explain different antagonisms surrounding COVID-19 from the perspective of the narrative paradigm as elaborated by Walter Fisher, but also extend the framework and nuance it in the course of analysis, especially with reference to its application to medical narratives and its potential for offering a point of orientation for medical practitioners and policy makers in the healthcare sector.

 

Read excerpt from the chapter here.

Video Summary of Rethinking Evidence in the Time of Pandemics

Our book, Rethinking Evidence in the Time of Pandmics,  provides a framework for how health officials can develop more effective interventions during public health crises. The policies should engage with the narratives people believe and their reasons for doing so.   Watch a video summary of our book below and

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Eivind Engebretsen

Teaching sustainable health care through the critical medical humanities

Many medical schools have started to include the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their curricula. Doctors graduate knowing they shouldn’t prescribe inhalers containing greenhouse gas propellants. But they are ignorant of wider aspects of sustainability, including partnership-building, decolonization, and just transformation. The standard approach to teaching the SDGs

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