Narrative and Bioethics, Wake Forest University

This team-taught course provides bioethics students with an overview of the different ways in which narratives of diverse types are instrumental to bioethics thinking. Four to six faculty will teach individual course units of 2-3 sessions, addressing topics including but not limited to: illness narratives; bioethics in fiction and film; performable case studies addressing bioethics issues; the voice of the medical case presentation; narrative reading and narrative writing; bioethics in the news; and the ethics of “thick description.” Involvement of multiple faculty enables critical reflection on narrative from a variety of disciplinary perspectives common to bioethics. This course is offered as part of the Bioethics Graduate Program, but Wake Forest offers a dual MD/MA degree and it is therefore possible for medical students to enrol. This information has been collected for the Post-Discipline Online Syllabus Database. The database explores the use of literature by schools of professional education in North America. It forms part of a larger project titled Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities, led by Dr Merve Emre with the assistance of Dr Hayley G. Toth. You can find more information about the project at https://postdiscipline.english.ox.ac.uk/. Data was collected and accurate in 2021/22.