Dr Peter Wilkins and Marie-Pier Caron of Douglas College will present on the Parables of Care project at the Western Canada Health Science Educators conference in Parksville, British Columbia, May 17-18 2018.

The theme of the conference is “Building Bridges: Working Together for SAFER Patient Care”, and the title of their presentation is “Drawing Dementia Care: A Comics and Healthcare Initiative at Douglas College.”

Peter and Marie will focus on interdisciplinary approaches to healthcare, particularly representing and sharing experiences and best practices of dementia care through the intersections between art, art theory, and healthcare practices.  You can read an update on their ongoing work here.

This presentation will will focus on interdisciplinary approaches to healthcare, particularly representing and sharing experiences and best practices of dementia care through the intersections between art, art theory, and healthcare practices.

It will discuss the project at Douglas College to adapt experiences and best practices of dementia care into comic book form as part of a larger, international Graphic Medicine project that originated at City, University of London in 2016.

The presentation will discuss the project at Douglas College to adapt experiences and best practices of dementia care into comic book form as part of a larger, international Graphic Medicine project that originated at City, University of London in 2016 where comics scholars Simon Grennan, Ernesto Priego, and Peter Wilkins worked with the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design at City to adapt stories caregivers had submitted to the Care ‘n’ Share app to produce Parables of Care, a 16-page comic.

Peter and Marie have a Research Incentive Grant at Douglas to work with focus groups and individuals from across health sciences and therapeutic recreation departments to gather stories for a similarly sized comic, which a team of student research assistants and an artist will adapt.

We will discuss the theorization of the project and its relation to the larger Graphic Medicine and Medical Humanities movements.

We are particularly interested in what comics can represent about the experiences of dementia care that other discourses cannot. Our hypothesis is that because dementia care involves working with different registers of rationality and emotion, the multimodal representation of comics offers a good medium for representing and exploring dementia.

We will present some sample pages and discuss the difficulties and successes of our work so far, and we will have print copies of Parables of Care for free distribution.

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