PhD Oral Exam - Darian Goldin Stahl, Humanities

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how the elements of artists’ books, that is, their texts, images, forms, and other sensory engagements, coalesce to communicate lived experiences of illness and disability. I ask how the meanings of these abstracted book-bodies adapt and change when they are re-interpreted by readers, and if this is an effective strategy for forming more relational understandings of what it is like to live with illness. Within the framework of a phenomenological practice, I show the generative potential for empathy, or intercorporeality, that occurs when engaging with another’s artist’s book. In patient communities, for example, such a practice may assist in fostering tacit and multi-sensory expressions of embodied phenomena that may otherwise be difficult to communicate through linguistic means alone. Within health humanities pedagogies, reading and making artists’ books may assist in resisting systemic pressures for clinical efficiency and unseat bias towards illness and disability. This dissertation thus serves as a philosophical and pragmatic example of how to engage with artists’ books within health contexts. It examines how the formation of archival, hand-made objects constitutes a legacy of lived experience that may be called upon, again and again, to share and better understand life, death, illness, health, unease, and wellbeing.