In Pursuit of Healthful Narratives:

Introduction to My Dissertation Study

“Art has the power to enable healing, but intention is necessary. Art and culture that contributes to racial, gendered capitalism is not healthy; and contradicts our efforts to generate more healthful impacts.”

Healthful : having or conducive to good health

Snapshot of New York Times article with the headline "Boston Revisits Common Ground and Busing, Onstage" By Michael Paulson. Image is of actors in a scene. — In “Common Ground Revisited,” a company of 12 actors, including Stacy Fischer and Elle Borders, not only re-enacts scenes from the Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Boston’s busing crisis, but also discusses how those events echo today. Credit: T Charles Erickson

I am pictured alongside actors Lyndsay Cox, Omar Robinson, and Elle Borders. Credit: T Charles Erickson

Why I’m Doing This Dissertation

“In Pursuit of Healthful Narratives” encapsulates a great deal of my motivations and belief in “Arts in Public Health”.

I read a book heralded as “Boston’s Bible” as an Acting student at Emerson and was confronted with both Boston’s past and what haunts its future. The story and experience of creating a theatrical response to Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas further educated me on policy and culture, but more specifically the social determinants of health. The class sparked questions for me about education, wellbeing, and the creative process.

Ten years later, I’ve just wrapped up performing in the world premiere of its adaptation for the stage — “Common Ground Revisited” co-concieved by Melia Bensussen (director) and Kirsten Greenidge (playwright) at the Huntington Theatre in Boston, MA. The show represents the closing of a chapter for me, and the start of a new beginning. Deeply intertwined in this experience, was a pursuit for truths. MY truth within this dissertation process has been setting up a space to listen and learn about “good health” through the perspective of those who are Black, women and/or gender-expansive, and whose creative labor is based in imagination and cultural work.