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Taiwanese environmental film festival: shifting from nuclear to climate fossil fuels

tschuetz

From Naomi Goddard (News Lens, March 10, 2023)

"Originally launched in 2013 under the name Nuclear Film Festival (核電影), the biannual event was created to draw attention to the organizers, Green Citizens’ Action Alliance (GCAA)’s concerns about nuclear energy. In the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, the festival showcased films advocating for a nuclear-free world and addressing energy-related issues.

However, over the years the festival has expanded its focus to include films about climate change and the fossil fuel industry. As the urgency of the climate crisis has become increasingly pressing, the festival has evolved alongside it. This year, the festival has been renamed to Climate Tipping Point Film Festival to reflect its broader focus on global heating and the need for systemic change to mitigate its effects."

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Sara.Till

Byron Good, Ph.D., is a professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School. His primary area of research is mental illness and how social perceptions evolves around these issues, in terms of both treatment and social acceptance. Dr. Good has several works on these issues, including several that explore the perspective of bio-medicine in non-western medical knowledge, the cultural meaning of mental illness, and patient narrative during illness. His publications including several papers, books, and edited volumes; he is regarded as a major contributor to the field of psychological anthropology. 

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Sara.Till

The article primarily asserts that how a patient narrates or describes their medical history is deeply rooted in their native culture. As such, physicians must be aware of how an individual's medical experiences can be altered based on this. In turn, physicians must recognize the importance of story-telling and anecdotes when receiving information directly from patients. Narratives project the patient's experience and events through their perspective, granting professionals a glimpse into their thought processes and action patterns.

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erin_tuttle

The author, Byron J. Good, is a Harvard professor in the department of global health and social medicine. He is the director of the International Mental Health Training Program, and has significant experience with field research that has led to many publications.

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erin_tuttle

The article’s main argument is that the narration of an illness is founded in the emotional connection it has to the sufferers life, the place from which they view the illness which includes individual and cultural aspects. Furthermore any lack of factual accuracy is an indicator of the social and cultural environment in which the illness presents itself and is revealing as to how it will be perceived and treated.

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erin_tuttle

The main argument is supported primarily through interviews with many individuals living in Ankara, through which they describe the first presentation of their seizures and in many cases the steps they tool to attempt a cure. Along with the interviews, statistics of the individuals interviewed and their diagnoses is used to provide a reference point to better understand their stories. Finally the article includes an analysis of narratives in a more general sense that can be applied to the narrative of an illness.

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erin_tuttle
  • “… illness narratives - both the corpus of story episodes and the larger life "story" or illness narrative to which they contribute - have elements in common with fiction. They have a plot; succession is ordered as history or event, given configuration.” (164)
  • “The diverse accounts of the illness in these narratives represent alternative plots, a telling of the story in different ways, each implying a different source of efficacy and the possibility of an alternative ending to the story. My point is not that persons having access to a plural medical system do not simply choose among alternative forms of healing but instead draw on all of them” (155)
  • “Predicament, human striving, and an unfolding in time toward a conclusion are thus central to the syntax of human stories, and all of these, as we will see, are important to stories about illness experience.” (145)

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erin_tuttle

Emergency response is not addressed in this article however it does provide emergency responders with insight into the stories those suffering from illness will have to explain their suffering. As emergency responders will often be working in societies and cultures very different form their own in the case of disaster response, it is important to understand that what may seem like fiction in a story cannot be dismissed without considering the deeper cultural significance of those elaborations.