Cafe Scientifique Mon 7 Nov 7.00 pm

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Living with Stroke

There are 1.1 million stroke survivors in the UK alone. Each survivor has a unique experience of living with stroke and a distinct perspective on their recovery ‘level’. Over the course of a long-term condition such as stroke, however, stroke survivors change their perspectives, revise their life stories, and reinterpret the meaning of life in the light of their current circumstances. In line with the changes that happen after the stroke such as body changes and change of roles and relationships, they revise their life experiences and create new identities for themselves in order to accommodate to the stressful situation after stroke. Current understanding of survivors’ experiences is based, primarily, on qualitative inquiry-based studies, in which a stroke survivors’ story is collated using methods such as focus groups, and one-to-one interviews. Such methods commonly use a textual narrative to depict participants’ experiences. The question, then, is to what extent a written text can represent experience? This crisis of representation has created many problems in qualitative research

Living with Stroke sets out to address this crisis through an interdisciplinary cross-faculty collaboration between the School of Health and Related Research, Theatre studies and stroke survivors. The aim of the project is to explore the experiences of living with stroke by combining methods of Narrative inquiry and Forum Theatre.

 

Carmen Levick is a Lecturer in Theatre at the University of Sheffield. Her main research interests are: theatre and wellbeing and memory and cultural heritage. She has been working on the ‘Living with Stroke’ project since 2014 and is hoping to develop it further in the coming years.