Events

Past Event

“Swim Team”: A Medical Humanities Film Series

January 29, 2018
6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
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The Heyman Center (Second Floor Common Room), Columbia University, New York
  • DirectorLara Stolman, Film Director
  • Participant: Kathryn Cai, Graduate Student, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Participant: Rachel Adams, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

The Heyman Center is hosting a film screening of Swim Team, an award winning feature documentary about a New Jersey YMCA based, community swim team made up of kids on the autism spectrum. The film follows three of team’s star athletes, boys on the cusp of adulthood, when government services become scarce.

Swim Team is a portrait of diverse American families grappling with the problem of “aging out.” Over the course of a year, Swim Team explores the overwhelming struggles they face and triumphs they achieve as they strive for independence, inclusion, and a life that feels winning.

Directed by award-winning filmmaker Lara Stolman, Swim Team offers an inspiring look at the power of community to transcend disability and create hope and opportunities for the future. For more information, please visit the film’s website.

This event is part of the series, Explorations in the Medical Humanities. Please visit the Heyman Center website for updates.

About the Series:

As a set of disciplines, the humanities face the challenge of how to write about embodied experiences that resist easy verbal categorization such as illness, pain, and healing. The recent emergence of interdisciplinary frameworks such as narrative medicine has offered a set of methodological approaches to address these challenges. Yet conceptualizing a field of medical humanities also offers a broader umbrella under which to study the influence of medico-scientific ideas and practices on society.  Whether by incorporating material culture such as medical artefacts, performing symptomatic readings of poems and novels, or excavating the implicit medical assumptions underlying auditory cultures, the approaches that emerge from a historiographical or interpretive framework are different from those coming from the physician’s black bag.

Sponsored by The Society of Fellows in the Humanities, the Center for Science and Society, the Medical and Health Humanities Journal, and the Heyman Center for the Humanities.