Chloe Wong-Mersereau’s bio
Chloe Wong-Mersereau recently completed her master’s in social cultural Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her research interests includes crisis-narratives, aging diaspora communities as well as the sensorial and embodied experience of marginalized peoples navigating medical spaces. During the pandemic, she has worked with the Canadian Red Cross in long term care homes, COVID-testing clinics, homeless shelters, and on the housing crisis project in Montreal. This involvement has led to the development of her interest in understanding people’s lived experience navigating medical institutions through community and arts-based approaches. Now she currently works as a graduate research assistant on the Frictions of Futurity team led by Dr. Suze Berkhout and Dr. Kelly Fritsch. She is leading a discourse analysis of public facing materials in liver transplant and co-organizing a digital storytelling with a team of filmmakers to help liver transplant recipients in exploring, crafting, and sharing their stories.
Expanding Temporalities: Complicating Psychosocial Tools for Liver Transplant Survivors through Critical Discourse Analysis and Digital Storytelling
Chloe Wong-Mersereau, Ruo Hao (Selena) Zhang, Fraser Best, Josee Lynch, Mamatha Bhat, Kelly Fritsch, and Suze Berkhout
Background: Little qualitative research on the experience of liver transplant survivors exists in the literature. What does exist demonstrates the complexity of pre and post-transplant experiences. Transplant programs often attend to these challenges through clinical scales and tools that prepare recipients for the tracking and management of psychosocial challenges. However, the materials used to capture the experience of liver transplant patients shape those very experiences and in turn tell a particular kind of story.
Methods: The Temporalities of Cure in Liver Transplantation (Temporalities) research project examines what is left unexplored in the experience of surviving liver transplantation through a critical discourse analysis of the transplantation manuals, clinical tools, and scales as well as a qualitative interviews and digital storytelling with long-term liver transplant survivors.
Results: The language and structure commonly used in psychosocial assessments and quality of life scales, surveys and questionnaires can be inattentive to the impacts of social axes of power on the healthcare needs of survivors pre-, during and post-liver transplant. These may also contribute to structuring patient narratives in such a way that the temporal complexities of transplantation are not fully represented. Patient manuals similarly construct a linear narrative of the transplant experience that can be juxtaposed with the more layered and complex lived experiences told through people’s digital stories.
Discussion: Both the clinical scales and patient manuals can affectively flatten the experience of transplantation, whereas the multimodality of interviews and digital stories engages storytellers and viewers/listeners in ways that reveal important aspects of the psychosocial challenges that exist as one’s transplant journey evolves over time. Critical discourse analysis and digital storytelling complicates conventional biomedical ways of knowing liver transplantation by opening space for seriously engaging, understanding, and witnessing the tensions and frictions that can arise when illness experiences have an extended (chronic) temporality.