Project Narrative is hosting a hybrid event with Elena Kalodner-Martin.
The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored how stories both reflect and authorize health beliefs and actions, particularly in moments of uncertainty and crisis. Across social media platforms, individuals narrated their vaccination choices through the lens of permission structures: rhetorical frameworks that draw on existing cultural values to make certain health decisions feel acceptable, encouraged, or necessary. In this talk, I analyze how four key narrative framings—vaccination as social responsibility, economic imperative, personal freedom, and tool of institutional control—have circulated in digital spaces over the last five years. I show how these competing narrative logics both facilitated and constrained decision-making, revealing tensions between individual autonomy and collective obligation, trust and mistrust, and ethics and expediency. I argue that permission structures are not simply persuasive devices but narrative mechanisms that mediate the boundary between belief and action in moments of public health crisis. By unpacking these dynamics, I invite us to consider how narrative theory can help us understand the entanglement of story, value, and risk in shaping public health behaviors and how narrative frameworks might be reimagined to foster more equitable and inclusive approaches to medical decision-making.
Meeting ID: 925 8218 5611
Password: 838658