[10-9] Vaccine-hesitancy and medical education: Artist-researcher as a mediator between vaccine-critical parents and medical students
Presentation language：English
This presentation introduces an interdisciplinary arts-based project on vaccine-hesitancy, developing two interrelated strands: first, investigating vaccine-critical parents’ underlying health beliefs, and second, developing an arts-based intervention on vaccine-hesitancy for medical students. The presentation discusses the various voices and settings involved in the project, highlighting especially the artist-researcher’s fluid positionality. In the project, she navigates between 1. Ethnographic interviews at vaccine-critical parents’ homes, 2. Analysis and visualization of the interview data in the artist studio, 3. Longitudinal art-science meaning-making dialogue with a vaccine scientist, and 4. Developing an arts-based intervention on vaccine-hesitancy for a Prevention study module in medical education. The project illustrates benefits and challenges arising from “mediation” between the parents’ and the scientist’s/medical students’ conflicting viewpoints, and the difficulty of maintaining a neutral ground in a highly polarized subject matter. The presentation maps out the parents’ predominant health beliefs backgrounding their decision-making on immunization, such as perceived benefits of illness and aspiration for a “natural” lifestyle. It also discusses the medical students’ responses to the parents’ beliefs as represented in a film and a writing exercise, in preparation for constructive encounters with the parents.