Suffer Well was a year-long seminar organized by the UCI Center for Medical Humanities to bring together scholars, artists, and medical practitioners to explore human suffering as both the limit of communication and expression and the event horizon from which new forms of sociality and social formation may be made possible. Suffer Well created a dialogue around how different disciplines attend to and develop modes of understanding suffering and react to experiences of suffering.
Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the seminar was led by James Kyung-Jin Lee, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies. The Mellon Foundation established Sawyer Seminar grants in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. The grant supported a series of open lectures and workshops during the academic year, an external postdoctoral fellowship, and two graduate student predoctoral fellowships.
While suffering is an existential theme, the contemporary attention to and attitude of suffering has not been able to engage the question of suffering in a comprehensive way. Instead, suffering is regarded and, at times, treated as a problem that may be alleviated by measurable pathways, whether pharmacological, therapeutic, linguistic, or political. Yet the experience of suffering exceeds recompense, reflects social as well as medical causes, and demands new forms of social response beyond the analgesic. This seminar brought these various approaches to suffering into conversation in order to understand how attention to suffering can lead us to rethink the relationship between the subjective experience of one person’s suffering to suffering on larger scales, from households to communities.
