Erin La Cour wins ERC Consolidator Grant

Out of 2,130 candidates, the European Research Council (ERC) has selected 308 researchers for this year's Consolidator Grants. Erin La Cour , associate Professor of English Literature and Visual Culture, is one of the researchers who has received this year's ERC Consolidator Grant for her project that investigates how Graphic Medicine can offer new insights to improve healthcare training, practice, and dissemination. With this Grant of 2 million euro La Cour and her team will study the helpful effects of comics in healthcare for a period of five years. "The term Graphic Medicine was coined to denote the intersection between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare," says La Cour. "As a field that utilizes theoretical and artistic research practice, Graphic Medicine is concerned with encouraging more individualized healthcare practices through opening dialogues about health and healthcare." "How can healthcare become more attentive to individual patient experiences? How can we take back healthcare by talking with and talking back to practitioners and systems? What tools are needed to open productive dialogue? These are important questions and I think Graphic Medicine can be an answer," says La Cour. Need for different communication. Much of the communication between healthcare institutions and patients focuses on the ins and outs of healthcare systems, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment options, and statistics, often in the form of pamphlets and infographics handed top-down from the healthcare institution to the patient.