Paper short abstract:

Through letter writing, cancer-stricken children in a pediatric charity hospital voice unheard issues, create new intimate relationships and evoke a call for action that transcends borders and medical isolation. The paper explores this transformative process and its sometimes unpredictable outcomes.

Paper long abstract:

As part of their services to cancer-stricken children and their families, MAHAK, a charity society based in Tehran, works with children and hospital staff to write letters telling the children's stories. MAHAK representatives regularly meet with children and parents to explain the project and evoke stories from the children; depending on their age, the child, a caregiver, or MAHAK representative then writes the child's story in the form of a letter. These letters, circulated across spaces and audiences, become an interdisciplinary tool and collaborative project, drawing children, their families, social workers, psychologists, MAHAK representatives, medical staff, the Iranian state, and the international public into new relationships. Locally, the letters are distributed to the children's doctors and staff via the hospital's newsletters and medical portal. In the process, these letters, which capture the children's struggles and hopes and encapsulate life in a pediatric cancer hospital, visibilize the children and their families to doctors in new ways, sparking the construction of newly intimate bonds between children and their doctors. Broadly, the letters reach journalists, policymakers, and publics in Iran and, in one case, across Europe, where the children's narratives simultaneously drew criticism from the Iranian state, evoked sympathy in Europe for the 'suffering stranger', and effected action that resulted in access to new medicines previously unavailable due to sanctions against Iran. This paper explores how the storytelling process unfolds and how these stories open up children's experiences and co-constituted illness narratives into powerful modes for cultivating new relationships, intimacies, visibilities, and actions.