CFP: ‘Discourses of Care: Care in Media, Medicine and Society’ (Sept. 2016; Glasgow, UK)

Event: Discourses of Care: Care in Media, Medicine and Society Conference

Location: Gilmorehill Halls, 9 University Avenue, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ

Date: Monday 5^th – Wednesday 7^th September 2016

Deadline for proposals: Friday 3^rd June 2016

Keynote speakers:

• Prof. Eva Feder Kittay, Stony Brook University NY
• Prof. Andrew Kötting, artist and filmmaker, University for the Creative Arts

Summary: This Wellcome-funded interdisciplinary conference aims to support and foster collaborative work in relation to media and questions of care and well-being, focusing on care and care giving as critical concepts. Bringing together scholars from film and television studies, medical humanities, disability studies, and philosophy, we will debate how understandings of medical and social care are (and might be) positioned in relation to media and cultural studies. This would be a significant first step toward building inter-disciplinary alliances and driving forward work within the as yet under-determined field of ‘visual medical humanities’. The specific focus of the conference and anticipated publication/s is to explore the ways in which media do more than simply represent care and caring (although representation, of course, remains an important issue). Taking a new approach, the conference will explore how media forms and media practices (the creation, exhibition and reception of media) may act as a mode of care. Thus we wish to explore how different kinds of media programming, media technologies and media practices present opportunities in which care is manifest as both an ‘attitude’ and a ‘disposition’ (Feder Kittay).The event will underpin at least one multi-authored publication. Through this conference we will explore the politics and ethics of care-relationships and contest binary understandings of autonomy and dependency amongst individuals with cognitive and physical disabilities, carers and medical professionals. We are particularly interested in the nexus of youth (the ‘child’), age (the ‘aged’) and disability as a way of opening up alliances and challenges to popular cultural notions and representations of care and dependency. We are now looking for academics, care providers, and creative practitioners of all levels, periods, and fields to submit proposals for 20 minute conference papers.

We invite papers on topics that include (but are not limited to):

• Relationships between care and media
• Definitions of care in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
• Autobiographical representations of and reactions to care
• Disability studies approaches to care and dependency
• Media practices and outputs as modes of care
• Care and the visual medical humanities
• Adaptive technologies and care
• Spectatorship, care, and media
• Care, media, and children
• Care, media, and ageing
• Use of media in health education and rehabilitation
• Consumer ‘choice’ and ‘autonomy’ in popular culture
• Screen cultures in our ‘institutions of care’ (e.g. the NHS and the BBC).

Please email an abstract of up to 300 words and a short bio (100-200 words) to the conference organisers (discoursesofcare@gmail.com) by Friday 3^rd June 2016. The conference team will respond to proposals by Friday 10^th June 2016.

There are a limited number of travel bursaries available for postgraduate and/or early career presenters; the recipients of these grants will be asked to write a short reflection on the conference, which will be published on the Glasgow Medical Humanities Research Centre blog, and the conference website.

If you wish to be considered for one of the travel bursaries, please email us for an application form and submit it with your abstract and bio. We will contact all respondents on the outcome of their proposal by the end of June 2016. Thanks to funding from the Wellcome Trust, this conference will be free to attend.

The conference venue, the Gilmorehill Building, is fully accessible, and the conference will include accommodations such as pre-circulated papers and discussion topics, ending with an interactive roundtable discussion. For more information on access, transport, and the venue please visit our website. If you have any questions, please email the conference team at discoursesofcare@gmail.com, or contact us via @CareDiscourses.

Conference team: Prof. Karen Lury (Film and TV), Dr Amy Holdsworth (Film and TV), and Dr Hannah Tweed (English Literature).

CFP: ‘Dissecting the Page: Medical Paratexts, Medieval to Modern’ edited collection

From Christina Lee and Freya Harrison’s discovery of the MRSA-combatting properties of an Anglo-Saxon recipe, to the increasing popularity of Ian Williams’ Graphic Medicine as a teaching tool for medical students, current research into the intersections between medicine, text, and image is producing dynamic and unexpected results (Thorpe: 2015; Lee and Harrison: 2015; Taavitsainen: 2010; Couser: 2009; Cioffi: 2009; Díaz-Vera: 2009). Recent years have seen conferences on paratextual research, and a range of events orientated around literature and medicine. The purpose of this edited collection is to open up wider scholarship into medical paratexts, spanning pragmatics, literary studies, and the medical humanities.

We propose that the breadth of research into medical book history in the medieval and early-modern period will prompt productive and innovative overlaps with work on modern medical paratexts. We understand paratext as the apparatus of graphic communication: title pages, prefaces, illustrations, marginalia, and publishing details which act as mediators between text and reader. Discussing the development of medical paratexts across scribal, print and digital media, from the medieval period to the twenty-first century, the collection will be provisionally structured in three chronological sections: Anglo-Saxon and Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern periods.

We are now looking for academics, artists, and medical professionals to submit abstracts on topics pertaining to medical paratexts. We invite proposals on topics that include (but are not limited to):

• the role of the medical preface
• graphic medicine in popular culture
• medicine, illness, and/or disability and graphic novels
• the development and role of medical (and medicalised) illustrations
• the advertising and placement of texts depicting medicine/illness/disability
• the development of paratext in medical texts from script to print
• the use and readers of medical texts
• auto/biography and medicine
• online medical writing, publishing, and paratexts

We have received initial interest from Palgrave Macmillan about the proposal, and intend to submit a full proposal for a Palgrave Pivot edited collection of approximately 40,000 words. Key benefits of the Pivot model include publication within three months of acceptance of final manuscripts, flexible length, peer review, and availability in e-book and hardback formats.

• The provisional timeline for the collection is as follows:
• January: deadline for abstracts (500-700 words)
• May: first drafts of articles submitted to editors (4000-4500 word chapters)
• June: article drafts returned with comments
• August: final proofs submitted to Palgrave
• December: publication of edited collection.

Please email an abstract of 500-700 words and a short bio to the conference organisers (Dr Hannah Tweed and Dr Diane Scott) at medicalparatexts@gmail.com by Sunday 10th January 2016. We will respond with decisions on chapters by the end of January 2016.

Book Launch: Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies: Critical Approaches in a Global Context

The Birkbeck Centre for Medical Humanities invites you to a book launch with wine reception for Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies: Critical Approaches in a Global Context edited by Tillie Curran and Katherine Runswick-Cole.

6pm-8pm, Friday 31st January

Peltz Gallery, School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, Birkbeck, University of London, WC1H 0PD

Free and open to all, but registration required. Please email Harriet Cooper to register (h.cooper@bbk.ac.uk). Book Launch on Fri 31 Jan_’Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies’

 

PhD Opportunities – ‘Biohybrid Human Network’ @ Univ. of Sheffield

Multidisciplinary PhDs in Social Science, Humanities, Bioscience and Engineering: Biohybrid Human Network

Deadline for applications: 17^th January 2014; Entry date: 1^st October 2014

***project 5 and 6 might be of particular interest to disability studies peeps***

Background: Rapid developments in bioengineering, computer science, psychology, and biomedicine are leading to increasing levels of interaction between humans and emerging biotechnologies in a wide range of settings from the clinic to the classroom. The use of these new technologies takes many forms, including implants, prosthetics, drugs and devices that modify or augment the body, and at the same time create new forms of individual and collective identity. These changes challenge both existing scientific and cultural categories and blur the boundaries between natural, social, and synthetic objects. The blurring of these boundaries raises important issues such as at what point does biology become artefact and technology become alive? In our increasingly biohybrid world, what does it mean to be living? And what does it mean to be human? The goal of the Biohybrid Human Network is to understand both the interactions and the distinctions between what we are and what we create, and to improve how we interact with our inventions. It involves academics from across the University of Sheffield and is initially focussed around three core research themes; i) biohybrid systems, ii) biohybrid individuals, iii) biohybrid societies. 

We aim to create a cohort of PhD students who will work with the Biohybrid community to unite the pure and social sciences, medicine, engineering, and the arts. This requires flexible individuals with a range of backgrounds who will learn from each other and gain a wide range of research skills and enhanced interdisciplinary knowledge.   We welcome applications from students who should have or expect to achieve an undergraduate honours degree at 2.1 or higher in a relevant field e.g. in computer science, cognitive science, Ecology, environmental engineering, neuroscience, psychology, social science or humanities. Students will receive a scholarship which will cover tuition fees at UK/EU rate and an annual stipend equivalent at the standard RCUK rate for 3 years full-time.

Projects available through the network:

1. Communicating with the environment through artificial ears: Perception of emotion in speech and music by cochlear implant users (Renee Timmers,r.timmers@sheffield.ac.uk; Department of Music).
2. Synthetic ecology: Engineering natural system (Jags Pandhal,j.pandhal@sheffield.ac.uk; Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering).
3. Towards an embodied model of multimodal musical learning (Stuart Wilson,s.p.wilson@sheffield.ac.uk; Department of Psychology).
4. Modelling the (biohybrid) human using ‘living machines (Paul Martin,paul.martin@sheffield.ac.uk; Department of Sociological Studies).
5. Posthuman, enhanced and lacking bodies: Rethinking the human (Dan Goodley,d.goodley@sheffield.ac.uk; School of Education).
6. Posthumanism, migrant and dis/abled bodies (Nishat Awan,n.awan@sheffield.ac.uk; School of Architecture).

Potential applicants are encouraged to contact the lead supervisor(s) directly to discuss and develop a project idea that interests them. Formal applications including a 3 page summary of the project idea (developed in collaboration with the lead supervisor), CV (with reference details – we will NOT contact your referees; it is your responsibility to request references and ensure we receive them), and degree transcripts (if available) should be submitted to the lead supervisor of the project you are interested in by 17^thJanuary 2014.

The advert is live at: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/scholarships/projects/biohybrid

CFP: Alternative Psychiatric Narratives Conference (May 2014, UK)

Call for Papers: Alternative Psychiatric Narratives

When: Friday 16th + Saturday 17th May 2014

Where: Birkbeck College, University of London

Chair: Professor Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck

In recent years, historians of psychiatry have heeded Roy Porter’s call to produce psychiatric histories from the patient’s point of view. Studies have moved on from focusing on medical discourse to investigating the diversity of the patient population, their varied experiences, and their pathways to and from psychiatric institutions. Only just beginning, however, is work which pays attention to alternative narratives of psychiatry: individuals and accounts that have been excluded or overlooked in the midst of this focus upon doctor and patient. These include the experiences of those located outside formal psychiatric spaces and relationships, from families and non-medical staff, to activists and campaigners, as well as narratives taking unconventional forms or found in unexpected places, offering alternative readings of sites, spaces, or texts, or challenging the very ways in which psychiatric narratives could or should be expressed and used.

This conference seeks to contribute to the development of these alternative narratives of psychiatry (in the broadest sense of the term) by exploring the voices and experiences of those involved in the non-institutional, non-formal aspects of psychiatry, and by investigating new ways to access all aspects of psychiatric experience, from the early modern period to today. This will be a space to discuss wide ranging (alternative) narratives of psychiatry, representations of psychiatry over time, and the methods and meanings behind this work from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

Proposals for 20 minute papers touching on any aspects of alternative psychiatric narratives are welcomed from postgraduate and early career researchers across the humanities and social sciences.

Possible topics might include (but are not limited to):

• Alternative methodologies (such as oral history, social geography, ethnography, and more)
• Histories of familial and community care
• Representations of psychiatry in literature, theatre, art, music and the media
• Disability theories and histories in relation to the history of psychiatry and mental health
• Reforms, campaigns, and histories of activism and the psychiatric survivor movement
• Alternative views of traditional psychiatric sites such as asylums, hospitals, clinics
• Developments, experiences and perceptions of auxiliary and support staff
• Questions of space, time, culture and locality
• The gendering of psychiatric spaces, diagnoses and treatments
• Changing therapeutic identities over time
• Race and ethnicity, and other hidden dimensions of psychiatric history
• The classic sick role: its history, consequences and alternatives
• Medical texts and their role in shaping psychiatric stories
• The problems with psychiatric narratives: authenticity and authority, uses and abuses

Those interested in presenting a paper should email a short proposal (max. 300 words) to AltPsychiatricNarratives@gmail.com by Monday 3rd March 2014

Subject to funding, we hope that some travel expenses will be available for speakers. Members of the Society for the Social History of Medicine will be able to apply for travel bursaries from the Society; visit www.sshm.org/content/conference-bursaries-students  for more details.

Further details and information regarding registration will be at www.altpsychiatricnarratives.wordpress.com

New Publication: Special Issue on “Translating Happiness: Medicine, Culture and Social Progress”

The special issue of the journal Health, Culture and Society, “Translating Happiness: Medicine, Culture and Social Progress” has just been published and is available through open access.

The issue includes:

Editorial Introduction ~ K. Aubrecht

Encounters with Translations of Happiness ~ T. Titchkosky

The Neoliberal Circulation of Affects: Happiness, accessibility and the capacitation of disability as wheelchair ~ K. Fritsch

As If You Have a Choice: Autism mothers and the remaking of the human ~ P. N. Douglas

Alterity In/Of Happiness: Reflecting on the radical possibilities of unruly bodies ~ E. Chandler and C. Rice

A link to the issue table of contents is included below. PDFs can be downloaded by clicking on “PDF” (on the right side of the page).

http://hcs.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/hcs/issue/current/showToc

Enjoy!

 

CFP: ‘This is my Body’ Conference: Nov, 2013 – Cambridge, UK

 

Conference Title:  This is my Body

Dates: Monday, 18 November 2013 – Tuesday, 19 November 2013
Location: William Harvey Lecture Theatre, Addenbrooke’s Clinical School, University of Cambridge, UK

Conveners: Dr Olivia Will (Department of Surgery, Addenbrooke’s Hospital, UK) and Dr Lucy Razzall (Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, UK)

Summary: The relationship between the mind and the body raises innumerable challenging questions across the arts, humanities, and social science disciplines. For those who come into professional contact with the human body every day in the National Health Service, the mind and the body are usually considered distinct from each other. This is even reflected in the organisational structure of the NHS, where mental health trusts are separate from other healthcare services. Any medical interpretation of the human body, even while it is grounded in empirical evidence, is also inevitably shaped by the intricacies of cultural context, but this is often overlooked in contemporary medicine.

Keynote speaker:Ludmilla Jordanova (King’s College London, UK)

Call for Papers: This two-day conference aims to return human experience to the centre of medical discussion by bringing scholars of the body from across the arts, humanities, and social sciences together with medical and surgical practitioners from the National Health Service. In engaging with the human body from a wide range of perspectives, this conference will explore the ways in which understandings, experiences, and representations of the body beyond the traditional medical sphere might inform healing and healthcare. This interdisciplinary conference will be the first of its kind ever held at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, and will establish an important new interface between the academy and the National Health Service.

We invite proposals (250 words) for 20-minute papers from graduate students and senior scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, and from medical students and medical/surgical professionals, which will offer disciplinary perspectives on the human body and experiences of embodiment. Papers could address, but are not restricted to, any aspect of the following:

• physical and mental illness: treatment and recovery
• roles, identities, and relationships of patients, carers, and doctors
• injury, wounds, and healing
• trauma and disfigurement
• pain and suffering
• gender and sexuality
• life-cycles: birth, childhood, puberty, reproduction, ageing, frailty, death 

Please email your proposal to conferences@crassh.cam.ac.uk. Any informal enquiries may be addressed to the conveners, Olivia Will and Lucy Razzall.

The deadline for submission is 31 July 2013.

CFP: Gothic Studies special issue on ‘Gothic and Medical Humanities’

Proposals are invited for a special issue of Gothic Studies exploring intersections between the Gothic and medical humanities.

Gothic Studies has long grappled with suffering bodies, and the fragility of human flesh in the grip of medical and legal discourse continues to be manifest in chilling literature and film. The direction of influence goes both ways: Gothic literary elements have arguably influenced medical writing, such as the nineteenth-century clinical case study. In this second decade of the twenty-first century, it seems apt to freshly examine intersections between the two fields.

The closing years of the twentieth century saw the emergence of medical humanities, an interdisciplinary blend of humanities and social science approaches under the dual goals of using arts to enhance medical education and interrogating medical practice and discourse. Analysis of period medical discourse, legal categories and medical technologies can enrich literary criticism in richly contextualising fictional works within medical practices. Such criticism can be seen as extending the drive towards historicised and localised criticism that has characterised much in Gothic studies in recent decades.

Our field offers textual strategies for analysing the processes by which medical discourse, medical processes and globalised biotechnological networks can, at times, do violence to human bodies and minds – both of patient and practitioner. Cultural studies of medicine analyse and unmask this violence. This special issue will explore Gothic representations of the way medical practice controls, classifies and torments the body in the service of healing.

Essays could address any of the following in any period, eighteenth-century to the present:

• Medical discourse as itself Gothic (e.g., metaphors in medical writing; links between case histories and the Gothic tradition), and/or reflections on how specific medical discourses have shaped Gothic literary forms
• Illness narratives and the Gothic (e.g., using Arthur Frank’s ‘chaos narratives’ of helplessness in The Wounded Storyteller).
• Literary texts about medical processes as torture/torment in specific historical and geographic contexts (including contemporary contexts)
• Doctors or nurses represented in literature as themselves Gothic ‘victims’, constrained by their medical environment
• Genetic testing; organ harvest; genetic engineering; reproductive technologies; limb prostheses; human cloning, and more.

 To date the links between Gothic and psychiatric medical discourse have been the most thoroughly explored, so preference will be given to articles exploring other, non-psychiatric medical contexts in the interests of opening up new connections.

Please email 500-word abstract and curriculum vitae to Dr Sara Wasson, s.wasson@napier.ac.uk.

Deadline for proposals: 1 October 2013.

The official journal of the International Gothic Studies Association considers the field of Gothic studies from the eighteenth century to the present day. The aim of Gothic Studies is not merely to open a forum for dialogue and cultural criticism, but to provide a specialist journal for scholars working in a field which is today taught or researched in almost all academic establishments. Gothic Studies invites contributions from scholars working within any period of the Gothic; interdisciplinary scholarship is especially welcome, as are readings in the media and beyond the written word.

For more information on Gothic Studies, including submission guidelines and subscription recommendations, please see the journals website.

To view Gothic Studies online, see here.  To sign up to alerts for Gothic Studies, see here.