Literature and Medicine calls for papers / meetings & conferences

Call for Papers: Altered Consciousness in Relation to Popular Culture

16-17 November 2013 Queen Mary, University of London, United Kingdom

Closing date for submissions: 14 June 2013

This meeting will explore the theme of altered consciousness in relation to popular culture, psychology, philosophy, religion, medicine and literature during the period 1918-1980.

Many literary and popular authors and performers during the mid twentieth century represented altered states of consciousness in their work, responding to and participating in research relating to such topics as interplanetary contact, ESP, clairvoyance, telepathy, mind-altering drugs, psychic therapies, spiritualisms, shamanism, erotics, conversion, revivals, somnambulism, precognition, distraction, group mind, multiple personality, hypnotism, lucid dreaming, Vedanta, hysteria and automatism.

What was the continuing legacy of nineteenth-century approaches to mind and spirit? How did work at the fringes of psychiatry and psychology intersect with mind sciences that consolidated their authority during the mid-twentieth century? What are the key interactions between European, North American and non-Western sources? How did investigations cross the borders between arts, sciences, religion, education and the military?

Priority will be given to submissions that show potential for sparking discussion across disciplinary boundaries, and are accessible to a non-specialist audience.

We are especially keen to hear from women contributors, and those whose work extends beyond British and North American contexts.

Please send a talk summary of approx 300 words and author bio of approx 50 words to: altconsc@qmul.ac.uk by 14 June 2013.

Speakers accepted onto the programme will have 20 minutes to speak.

This event is generously supported by: the British Society for the History of Science, and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Centre for the History of the Emotions, and the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London.

Call for Papers: The Disability Experience: State of the Arts, Scholarship and Research

October 31st and November 1st, 2013 University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Set aside the dates and submit an abstract! The Students for Disability Advocacy, a newly formed student group at the University of Pittsburgh whose mission is to advocate for students with disabilities, will be holding a conference  October 31st and November 1st, 2013 at the University of Pittsburgh William Pitt Union entitled The Disability Experience:  State of the Arts in Research, Scholarship and the Arts. The purpose of the conference is to highlight the arts, scholarship and research concerning the disability experience.  The conference will focus on panel presentations by students with faculty respondents.  A variety of submissions will be accepted from students with and without disabilities at the University of Pittsburgh and around the country. Panel presentations will draw from a variety of disciplines including: Assistive Technology across disability, Health & Wellness (disparities), Employment, Policy and Law, the Arts, Education, History, Philosophy, and English. A faculty-student round-table discussion is the final event of the conference with discourse concerning relationships between faculty and students with disabilities. Limited scholarships for travel may be available and food will be available free at the conference.

Purpose and objectives of the conference:

The aim of this first ever disability studies conference at the University of Pittsburgh is to bring together a wide spectrum of faculty, students, and other individuals – especially those from the University and its communities – whose interests capture the experience of disability and who wish to advance disability-related fields and further their integration into the curricula and in community life.  The conference will:

Invite students to present their field-specific disability-related work from across the curricula of science, the arts and the humanities to an interdisciplinary audience

Promote discourse across disability-related fields in order to integrate disability studies into the curricula

Provide networking opportunities by encouraging and enabling attendees to establish connections with individuals of varying fields

Create dialogue between students and faculty about issues and experiences students with disabilities have and to identify mechanisms for resolution of problems.

Submissions:

Abstract submissions should be no more than 500 words and up to three keywords for the paper.  Submissions must include 1) your name, contact information and discipline  2)  title of your presentation and 3) the panel (e.g. Assistive Technology, Health & Wellness, Employment, Policy and Law, Education, History, Philosophy, or English and the Arts) in which you would like to be included.  There will be three accepted abstracts for each panel.  Papers will be shared with other panelists in mid-September and power points will be due two weeks before the conference.    The authors will be asked to make a 15 minute presentation with 5 minutes for Q and A. If you want to display art or show a film, provide a description as well as space and other requirements.

Please submit abstracts by July 1st to Jonathan Duvall at sorc+disability@pitt.edu. Authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by August 15, 2013. Direct any questions or inquiries to Jonathan Duvall at sorc+disability@pitt.edu.  Please feel free to share this announcement with anyone who might be interested in participating.

This conference is supported by University of Pittsburgh, Students for Disability Advocacy and other organizations.

Call for Papers: Shakespeare and Natural History

As a part of the Shakespeare 450 conference in Paris from April 21 to 27, 2014, this panel seeks to extend our understanding of how Shakespeare’s time was teeming with the new practice that would come to be known as natural history. Today, 450 years after Shakespeare’s birth, we are the beneficiaries of more than just the poetry of the era. Shakespeare’s recognition of and interaction with the community of natural historians demonstrates the importance he and others of his time placed on this new field. At the same time we honor the legacy of his literary engagement, so too can we consider the impact that his generation had on the imminent scientific revolution and the interaction among science, literature and society that would follow.

For this panel, I am seeking a multidisciplinary group of Shakespeare scholars, Renaissance literature experts, historians of science, and classicists to engage the theme of Shakespeare and science along broad lines. For instance:

1. What echoes or foreshadowings of the new natural history are found in Shakespeare’s work? What classical or contemporary scientific texts are particularly important for Shakespeare scholars? Which plays, poems, or even characters lead themselves to our greater understanding of the discipline?

2. How do Shakespeare’s gestures toward a natural history differ from the way the practice develops? In particular, what does the way he engaged with sources tell us about the practitioners of and assumptions about early modern science? To what extent is Shakespeare supporting this new discipline? Is it fair to call Shakespeare a natural historian? A popularizer of science?

3. In what way do the communities that Shakespeare depicts reflect the mobility exploited by natural historians or provide contrasting examples from earlier times? Can a better knowledge of particular fields, such Renaissance findings in botany/zoology, anatomy/medicine/pharmacology, astronomy/alchemy, or geology/geography/cartography, provide us with a richer understanding of Shakespeare’s work? Which key figures or texts from these disciplines should be as well known as Plutarch’s Lives or Holinshed’s Chronicles to Shakespeare scholars?

4. How can the evidence of natural history in Shakespeare help us better understand the interaction between science and literature in general? Does it offer us evidence of the social construction of scientific knowledge?

Proposals for papers that address these or related topics are welcome. Proposers are encouraged to review the relevant articles in the Winter and Spring 2009 issue of South Central Review, in addition to the bibliographic notes about the contributors in Carla Mazzio’s editorial introduction to the special edition, before submitting. Send name, email, affiliation, abstract (250 words) and title of your contribution with a brief CV to Chris Leslie by email (cleslie@poly.edu) by August 1, 2013. Participants in this panel will precirculate draft papers with each other by April 7, 2014 to ensure a lively discussion at the conference.

This conference is organized by The Société française Shakespeare and will take place in a variety of venues in the center of Paris. For more information visit the Shakespeare Anniversary website: http://www.shakespeareanniversary.org/?-Shakespeare-450

Call for Papers: 10th Global Conference--Making Sense of Dying and Death

Thursday 7th November 2013 – Saturday 9th November 2013 Athens, Greece

This inter- and multi-disciplinary conference explores dying and death and the ways culture impacts care for the dying, the overall experience of dying, and ways the dead are remembered. Over the past three decades, scholarship in thanatology has increased dramatically. This particular conference seeks a broad array of perspectives that explore, analyze, and/or interpret the myriad interrelations and interactions that exist between death and culture. Culture not only presents and portrays ideas about “a good death” and norms that seek to achieve it, culture also operates as both a vehicle and medium through which meaning about death is communicated and understood. Sadly, too, culture sometimes facilitates death through violence.

Given the location of this year’s conference, a central theme in our proceedings (augmenting those listed below) will involve tracing the on-going and profound shift in contemporary attitudes toward death. In ancient Greece, for example, citizens learned about death and dying through intimate, hands-on experiences. Indeed, the same was true for most people throughout the world until the mid-20th century. Today, many people around the world maintain an increasingly passive role in caring for the dying, and supporting those who grieve a loss. Given that death, serving the dying, and caring for the bereaved has always been such an essential and unavoidable feature of life in traditional societies, a key emphasis in this year’s conference will involve an exploration of the connections between contemporary technologies, social media hubs, and modern health care delivery systems and the ways they impact current end-of-life issues and decisions, including the experience of bereavement and grief. This conference welcomes submissions that specifically assess how these factors are altering our contemporary attitudes toward death, and how patients, staff, and survivors intersect amidst newly emerging care settings and sites of memorialization.

We also welcome submissions that produce conversations engaging historical, ethnographic, normative, literary, anthropological, philosophical, artistic, political or other terms that elaborate a relationship between death and culture.

Papers, reports, presentations, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues on or broadly related to any of the following themes:

1: Health Care Systems: Patients, Staff, and Institutions

Modern Health Care Delivery Systems and Care for the Dying

Palliative Care

Hospice

Elder Care/Ageing in Place Models

Trauma and Emergency Care

Nursing Homes/Skilled Facilities/Residential Care Facilities for the Elderly (RCFEs)/Assisted Living

Clinical Competencies in Pain Management and Symptom Control

Measurements, Incentives, Regulatory Statutes, and Recommendations

Continuity of Care Across Treatment Settings

Interdisciplinary Care

2: The Caregiver-Patient Relationship

Caregiver’s (Physician’s?) Obligations and Virtues

Medical Paternalism and Respect for the Patient, Autonomy

Truth-Telling

Informed Consent

Medicine in the West for a Multicultural Society

Contested Therapies Within the Physician-Patient Relationship

Conflicts of Interest; Problems of Conscience

Caregiver Stress/Caregiver Burnout/Compassion Fatigue

Being With Someone Who Is Dying

Assessment Challenges/Barriers

3: End-of-Life Issues and Decisions

Defining Death

Organ Transplantation and Organ Donation

The Interplay of Ethical Meta-Principles at the End of Life

Nonmaleficence

Beneficence

Autonomy

Death Anxiety

Choosing Death

Advance Directives/Advance Planning/Physician Order for Life-Sustaining Treatments (POLST)/Do Not Resuscitate

Considering End-of-Life Issues and Decisions and Legislation

4: Relationships Between Death and Culture:

internet/social media

music

literature

film

broadcast media

religious broadcasting

journalism

athletics

comic books

novels / poetry / short story

television

radio

print media

technology

popular art / architecture

sacred vs. profane space

advertising

consumerism

Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 14th June 2013 If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 13th September 2013

What to Send

300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords
E-mails should be entitled: DD10 Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Nate Hinerman

Rob Fisher: dd10@inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the Making Sense Of: series of research projects, which in turn belong to the Probing the Boundaries programmes of Inter-Disciplinary.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Call for Papers: Victorian Body Parts

St Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum, Clerkenwell, United Kingdom Saturday 14th September 2013

The Victorian Body Parts Conference is an interdisciplinary event for postgraduate and early career researchers, and will be held on Saturday 14th September 2013 at St Bart’s Pathology Museum, Clerkenwell.

It is supported by the British Association for Victorian Studies and the Birkbeck Centre for 19th Century Studies.

The conference is being organised by Beatrice Bazell and Emma Curry, both in their 2nd year of PhD research at Birkbeck, working on representations of body parts in Victorian culture.

Why were the Victorians so interested in atomizing the body? What was causing nineteenth-century bodies to come apart at the seams? From articulated bones to beating hearts, from wooden legs to hair bracelets, from death masks to glass eyes, the Victorian body was chattering with its own discorporation.

The results of this fragmentation are successors to the recent scholarly work on material culture in examining the atomisation of the body as a symptom of being surrounded by the commodities generated by the nineteenth century. From objects under glass domes to pieces of the body in glass cases (authentic specimens of which fill St Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum), commodification and dissection have much in common.

This conference thus seeks to explore, develop and enrich perspectives on the numerous and varied ways in which the Victorians approached their anatomy, bringing together postgraduate, early career and established researchers to consider why body parts provided such an urgent and stimulating focus within the nineteenth-century cultural imagination.

Possible topics could include, but are by no means limited to:

§ Mementos of the body and the culture of mourning

§ Disability and the “substitution” of the body part

§ Dress and the exaggeration of, or emphasis on, elements of the body

§ Darwin and bodily means of expression in science

§ The“queering” of the body part

§ Measuring the body: deviation from the standards of Western patriarchy

§ Preserving the body: collecting and museum cultures

Proposals of up to 300 words should be sent to victorianbodyparts@gmail.com by Friday 31st May 2013.

Blog:victorianbodyparts.wordpress.com                        

Twitter: @victbodyparts

Call for Presentations: 1st Global Conference on Suicide, Self-Harm and Assisted Dying

Monday 4th November 2013 – Wednesday 6th November 2013 Athens, Greece

This conference brings together discussion of research and practice in three complex areas – Suicide, Self-Harm and Assisted Dying.

Over one million people worldwide die from suicide each year. The incidence of completed suicide is very much higher in males than females, for all age groups and in most societies where recording occurs. A notable exception is China where female suicides equal or exceed male rates.

Risk factors highlighted in research into suicide have included poverty, abuse, gender, age, masculinity, sexuality, mental illness, situational trauma, substance misuse, homelessness, unemployment and other adverse life events. Completed suicides leave in their wake a long-lasting trail of guilt, shame and pain.

Self-harm is a direct and deliberate physically damaging form of bodily harm which may or may not be intentionally life-threatening. It is often repetitive in nature and usually socially unacceptable.

Self-harm is a risk factor in subsequent attempted suicide. Patients who deliberately harm themselves have a risk of suicide some 100 times greater than that of the general population. However it may occur as an event or pattern of behaviour with no relation to suicidal intent. The UK is estimated to have one of the highest rates of deliberate self-harm in Europe, at 400 per 100,000 population (Self-poisoning and self-injury in adults, Clinical Medicine, 2002). It is hard, however, to arrive at definitive rates since self-harm is often practised secretly. Like suicide, it carries considerable stigma.

Assisted dying or assisted suicide describes the set of actions by which an individual helps another person voluntarily to bring about his or her own death. This is a separate issue from euthanasia, which is not a topic within the remit of this Call for Papers. Assistance may include the provision of means, such as drugs, or other actions. There is currently intense public debate globally about a person’s right to achieve death in this way, with complex legal, religious, cultural, ethical and practical issues involved. Assisted suicide is legal in several jurisdictions, including Luxembourg, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands and some American states.

Societal responses to suicide have ranged right across the spectrum, from encouragement or acceptance to outright criminalisation of the act. Suicide, assisting suicide and attempting suicide have historically been considered crimes in many societies, often because of prevailing religious doctrines, and yet some cultures and sub-cultures have advocated suicide. Currently there are on-line sites that encourage or facilitate it. There is a wide range of counselling and other therapeutic interventions and treatments associated with suicidal and self-harming states of mind, and these therapeutic approaches are also used to help deal with the painful aftermath of a completed suicide. Art and music therapies have been used to help sufferers deal with suicidal states of mind. Suicide and self-destruction have been fertile grounds for literature and art, producing a rich and poignant body of creative work.

In England and Wales, to focus on one jurisdiction only, suicide itself was decriminalised as recently as 1961. Assisting suicide, however, remains a crime. There is pressure to change the law following some test cases, so as to permit assisted dying. This presents modern medicine, law and ethics with particular complexities since it runs counter to several core principles in those bodies of knowledge and practice.

We welcome abstracts on any of the topics of Suicide, Self-Harm or Assisted Dying from the fields of medicine, psychiatry, nursing, social work, counselling, psychotherapy, philosophy, ethics, psychology, sociology, history, cultural studies, history, law, creative writing, music, art and literature.

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers  and presentations will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts or presentation proposals should be submitted by Friday 14th June 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper, if appropriate, should be submitted by Friday 13th September 2013.

What to Send:

300 word abstracts or presentation proposals should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract.
E-mails should be entitled: SSA1 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chair

Diana Medlicott: diana@inter-disciplinary.net

Rob Fisher: ssa1@inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.