Literature and Medicine calls for papers / publications

Call for Graphic Memoirs on Mental Health Problems and the Psychiatric System

Editors: John Stuart Clark & Theodore Stickley

An undervalued feature of the recovery movement is the powerful narratives of those who have survived mental health problems and the psychiatric system.

Increasingly people in distress or recovery have turned to the graphic medium of comics to tell their sensitive stories, sometimes collaborating with friends or therapists, more commonly working alone to produce a personal diary or recollection. While a few have emerged as published ‘graphic memoirs’, most never see the light of day, or at best, are only accessible as web-comics.

Going some way to correct this, we invite submissions for a compendium book of graphic short stories of personal journeys (or part of) to be published early next year. The invitation goes out to everybody, past or present ‘sufferer’, regardless of artistic or literary expertise.

The editors appreciate that the form and dimensions of any proposed book are critical to those who create comics, so before committing, we ask for expressions of interest. This should be no more than a title and paragraph outlining your proposed story, plus a sample page of artwork submitted as a jpeg no bigger than 2MB. Deadline for Expressions: 31st July 2012

As a rough guide, imagine the finished book is A4 format and in black & white. Your finished story or episode should be no more than ten pages long, but can be as short as a single page.

Provided it is indicative of your style or that of the person you will collaborate with, the sample artwork can be of anything and any dimension. It is not necessary to work up a sample of your proposed story. Postal submissions will be accepted, but your outline must be typed, the artwork must be a photocopy, and a stamped self-addressed envelope must be included. Foreign language contributors will need to provide their own translations into English, and the page must read left to right.

The editors will respect full confidentiality should you wish your work to be included anonymously, but we need full contact details, even if you prefer to use a pseudonym. The editors cannot team up writers with artists, or visa versa.

COPYRIGHT: Standard copyright practice is adhered to.

DATA PROTECTION: The editors will retain entrants’ personal data for use solely in conjunction with work on this project and will not make this available to other organisations.

Digital submissions: Theo.Stickley@nottingham.ac.uk

Postal submissions: Theo Stickley, Faculty of Medicine, Institute of Mental Health Building, University of Nottingham, Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road, Nottingham NG8 1BB, U.K.

Call for Papers: Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies

Autumn Issue 2012

The Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies is pleased to announce its second call for submissions for the Autumn issue (JLTS issue 2). The Journal is a bi-annual peer reviewed academic publication, accessible on JSTOR and MUSE and available in both electronic and hardcopy formats. The first tissue on ‘tragedy and trauma’ is about to appear and the Editorial Board is now seeking quality submissions from interested researchers, scholars and writers working in the interrelated fields of literature, trauma and memory studies.

The call is open and all submissions are subject to blind peer review. However, the Board is particularly interested at this juncture in receiving submissions dealing with poetry, memory and trauma.

Articles should be submitted by 2 September 2012. Style conventions and other relevant details can also be accessed at this location. Submissions and enquiries should be sent to General Editor Dr David Miller (v1dmill4@staffmail.ed.ac.uk) and Assistant Editor Dr Lucia Aiello (lucia.aiello@york.ac.uk). New and recent publications for review should be sent to the same address.

Call for Reflections: Journal of Social Work in End-of-Life and Palliative Care

Journal Editor: Ellen L. Csikai, Ph.D
Section Editor: Mercedes Bern-Klug, PhD

We are pleased to be able to offer this opportunity to publish personal accounts of various aspects of social work in end-of-life and palliative care. We hope these entries in the journal will provide an insider’s look into everyday practice or give some inspiration as we assist individuals and families at this crucial time in life.

Description of Section:
Our work in providing end-of-life and palliative care affects us both personally and professionally. This new section of the journal is dedicated to using creative writing to give voice to the personal impact of end-of-life and palliative care social work in clinical practice, community organizing, policy practice, research, and education. Content, reflecting both the art and science of social work, is accepted in three forms: poetry, essays, and case studies.

Authors should submit only material that is original and that has not been previously published. In addition, please do not submit any material that is currently under consideration by another publication source. Do not disclose the identity of living persons without their written permission. If the content of your material can lead to the identification of a colleague, client, family member, or any person other than yourself, please follow your organization’s rules for the protection of human subjects, and indicate in your cover letter that your material conforms to your organization’s guidelines.

Poem
Poems from 7-15 lines in length are preferable, although longer poems will be considered.

Essay
Essays should be no longer than 1,400 words (about 5 pages double-spaced), although longer lengths may be considered. Essays can reflect the personal meaning-making experience of the author and tap into insights about, for example, ethical dilemmas, the importance of relationships, satisfaction or strain related to work in end-of-life and/or palliative care, gratitude, grief, humility, humor, and hope. The range of potential topics is deliberately broad. They may be written in the first person. Authors are encouraged to seek editorial feedback from a colleague or writing specialist before submitting material for consideration. No references or citations are expected.

Case Study
Case studies that do not exceed 1,400 words (about 5 pages double-spaced) are preferred although longer submissions will be considered. Case studies describe circumstances that are unusual or could be considered outside the experience of many readers by virtue of the characteristics of the client, his or her family system, the community, the social worker, local laws or regulations, or historical events (for example, a natural disaster like a flood, a hurricane, a traffic accident, or an organizational budget cut that affected care). Case studies present an issue that challenges the social worker, describes consideration and weighing of options, and presents the conclusion or clarifies that there was no conclusion. Authors are strongly encouraged to seek editorial feedback from a colleague or writing specialist before submitting material for consideration. References or citations should be included where appropriate, but are not required.

Submissions are online at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/wswe

With your submission please include a cover letter with full author(s) contact information and a statement that the author(s) has followed his/her organization’s IRB procedures as appropriate.

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature: Theorizing Breast Cancer: Narrative, Politics, Memory

We invite proposals for a special issue of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature that will focus on feminist theories of embodiment in breast cancer narratives, with particular emphasis on transnational, queer, environmental, genetic, biomedical/bioethical, and activist discourses. We seek traditional scholarly or mixed-genre essays that analyze literary and cultural representations of breast cancer in fiction, autobiography/memoir, and/or visual culture and that explore topics such as the following:

1) Women¹s representations of medicalization, e.g. breast cancer diagnosis, lumpectomy, mastectomy, radiation, chemotherapy, other pharmaceutical or technological interventions, and decline or recovery;

2) The shifting politics of prosthesis, reconstruction, breast cancer culture, and/or survivor discourses;

3) Historiographies of breast cancer, including pre-history of cancer narrative as a defined topic;

4) Theories of breast cancer in relation to social determinants of literary and cultural representations;

5) Current and historicized breast cancer narratives as sites of public memory and individual/communal mourning;

6) The politics of location and/or theories of intersectionality in breast cancer narratives as regards racial-ethnic, class, queer, and/or disabled identities;

7) The aesthetic and representational strategies of writers, photographers, and artists who document breast cancer's physical and/or psychological terrain;

8) Possible links among breast cancer, environmental carcinogens, and corporate cultures;

9) The ethics and efficacy of genetic testing, prophylactic mastectomy, and previvor discourses;

10) Breast cancer narratives in popular culture, including film narrative, television, blogs, and websites.

All essays should be informed by recent feminist scholarship on illness, medicalization, and cancer in medical humanities or narrative medicine and in literary, gender, cultural, visual, disability, and/or trauma studies. In the U.S. alone more than 178,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year, and 40,000 die of this disease. Worldwide breast cancer rates are rising, and current projections suggest that within ten years, 70% of all breast cancer will affect women from the Global South. This issue of TSWL will examine a wide range of visual and verbal narratives that explore the contours of illness, survival, and memorialization.

Essays should be 6000-9000 words (excluding footnotes and bibliography), should conform to the 15th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, and should be submitted in Microsoft Word. Please send detailed abstracts by August 1, 2012 to both of us and to TSWL editor Laura Stevens (laura-stevens@utulsa.edu). Final essays, subsequent to acceptance of abstracts, will be due by January 4, 2013.

Mary K. DeShazer  Wake Forest University (deshazer@wfu.edu)

Anita Helle Oregon State University (ahelle@oregonstate.edu) 

Call for Papers: The Male Body in Medicine and Literature

Following the success of the recent collection The Female Body in Medicine and Literature (LUP 2011) Liverpool University Press have commissioned a companion volume entitled The Male Body in Medicine and Literature. This new collection will provide interdisciplinary essays that will explore the complex intersections between literature and the medical treatment of the male body. We wish to consider the wider cultural ramifications of the representation of the male body, health, sickness, masculinity and ‘manhood’ in order to further our understanding of gender studies, gender politics, science, medicine and literature.

The purpose of this book will be to survey the complex relations between literature and the medical treatment and representation of the male body from 1600 to the present day and we are seeking essays which offer a range of methodologies that will be interdisciplinary in their discussion of medicine of the male body, the cultural representation of male corporeality in sickness and in health, and the wider cultural ramifications of male health, its intersections with masculinity and manhood. We expect the essays to draw on a wide range of topics that have been informed by cross-pollinating disciplines including literature, history of medicine, gender studies and gay fiction. This collection will offer a major new analysis of the medical treatment and cultural representations of the healthy and sick male body from the early modern period to the present. This will be one of the first single-volume books to concentrate on the links between literature and medicine in their shared dedication to understanding the male body. The healthy male body has a complex relationship with ideas of masculinity, manhood and male power; plus, the health and strength of the male body is linked to ideas of nation at times of war and at times of peace; this book will seek to address these issues and more.

Essays might cover, but are not limited to, the following topics:

Male hysteria
Male consumptives
HIV/AIDS
War, conflict and the male body
Virility, fertility and impotence
Male nursing
The working class male body and medical experimentation
Urology
Disability
Mental health and the male body
Sexually transmitted diseases and the male body

Please submit articles for consideration between 5000 – 7000 words to Greta Depledge (depledgeg@aol.com) and Andrew Mangham (a.s.mangham@reading.ac.uk) by 1st December 2012.

Contributors should follow LUP’s house style, details of which can be found on their website:
http://www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk/html/howtopublish.asp

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Literature and Theology: Cognitive Science, Literature and Religion

We invite essays that bring together the fields of cognitive science, literature and religion. Such topics might include the cognitive nature of prayer, ritual, faith, mysticism, myth-making, and belief as represented in the literature of a particular culture and historical period; principles of neurotheology as reflected in reading practices, literacy, the use of analogy and metaphor; theory of mind and the construction of God-images in literature and culture; cognitive theories of acting, dramaturgy, and performance in devotional and religious texts; and more multidisciplinary inquiries from the related fields of evolutionary psychology, neurophilosophy, and cognitive anthropology.

Accepted essays will be published in a Special Issue of the peer-reviewed journal Literature and Theology (Oxford University Press).

Please send essays of no longer than 7,000 words to Paul Cefalu, Lafayette College and Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine. Deadline for receipt of essays is September 1, 2012.