Bereavement meetings & conferences

Association for Death Education and Counseling 36th Annual Conference

Riding the Dragon: End of Life and Grief as a Path to Resilience, Transformation and Compassion

April 23–26, 2014 Pre-Conference Institute: April 22–23, 2014 Baltimore, Maryland

Death and bereavement are profoundly life-altering and may be likened to a great and mysterious hero’s journey. The path of grief is often dark and ominous, when suddenly,
in the words of author Julia Cameron, “rising from the mists and rolling fog of our not knowing,” the hero (griever) comes face to face with a dragon. According to a Chinese proverb, “If he ignores the dragon, it will eat him. If he tries to confront the dragon it will overpower him. But if he rides the dragon, he will take advantage of its might and power.” Therein lies the potential for resilience, transformation and compassion. At this year’s conference, participants will deepen their appreciation for the dark night of the soul and the great gifts that can emerge when, rather than being defeated, the bereaved find the strength and courage to ride the dragon.

About ADEC:

The Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC), founded in 1976, is the oldest interdisciplinary organization in the field of dying, death and bereavement. The membership comprises educators, counselors, nurses, physicians, hospital and hospice personnel, mental health professionals, clergy, funeral directors, social workers, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, physical and recreational therapists, and wellbeing specialists. ADEC’s goal is to enhance the ability of professionals to meet the needs of those with whom they work in death education and grief counseling.

Questions?

Contact ADEC Headquarters at:

ADEC Headquarters
111 Deer Lake Road, Suite 100
Deerfield, IL 60015 USA
Phone:+1- 847-509-0403
Fax: +1-847-480-9282
E-mail: adec@adec.org

Star Legacy Foundation Stillbirth Summit 2014

June 19-21, 2014 Eagan (Minneapolis), Minnesota

Preventing Stillbirth: Protecting the Vulnerable Baby

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.

Blog:victorianbodyparts.wordpress.com                       

Twitter: @victbodyparts

17th Annual National Alliance for Grieving Children Symposium

June 20 to 22, 2013 Phoenix, Arizona

The NAGC is honored to host this important annual gathering of grief support professionals, volunteers and researchers from around the country for educational opportunities and other resources. Highlights of this event include networking opportunities and collaboration with colleagues providing services to grieving children and families.

The Mission & Vision of the NAGC:

Mission: The National Alliance for Grieving Children promotes awareness of the needs of children and teens grieving a death and provides education and resources for anyone who wants to support them.

Vision:  Because all grieving children deserve a chance to heal.

Mission of the NAGC Symposium:

The mission of the National Alliance for Grieving Children’s Annual Symposium is to provide a National Forum for those who serve grieving children and families and to offer educational resources and networking opportunities in a dynamic, collaborative, and supportive atmosphere.

11th Death, Dying and Disposal Conference

The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom September 5-8, 2013

We are delighted to announce that the eleventh biennial Death, Dying and Disposal conference will be held at The Open University, Walton Hall Campus in Milton Keynes between the 5th -8th September 2013 under the auspices of the OU's Faculty of Health & Social Care and the Association for the Study of Death & Society (ASDS). We are arranging what we envisage will be a thought-provoking and innovative event which will once again bring together some of the leading international academics, practitioners and experts from across the arts, humanities, social sciences and clinical fields that make up the diverse arena of death and dying studies.

The underpinning rationale for the 2013 conference is 'Where theory meets practice' and we would like to welcome papers from academics, professionals and practitioners from a range of disciplines on any issue or topic which addresses this overarching theme.

Registrations

Conference registration opens in October 2012, so if you would like to find out more information about the conference or join our event mailing list, please visit our website at http://www8.open.ac.uk/health-and-social-care/main/research/research-events/death-dying-and-disposal-11Web Page: www8.open.ac.uk/health-and-social-care/main/research/research-events/death-dying-and-disposal-11

Contact: hsc-re-events@open.ac.uk

Melancholy Minds and Painful Bodies: Genealogy, Geography, Pathogeny

University of Liverpool, United Kingdom 9-11 July 2013

One of the major developments in the study of melancholia over the last thirty years has been the rise to aesthetic and cultural prominence of varieties of negative emotions proposed and discussed as melancholy, including different conceptions, analyses, and portrayals from grief to insanity. Most recently, Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia(2011) happens to be the melodramatic adaptation of the concept fuelled by cinematic symbols. Correspondingly, often observed as ‘a central European discourse’, melancholia has resurfaced to embody complementary or paradoxical notions not merely in the literary analysis of texts and contexts, but it has also emerged to retrieve its historical categorization. The cultural and social history of emotions entwined with modern medical and psychiatric lexicalization has opened new pathways to provide relative definitions of melancholia. However, theories about the choice of analogies for melancholy, whether aesthetic, cinematic, religious, or medical, somehow fail to distinguish the connections between contrary factors involved in melancholia.

It is also noteworthy that theories of characterization, no matter of what kind, tend to reformulate and evaluate contrary factors for the sake of preserving ‘superiority’ according to prevalent taste at each moment in time. In Britain, for example, individual and collective melancholia has been appreciated as a sign of genius and national pride at one time and announced as a national malady at another. Analogous is the contemporary history of behavioural rather than cognitive attributes to grief, e.g. tearfulness. Pain, in comparison, is bodily and often mental distress which in the past was closely perceived in relation to melancholia, but today research on pain is divorced from depression let alone melancholy. Thus, we miss the ‘melancholy-pain bridge’ in contemporary scholarship of mental and physical suffering. On the other hand, while pain is seen through the lens of universality, with management models stretching from Chinese medicine to Latin America, melancholia has rarely been investigated beyond the Western borders with regard to its genealogy, pathology, pathogeny, and management. Whether this geographical focus is a matter of re-establishing pre-eminence or in want of psycholinguistic reference, thereby centred on a gap in universal scientific communication, it invites intriguing and challenging enquiries.

Possible topics

Diversity in the geography of melancholia and pain
The relationship between Western theories of emotions and Oriental conceptions
The European hypothesis of melancholia-pain in non-European cultures
Orientalism, grief, and abstinence
Emotionality as negativity
Gender attributes and tearfulness
Art history, muscle tension, and the painful posture
Interpretation, assumption, semantic relation
Fear, Pain, and melancholy dominance
Depression and pain
Paranoia, melancholia, and pain
Misconceptions; cyclothymia and bipolar disorder
Melancholy appropriation, ethnicity, multicultural perspectives
Cosmology and elegiac pain management
Cinematic symbols
Literary emotionality, fictive superiority
Embodied cognition
Anaesthetics, the relationship between medical management and other models
Lyric manifestation of melancholy and pain