Bereavement meetings & conferences

3rd International Public Health & Palliative Care Conference

Limerick, Ireland, 25-27 April 2013

The International Public Health and Palliative Conference has been growing in its number of participants since the first conference was held in 2009 in Kerala, India. Up to 250 delegates will gather together for the 3rd International Public Health and Palliative Conference to be held in Limerick, Ireland between 25-27 April, 2013.

As part of the Conference, we are delighted to announce that the International Association for Health Promoting Palliative Care will be launched.

The scientific programme will consist of key-note speakers, invited papers, concurrent presentations and facilitated workshops based on submitted abstracts. We aim to achive a high number of scientific contributions in Limerick and will mix these with creative, thought provoking contributions, workshops and café conversations that bring clinicians and academics, professionals and non professionals together to discuss and reflect on death, dying, loss and care.

Conference organisers:

Milford Care Centre & the University of Limerick
c/o Milford Care Centre
Limerick, Ireland
Telephone: +353 (0)61 485 843
FAX: + 353 (0)61 331 181
PublicHealthPalliativeCare.org

Shared Traumas, Silent Loss, Public and Private Mourning

Summer Symposium, Brandbjerg, Denmark, July 27th – August 3rd 2012

Beyond Words: Helping Families Through Grief After Sudden Loss

An Interdisciplinary Conference Organized by the All Inclusive Care for Children Coalition

April 26, 2013 Vernon, New York

Contact Us:

12 Rhoads Drive
Utica, NY • 13502
Phone: 1-877-515-8490
Fax: 315-792-9734
Email: Info@allinclusivecareforchildren.com

Grievings 2012

Grievings 2012, the next edition of the Annual International Conference of the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures of the University of Silesia in Katowice, will be held in Ustroń, Poland, 20-23 September 2012.

Although generally resented and deemed unfavourable for individuals, societies and nations, grief, grievance, and grieving, along with a complex list of epithets that could in various situations, under varying circumstances, accompany them – racial grief, political grievance, protracted grieving, chronic grief, traumatic, unresolved grievance – nevertheless occupy a notorious place in culture and its manifestations in literature, art, history, science, or politics.

Confused experiences of melancholia, grief, nostalgia, shame, anguish, hate, longing, and jealousy continue to permeate cultural productions across historical moments, literary epochs, and political sympathies.

It is these veneers that we intend to uncover and dismantle, thus – dissolve, or, assuming yet a different approach, assemble into larger entities exhibiting common patterns of formulaic imagining.

The name Grievings comes with several emphases in mind – we place great impact on attempts to explore questions of how globalization has affected modes of grieving, how it has altered the subjects/objects over which we grieve, and finally, how grievances have come to adopt the shape of ultimatums, sometimes escalating into forms of sabotage, schizophrenia, or even outright military conflict.

Should any questions arise, please do not hesitate to contact us!

Organizers' snailmail address

Department of Postcolonial Studies and Travel Writing
Institute of English Cultures and Literatures
University of Silesia in Katowice
ul. Gen. Stefana Grota-Roweckiego 5
41-205 Sosnowiec
Poland

2012 International Conference on Stillbirth, SIDS/SUID and Infant Survival

October 5-7, 2012 Baltimore, Maryland

We are glad to invite you to take part in a one-of-a-kind event, the 2012 International Conference on Stillbirth, SIDS/SUID and Infant Survival. This biennial event is expected to unite esteemed international researchers, parent leaders, stakeholders, and medical professionals to exchange vital information and concerns, and establish essential connections for the common goal of reducing infant loss. The United States is proud to welcome distinguished attendees who globally represent a vast array of respected organizations and individuals. These vital organizations form a comprehensive national fabric that reduces infant deaths and supports families who have experienced infant loss. Together, we look forward to greeting you here in Baltimore in 2012.

The purpose of the conference is to help prevent stillbirth and infant deaths by bringing researchers and consumers of research (health care providers, parents, health educators) together to exchange information around the topics of SIDS, SUID and stillbirth.

Specifically the IC will:

• Educate on new findings, theories and initiatives to increase global awareness and impact decisions
• Convene the people, forums, tools and expertise needed to take action
• Work together to continue to put infant survival on the global map of issues
• Exchange practices from around the world to stimulate solutions
• Enable participants to inform research through exchange
• Support participants to give outlet to grief
• Provide a forum for formal meetings of the various international organizations

The conference website can provide you with additional useful information:
http://www.firstcandle.org/internationalconference/

Contact Information
Email: IC2012@firstcandle.org

Phone: 800.221.7437 | 410.653.8226

Fax: 410.653.8709

Centre for Death and Society Conference 2012--Dying in the Digital Age

9-10 June 2012 Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute (BRLSI), Bath, United Kingdom

The 2011 CDAS Conference, Death & Dying in the Digital Age, was possibly the first ever to bring together computer scientists and death studies researchers. Reflecting the literature, the most coherent body of the 2011 papers referred to post-death phenomena, specifically digital mourning and legacy, and a selection of those papers will appear in a special issue of Bereavement Care in spring 2012.

By contrast, research into how digital technologies affect the interactions and experiences of those near the end of life – the frail elderly, the terminally ill – is much more limited and fragmented. Considerable research has been done on technologies to sustain people’s physical wellbeing toward the end of life, but very little on technologies to sustain their social lives.

Topics can include, but are not limited to, the modelling, development or use of technologies that promote social inclusion, blogs, social networking, health & social care technologies, narrative analysis, etc. Our aim is to bring together the fragmented research and knowledge in this area.

The University of Bath’s Centre for Death & Society (CDAS) has extensive contacts in death studies, palliative care, the funeral industry, gerontology, and computer science, and is in a unique position to promote engagement between computer sciences and death studies.

The conference will be held in the centre of the world heritage city of Bath, in the amenable surroundings of the Bath Royal Literary & Scientific Institute (car park nearby, Bath Spa station 10 minutes walk, Bristol Airport 1 hour). The cost, £45 for a single day, £80 for the weekend, includes lunch and refreshments. There will be opportunities to socialise over a drink on Friday evening or meal on Saturday evening (neither included in price). There is plentiful accommodation nearby, which delegates need to arrange for themselves.

Framing Lives, the 8th Biennial Conference of the International Auto/Biography Association

17-20 July 2012, Canberra, Australia

The Humanities Research Centre and National Centre of Biography at the Australian National University, in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, present Framing Lives, the 8th Biennial Conference of the International Auto/Biography Association.

The field of auto/biography and life narrative studies is dynamic and interdisciplinary. Founded in 1999, the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) is the leading international forum for scholars, critics and practitioners. The Framing Lives conference will feature distinguished international speakers and events at the National Portrait Gallery and other national collecting institutions.

Framing Lives draws attention to the extraordinary turn to the visual in contemporary life narrative: to graphics and animations, photographs and portraits, installations and performances, avatars and characters, that come alive on screens, stages, pages, and canvas, through digital and analogue technologies. At the same time, framing suggests the ways that lives are lived, recorded and viewed through multiple frames including those of language, politics, place, gender, history and culture. It draws attention to the multiple ‘I’s of auto/biographical representations now, and the various fields of vision, lines of sight, and points of focus for critics, artists, writers, historians and curators in the life worlds of auto/biography. Conference themes include depiction and display, ethics and rights, living archives, place and displacement, media and celebrity, digital identity and social media, and creative life narrative.

Convenors

Paul Arthur (Deputy Director, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University)
Rosanne Kennedy (Associate Professor and Head of Discipline, Gender Sexuality & Culture, Australian National University)
Gillian Whitlock (ARC Professorial Fellow, School of English, Media Studies & Art History, University of Queensland)

Conference Themes

1. Depiction and display

Histories and analyses of visual representations of lives
Lives as art, including portraiture, sculpture, photography, film and new media
The life of objects and things in storytelling
Curating online collections
Adaptation and remediation
Eavesdropping and voyeurism
Framing, filtering, capturing, exposing, colouring lives
Digitisation, simulation, authenticity

2. Ethics and rights

Human rights, privacy, advocacy, law
Rights of biographical subjects
Trauma, grief and testimony
Editing and ethics
Disability, illness, therapy and recovery in life narrative
Environmental biography
Posthuman lives
Gender and sexuality
Secrets and lies

3. Living archives

The archive within: genetics, genomics, neurology, emotions
Archival legacies: remembering and forgetting
Managing archival material: methodologies, policies, selection, metadata
Oral history theory and practice
Life story consent, copyright, constraints
Preserving ephemera
Institutional partnerships
Transnational archives
Transgenerational archives

4. Place and displacement

Translating ‘life’ and lives across cultures and languages
Indigenous lives
Diasporic lives
Immigrant lives
Transnational lives
Minoritarian life narrative
Genealogies
Witnessing publics

5. Media and celebrity

Press, radio, television, film and music biographies
The media as biographer
Creating notoriety
The changing nature of fame
Collective memory and biography
Refashioning identity: bodies in the media
Confessional modes in public life
Obituaries

6. Digital identity and social media

Cyberlives
Auto/graphics
Social media audiences
Digital relationships, communities, intimacy
Epistolarity before and after email
Avatars, animation, machinima
Transfigured bodies
Pocket lives: iPhone, iPad, Android, apps

7. Creative life narrative

New hybrid forms of life narrative
Approaches to constructing the autobiographical self
Memoirs, journals, diaries, reflections
Autoethnography
Scholarship versus creative practice
Fantasy lives
Personal journeys
Digital storytelling

Society for the Social History of Medicine Conference 2012

The SSHM has set the theme and dates for our 2012 conference.

The Topic: Emotions, Health and Wellbeing
The Place: Queen Mary, University of London
The Dates: 10-12 September 2012

The Society for the Social History of Medicine hosts a major biannual, international, interdisciplinary conference. In 2012, it will be held in conjunction with the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions.

Plenary Speakers: Professor Mark Jackson (Exeter University)
Professor Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck, University of London)
Professor William Reddy (Duke University, USA)

The conference in 2012 will investigate the intimate relationship between the emotions and medicine. It will cover all chronological periods, and invites historical papers from across the disciplines, including from the medical humanities. The following topics are suggested as guidelines:

• Managing the passions
• Disease, contagion and emotion
• Death and mourning
• Pathologies of emotion
• The politics of wellbeing and happiness
• The chemistry and physiology of emotion
• Psychosomatic medicine and emotion

A Call for Papers will be circulated widely in September 2011. To receive this directly, please join the Centre’s mailing list at http://www.qmul.ac.uk/emotions/. But we will be posting a CFP on the website and Facebook.

Discounted registration fees will be available to members of the Society for the Social History of Medicine and the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health.

Convenor: Professor Colin Jones (c.d.h.jones@qmul.ac.uk)
Organising Committee: Dr Thomas Dixon, Dr Rhodri Hayward, Professor Tilli Tansey, Dr Elena Carrerra, Dr Tiffany Watt-Smith & (for SSHM) Dr Rosemary Wall.

Sponsored by the Wellcome Trust