Literature and Medicine meetings & conferences

First International Congress--Narrative Medicine and Rare Diseases

The First International Congress "Narrative medicine and rare diseases" will be held on 4 June 2012, at the Italian National Institute of Health (Aula Pocchiari, Viale Regina Elena 299, Rome, Italy). The Congress aims (i) to promote narrative medicine applied to rare diseases among health practitioners and patients, (ii) to stimulate new theoretical approaches and practical applications, at international level.

The Italian National Centre for Rare Diseases of the Italian National Institute of Health has organised the Italian national
congress "Narrative medicine and rare diseases" annually since 2009.

Rare diseases, defined by their low prevalence, can be acute, severe, chronic and disabling conditions. They may be difficult
to diagnose and with few specific therapeutic treatments.

Narrative medicine aims to build a bridge between the clinical knowledge of health care practitioners and the patient’s subjective experience.

This year, the Italian National Centre for Rare Diseases of the Italian National Institute of Health is organising the First International Congress "Narrative medicine and rare diseases".

The official language will be English (simultaneous translation service English/Italian will be available).
Travel and accommodation expenses will be born by the participants.

For additional information, clarifications, or questions, please contact the Scientific Secretariat, at medicina.narrativa@iss.it.  

Istituto Superiore di Sanità
Via Giano della Bella, 34
00161 - Roma (I)
Phone: 06 4990 4017
Fax: 06 4990 4370
taruscio@iss.it

Retelling Familiar Tales of Pregnancy and Birth in European Cultures

Tues 3rd-Weds 4th July 2012, Oxford, United Kingdom

Purpose of conference

This conference aims to bring together leading specialists from a range of the medical humanities with healthcare professionals to explore the trope of the retelling of stories about pregnancy and birth. While recent work has considered the way in which stories of exceptional pregnancies and unusual births have been told again and again over western history, from Greek mythology and the Old Testament until the present day, the methodological and intellectual questions raised by these retellings have not been discussed in detail. Taking a very broad geographic and chronological focus (Europe from antiquity to the present day), our objective is to encourage innovative interdisciplinary exchanges by addressing the following questions.

How did the growth of print culture in Europe encourage the retelling of familiar birthing tales, and how were new ones added?
Why did some stories of pregnancy and birth circulate more widely than others?
When stories are retold, which details of the original are always retained, which are lost in the retelling, and how and why do new accretions creep into the story?

Sessions

The gathering particularly looks to provide the opportunity for discussion and exchange on both substance and methodology between, on the one hand, a wide range of academic disciplines contributing to the medical humanities (e.g. cultural history, art history, history of the book, literary scholars) and, on the other hand, health care practitioners who have been increasingly focused on the oral transmission of case histories (midwives, obstetricians and gynaecologists, psychiatrists). The four sessions proposed are thus wide-ranging and deliberately aim to juxtapose contributions from academics and practitioners in the various sessions.

1) The trope of repetition, or why some tales of pregnancy and birth are retold

2) Exploring accretion and loss: how tales are retold across time (antiquity to the present) and across different geographic and cultural European contexts

3) Who sees or experiences, who tells and who reads repeated tales: patients, practitioners, witnesses and readers:

4) The significance of the material circulation of repeated tales in word and image

Keynote plenary session: Professor Monica Green (Arizona State University)

Practical details

The conference sessions, including lunches and dinners, will be held in Lady Margaret Hall, a college of the University of Oxford, located in attractive grounds in the north of the city. We are looking to provide bed and breakfast accommodation in another Oxford college for the nights of 2-3-4 July 2012 for delegates who wish to take advantage of this. Alternatively, Oxford has a range of good guesthouses and hotels for those wishing to organise their own accommodation. We hope to have some bursary support available for students.

Shared Traumas, Silent Loss, Public and Private Mourning

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

Shakespeare and Emotions

27–30 November 2012
The University of Western Australia
Perth, Western Australia

The 11th Biennial International Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association in collaboration with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions

The study of emotions in history, literature, and other aspects of culture is a burgeoning field, and Shakespeare takes a very central and influential place. As the theme of the 11th Biennial International Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association, presented in collaboration with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Shakespeare and Emotions will feature papers that explore aspects of the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented emotions in poetry, drama, and other works, and how these representations have been received by audiences and readers from the sixteenth century to the present day.

The ANZSA conference committee for 2012 consists of:

Winthrop Professor Bob White (Local Chair), University of Western Australia
Professor Chris Wortham, University of Notre Dame
Dr Brett D. Hirsch, University of Western Australia
Dr Mark Houlahan, University of Waikato
Assistant Professor Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawers, University of Western Australia

The committee may be contacted individually, or as a group via email sent to conference@anzsa.org.

Our Future is Aging: Current Research on Knowledge, Practice and Policy Research Conference

November 21st-23rd, 2012 Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

"Our Future is Aging: Current Research on Knowledge, Practice and Policy" research conference will be held on November 21-23, 2012, Delta Halifax Hotel, Halifax, Nova Scotia. This Conference will bring together researchers, academics, service providers, decision makers, artists, students, policy analysts and members of the community to share the diversity of perspectives and approaches to aging research within the Atlantic region and throughout Canada.

The Conference is being hosted by the Nova Scotia Centre on Aging, Mount Saint Vincent University as part of its 20th anniversary activities. Our Centre, in collaboration with a planning group of reseachers and representatives from practice and policy from throughout the region, are working to offer a valuable conference experience for you.

Atlantic Canada has the oldest populations in the country, and there is significant scholarly research on aging underway in the region that is not well known. This conference provides a unique opportunity for emerging and established researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in the region who are interested and engaged in age-related research to come together to learn about, and be inspired by, one another’s work. It offers an occasion to learn about existing collaborations in aging research, and foster new ones.

About the Organization

The NSCA is a research centre affiliated with the Department of Family Studies & Gerontology at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, that was established in 1992. Through research, education and community engagement, the NSCA advances knowledge on aging to inform social policy and practice and enhance the quality of life of older people and their families. For more information on the NSCA visit www.msvu.ca/nsca.

2012 marks our 20th anniversary, and we are planning a special celebration. Our anniversary theme is Our Future is Aging. We chose this theme because it captures where we as a society are headed (our population is aging) and it reaffirms the work and mission of the NSCA to generate knowledge that informs policy and practice on aging related issues. Our Future is Aging: Current Research on Knowledge, Practice and Policy, is one event in the 20th Anniversary program of activities. This research conference supports two of the Centre’s strategic directions by fostering research collaborations and engaging in knowledge translation activities.

Travel Bursaries
If funding permits a limited number of travel bursaries may be available to students traveling to the conference. These bursaries will be distributed on a first-come-first serve basis, and will require the completion and submission of a student travel bursary form. Students are encouraged to identify their intent to apply for a travel bursary on the Online Submission form.

For additional information please consult the Nova Scotia Centre on Aging website: www.msvu.ca/nsca.

Halifax Nova Scotia B3M 2J6 Canada
Tel 902-457-6546 • Fax 902-457-6508

Email: nsca@msvu.ca
www.msvu.ca/nsca

Celebrating 20 Years of Advancing Aging Research and Enhancing Seniors' Lives

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

Jung in the Academy and Beyond: The Fordham Lectures – 100 Years Later

October 26 -27, 2012 Fordham University, Bronx, New York

In the autumn of 1912, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung delivered a series of nine lectures at Fordham University. In his Fordham presentations, Jung outlined the difference in his perspective from the theories of Sigmund Freud. A revised edition of these lectures, first published in the inaugural Psychoanalytic Review, has just been released by Princeton University Press: Jung Contra Freud: The 1912 New York Lectures on the Theory of Psychoanalysis, with an introduction by Sonu Shamdasani.

Fordham University, in collaboration with the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association of New York, will observe the centenary of these lectures with a conference that will locate Jung in the academy, and beyond, in the culture. It will explore Jung’s position in the years of the original lecture, in the present, and in the future.

Locating Jung in academia and beyond involves contributions from many disciplines, including psychoanalysis, psychology, psychiatry, literature, religious studies, history, the sciences and arts, and interdisciplinary fields.

The conference will be held October 26 and 27, 2012 at Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus, the site of the original lectures. On Friday evening, October 26th, Sonu Shamdasani (Philemon Professor, University College London) will present a public keynote lecture. Other invited speakers include Joseph Cambray (Harvard Medical School), Eugene Taylor (Saybrook Graduate School and Harvard Medical School), and Ann Ulanov (Union Theological Seminary).

NeuroCultures - NeuroGenderings II

In co-operation with the network NeuroGenderings, the Gender Research Office at the University of Vienna, will launch a three-day international, interdisciplinary conference entitled "NeuroCultures – NeuroGenderings II" 13 - 15 September 2012 at the University of Vienna.

The aim of the conference "NeuroCultures – NeuroGenderings II" is to improve reflective scientific approaches concerned with sex/gender and the brain, and to gain particular insight into the transformation or persistence of gendered norms and values that accompany the mutual entanglements between brain research, various disciplines and public discourse.

With the expansion of the domains of neuroscientific knowledge, today we are witnessing an abundance of emerging neurocultures (such as neuropedagogy, neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, neurotheology, neuroaesthetics, among others) in which bio-socio-cultural relations are (re-) negotiated within research, neuro-(technological)applications, and public discourses.

We use the notion of the "cerebral subject" – the cultural figure of the human according to which all we need to be ourselves is our brains (Ortega & Vidal 2007) – to describe how thought, behaviour, subjectivity and identity are collapsed with the brain’s biology in these neurocultural fields. The cerebral subject is a specific kind of subject; the brain vocabulary produces a culturally and historically specific version of the human and, as such, impacts individual, social, cultural and political spheres.

Gender aspects have to be seriously taken into account within these endeavours on various levels: their empirical significance, the close entanglement of neuroscientific research with society, the impacts of neurofacts and neurotechnologies (in the broadest sense) on socio-cultural gender symbolisms and gendered power relations. Additionally, the hybrid conceptions of neurocultures have to be questioned in terms of their potentials for disrupting nature-culture dichotomies on both material and epistemological levels.

Contact
Conference Board:

Univ.-Prof.in Dr.in Sigrid Schmitz (Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology / Scientific Head of the Gender Research Office, University of Vienna)

Organisation:

Grit Höppner, MA (Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna)

Mag.a Katrin Lasthofer (Gender Research Office, University of Viennna)

Body and Awareness--The Discourse Between Anthropology and Literature

25-27 May 2012 Zadar, Croatia

The conference would like to establish a forum for debate and dialogue on current theory, practice and form of anthropological and literary work in social and cultural conceptualizations of body and awareness.

Overall topic: Body and Awareness. The Discourse between Anthropology and Literature.

Following the trace of Csordas' anthropology of embodiment and Nancy's theory of “writing the body,” intending to elaborate further on the discourse of semiotics (intertextuality) and phenomenology (intersubjectivity), we would like to include awareness as a phenomenon which we consider pivotal in understanding and deconstructing the common dualities of body and mind, body and self etc.

On the level of discourse we challenge the current crisis in representation to the point of encounter of anthropology and literature and look for ways of 'incorporating' awareness/embodiment in cultural theory. Such theory lives up to the blurred shaping of cultural practice as it manifests itself today in all spheres of social, literary and artistic life: concentrating on ambiguous strategies stretching between archive and vision, confinement and transgression, and searching into the human condition of embodied awareness.

In such a context, 'body' is becoming both agent and receiver of processes of awareness, while 'awareness' remains the witness of both bodily and conscious epistemological and practical acts. Embodiment as lived experience is a cultural phenomenon which can neither be perceived as equivocal with 'person' nor as clearly distinct. The process of de-ontologizing the difference and non-difference between body and awareness raises the question: how to objectify the ‘body’ which is our own? Only as an act of eccentric awareness which is simultaneously both the experience of existential presence and the representation of an objectified and recognizable abstraction. Each claim, either of identity or difference between body and awareness leads us into paradoxes, since in both cases while aiming at truth we get entangled in fictions.

Apart from reframing theoretical presumptions about embodiment as being-in-the-world, we want to discuss various modalities of its appearance in the stream of life – from biological, individual, social, political, cultural, narrative and performing formations of the lived body to the ultimately dead body in its social encounters and literary anticipations.

Crucial questions will be raised: Are we in intercultural situations embodied in the same way as on our cultural home-ground? Does every transnational experience require new embodiment?

Date and Venue
25-27 May 2012, University of Zadar, New Campus (Novi kampus), dr. Franje Tudjmana 24 i

Organizing Committee
Snježana Zorić, University of Zadar, Croatia
Gert Hofmann, University College Cork, Ireland
Mario Katić, University of Zadar, Croatia

Keynote Speakers
Klaus-Peter Köpping, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Frank Chamberlain, University College Cork, Ireland

Conference participation fees
Participation fee is – € 100
Participation fee for PhD and postdoctoral research students is – € 50.
The participation fee includes all symposium proceedings, daytime refreshments and two excursions into the Velebit Mountains where we are going to see mirila (a unique funeral custom) and to the old castle of Benkovac in Zadar hinterland.

Enquiries

Queries about organizational issues may be addressed to Mario Katić (makatic@unizd.hr)

All information will be regularly updated on www.bodyandawareness.info

Comics & Medicine: Navigating the Margins

22-24 July 2012 Toronto, Canada

Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto

Biomedical Communications Program, University of Toronto

Office of the Vice-Principal, Research, University of Toronto Mississauga

The third international interdisciplinary conference* on comics and medicine will continue to explore the intersection of sequential visual arts and medicine. This year we will highlight perspectives that are often under-represented in graphic narratives, such as depictions of the Outsider or Other in the context of issues such as barriers to healthcare, the stigma of mental illness and disability, and the silent burden of caretaking.

The conference will feature keynote presentations by comics creators Joyce Brabner and Joyce Farmer. Brabner, a comics artist and social activist, collaborated with her late husband Harvey Pekar on the graphic novel Our Cancer Year (1994), which won a Harvey Award for best graphic novel. Farmer is a veteran of the underground comics scene who nursed her elderly parents through dementia and decline as shown in her graphic memoir Special Exits (2010), which won the National Cartoonists Society award for graphic novels.

Possible topics:

Graphic pathographies of illness and disability
The use of comics in medical education
The use of comics in patient care
Depictions of the illness experience from the perspective of loved ones and family caregivers
The interface of graphic medicine and other visual arts in popular culture
Ethical implications of using comics to educate the public
Ethical implications of patient representation in comics by healthcare providers
Trends in international use of comics in healthcare settings
The role of comics in provider/patient communication
Comics as virtual support groups for patients and caregivers
The use of comics in bioethics discussions and education

We envision this gathering as a collaboration among humanities scholars, comics scholars, comics creators, healthcare professionals, and comics enthusiasts.

*Information about the 2010 conference, “Comics and Medicine: Medical Narrative in Graphic Novels,” in London, England, and the 2011 conference, “Comics and Medicine: The Sequential Art of Illness,” in Chicago, Illinois, USA, can be found at www.graphicmedicine.org.