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Objects of psychiatry: Between thing-making, reification & personhood (CfP, University of Zurich, 8-11 June 2016)

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Psychiatry is situated at the interface between the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. The ensuing hybrid nature invites inter- and transdisciplinary research approaches. This conference aims to give a platform to such approaches asking the central question: Who or what is, becomes or constitutes psychiatry’s object?

Taking its starting point from the study of concrete research objects – case notes, images, films and texts, diagnostic concepts and labels, research instruments and therapeutic procedures, doctors and patients – it invites reflection on how objects are related to subjects, selves and personhood. Can this relationship be conceptualized along the lines of the traditional Western dichotomy between object and subject or does it have to be fundamentally re-thought? And is it linked to other classical dichotomies e.g. the one between matter and meaning? Is there a role for agents as object-, subject-, self- or thing-makers?

OBJECTS OF PSYCHIATRY takes up current debates within psychiatry namely the debate about the reification of psychiatric diagnoses like “schizophrenia”, but also deliberations about autonomy, human rights and participation. At the same time, it considers how the humanities situate psychiatric objects in wider societal contexts and discourses and bring into focus their historical genesis and configuration.

Drawing together heterogeneous traditions of thought and methods, it invites participants to build – and to reflect on – transdisciplinary bridges between sciences and humanities as well as between theory and practice. Contributions are invited, but not limited to, perspectives from psychiatry, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, history, history of science and medicine, neurosciences, as well as cultural, literary, film & visual studies. Medical Humanities approaches are welcome.

International Conference organised by the interdisciplinary research project: “Schizophrenia”: Reception, semantic shift, and criticism of a concept in the 20th century. University of Zurich, Psychiatric Hospital Zurich University.

Proposals (max. 250 words) for 20-minute papers should be sent to Veronika Rall. Deadline: Dec. 1, 2015.

‘Care of the Body: spaces of practice’ – Announcing a new special issue of Social & Cultural Geography

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‘Care of the Body: spaces of practice,’ edited by Centre for Medical Humanities Associate Director Sarah Atkinson, Victoria Lawson and Janine Wiles, is the latest special issue of Social & Cultural Geography.

From the editors’ introduction: “Care—concept, emotion, practice, politics, moral exhortation—is a starting point for a range of critical geographies. Care affords geographers a richness of possibilities through which to engage critically with a range of politically charged discourses. This special issue offers a suite of ‘think’ pieces on geographies of care which provoke further examination of three challenges. First, we need conceptual strategies to explore the connections of care across different spatialities and temporalities. Secondly, biases within current research on care help make invisible the multiple sites through which our practices are shaped. Thirdly, certain concepts within the care lexicon have gone unchallenged such as dependency and vulnerability.We contemplate the potential of imagining care both as relation and as flow. The nodal characteristic of a relational care shapes how care flows through those nodes to focus on the spatial and temporal unevenness and inequalities in care, the processes eroding situated traditions of care, and the spaces and practices facilitating care of the body.”

Social & Cultural Geography, 2011, Vol 12, (6).

Contents

Care of the body: spaces of practice (introduction to the special issue)
Sarah Atkinson, Victoria Lawson and Janine Wiles

Reflections on being a recipient of care: vexing the concept of vulnerability
Janine Wiles

Shopping for support: personalisation and the new spaces and relations of commodified care for people with learning disabilities
Ed hall

Friendship, co-presence and care: neglected spaces
Sophie Bowlby

Scales of care and responsibility: debating the surgically globalised body
Sarah Atkinson

Recentring care: interrogating the commodification of care
Maia Green and Victoria Lawson

Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society: a postgraduate conference (CfP, Conference, London, 14 June 2014)

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Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society: a postgraduate conference
Centre for Psychoanalysis
Middlesex University, London
Saturday, 14 June, 2014

We invite postgraduate students and research fellows to submit proposals for papers on psychoanalysis or psychoanalytically informed research. Papers may be from any academic discipline, including psychology, sociology, cultural studies, psychosocial studies, history, literature, art, religious studies or philosophy. We also welcome proposals on clinical or theoretical topics from students on psychoanalytic trainings.

This one-day conference is designed to give postgraduate students from all disciplines who are interested in psychoanalysis an opportunity to present and discuss their research in an informal and intellectually stimulating setting.

Abstracts of 300 words (maximum) should include a title, the name of your university or training organisation and a telephone number. Papers should be no more than 20 minutes long. A further 10 minutes will be allowed for discussion. Sessions of 1½ hours will have space for three papers. There will be concurrent panels to accommodate as many papers as possible. The day will end with a plenary.

The conference takes place at the Hendon Campus of Middlesex University (30 minutes from central London) between 9:30 and 5:30 on Saturday, 14 June, 2014. Tea, coffee and a light lunch will be provided. The conference fee is £40 for presenters and attendees.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is Friday, 23 May, 2014. Early submission and registration is recommended. Abstracts and queries should be sent to: David Henderson.

Registration.

Centre for Psychoanalysis.

Hearing the Voice Research Seminar Series (2014-2015, Durham University)

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The Hearing the Voice Research Seminar series is designed to provide a platform for HtV researchers to share the detailed findings of their research and gain feedback from a wider audience. Anyone with an interest in interdisciplinary research on voice-hearing or auditory hallucination is welcome to attend.

The programme for 2015 is as follows:

Thursday 22 January 2015: Dr Ben Alderson-Day (Postdoctoral Research Associate in Psychology, Durham University) on ‘Voices, Agents and Presences: Asking the “Who?” question of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations’

Thursday 12 March 2015: Dr David Smailes (Postdoctoral Research Associate in Psychology, Durham University) on ‘Tailoring Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to Sub-types of Voice-hearing’

Thursday 7 May 2015: Professor Pat Waugh (Department of English Studies, Durham University) on ‘Voices Becoming Characters: Insights from the Experimental Novel’

Thursday 4 June 2015: Professor Charles Fernyhough (Department of Psychology, Durham University) on ‘The Voices in Our Heads’

All seminars will take place in the Birley Room at Hatfield College, Durham University (number 20 on this map) from 5 pm to 7 pm. If you would like to reserve a place at any of these events, please register using our online registration form. If you have any queries, please contact Victoria Patton.

HERA 10th Annual Conference: Humanities through the Ages (CfP, Chicago, 7-10 March 2018)

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The Humanities Education and Research Association conference program committee invites proposals for presentations at the 2018 conference. The program committee’s theme is designed to incorporate any and all possible connotations: the history and development of the humanities, the changes in the humanities over time, the triumphs of and threats to the humanities, the importance of the humanities, the challenges to the humanities. Also included within the theme is the idea of humanities and humanities education being enriched and enlivened by commitment and dedication from all age levels, spanning the lives of individuals as well as history.

The HERA conference program committee maintains that individuals engaged in research and education in all fields of the humanities and liberal arts and sciences carry forward the humanities through the ages into the future. We call for papers that explore continuity and change, form and function, courage and fear, voices and unspoken presences from any individual fields of study. Our work and its vitality validates our common pursuit.

The wide-ranging span of the Humanities provides the finest range of approaches and methodologies to explore the vast array of concepts and themes within the humanities throughout the world. HERA seeks your contributions concerning the explorations of identity, image, and voice within any aspect of the Humanities. The 2018 HERA Conference theme is intentionally seeking disciplinary, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholarship exploring voice and vision from the local to the global.

New this year is the HERA Undergraduate Research Prize, a prize of $1,000 awarded to the best undergraduate conference paper (or divided among a panel of papers), sponsored by an attending professor (with a $500 prize awarded to the professor). See HERA’s website for more details.

Submissions are encouraged from educators at all levels (including undergraduate/graduate students) as well as all those with an interest in the arts and humanities. Proposals for papers, panels, or workshops (150-200 words) must be submitted through the conference submission portal on the HERA website. Creative presentations, readings, and exhibitions are also welcomed.

Questions may be directed to the conference organizer, Marcia Green. Presentation time for individual papers is limited to 15-20 minutes.

Deadline for submission: no later than January 25, 2018

The Palmer House has a special rate of $139 for conference attendees. It is located across the street from the Chicago Art Institute, the Chicago Symphony, the Chicago Theater district, and a few blocks from the Chicago Lyric Opera. It is near the city center; shopping & sightseeing, public transit, & the train station. The hotel booking link is on HERA’s website.

Sociology of Health & Illness – Key thinkers and debates series – Podcasts Now Available

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Podcasts in the “Key thinkers and debates” series contain interviews and discussions with key figures in the sociology of health & illness. In some cases, these are long-established sociologists reflecting on the past, present and future of the field, or on particular contributions which they have made. In other cases, they are authors or editors discussing papers or special issues which they have produced under the auspices of the journal.

An interview between Mike Bury and Jonathan Gabe
A podcast split into three parts:
1. The History of Medical Sociology in the UK: Biographical Disruption and Illness Narrative
2. The Expert Patient and NICE
3. Ageing and Health

Key articles:
Illness narratives: fact or fiction? by Mike Bury
Chronic illness, expert patients and care transition by David Taylor & Mike Bury
The sociology of chronic illness: a review of research and prospects by Mike Bury
Chronic illness as biographical disruption by Mike Bury

Also in the series: Watch the interview with Professor Renee Fox about the Reflections on the development of medical sociology.

First Event in Medical Humanities Research Network Scotland

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The Medical Humanities Research Network Scotland is an initiative supported by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The MHRNS aims to enable greater and more sustained collaborative research within Scotland in the medical humanities.

The first research workshop in the series organised by the MHRNS took place on Saturday 18 June at the University of Glasgow. The organisers, Dr David Shuttleton, and Dr Gavin Miller, and the Project Assistant, Dr Megan Coyer, thanked all who had managed to attend at what was a difficult time of year, given the competing demands of well-earned leave, and conference attendance. A guest participant also took part in the workshop: Dr Claire McKechnie, who has recently been involved in teaching English Literature within the medical curriculum at Edinburgh University.

Discussion for the day was on the theme, “Why Historicise?”, and centred on two articles: “Medical records as catalogues of experience”, by Anne Borsay; and “Medicine, history and the present” by Nikolas Rose.

Future events (workshops, lectures, seminars) will centre on the network’s four themes: “Why Historicise?”, “Theory into Practice”, “Mental Health”, and “Dependency”. Please check the Medical Humanities Research Network Scotland for details.

Reviewer needed: ‘Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States’ by Seth M. Holmes

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Two copies of ‘Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States‘ by Seth M. Holmes (University of California Press, 2013) are available for review. We are looking for two contrasting perspectives on Holmes’ work, which could take the form of different academic perspectives or reviews by an academic and clinician. Expressions of interest are welcome from across the medical humanities.

‘Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system. An anthropologist and MD in the mould of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, Holmes shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care.

Holmes’s material is visceral and powerful. He trekked with his companions illegally through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the U.S., planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This “embodied anthropology” deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which social inequalities and suffering come to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care’.

If you would like to write a review on ‘Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies'(approximately 1,000 words in length), then please email our reviews editor with a short explanation of why you are well placed to review the book.

Review guidelines can be found here.

Ted Schrecker ‘A tale of two controversies: Standards of proof in health policy’ (Seminar, Durham University, 29 Jan 2014)

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A tale of two controversies: Standards of proof in health policy
Professor Ted Schrecker
29th January 2014, 4-5pm
Pennington Room, Grey College

This Durham CELLS seminar will be given by Ted Schrecker who is Professor of Global Health Policy, Durham University. Professor Schrecker is also an adjunct professor of Epidemiology and Community Medicine at the University of Ottawa.

Abstract The importance of social and environmental determinants of health is increasingly being recognized in health policy, at least at the level of rhetoric. Critical choices involve what is called at least in common law countries a standard of proof: how much evidence is considered to justify action. A substantial environmental policy literature dating back to the 1970s demonstrates (a) that there is no ‘right’ standard of proof; (b) that the choice is inescapably value-driven, and is one with respect to which scientists qua scientists have no special competence; and (c) that the choice cannot be avoided, since deferring action pending the availability of conclusive scientific evidence is itself a choice to value some risks, benefits and interests more highly than others.

I examine the treatment of standards of proof in two health policy debates: (a) policy toward endocrine-disrupting agents in the environment, primarily but not exclusively in the European Union, where the precautionary principle is entrenched in law and these agents have been addressed in a formal policy development process; (b) how public policy should address the ways I which the built environment, stress associated with economic insecurity, and the marketing activities of major food and beverage corporations contribute to rapid increases in overweight/obesity. The first case was selected because of potential health impact, current political salience and the fact that it replicates earlier contests in cancer policy, related to the need for evidence of human health impact and to the (non)existence of thresholds or no-effect levels of exposure. The second was selected because of potential health impact and perceived urgency within the public health community, and because it exemplifies the challenges of developing evidence-based policy to address multiple causal pathways that link social determinants of health to health outcomes.

In each case, misunderstandings about standards of proof offer powerful interests an opportunity to camouflage choices about the appropriate distribution of harms and benefits as scientific rather than normative/value driven. Whether such misunderstandings have been actively and strategically cultivated or passively capitalized upon is a matter for further research.

Contact [email protected] for more information about this event.