Call for Papers: Launch of the International Network for Narrative Medicine
A Narrative Future for Health Care
Launch of the International Network for Narrative
Medicine
Co-Sponsored by the Centre for the Humanities and Health
at King’s College London
and The Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia
University, New York
June 19-21, 2013
At King’s Guy’s Hospital Campus, London
Humanities scholars, social scientists and clinicians are
learning to write and read clinical discourse in ways that take account of
developing narratological thinking in literature, philosophy and ethics. They
have started to recognize and describe narrative impulse, shape, and techniques
in clinical conversations, observations and illness-related life-writings of
patients, care-givers and writers. Narrative medicine has emerged from elements
of literary theory, cultural studies, creative writing and artistic practice,
disability studies, narrative ethics, and history of medicine, which intersect
with the professional disciplines of nursing, social work, medicine, and the
psychotherapies.
Conference Objectives:
1. To convene
broad international interest in the place of narrative knowledge and practices
in health care
2. To expand
our appreciation of the role of creativity in the care of the sick
3. To focus on
global narrative health care futures
4. To sharpen
and critique narrative concepts in relation to clinical practices and training
methods
5. To examine
current goals in teaching, research, and clinical care
6. To
articulate the risks of narrative practices in health care
7. To
strategize means of influencing mainstream clinical institutions
8. To raise
the visibility of narrative concepts and methods in health care policy
discourse
9. To
interrogate how Illness Narrative should be theorized
10. To situate
Narrative Medicine in the context of other clinical and scientific developments
such as ‘Personalised Medicine’.
Confirmed Keynote Speakers
Catherine Belling
Havi Carel
Arthur Frank
Ann Jurecic
John Launer
Call for papers
Paper abstracts are solicited from conference attendees
for inclusion in break-out parallel sessions. Topics of interest include but
are not limited to:
- Fortifying clinical practice with narrative methods
- Illness narratives in practice
- Life writing, health, and social care
- Social justice, health, and narrativity
- Teaching close reading and creative writing in health
care schools
- Narrative medicine responses to trauma
- Visual representations of illness and care
- The limits of representing illness
- Health policy implications of the narrative jolt in
health
- Narrative ethics
- The neuroscience of narrative acts.
Submission of abstracts
Abstracts should be no more than 400 words and sent to julia.howse@kcl.ac.uk by 5th January
2013. Please include a title, and the topic from the above list which your
abstract addresses. We welcome and encourage papers from researchers and
practitioners from scientific, clinical, humanities, disabilities studies,
health service and policy backgrounds, as well from writers and artists.
Abstracts should be submitted in a Times Roman typeface size 12.
Please contact Julia Howse (julia.howse@kcl.ac.uk) if you have any
questions regarding the conference or the submission of abstracts.
General Chairs
Brian Hurwitz, MD
Rita Charon, MD, PhD
Maura Spiegel, PhD
Nellie Hermann, MFA
Neil Vickers, DPhil
James Whitehead, PhD.