cfp.english.upenn.edu

2nd Global Conference
Making Sense of: Chronicity: A Health, Illness and Disease Project

Thursday 30th August – Saturday 1st September 2012
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers:

This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary project aims to explore the processes by which we attempt to create meaning in chronic illness. The apparent increase in and diversity of chronic conditions calls for better understandings of the spaces between health and illness that chronic patients occupy, often for most of their lives. How can we articulate the tension between the biomedical model of chronicity and its embodied experience? What language and other forms of representation can we use to map, chart and begin to explore the meanings possible within such spaces? What insights can these provide to inform better chronic care management? What is the relationship between chronicity and wellbeing? How do individuals, societies and cultures make sense of chronicity?

We particularly welcome papers/ worshops/ short performances on topics which might include, but are not restricted to:

1. The Borderlands:
- well but ill; degrees of wellness; degrees of illness.
- chronic illness; terminal illness
- chronic pain/ acute pain
- metaphors for and of the journey

2. Understanding CI
- clinical trials/ Big Pharma and CI
- identity and sense of self
- shame, stigma and guilt
- medicine, the clinical gaze, and CI
- the relationship with our body

3. Living with CI
- CI and family
- CI and work
- CI and disability
- CI and ethnicity
- CI and gender

4. Giving CI Voices
- the language of CI
- narrating CI
- representing CI
- performing CI

5. Coping with CI
- chronic pain
- managing chronic illness/self-managing chronic illness
- life, time and reinventing meaning
- healthcare and CI
- living well

Papers will be accepted which deal with related areas and themes.

The 2012 meeting of Making Sense Of: Chronicity will run alongside the fifth of our projects on Making Sense Of: Madness and we anticipate holding sessions in common between the two projects. We welcome any papers or panels considering the problems or addressing issues that cross both projects. Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. 300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords
E-mails should be entitled: CHR2 Abstract Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chair .

Maria Vaccarella
Hub Leader, Making Sense Of: and Marie Curie Research Fellow, King’s College, London
E-mail: maria.vaccarella@inter-disciplinary.net
.
Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Freeland, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
E-mail: chronicity2@inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the ‘Making Sense Of:’ series of research projects. The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the project, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/making-sense-of...

For further details of the conference, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/making-sense-of...

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.