3rd Global Conference - Making Sense Of: Chronicity

Monday 23rd September - Wednesday 25th September 2013
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Presentations
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 and raises questions not just about those that suffer, but also about those that care for them, available treatments and care, and social inclusiveness.

Questions:
1) How can we articulate the tension between the biomedical model of chronicity and its embodied experience?
2) What language and other forms of representation can we use to map, chart and begin to explore the meanings possible within such spaces?
3) What insights can these provide to inform better chronic care management?
4) What is the relationship between chronicity and wellbeing?
5) How do individuals, societies and cultures make sense of chronicity?

Themes for Papers/ Workshops/ Short Performances:

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

Presentations will be accepted which deal with related areas and themes. The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals.

What to Send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 22nd March 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 21st June 2013. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords. Emails should be entitled: CHR3 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). 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 Chairs

Maria Vaccarella :
Rob Fisher:

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 conference, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/making-sense-of/chronicity/call-for-papers/

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.