Call for Papers

2nd Global Conference

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

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

THE WHAT: 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 27th April 2012.

                                                                            THE HOW: Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to all 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. 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 : maria.vaccarella@inter-disciplinary.net
Rob Fisher: chronicity2@inter-disciplinary.net

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