Location: Gilmorehill Halls, 9 University Avenue, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ
Date: Monday 5th – Wednesday 7th September 2016
Deadline for proposals: Friday 3rd June 2016
Keynote speakers:
- Eva Feder Kittay, Stony Brook University NY
- Andrew Kötting, artist and filmmaker, University for the Creative Arts
This Wellcome-funded interdisciplinary conference aims to support and foster collaborative work in relation to media and questions of care and well-being, focusing on care and care giving as critical concepts. Bringing together scholars from film and television studies, medical humanities, disability studies, and philosophy, we will debate how understandings of medical and social care are (and might be) positioned in relation to media and cultural studies. This would be a significant first step toward building inter-disciplinary alliances and driving forward work within the as yet under-determined field of ‘visual medical humanities’.
The specific focus of the conference and anticipated publication/s is to explore the ways in which media do more than simply represent care and caring (although representation, of course, remains an important issue). Taking a new approach, the conference will explore how media forms and media practices (the creation, exhibition and reception of media) may act as a mode of care. Thus we wish to explore how different kinds of media programming, media technologies and media practices present opportunities in which care is manifest as both an ‘attitude’ and a ‘disposition’ (Feder Kittay).
The event will underpin at least one multi-authored publication. Through this conference we will explore the politics and ethics of care-relationships and contest binary understandings of autonomy and dependency amongst individuals with cognitive and physical disabilities, carers and medical professionals. We are particularly interested in the nexus of youth (the ‘child’), age (the ‘aged’) and disability as a way of opening up alliances and challenges to popular cultural notions and representations of care and dependency.
We are now looking for academics, care providers, and creative practitioners of all levels, periods, and fields to submit proposals for 20 minute conference papers. We invite papers on topics that include (but are not limited to):
- Relationships between care and media
- Definitions of care in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
- Autobiographical representations of and reactions to care
- Disability studies approaches to care and dependency
- Media practices and outputs as modes of care
- Care and the visual medical humanities
- Adaptive technologies and care
- Spectatorship, care, and media
- Care, media, and children
- Care, media, and ageing
- Use of media in health education and rehabilitation
- Consumer ‘choice’ and ‘autonomy’ in popular culture
- Screen cultures in our ‘institutions of care’ (e.g. the NHS and the BBC).
Please email an abstract of up to 300 words and a short bio (100-200 words) to the conference organisers (discoursesofcare@gmail.com) by Friday 3rd June 2016. The conference team will respond to proposals by Friday 10th June 2016. There are a limited number of travel bursaries available for postgraduate and/or early career presenters; the recipients of these grants will be asked to write a short reflection on the conference, which will be published on the Glasgow Medical Humanities Research Centre blog, and the conference website.
If you wish to be considered for one of the travel bursaries, please email us for an application form and submit it with your abstract and bio. We will contact all respondents on the outcome of their proposal by the end of June 2016. Thanks to funding from the Wellcome Trust, this conference will be free to attend.
The conference venue, the Gilmorehill Building, is fully accessible, and the conference will include accommodations such as pre-circulated papers and discussion topics, ending with an interactive roundtable discussion. For more information on access, transport, and the venue please visit our website. If you have any questions, please email the conference team at discoursesofcare@gmail.com, or contact us via @CareDiscourses.
Conference team: Prof. Karen Lury (Film and TV), Dr Amy Holdsworth (Film and TV), and Dr Hannah Tweed (English Literature).
