Date: 7-8 November 2019
Location: Centre for Studies in Practical Knowledge, Södertörn University, Sweden
Closing Date for Applications: 15 August 2019
Call for abstracts:
Existential Medical Humanities
Konferens och möte för det nationella nätverket för medicinsk humaniora och samhällsvetenskap
Arranged by Centre for Studies in Practcal Knowledge, Södertörn University, Sweden
7-8th of November 2019
Keynote speakers:
Sarah Atkinson, University of Durham
Max Liljefors, Lund University
Contemporary medicine influences the ways we think about and deal with existentially challenging situations in human life. The existentially challenging situations take place at the beginning and ending of human lives and in-between birth and death when medical diagnoses and treatments affect the way persons approach their health and identity. However, medicine not only affects the ways we presently think about existential issues, contemporary health care is also under strong pressure to find ways to address and integrate existential issues appropriately in its practice. Health care professionals are not only dealing with malfunctioning bodies, but also with persons finding themselves in challenging life situations. They must make room for the vulnerable and suffering person and not only for his or her physical body in the clinical encounter. What is important to patients are not only medical issues in the narrow sense of diseases and diagnoses, but what their medical conditions will do to them and their lives as persons.
To this conference, we especially welcome contributions that in some way address existential issues in health care from a humanities or social science perspective. However, since medical humanities and social sciences are by way of definition bringing cultural and social perspectives of the human being to medicine and are in this sense related to existential questions, all contributions in these fields are welcome.
Contributions can be in Swedish or English.
Deadline for abstracts is the 15th of August 2019.
Please send abstracts in Swedish or English, maximum 500 words with title, author and affiliation to conference secretary Anna Wennergren: anna.wennergren@sh.se
Questions about the conference could also be sent to: fredrik.svenaeus@sh.se
https://www.sh.se/kalender/kalenderpost/2019-03-25-call-for-abstracts-existential-medical-humanities