Narrative & Medicine: (Con)texts and practices across disciplines.

The concept of Narrative Medicine, established by Rita Charon, among others, in the late 1990s, claims that a patient-centred medical practice should include the competence to interpret “stories of illness” in order to better attend to the personal experience of illness (Charon 2006). Drawing on the works of Paul Ricoeur, who argued for the narrative roots of identity, Narrative-Based Medicine recognizes the inter-subjective nature of the therapeutic relationship and affirms the relevance of narrative knowledge for the diagnosis, the therapeutic process, the education of patients and healthcare professionals, and for research (Greenhalgh & Hurwitz, 1998).

 

Strengthened by the integrative medicine movement that emerged in the 1990s, NBM/Narrative-Based Medicine proposes to complement the prevalent rational andobjective paradigm of EBM/Evidence-Based-Medicine, considering that the present techno-scientific developments call for a humanistic reorientation towards an “ethics of relationship” and empathy (Hervé et al., 2001), of generosity and singularity. The role of NBM is recognized today, both for its large critical output (Zaner, Charon, Frank, Hurwitz, Danou), and for the simultaneous development of medical training programmes in North America andin European countries such as the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France and more recently Portugal.

In line with the multidisciplinary innovative research developed by the project Narrative & Medicine: (con)texts and practices across disciplines, we launch a Call for papers for an interdisciplinary conference, aiming to provide a forum for healthcare professionals and international and national scholars from the Humanities and Medicine, interested in discussing the future of this subject.

 

Topics of inquiry include but are not limited to:

 

• Humanities methodologies for the Medical Sciences

• Social impacts and impact areas of Medical Humanities

• Narrative Medicine and medical education

• Patient care, health care, caregivers and social health conditions

• Vulnerability and clinical relationship

• Illness, medical care and their literary and artistic manifestations

• Narrative and ethics

• Narrative medicine, neuroscience and cultural anthropology

• Narratives and experiences of illness

• Narratives and medical experience

• Narrative and trauma

• The limits of representing illness

• Art and art therapies

• “Affect theory” and Narrative Medicine

• Literature in Narrative Medicine and its implications for Literary Studies

 

The programme includes plenary sessions with keynote speakers and break-out parallel sessions subject to abstract submission.

 

Languages: Portuguese, English, French

 

Important dates

Conference announcement (CFP): 8 April 2014

Deadline for abstract submissions: 31 July 2014

Notification of acceptance: 30 September 2014

Provisional programme: 30 November 2014

Definitive programme: 6 February 2015

 

Registration:

15 December: 100 Euros

16 December to 31 January: 150 Euros

Students (Graduate, Master, PhD): 30 Euros

 

Organization:

ULICES – University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies

 

Organizing Committee:

 

Isabel Fernandes

Adelino Cardoso

Alda Correia

Amândio Reis

Cecilia Beecher Martins

Diana Almeida

Manuel Silvério Marques

Marijke Boucherie

Maria de Jesus Cabral

Miguel Ângelo Fernandes

Nuno Proença

Teresa Casal

Zuzanna Sanches

 

Scientific Committee:

 

Isabel Fernandes (coord.)

Adelino Cardoso

Alda Correia

Antonio Pithon Cyrino

António Barbosa

António Martins da Silva

Brian Hurwitz

Cecilia Beecher Martins

Christian Hervé

Clara Rocha

Dante Gallian

Diego Gracia

Diana Almeida

Gérard Danou

José Ricardo Ayres

João Flor

João Lobo Antunes

José Lazaro

Manuel Silvério Marques

Maria Amélia Ferreira

Maria Antónia Rebelo Botelho

Marijke Boucherie

Maria de Jesus Cabral

Marie-France Mamzer

Nuno Proença

Paolo Tortonese

Paula Chaves

Rita Charon

Teresa Casal