11th Global Conference: Making Sense Of: Dying and Death

Call for Presentations

This inter- and multi-disciplinary conference explores dying and death
and the ways culture impacts care for the dying, the overall
experience of dying, and how the dead are remembered. Over the past
four decades, scholarship in thanatology has increased dramatically.
This particular conference seeks a broad array of perspectives that
explore, analyse, and/or interpret the myriad interrelations and
interactions that exist between death and culture. Culture not only
presents and portrays ideas about "a good death" and norms that seek
to achieve it, culture also operates as both a vehicle and medium
through which meaning about death is communicated and understood.
Sadly, too, culture sometimes facilitates death through violence.

Today, many people around the world maintain an increasingly passive
role in caring for the dying, and supporting those who grieve a loss.
Given that death, serving the dying, and caring for the bereaved has
always been such an essential and unavoidable feature of life in
traditional societies, a key emphasis in this year's conference will
involve an exploration of the connections between contemporary
technologies, social media hubs, and modern health care delivery
systems and the ways they impact current end-of-life issues and
decisions, including the experience of bereavement and grief. This
conference welcomes submissions that specifically assess how these
factors are altering our contemporary attitudes toward death, and how
patients, staff, and survivors intersect amidst newly emerging care
settings and sites of memorialization.

Furthermore, this conference welcomes submissions discussing changes
in policy, protocol, and/or legislation regarding aid-in-dying,
active/passive euthanasia, and assisted suicide. Given the many recent
alterations of law involving these topics in several European
countries, submissions exploring such issues will be embraced
especially.

We also welcome submissions that produce conversations engaging
historical, ethnographic, normative, literary, anthropological,
philosophical, artistic, political or other terms that elaborate a
relationship between death and culture.

Proposals in the form of presentations, performances, workshops and
pre-formed panels are invited on any of the following additional core
conference themes listed below:

1: Health Care Systems: Patients, Staff, and Institutions
-Modern Health Care Delivery Systems and Care for the Dying
-Palliative Care
-Hospice
-Elder Care/Ageing in Place Models
-Trauma and Emergency Care
-Nursing Homes/Skilled Facilities/Residential Care Facilities for the
Elderly (RCFEs)/Assisted Living
-Clinical Competencies in Pain Management and Symptom Control
-Measurements, Incentives, Regulatory Statutes, and Recommendations
-Continuity of Care Across Treatment Settings
-Interdisciplinary Care

2: The Caregiver-Patient Relationship
-Caregiver's (Physician's?) Obligations and Virtues
-Medical Paternalism and Respect for the Patient, Autonomy
-Truth-Telling
-Informed Consent
-Medicine in the West for a Multicultural Society
-Contested Therapies Within the Physician-Patient Relationship
-Conflicts of Interest; Problems of Conscience
-Caregiver Stress/Caregiver Burnout/Compassion Fatigue
-Being With Someone Who Is Dying
-Assessment Challenges/Barriers

3: End-of-Life Issues and Decisions
-Defining Death
-Organ Transplantation and Organ Donation
-The Interplay of Ethical Meta-Principles at the End of Life
-Nonmaleficence
-Beneficence
-Autonomy
-Death Anxiety
-Choosing Death
-Advance Directives/Advance Planning/Physician Order for
Life-Sustaining Treatments (POLST)/Do Not Resuscitate
-Considering End-of-Life Issues and Decisions and Legislation

4: Relationships Between Death and Culture:
-internet/social media
-music
-literature
-film
-broadcast media
-religious broadcasting
-journalism
-athletics
-comic books
-novels / poetry / short story
-television
-radio
-print media
-technology
-popular art / architecture
-sacred vs. profane space
-advertising
-consumerism

Proposals, presentations and performances will be considered on any
related theme.

In order to support and encourage inter-disciplinarity engagement, it
is our intention to create the possibility of starting dialogues
between the parallel events running during this conference. Delegates
are welcome to attend up to two sessions in each of the concurrent
conferences. We also propose to produce cross-over sessions between
these groups âАУ and we welcome proposals which deal with the
relationship between Making Sense of: Dying and Death, Strangers,
Aliens and Foreigners and Making Sense of: Play.

What to Send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 27th June 2014. If an
abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be
submitted by Friday 19th September 2014. Abstracts should be submitted
to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or RTF formats,
following this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in
programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) body of
proposal, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: DD11 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:
Nate Hinerman: nphinerman@usfca.edu
Rob Fisher: dd11@inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the Making Sense Of: series of research
projects, which in turn belong to the Probing the Boundaries
programmes of Inter-Disciplinary.Net. It aims to bring together people
from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore
discussions which are innovative and challenging. 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.

Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and
professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should
attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make
this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation.

For further details of the conference, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/making-sense-of/dying-and-death/call-for-papers/