Wednesday 29^th February 2012, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm,
Room 147, Elvet Riverside 1, 83 New Elvet, Durham, County Durham DH1 3JT
Tea and Coffee will be served from 12:30 pm

We would like you to tell us how you would like to participate in making the centre a hub for staff, students and members of the community who are working in or concerned with LGBQT issues, sex, sexuality and gender equality.  If you can’t come along, we’re still very keen to have your contribution. Share your thoughts, ideas, interests and dreams via this form and we will feed them into the discussion.

This event is following the successful inaugural lecture Equality, Diversity, Queer Theory and Children in the Modern Age in November 2011 which was delivered by Professor Katherine Bond Stockton, University of Utah.

For further information please contact: Mwenza Blell or the Centre for Sex, Gender and Sexualities

I got a really warm reception, however, at the Alberta Health Services ‘Connecting For Kids’ event – and this annual conference attracts leading thinkers in child health and psychology, but this is the first time it has focused prominently on the arts in health.  The advance visits I made to some of the schools-based projects in the province’s child mental health programme, where I talked to some super-confident kids with tales of transformation and met an extraordinary array of agencies working in partnership, convinced me I had nothing to say to them that they weren’t already addressing – so I focused instead on how to make such programmes arts-driven, both theoretically and practically, rather than simply offering arts activities. This went down well, though habitual declarations of “awesome, just awesome” could have become meaningless were it not for the delegates’ ready enthusiasm to adapt our lantern-making and transition ceremonies into their projects. Round table conversations cropped up all over and if brains were dominoes, they were clearly ‘knocking’ on this one. There are thirty five schools clusters delivering this programme across the vast province, some working with indigenous and French-speaking  communities, and the track record of achievement in improved mental health for individuals and whole settlements is really impressive.

The other keynote presentation was a fascinating talk on the role of humour in reflective practice given by Warren Persowich, an educational psychologist and cancer survivor who moonlights as a stand-up comic on Canadian TV.

I came away envious at the intelligence, well-deployed resources, and relationship-based working that fuels the ‘Connecting For Kids’ programme.   Alberta has a story to be told to education and health services here in their crucial time of troubled transition.  But as my genial hostess and programme director Tracey Trudeau explained to me, Alberta Health Services are more inclined to bring in outsiders to speak to them than to export their own knowledge.  I still think there is a dialogue here to be pursued and CMH’s schools-based work could forge some great partnerships with the people who shape this Canadian programme.

“I am not being critical of cognitive neuroscience research, much of which is ingenious, elegant and deeply valuable. Rather, I am questioning how we consume and respond to this new kind of knowledge.

For me, the best way of exploring these reactions is through a medium that might seem to have little to do with the realities of neuroimaging head coils and 3-Tesla magnets. Writers of fiction have always been barometers of change in how humanity has understood itself. Ideas from Darwinism and Freudianism, to take two examples, quickly permeated literary fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. George Eliot’s plots are ever-conscious of Darwinian scepticism about the possibility of freewill, while Freud’s theory of the unconscious had a deliciously fertile influence on modernist writers such as Joyce and Woolf. Will neuroscience permeate fiction as rapidly and pervasively? Are the barometers already twitching?”

Continue reading on the School of Life web site.

A Box of Birds is the story of a young neuroscientist, Yvonne Churcher, who has problems in the world beyond her lab. One of her students, James, is a dangerously attractive anti-science protestor who has set out to challenge her entire philosophy about how the brain works. His friend, Gareth, is a brilliant, unstable computer whiz who’s obsessed with the biochemical basis of memory. He tries to persuade Yvonne to get involved with a plan to stimulate memory artificially, which sets off a chain of events involving unscrupulous biotechs, stolen brain-mapping data and a strange brand of eco-terrorism.

You can support the publication of A Box of Birds – and participate in ongoing discussions about literature, neuroscience, and the ways we understand the self – by visiting the Unbound web site.

Although such edificationist sentiments are both familiar and enjoy precedent, care ought to be taken when one tries to articulate and explore them. Many problems present themselves, but the following strike me as the most important. First, not all ill persons find their illness edifying, with some persons passing through even sustained periods of illness without any significant change in their moral character, while other persons are – by their own accounts – in fact, made worse as a result of illness. As the cancer patient Christina Middlebook vividly puts it, if edificationist talk is accurate, it turns her ‘ugly as Medusa’. Second, it is unclear what sorts of processes – cognitive, psychological and social – are involved in edification. What does edification entail, how can it be encouraged, is it active or passive, individual or social, and should it involve the contributions of moral or medical practitioners, and so on? Third, what contributions can ill persons themselves make to the development of a mature edificationist conception of illness? I take it as axiomatic that one should incorporate the first-person lived-perspective into our understanding of illness – a point well made by Havi Carel – and there is, perhaps, truth in Nietzsche’s striking remark that the healthy cannot understood illness, ‘for they are an interested party’.

These three problems indicate some of the central questions which an edificationist account of illness must address, and they bear on moral, medical, psychological and existential issues, amongst many others. It should also be clear that those questions will invite, if not demand, the insights and expertise of a diversity of scholarly disciplines – from philosophy of medicine to medical humanities, psychology to the sociology of medicine – and the contributions of many communities, most obviously including ill persons and healthcare professionals. For the edificationist asks how a person’s experience of their illness can be located within a tenable conception of the good life, and so any sophisticated answer to that question must incorporate all aspects of that life – surely a worthy task, for, to recall Nietzsche’s remark, on matters of illness, we are all an interested party.

Ian Kidd will present his paper ‘Can Illness be Edifying?’ in the Philosophy Department Seminar Series, 11am on 23 February. All welcome; details are here.

Reference Number 1453
Location Durham City
Faculty/Division Social Sciences and Health
Department School of Medicine and Health
Grade Grade 7
Position Type Full Time
Contract Type Fixed Term
Salary (£) 30122 – 35938
Closing Date 23 March 2012

Job Description

Responsible to: CMH Directors
Responsible for: Development and administrative work relating to grant development within the CMH.
Job Summary and Purpose:

The PDRA will work with the four directors of CMH and possibly other members of staff, on collaborative grant proposals that are under development. Three discrete projects are currently in the early stages of development and the post holder will be expected to work on any two at one time. The post will involve finding, reviewing and summarising relevant literature, organising and minuting meetings of research teams, liaising with potential funders, writing grant proposals. The post holder is expected to be comfortable with interdisciplinary team working and able to deal with literature and methodologies spanning the humanities and social sciences. The post will involve at least 0.1 FTE per week for the PDRA to develop publications related to their own research.

Requirements

This post is for a year only.

Key Responsibilities

• To undertake and collate literature summaries and reviews;
• to assist with preparing research grant proposals;
• to organise and take minutes of research group meetings;
• to liaise between the research lead and academic office;
• to liaise between the research group and potential funders;
• to liaise between the research group and research partners and collaborators;
• to maintain a database of contacts;
• to ensure that tasks are undertaken within agreed timescales
• to undertake any other tasks as required by the co-directors of the Centre

Closing date: March 23. Further details and instructions on how to apply are available here.

Reblogged from graphicmedicine:

Remember that our CFP for Toronto 2012 closes in just over a week. We have had a strong response so far, with more abstracts coming in each day, so make sure you send us your proposal if you want to take part.

Comics & Medicine: Navigating the Margins (Conference, Toronto, July 2012) – CFP closing Feb 28!

The US and the UK enjoy levels of material prosperity unprecedented in human history, yet they also have some of the highest rates of mental illness, anxiety, and depression anywhere in the world.  Up to 25% of the adult population, and 10% of children under the age of 18, are now being diagnosed or treated for psychiatric symptoms.

Over the past 30 years, as these numbers have skyrocketed, American cultural attitudes about mental health problems have undergone radical change.  Before the 1980s, most Americans took the view still predominant in much of the world today, namely, that social factors – family relations, trauma history, unemployment, racism, poverty, war, or economic circumstance, etc. – affect mental health more powerfully and more directly than genetics or physiology do.  But now the US public is taught to think the opposite, that there is a biological cause for every problem, and only interventions at that level (like medication) can prove helpful.

In the UK and Europe, there has been increasing emphasis on issues of ‘well-being’, as mental health comes to be seen as among the most important determinants of general life quality.  But the rise of bio-medical explanations and treatments for emotional distress has often made it seem as if mental health simply means the absence of symptoms, and that people’s own understandings of themselves have little place in modern psychology.

My current project, Our Minds and Each Other, seeks to restore an appreciation for the subtlety and usefulness of our own narratives of ourselves, and in particular, to highlight the crucial significance of relationships in shaping mental health.  I want to encourage more curiosity about how our own minds work and less fear about the prospect of ‘mental illness’ whenever there are problems.  There is real value in the messiness of people’s own ways of framing their experiences, and my IAS public lecture will be devoted to exploring this idea.

All welcome.