The next Graphic Medicine conference will be held in Dundee on July 7-9th. The event will look at the interaction between medicine (in terms of practise, research, policy, and patient experience) and comics.
Theme
The theme of this year’s annual international comics and medicine conference, Stages & Pages, invites people to think about comics and healthcare in relation to performance in its myriad conflicting and complementary forms. Both clinicians and patients often feel the need to live up to prescribed “roles” both on and off the medical “stage”, and this conference will consider the various ways in which comics address these issues.
The Graphic Medicine team behind the conference invite the submission of a wide variety of abstracts focusing on medicine and comics in any form (e.g. graphic novels, comic strips, manga, web comics) that examine topics including, but not limited to:
• Comic narratives of stages of life, illness, and the medical career
• Stages of the creative process, process as performance, and the relation of the creative process to disability, illness, and medicine
• The comic/body as stage
• Comics and the social performance of illness, disability, and the healthcare profession
• Technical performance in healthcare, illness, disability, and comics
• The use of space in performance, illness, disability, and healthcare
• Ethical implications of comics and performance
• Trends in, histories of, or the use of comics in healthcare
• The use of comics and design in the service of healthcare education
• Intermedia approaches to comics and healthcare (animation, theatre, digital comics, apps etc.)
Image courtesy of Andrew Godfrey
Formats:
• Lightning talks: 5-minute presentations with up to 15 slides. This format is meant to encourage submission of short presentations to share your work (e.g. comics, new research projects, new ideas) in a concise format
• Oral presentations: 15- to 20-minute presentations
• Panel discussions: 90-minute interviews or presentations by a panel of speakers
• Workshops: 90-minute sessions intended to be “hands-on” interactive workshops for participants who wish to obtain particular skills with regard to comics and medicine. Suggested subjects for workshops are; creating comics, understanding, reviewing, and critiquing comics, getting comics published and learning with comics.
Submission:
Proposals may be in Word, PDF, or RTF formats with the following information in this order:
• author(s)
• affiliation
• email address
• phone number
• title of abstract
• body of abstract
• sample images or web links to work being discussed
• presentation preference (see format options above)
• equipment needed (e.g. AV projection, whiteboard, easel, etc.)
300 word proposals should be submitted online by Friday, February 12, 2016 to: graphic.medicine.conference@gmail.com.
Featured image taken from James Sturm Comics & Medicine Keynote 2013, Part 1: available to watch here.