Comics and Medicine 6^th International Conference: 

SPACES OF CARE

16^th – 18^th July 2015

Culver Arts Center

University of California, Riverside

Theme

The theme of this year’s conference, Spaces of Care, invites us to think about space as a critical element in health care and comics. Receiving medical treatment can affect how we relate to and interact with each other and our environments. Medical care is often thought of as taking place primarily in clinical spaces. A strength of comics is their ability to visualize care beyond these settings to include geographic, physical, ideological, imaginative, temporal, and social spaces.

Call for Papers

We 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:

• Comics depictions of architecture and design and their impact on illness and disability
• Comics representations of physical spaces that impact the delivery of medical care
• Use of comics to imagine new spaces for well-being and care
• The use of comics in creating internal bodily spaces in medical education and illustration
• The materiality of comics as a space for expressing or demonstrating care
• The use of space in comics to evoke intersubjective understandings of health and illness narratives
• The use of comics to visualize geographical, ideological, and/or political boundaries and access to medical therapies
• Ethical implications of creating comics for patients, physicians, or institutions
• Trends in, histories of, or the use of comics in healthcare
• The interface of graphic medicine and popular culture

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
• teaching and learning with comics

Submission Process

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 weblinks to work being discussed
• presentation preference (see choice above)
• equipment needed (e.g. AV projection, whiteboard, easel, etc.)

300-word proposals should be submitted online by Sunday, February 8, 2015 to: graphic.medicine.conference@gmail.com

Abstracts will be peer-reviewed by an interdisciplinary selection committee. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be completed by the week of March 30^th, 2015. While we cannot guarantee that presenters will receive their first choice of presentation format, we will attempt to honor preferences, and we will acknowledge the receipt of all proposals.

Please note: Presenters are responsible for session expenses (e.g. handouts and supplies) and personal expenses (travel, hotel, and registration fees). All presenters must register for the conference.

 

Images courtesy of Lydia Gregg and Brian Fies