CFP: Storytelling and History: Encounters in Health

The Association Medical Services Nursing History Research Unit at the University of Ottawa invites you to participate in an Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Workshop on "Storytelling and History: Encounters in Health".

Storytelling is an important part of history. In the course of conducting their research, everyone has come across a story or event that is particularly compelling and meaningful. We invite graduate students from any discipline whose research is grounded in the social history of medicine, health, and healing to submit a proposal for a workshop that focuses on the stories that historians use to uncover the past. We are interested in those stories that show how encounters are shaped by (human) interaction with other people, objects, or spaces and that speak to wider social relationships, broader historical contexts, and themes. How do the stories we tell contribute to creating new understandings and interpretations of the past?

Participants are asked to select a brief account from their own data collecting that highlights some encounter involving, for example, patients, health care workers, health care systems, medical technologies, medical institutions, or other environments of health, disease, or illness. In doing so please consider the following questions: What were the underlying assumptions in these encounters and what were the consequences? What did this encounter represent and what was its significance? Did it subvert contemporary (or current) understandings, or initiate change (perhaps in retrospect)? How useful are these encounters in illuminating larger historical contexts within participants’ own research areas? Suggestions include, but are not limited to, themes of technology and science, disease and illness, bodies and culture, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, power and authority, politics and the state, discourse and epistemology, professionalization and specialization.

While this interdisciplinary group of graduate students will all be engaged in research on the history of health and health care, broadly defined, we recognize that individuals may be at different stages in their research program. The workshop will thus offer participants a collegial place in which to try out new ideas and receive constructive feedback from colleagues, as well as an opportunity to publish. Participants are expected to submit a full paper of 6000-7000 words for publication in an edited collection by 1 February 2012.

Contingent upon SSHRC funding, the workshop will take place in Ottawa in May 2011 under the auspices of the Nursing History Research Unit at the University of Ottawa. Please submit a 250-word proposal, a one-page curriculum vitae, and your contact information by 15 October 2010 via email to Dr. Jayne Elliott at jelliott@uottawa.ca. Successful applicants will be notified by 4 February 2011.

Programme Committee Chairs:
Dr. Kristin Burnett, Department of History, Lakehead University, kburnett@lakeheadu.ca
Dr. Cynthia Toman, NHRU, University of Ottawa, ctoman@uottawa.ca.