Encountering Pain: hearing, seeing, speaking

A free two-day live event and international conference at UCL

Friday 1st and Saturday 2nd July 2016

Pain is not only expressed linguistically but through bodily movements, emotional reactions, and artistic expressions.

How do we respond when we encounter the pain of another? What happens when our own bodies encounter pain?  What tools do we possess when attempting to communicate pain and are there forms other than language for expressing it?

During these two days, we will explore a range of international and interdisciplinary approaches that can help us better understand encounters with pain both within and beyond the clinic. This event is aimed at those: living with pain, caring for someone in pain, treating or researching pain,  artists whose work touches on pain and others exploring alternative means of communicating and assessing pain.

The event will divert radically from the traditional academic conference format to encourage exchange between different groups affected by pain.

Call for Abstracts

Deadline 18th March 2016

Abstracts are invited from individuals or groups responding to the general theme of communicating and/or encountering pain. These may be conventional conference presentations and posters, visual arts or interactive sessions.

While particularly encouraging papers reporting research findings we also welcome those exploring innovative practices at the interface of the humanities, art and medicine.

Papers are invited (but not limited to) the following themes:

• pain encounters within any healthcare context
• pain encounters within alternative settings
• pain encounters within a range of cultural contexts (for example explorations of how different cultures and people in different times attempt to make sense of human and animal suffering)
• current and historical visualisations of pain
• the value of the arts to democratizing medicine and breaking down existing hierarchies
• assessing pain by non-conventional methods
• alternative ways of recording and reporting pain narratives
• the implications of patient pain narratives for other areas of medicine such as psychiatry and neurology
• neural mechanisms for pain
• pain as emotion
• pain as identity
• the meaning of pain and its lived experience, in the past and present

Please send a submission of no more than one page of A4, which you are free to use in any way you wish. Guidelines for submissions can be found under the Conference Deadlines tab, however for scientific abstracts (only) please follow the conventional format: Title, Background, Aims, Method, Results, and Conclusion. Conflict of Interest: Authors must declare any financial support received or any conflict of interests on their abstract.

Abstracts must be no longer than one A4 page, font no smaller than 11 pt.

Please send to encountering-pain@ucl.ac.uk by 18th March 2016.

Please include an email address.

Successful applicants will be notified by 18th April 2016.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/encountering-pain/abstracts

For more information on the research projects that gave rise to this event, please see the links below.

www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/research/projects/pain-speaking-the-threshold