{"id":1270,"date":"2017-09-14T14:00:51","date_gmt":"2017-09-14T13:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/?p=1270"},"modified":"2017-10-30T13:46:07","modified_gmt":"2017-10-30T12:46:07","slug":"conference-report-empathies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/2017\/09\/14\/conference-report-empathies\/","title":{"rendered":"Conference Report: Empathies"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘Empathies: 11th Conference of the European Society for Literature and the Arts’<\/a>, Basel University, 20-25th June 2017<\/p>\n

By Anna McFarlane<\/a><\/p>\n

The ESLA conferences have been growing for a number of years, working alongside their sister organisation in America, the Society for Literature and the Arts<\/a> to promote interdisciplinary communication through wide-ranging conferences that take one term as a starting point, deconstructing and recontructing it across disciplines and through varied media. The organising team for this year’s conference was headed up by Manuela Rossini, a posthumanism scholar<\/a> with a deep interest in the medical humanities, and an advocate for Basel, her home city, which provided a beautiful sunny backdrop for the conference with plenty of opportunities to swim in the Rhine. Her stewardship showed a programme that engaged with its subject deeply, firstly through the varied keynote speakers; neuroscientist Jean Decety, bioethicist and disabilities scholar Jackie Leach Scully, and philosopher Jesse Prinz, each of whom offered a very different epistemology for what ’empathy’ means, and whether it can be considered a basis for ethical behaviour, both in medicine and throughout society. Across the conference, much attention was paid to the arguments made in Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion <\/a><\/em>and other critical engagements with empathy, such as invited speaker Carolyn Pedwell’s Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

As well as exploring empathy through the body of the conference, Basel University offered a number of workshops for early career researchers, one of which focused on medical humanities specifically and included guest speakers Anne Hudson Jones (co-founder of the journal Literature and Medicine<\/em>), Seamus O’Mahony (medical doctor and author of The Way We Die Now<\/a><\/em>), Ivan Callus (professor of literature and cultural studies at the University of Malta), and Marion Coutts (author of the memoir The Iceberg <\/em><\/a>which tells the story of her husband’s death from a brain tumour). The workshops were not the only extras on offer; a series of entertainments were integrated into the conference programme, including a reading from the English poet and philosopher Denise Riley.<\/p>\n

‘Empathies’ was a dense and fascinating discussion that ranged from medical humanities to theories of mind, and the ethics of artistic practice. The next ESLA conference is entitled ‘Green’<\/a> and will be held at the University of Copenhagen in June 2018.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘Empathies: 11th Conference of the European Society for Literature and the Arts’, Basel University, 20-25th June 2017 By Anna McFarlane The ESLA conferences have been growing for a number of years, working alongside their sister organisation in America, the Society for Literature and the Arts to promote interdisciplinary communication through wide-ranging conferences that take one […]<\/p>\n

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