Call for Papers

A significant focus for this interdisciplinary project is an annual conference which provides valuable opportunities for participants to become involved in, perhaps, the first of many thoughtful, unique, and creative dialogues with one another. In this engaging and responsive forum presenters are encouraged to share their discipline with enthusiasm and to foster new working relationships through the exploration, examination and discussion of their work with colleagues.

Through its research and publications, and from a number of health and therapeutic care perspectives, this project began by characterising the patient as a liminal figure in an unstable landscape. As a result conference participants have begun discussions that explore the positioning of patients, families and institutions, helping professionals and clinicians, the nature of practice and the significance of theory in terms of: quality of care; professional and personal expectations; reluctance and resistance; institutional and individual needs; and, the value and role of education.

In this next stage of the project we would like to warmly encourage participants to consider the patient in terms of collaborative therapeutic relationships – to site the patient in a place of care where she might be defined by the quality and strength of her relationships rather than her liminality. In addition, this project invites a critical examination of those therapeutic approaches, roles, skills, and conditions of relationship that make agency possible, establish collaboration, and assist in mutually helpful outcomes. Often the practice of these approaches is narrowly defined in terms of the curative benefits to the patient or client. However, this conference will add to the scope of previous discussions by capturing and examining the myriad roles that relationships play in effectively assisting individual patients and client groups toward the achievement of their therapeutic goals.

Presentations, papers, workshops, presentations and pre-formed panels are all invited on any of the following themes:

The patient/helper relationship – theory and practice: past; present; and, future; Re-visioning patient experience through a humanist lens; On the ground – therapeutic relationships from patients’, helpers’, and organisational perspectives; Identifying and supporting patients’ relational needs in different settings; Projects that assist patients to help themselves; Patient-centred education and training; Key philosophical, ethical, and legal issues in the organisation and management of patient and helper relationships across the lifespan; Cultural perceptions of relationship in patient care; Changing states – from person to patient – accounts of experience and representations from literature, the Arts, film, and the digital media; Preserving and nurturing relationships in a therapeutic setting – case studies, personal accounts, and institutional facts; The present and future roles of new global technologies in patient care.

See on www.inter-disciplinary.net