*CFP* "DIFFICULT DEATH: CHALLENGING CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF DEATH, DYING AND THE DEAD IN MEDIA AND CULTURE", EDITED COLLECTION

Death and dying are difficult to avoid both in the global media and in popular culture. At times the representation of death, dying and the dead can be especially challenging for viewers. Yet at other times it can offer solace, escapism, or provoke engagement with mortality. 

Penfold-Mounce (2018) has examined how different popular cultural texts can promote both ‘safe’ and ‘provocative’ morbid spaces for engagement with death and the dead. For those who create cultural texts, ranging from novels to journalism to film and television, how to engage with and represent death, dying and the dead also represents particular challenges. Often, texts can themselves be challenged by those who engage with them for the difficult, revealing or problematic ways that they represent death. For example, as Luckhurst (2016) has argued, the representation of the living dead in zombie horror can be read as a form of social realism with its own necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003). From depictions of real or ‘natural’ death in documentary, journalism or narrative to dramatic depictions of violent deaths and the (un)dead in literature, film and television, there is ample opportunity to explore the ways in which death can be represented in difficult ways, can raise difficult questions, and can be difficult to engage with in media and culture.

*CFP* "ILLNESS, NARRATED", ISSUE 11, ON_CULTURE: THE OPEN JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF CULTURE

In response to debates considering the relationship between illness and narrative, and the extent to which these concepts can be seen as mutually constitutive, this issue of On_Culture seeks to gather new approaches and critical perspectives to the intricate relationship between narrative and illness. We welcome (inter)disciplinary contributions addressing the concepts’ entanglement on an individual, societal, and global level.

Already in 1963, Michel Foucault linked (illness) narration to its discursive conditions in The Birth of the Clinic. Moving away from the politicized view on what narrative does, medical humanities today stresses the importance, and even healing aspect of telling an illness story. In this positive view on the redeeming aspects of illness narration, identity and narrative are understood as inextricably linked. Rita Charon asserts that narrative is a central instance of good medical practice, since “without narrative acts, the patient cannot himself or herself grasp what the events of illness mean” (Charon 2006, Narrative Medicine, 13). In this broad formulation, ‘narrative’ uncritically refers to the act of self-expression as such, without taking into account the conditions that set the parameters for it.

*CFP* "MEMORY, CINEMA AND PSYCHOANALYSIS", MEMORY STUDIES WORKSHOP

Memory Studies Workshop

Memory, Cinema and Psychoanalysis

Online Workshop

17 August 2020 (Timing TBC) 

London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research and Academic LAB

Sigmund Freud, in his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), wrote: "Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says." Indeed, from a psychoanalytical perspective, we can never be certain if our perception of the past is completely accurate, yet the narrative we construct has an undeniable impact on how we define ourselves. Often we might summon up seemingly innocuous details about previous events; it's what the conscious mind fails to recollect that becomes the real object of inquiry. The very function of memory is wrapped up in mystery, as is the experiential reality of remembering, which appears closely linked with repetition.

*CFP* "THE MEDIA HISTORY OF NURSES AND NURSING", EDITED ESSAYS COLLECTION

The intersection between nurses and popular media is longstanding. Florence Nightingale died in 1910 and British Pathe’s coverage of her funeral is a very early instance of nurses appearing on film. Nightingale was the subject of a silent film biography by 1915 and thereafter film, television, theatre and live performance and other media have showcased the nurse and the nursing profession. The familiarity of the nurse is inherently visual; the iconography of nurse in cap, cape and uniform remains current in realms from the stripper to the pop culture memories of the matron of the Carry On films, even though that iconography, especially the cap, has disappeared from real world nursing.

The presence of the nurse and the nursing profession in popular media has attracted some scholarly interest. The expression of values and professional identities, the influence of the popular understanding the actual, and particular popular culture nurses such as Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest have appeared in the scholarly literature. However more remains to be said about the variety of impressions and the diversity of platforms and representations of nursing that occur via media depictions that can range from valorising to sexualising.

*CFP* "POSTHUMAN PATHOGENESIS: VIRUS, DISEASE AND EPIDEMIOLOGY IN LITERATURE, FILM AND MEDIA", EDITED VOLUME

Since the Age of Enlightenment, which glorified reason and empirical observation as the nexus for human knowledge, and the Industrial Revolution, which brought about robust technological changes, science and scientific thinking have been increasingly placed above everything else. But from a humanities perspective, fiction has always moved one step ahead of science, dreaming of the impossible first. Science-fiction and speculative fiction, in both utopian and dystopian forms, are concrete examples of this. From Mary Shelley to Jules Verne, George Orwell, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Margaret Atwood, many authors explored what the future holds for the world in their narratives of the ‘back-then’ unimaginable. Following a similar path to the literary examples, film industry and new media genres such as music videos, computer and mobile games, and advertisements have come to shape our imagination and paved the way for the future technologies, at least before they came true.

Germs, bacterial and viral infections, and subsequent pandemics are no exception to the meeting point of science, technology, and fiction. They are, to adopt and evolve Donna Haraway’s metaphor of the cyborg, a blend of myth and social reality. Bending the boundaries between life and death, they are the powerholders in Achilles Mbembe’s “necropolitics,” calling to mind Jacques Derrida’s words in his exploration of the animal question: “The dead-alive viruses, undecidably between life and death, between animal and vegetal, that come back from everywhere to haunt and obsess my writing” (“The Animal that Therefore I am” 406).

*CFP* “COMMUNICATING RARE DISEASES AND DISORDERS IN THE DIGITAL AGE”, BOOK CHAPTER

A primary concern of rare diseases diagnosis is the lack of accurate information that, consequently, may lead to its delays, inaccurate treatments or rehabilitation interventions and social consequences. Although attention has been drawn to rare diseases with the Orphan Drug Act of 1983 in order to encourage pharmacology to develop new drugs, there is still lack of patients’ tracking and information about the diseases’ causes and incidence. 

Health communication continues to be one-way and rely heavily on the expertise from the health professional/practitioner and in such a broad spectrum of rare diseases, patients may find it hard to obtain timely information, accurate diagnosis, appropriate treatments and surgeries, medication or/and psychological counseling in their own countries. The use of Information and Communication Technologies open up avenues for future research on health communication, pathophysiology, innovative provider-patient mediated interactions, rare diseases initiatives, media and health campaigns, biostatistics and health monitoring.