Culture and the Mind: Voices, Sites and Practices

Deadline for the submission of abstracts: 15 January 2024

The role of cultural and socio-political contexts in shaping understandings of the human mind continues to be discussed and debated in the psy-disciplines as well as the arts and humanities. This international conference will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and career stages to discuss the current state of research on the entanglement of culture and the mind, and to outline new paths for future exploration. The conference will present a forum for discussing the cultural and social specificity of psychological distress, trauma and healing; for exploring the distinct cultural traditions in which ideas of mental health and treatment take shape; and for examining the varied vocabularies in which health and illness are expressed and imagined. Bringing clinicians and practitioners into dialogue with historians, anthropologies and medical humanities scholars, the conference will showcase the interdisciplinary collaborations that have furthered attempts to understand the culture-mind nexus, from the past to the present.

The conference will address the following topics and questions:

• The social and cultural variety of ideas about mental disorder, trauma and treatment:
  How do conceptions of mental health and therapeutic modalities reflect distinct cultural traditions and social contexts? How have definitions of the mind responded to major historical changes?
• The entanglement of the arts and the human sciences:
  How have medical and scientific explorations of the mind presented a resource for cultural producers, and how have clinicians drawn on the insights and techniques of film, literature, theatre and art?
• Languages of illness and healing:
  How do medical and scientific understandings of the mind travel outside the clinical setting? How do patient narratives and voices expand psychiatric discourses and diagnoses?
• The intersection of expert knowledge and political ideology:
  How have medical and scientific ideas about the human mind overlapped with political agendas and imperatives?
• Cross-cultural encounters in mental healthcare settings:
  How do medical professionals account for cultural factors in the course of diagnostic and therapeutic processes?How have the psy-disciplines engaged with the consequences of cultural change and migration?
• The place of the medical humanities:
  What role can the medical humanities play in uncovering the cultural dimensions of mental health, illness and treatment?

Submission guidelines

Please send proposals for oral presentations or posters (including a paper/poster title, an abstract of 300 words and
a brief academic biography of 200 words) to: cultmind@hum.ku.dk by the 15th of January 2024.

PDF version of call for papers