It’s 3 months and 13 days today until we host the 8th international In Sickness & In Health conference.
If you didn’t know about this conference until now, check out this link to see what it’s all about.
This post is mostly for those people who are planning on coming or have already secured their place.
Abstracts
The deadline for abstracts is still open.
We plan closing it on 13th December, so there’s still plenty of time to submit.
The abstracts can be formal or informal, as can the presentations at the conference itself. For more information, see here.
Here’s a sample of a few of the nearly 100 abstracts we’ve received so far…
Obstetric violence, biomarkers of weathering, and adverse maternal mental health outcomes
Caring for a teenager affected by an eating disorder: A poststructuralist analysis of parents’ experience
Indigenous-specific racism in health professionals’ education: becoming antiracist educators
Diagnosing the Body in Physiotherapy: Capitalism, Desire, and Slow Death
Boundary objects, non-human others and the problem of planetary sleep medicine
Choreographies of resistance: posthuman disability experiments
A word about the presentations…
It was our express desire to move away from the traditional business-like conference, where people had 15 minutes to speak and field brief questions from the floor.
We wanted this conference to be different.
So each presenter gets 40 minutes to introduce themselves, unpack their ideas, and open their work to conversation and connection.
Presenters can also use a wide variety of approaches to share their work and we will share this information with participants in advance.
Conference programme
The conference programme is taking shape now.
We will begin around 10am on Tuesday 13th February with a Pōwhiri (a formal welcome and greeting ceremony led by our Māori faculty and leaders) and close around 5pm on Thursday 15th.
We have our four keynotes leading off most of the day sections, and 16 workshop windows spread across the programme.
Interviewing the keynotes
In the coming months I’ll be interviewing our four keynotes for the ParaDoxa podcast series. I’ve met with Erin Stapleton already (coming out on ParaDoxa soo), and will meet Pouroto Ngaporo, Annemarie Jutel and Ian Buchanan in the coming months. Their keynote themes (assemblage, diagnosis, destruction and voice) shape the entire conference programme.
Registration
Registration for the conference will remain open until January, but early bird rates close on 13th December.
Accommodation
We’ve managed to negotiate 10-15% discounts on a number of the main hotels in central Auckland. If you’re booking accommodation, check out this page on the website for booking discount codes and information on the best suburbs to look for if you’re looking for an AirBnB place.
COVID mitigation
COVID will still be a fact of life for travellers next year so, if we want to have a conference where we can meet kanohi ki te kanohi (face-to-face), we need to be prepared.
To make sure everyone can enjoy the conference together, we’ve agreed as an Organising Committee to:
Provide face masks and ask everyone to wear them when they are in enclosed spaces (excepting exemptions);
Provide outside spaces for socialising and refreshment breaks. The venue is modern, large and airy, it will be high summer, and it will be two weeks before the start of the new academic year, so there will be plenty of room for us to spread out;
Provide hand sanitiser throughout the building;
Have RAT tests available for people’s conference packs.
We’ll post more updates on this site in the weeks leading up to the conference and we can’t wait to welcome you to Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland early next year.