2017 Comics and Medicine Conference

Posted by Patricia Devine on January 10th, 2017 Posted in: Health Literacy, Public Libraries

---

The 2017 Comics & Medicine Conference, to be held in Seattle June 15-17, is accepting proposals, due January 30. The conference is free to attend and will take place at the Seattle Public Library in downtown Seattle.

The conference theme is Access Points. Participants are invited to consider accessibility as a crucial aspect linking comics and health. Comics — a medium broadly characterized as “accessible” because of its ability to reach diverse audiences and to provide a platform for marginalized voices — can make visible and reflect upon the urgent subject of health access. Comics can explore the issue of accessibility in past and current practices of health care and can point to imaginative solutions for extending and expanding health care.

Submissions focusing on health, medicine, and comics in any form (e.g. graphic novels and memoir, comic strips, manga, web comics) are welcomed, including those that focus on the following topics:

• Comics depictions of disability
• Visual depictions of systemic and structural inequities in health care and social determinants of health
• Use of comics to provide health education for or about under-served communities
• Comics representations of physical or geographical spaces related to the delivery of medical care
• Collaborative comics projects that create access points between patients, healthcare providers, community organizations, and/or institutional stakeholders
• Use of comics to access new understandings of bodily/mental states
• Therapeutic uses of comics and cartooning
• Use of comics to encourage conversations about accessible spaces/events
• Innovative uses of comics to access diverse health experiences
• Use of comics to visualize ideological and/or political boundaries and access to medical therapies
• Comics and environmental health
• Ethical implications of creating comics for patients, physicians, or institutions
• Trends in, histories of, or the use of comics in health care and public health

Lightning talks, presentations, panel discussion and working groups and workshops are the presentation formats. See more information at their website.