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I think it would be great to have the UKCP network conference in Edinburgh and am very grateful to Grant and Rebekah for offering to take this on. There could be another possibility. We could postpone our next CP conference in Edinburgh until 2009 and for this year we could have a gathering at the Asylum conference in Manchester instead. The conference Asylum organisers would very much welcome us there if we chose to do that. We could have some spaces around the conference where our network could meet to discuss business matters and have our own space and place for plenaries, for re-forging our social connections with one another and so on, but our presentations would be interspersed among the Asylum conference presentations. The downside is that the conference deadline for presentation proposals is the end of Jan. Also, it might be more expensive than our own (£350 for three days) though there are bursaries for the low waged and unwaged and people might have the option of just attending one or two days for reduced fees. Here is a description of the conf (more info can be found at: http://www.mindfreedom.org/kb/act/asylum-conference) "The conference will bring together Invited speakers include: Peter Beresford, Peter Bullimore, Ron Coleman, Jacqui Dillon, Sandra Escher, Rob Evans, Gillian Haddock, Paul Hammersley, Lois Holzman, Alec Jenner, Lucy Johnstone, Marius Romme, Dorothy Rowe, Phil Thomas, Phil Virden" "Asylum! Conference and Festival Themes: Celebrating Terence McLaughlin - Life, work and change Professional and User Involvement - Radical practice Resisting Big Pharma - Resisting Big Psy Connecting Theory and Change - Academic knowledge and political activity Transdisciplinary Experimental Applied Psychology - Critique and creativity Disabling and enabling - In and against oppressive institutions New Social Movements - Linking with social action organisations, activists, campaigners and academics working for radical challenge and change in mental health. " "It will showcase critical work on psychiatry and psychology (‘Big Psy’) and the pharmaceutical industry (‘Big Pharma’), and alternatives to diagnostic medical labels like ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘paranoia’. The conference will run alongside a festival of organisations working for a better world. There will be guest speakers, academic papers, panel discussions, bookstalls, film, art, music and workshops." I suggest us piggy-backing the Asylum conference for a number of reasons 1) I am a little concerned that moving, as we have, from having biennial conferences to annual conferences is useful in providing momentum for us and for building our network, but might be a bit taxing on network members' resources and we might find it increasingly difficult to find network members who are able to host a conference (it takes a lot of work and planning). 2) Having our 2008 gathering at the Asylum conference instead would be directly supportive to a broad coalition of mental health service user/survivor groups (among others) i.e., be a useful way of ensuring the expenditure of our network members would serve another network we would, perhaps, like collectively to support if we had the opportunity to. 3) Could counter some problems in the past where service users/survivors were poorly represented in the content of our conferences and in the audience (being dominated largely by academics and practitioners - though the latter remain somewhat under represented still in CPUK events) and might potentially be an environment where academic and practitioners were a little less the insiders of the conference (inside in terms of being familiar/comfortable with the social conventions and practices engaged in at academic conferences) than service users/survivors 4) Could be a good way to respond to issues brought up in the final session of the CPUK conf in York where we had the chance to see what our network looked like from a mental health service user/survivor's perspective. I.e., it could give us the opportunity collectively to test the relevance of our network to mental health service users/survivors and to see how we speak differently, think differently, interact differently when we are in a different conference environment to the one our network is used to and in and around a different set delegates. 5) Would give our CPUK conference organisers more time to organise and we might find people are more likely to volunteer for the next one if they have a longer period of time to prepare for it. I do have vested interests in this as I am helping to organise aspects of the Asylum conference and have committed myself to attending it. So, if CPUK helped Asylum in this way it helps me. However, irrespective of the network agreeing or not for us to gather at the Asylum conference this year instead of having our own separate conference, I wonder if we could still consider the proposal that we have annual meetings of the network but every second one of these is a gathering at a service user/survivor event, a political event (such as at political demos, rallies, marches, sit-ins etc), a community event and such like. So, at the end of our next CPUK conference we could ask for volunteers to suggest a sister event to support for our next gathering and for volunteers to organise our own conference for the year after that. Any thoughts? p Paul Duckett Senior Lecturer Community Psychology Department of Psychology and Speech Pathology Manchester Metropolitan University Here is the ubiquitous university disclaimer to remind you of how litigious and neo-liberal a world some of us live in! 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