 |
 |
Hi Folks,
Please find below the CFP for a session on mental and emotional health and wellness for the conference on emotional geographies next June in Edinburgh.
Sorry this is very much last minute, but just send me a quick line if you are interested with an expression of interest.
All the best,
Laurence Simard
Call for Papers: Critical Reflections on Mental and Emotional Health and Wellness in the Academy
5th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies
Edinburgh, 10-12 June 2015
Session organizers: Laurence Simard-Gagnon and Beverley Mullings (Queen's University, Canada)
A rising number of students seeking mental health services across university campuses has prompted faculty, administrators and student service providers to call attention to what some describe as a “crisis of mental health”. Meanwhile, conversations about the neoliberalization of everyday life and of the academia, the phenomenology of differences and obstructions, and the possibilities for and of an ethics of care are emerging and swelling.
In this session we seek to explore how these conversations might converge to shape portraits of mental and emotional wellness in the academy. We invite reflection as educators, students, administrators and researchers on these emerging conversations and interventions from a variety of critical perspectives. Drawing on various perspectives, for example, over the relationship between mental health and social space, the changing balance between work and life, and the value of social reproduction, we seek to explore how the organized practices that produce the space of the Academy are implicated in the current state of mental health among students, faculty and staff across university campuses.
We propose a session-workshop format, in which participants will set the stage by briefly bringing forward their perspectives (about 10-15 minutes each), followed by an extensive discussion period in which all attendees will be warmly encouraged to engage.
Topics of contributions might include, but are by no means limited to:
1. Popular conceptualizations, discourses and practices related to mental and emotional health in the academy.
2. Intersectional analyses of mental health and marginalizing oppressions within the academy.
3. Critical perspectives on neoliberalization, the academy, work-life balance, mental and emotional wellness and ethics of care.
4. The relationship between the production of the space of the university and the production of emotional and affective life.
5. Critical approaches to mental health activism.
6. The roles of our professional associations in these engagements.
Through this session we want to contribute to a wider movement of awareness and discussion of issues surrounding mental and emotional health within geography. So this is a call to you. You don’t have to be a specialist researcher, but rather, someone who wants to share your concerns to a collective community. Interested participants please send an expression of interest and/or a short abstract (no more than 250 words, and less is fine) to Laurence Simard-Gagnon ([log in to unmask]) by Friday December 5th.