Panel 4: Popular Media Discourses of Care.

Monday 5 September, 2016

By Zoë Shacklock and Gaby Smith

• Maggie Sweeney (University of the West of Scotland): “Failings in the Duty of Care”: Mediated Discourses on “Children at Risk”
• Yvonne Cunningham (University of Glasgow): “I’ve Got Two Little Children and This is the Worst Thing That Could Happen”
• Anna McFarlane (University of Glasgow): “An Alien Inside”: Science Fiction and Pregnancy in Anne Enright’s “Breeding” (2004)

 

Takeaway:

-Discourses of care are inseparable from the mediated discourses in which they interact

-The mass media shapes the language we use to frame our understandings of care, powerfully impacting public perception

-These relationships are particularly important when they interact with mediated identity discourses, such as age, gender, or class

Maggie Sweeney discussed the ways in which the master narrative of childhood today is one of danger and risk. Framing childhood as precarious and vulnerable fuels high levels of anxiety about protection and wellbeing. Using Howard Becker’s idea of ‘labelling’, she explored how this narrative is perpetuated by the mass media. The media sets up particular frames of reference – failures of duties of care, children at risk – which influence both public perception and policy making. Sweeney discussed some of the more high-profile examples of child neglect in recent years, tracing the influence power of the language of the media.

Yvonne Cunningham also considered at the intersection between care discourses and the media, presenting a content analysis of cancer stories in UK newspapers. She found that two thirds of the stories focused on breast cancer, and an overwhelming number of these were personal stories. Since these stories focus on women’s experience, cancer stories intersect with caring discourses, with most of the women expressing their fears about how cancer will impact their ability to care for their children and families. Consequently, surviving cancer also means becoming a better carer. The stories emphasise the transformative power of cancer, in which women extend their affective capacity to become braver people who care for a bigger network of cancer suffers.

Anna McFarlane demonstrated how mainstream accounts of pregnancy leave little room for its more taboo elements – pain, horror, and loss. Yet science fiction has always provided a space to tell these sorts of stories, allowing culture (and women in particular) to engage with the horrors of giving the body over to another. Through a discussion of Anne Enright’s 2004 essay ‘Breeding‘ (which compares pregnancy with alien abduction), she explored how the language of science fiction gives us political tools, opening up a space to consider how dominant medical/political discourses impact upon our experiences of our own bodies.

 

 

Panel 3: New Approaches and Methodologies to Care.

Monday 5 September, 2016

By Gaby Smith and Zoë Shacklock.

• Ros Jennings and Hannah Grist (Gloucestershire), ‘Thinking with age in the UK care environment: an autoethnographic approach to the times and spaces of caring for older people’
• Val Bogan (Dublin Institute of Technology), ‘The visualization of the presenting complaint: promoting patient agency and care in the diagnostic process’
• Misha Kavka (Auckland), ‘Between ethics and affect: mediations of care’

 

Takeaways:

–  Experiences of the UK care home environment from a personal and professional level opening up discussions of how we should approach our care of old people and adopt new nursing practices.

–  Digital devices and technology harnessed to provide patients with better care, and wider options in the process of diagnosing a patient.

– Issues of ethics of ‘affect’ are considered within a filmic or televisual examination of care, establishing an affective connection with patients/ carer/ victim.

-What we might ‘care’ for/about next, might not be recognised immediately as it takes new forms and shifts.

 

Speaking of their own experiences of working hourly rounds, doing early breakfast duties and calling in a doctor to administer morphine to residents in pain in care homes, a common memory of the blaring television is offered by both Ros and Hannah despite their years apart in the care sector. In the remembering of restless residents who were often singing, foot-tapping and having conversations over old TV favourite ‘Stars In Their Eyes‘, the title makes reference to their unique role in care as staff, as academics and as humans who care.

Their work informs a wider understanding of the ethics of training and mode of care work that informs a necessary empathy, but also one that looks to build a stronger environment for carers and the cared for. In understanding care as a cultural practice which inform nursing models, there are underlying problems. Not only do some care workers often feel unprepared for care work, but worse still, un-nurtured when they get there.

Raising questions of a quantitive nature, the studies influencing the position of Val’s work refers to the ongoing development of medicine as a science, but also as an art. As a patient researcher, with aims to contribute to this field at the ‘soft’ end of science- in the developing of her own medical relationship with a surgeon, she feels she can personally vouch for her own academic understanding of a patient’s agency. Discussing issues of communication, dialogue and speech- there is a challenging of the idea of the ‘self’, and what the ‘self- care continuum’ can suggest, going beyond decisions of health to the assuming of responsibility.

Using Disney’s Big Hero 6 (2014), Misha explains that care has become big. Not only is the robot character of Baymax an emotional, caring and comedic one but he is one that evokes the way in which Television and Film has always incorporated the discourses of care at the heart of its narrative structure.

Distinguishing meanings of care through its etymological roots, the functional application of the term goes far beyond the semantic context. Questions raised about ethics and affect,  are addressed as care as an act and care as a feeling,  which can be seen in The Fundamentals of Caring (2016) and Me Before You (2016). Positioning care at the centre of media attention, the 2007 documentary by Paul Watson Malcolm and Barbara: Love’s Farewell shows an intimate examination of what it is to be a carer in a relationship, to return care without the same loving identity of the relationship that had previously existed, and the antagonism that is also involved in doing so.

Panel 2: Education, Media, and Care.

Monday 5 September, 2016

By Gaby Smith and Zoë Shacklock.

• Ben Lamb (Teeside), ‘Changing the welfare state: an investigation into the effects of alternative regional media on local services and recipients of care’
• Christian Bonah and Joel Danet (Strasbourg), ‘Careful cinema: Educational utility film by and for physicians in France in the 1970s’
• Nicole Matthews (Macquarie), ‘Teaching person-centred care for people with dementia through the “paranoid women’s film”’ (Skype)

 

Takeaways:

-Using film, television, video (and literature) to challenge the discourses of care and engage with the difficult relationship on and off-screen.

-Cinema as a form of reconstituting the shared experience between patient/ doctor, cared for/ carer. In doing so, giving access to a person’s feelings.

–  Educational media material used for multiple reasons: to reflect, to teach, to educate and to cultivate feelings, empathy, care and understanding.

 

Panel 2 approached and challenged the varying discourses of care as seen on screen- with a particular focus on film, television, video. Ben Lamb‘s archival research and ongoing research discussed the work of Trade Films and Amber Films, honing in on the North East of England as a key case study. Reflecting on his current research, Lamb highlights to what extent regional media operating as mode of care through examples such as ‘OAPS‘, ‘Farewell to the Welfare State‘ and ‘Shield Stories‘. The latter example not only worked to remove the stigma of applying for help such as benefits, but through using the soap narrative and format which was to be screened in public spaces such as doctor’s surgeries- it was for all to see. (Sadly, the series was never broadcast as it was blocked by Local Authorities).

Using a small corpus of films identified as pertinent to this issue Christian Bonah and Joel Danet, find it not only interesting but highly important to theorise the question of audience- especially within the context of care. The films used are situated in this area of study, and seek to provide perspectives on educational and medical filmmaking as transitional objects of cinema. There is a wide gap between the field (where they are) and the theory (what they are confronted with).

Nicole Matthews discusses the concerns around an ‘uncomfortable’ pedagogy, person-centred care approaches, whilst drawing closely on the work of Tom Kitwood and contexts of malignant social psychology. She asks, what is the ‘paranoid women’s film’? Through thinking of Rebecca, the gothic genre and the idea of the imperilled woman playing out types of horror- care and the uncanniness of the space of the domestic are dominant themes of horror, the unsafe home and the gothic situation that ‘Darkness in the Afternoon’ explore.

Panel 1: Cinema and Care.

Monday 5 September, 2016

By Zoë Shacklock and Gaby Smith.

• Philippa Lovatt (Stirling): ‘Illness, Caregiving and Healing in the Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’

• Suzanne Beth (McGill): ‘Ozu’s Tokyo Story: Care as the Medium’s Capacity to Bear’

• Ana Salzberg (Dundee): ‘Care Home as Cinematic Community: Enhancing Social Connectivity Through Film’

 

Takeaways:

-Care can be embedded within the formal features of cinema itself.

-The sensory, visceral experience of watching cinema parallels certain structures of care, and is in itself a form of care.

-Cinema’s relationship to care is heightened by its communal nature

Philippa Lovatt opened the panel with an astute discussion of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s body of work, which is thematically concerned with questions of care-giving, illness, and healing. Weerasethakul is concerned with seeing illness as a natural part of life, rather than something to be avoided. Consequently his work almost becomes a therapeutic experience – one film critic even suggested that they should be available on prescription. Through an analysis of the embodied experience of engaging with film form, Lovatt suggested that Weerasethakul’s films encourage a structure of embodied accompaniment with a film, one that mirrors the rhythms and structures of palliative care, and which is emphasised when we watch these films with others.

Suzanne Beth picked up Lovatt’s interest in accompaniment, using Agamben’s idea of gesture to consider discourses of care in Yasujirō Ozu’s film Tokyo Story. Beth explored how the film presents conventional ideas of care at a narrative and thematic level. Yet she extends this framework to argue for care as gesture – a form of support/endurance rather than a form of production/action. She suggests that this aligns nicely with the cinematic medium itself, which also supports/endures the passage of time.

Finally, Ana Salzberg presented her fascinating research on how Scottish care facilities attempt to re-create the cinematic experience for residents as a way to prevent loneliness and boredom, and foster social connectivity. She suggests that recreating the sensory experience of the cinema – emphasised by the drawn curtains, popcorn, and big screen – allows residents to enter into particular pleasures of spectatorship. This intensifies certain emotions, memories and sensation, and enhances their present experience too, acting as a form of care towards present-day forms of embodiment and connection.

 

Keynote 1: Eva Feder Kittay

Eva Feder Kittay, ‘The Completion of Care’

Monday 5 September 2016

By Zoë Shacklock and Gaby Smith

Takeaway points:

• All care requires an uptake by another person – it is not care until it has been recognised as such by the object of care
• ‘To care’ is an achievement verb, which requires action, not simply intention
• Defining care through its reception avoids issues of paternalism
• We have a moral obligation to graciously receive care when it is offered to us in good faith (to avoid harming ourselves and our carers)

Eva Feder Kittay opened the conference with a discussion of how we formulate an ethics of care. She stressed that care is different from other virtues (such as justice), because its reception is integral to its success. Consequently, she questions what an ethics of care would look like if we defined it from its endpoint – from how it is received and/or completed.

Care cannot simply be an intention (although intentions still matter) – it has to be an action, and that action has to be taken up by the subject in a way that contributes to their flourishing.The only way to determine the moral value of an act of care is to think how the object of care will respond to that action. We can’t define this objectively, otherwise care becomes a form of paternalistic intervention.

She also stresses that care is a form of relation – it involves an active participation from all parties in that relationship. Accepting care is an act of agency that affirms the caregiving relationship. This means that we have a moral obligation to graciously accept care when it is offered in good faith – to neither reject care (harming both carer and cared-for) or to overdemand care.

Feder Kittay illustrated her discussion with personal anecdotes from her experience of being a carer for both her daughter and her mother, which resonated with the audience.

Registration now open!

You can now register for the conference via eventbrite. Registration is free thanks to support from the Wellcome Trust.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/discourses-of-care-care-in-media-medicine-and-society-tickets-26129629425

 

 

 

Provisional Timetable for Discourses of Care

We are delighted to announce the provisional timetable for Discourses of Care: Care in Media, Medicine and Society, taking place on Mon 5th – Wed 7th September 2016. If you have any queries, please email the conference team at discoursesofcare@gmail.com, or contact us via @CareDiscourses.

Monday 5^th September

10.00 – 11.00: Registration with refreshments

11.00 – 12.15: Keynote 1: Prof. Eva Feder Kittay

12.15 – 13.00: Lunch (provided)

13.00 – 14.20: Panels 1 and 2

Panel 1: Cinema and Care

• Phillipa Lovatt (Stirling), ‘Illness, caregiving and healing in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’
• Suzanne Beth (McGill), ‘Ozu’s Tokyo Story: care as the medium capacity to bear’
• Ana Salzberg (Dundee), ‘Care home as cinematic community: enhancing social connectivity through film’

Panel 2: Education, Media, and Care

• Ben Lamb (Teeside), ‘Changing the welfare state: an investigation into the effects of alternative regional media on local services and recipients of care’
• Christian Bonah and Joel Danet (Strasbourg), ‘Careful cinema: Educational utility film by and for physicians in France in the 1970s’
• Nicole Matthews (Macquarie), ‘Teaching person-centred care for people with dementia through the “paranoid women’s film”’ (Skype)

14.20 – 14.40: Break

14.40 – 16.00:  Panels 3 and 4

Panel 3: New Approaches and Methodologies to Care

• Ros Jennings and Hannah Grist (Gloucestershire), ‘Thinking with age in the UK care environment: an autoethnographic approach to the times and spaces of caring for older people’
• Misha Kavka (Auckland), ‘Between ethics and affect: mediations of care’
• Val Bogan (Dublin Institute of Technology), ‘The visualization of the presenting complaint: promoting patient agency and care in the diagnostic process’

Panel 4: Popular Media Discourses of Care

• Maggie Sweeney (West of Scotland), ‘Failings in the duty of care: mediated discourses on “children at risk”’
• Yvonne Cunningham (Glasgow), ‘“I’ve got two little boys and this is the worst thing that could happen”’
• Anna McFarlane (Glasgow), ‘”An Alien Inside”: Science Fiction and Pregnancy in Anne Enright’s “Breeding” (2004)’

16.00 – 16.20:  Break

16.20 – 17.30: Plenary session: Sara Harkins and Maria McGill in conversation

17.30 – 19.00: Drinks reception

 

Tuesday 6^th September

09.30 – 10.00: Registration with refreshments

10.00 – 11.20:  Panels 5 and 6

Panel 5: Gender and Care

• Kristyn Gorton (York), ‘Nurse Jackie and discourses of care on TV’
• Susan Berridge (Stirling), ‘Gendered discourses of childcare in the UK film industry’
• Hilary C. Aquino (Albright College), ‘“Mother knows best” Selling public heath with 1950s femininity’

Panel 6: (Assistive) Technology and Care

• Anna Piccoli (Amsterdam), ‘Are digital platforms and touchscreen devices effective caretakers? The touch and go of visually impaired users’
• Bonnie Millar and Derek Hoare (NIHR Nottingham Hearing Biomedical Research Unit), ‘Discourses of care and sonic media’
• Kerr Castle (Glasgow) and Jonathan Perry, ‘TV or not TV: the practitioner’s approach to audio description and transforming television’

11.20 – 11.40: Break

11.40 – 13.00: Panels 7 and 8

Panel 7: Disability and Care

• Amelia Defalco (Leeds), ‘Dismantling the autonomy myth: dependency, comics and care’
• Arianna Introna (Stirling), ‘Imagining disability and/in the Nation: narratives of care and cure in post-devolutionary Scottish writing’
• Helen Hughes (Surrey), ‘Looking back at Mapping Perception’ (Skype)

Panel 8: Media, Care and Conflict

• Marie Allitt (York), ‘“Whom we fear to touch”: medical violence and the conflict of medical in military-medical caregiving narratives’
• Robert Hemmings (Leeds), ‘Performances of care: film, shell-shock and spectatorship’
• Hannah Tweed (Glasgow), ‘Writing care and nursing in the First World War’

13.00 – 14.00: Lunch (provided)

14.00 – 14.30:  Screening curated by Wellcome Trust

14.30 – 14.40: Break

14.40 – 16.00:  Panels 9 and 10

Panel 9: Activism, Advocacy, and Care

• Alexandra Endaltseva (Linkoping University, Sweden), ‘To care FOR and to care ABOUT: disability knowledge work and communication in the context of Russian MS society’
• Sara Erlandsson (Stockholm), ‘Objects of care or active citizens? Exploring representations of user influence on websites for eldercare and disability service providers’
• Sally Chivers (Trent University), ‘Not an activist? The puzzling place of advocacy in care advice’

Panel 10: Media and End of Life Care

• Paul Sutton (Roehampton) ‘Care and Televisual Spectatorship’ [title tbc]
• Helen Wheatley (Warwick), ‘Signs of Care: Television documentaries about assisted suicide and the persistence of television’
• Agnese Sile (Aberdeen), ‘The ethics of care in Briony Campbell’s photographic essay The Dad Project’

16.00 – 18.30:  Pre-theatre dinner (own arrangements)

18.30 – 20.30:  Screening and Q&A with Andrew Kötting

 

Wednesday 7^th September

09.45 – 11.00: Keynote 2: Prof. Andrew Kötting

11.00 – 11.15:  Break

11.15 – 11.45: Presentation on collaborative work and the ‘Shouting at Cancer’ project from Donatella Maraschin (London South Bank), Evangelos Himonides (UCL), and Thomas Moors (physician)

11.45 – 13.15: Workshop: discussion, networking, and project building session

13.15 – 13.30: Closing remarks

13.30 – 14.30:  Lunch (provided) and end of conference

CFP: Discourses of Care

Call for Papers: ‘Discourses of Care: Care in Media, Medicine and Society’

Location: Gilmorehill Halls, 9 University Avenue, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ

Date: Monday 5^th – Wednesday 7^th September 2016

Deadline for proposals: Friday 3^rd June 2016

Keynote speakers:

• Eva Feder Kittay, Stony Brook University NY
• Andrew Kötting, artist and filmmaker, University for the Creative Arts

This interdisciplinary conference aims to support and foster collaborative work in relation to media and questions of care and well-being, focusing on care and care giving as critical concepts. Bringing together scholars from film and television studies, medical humanities, disability studies, and philosophy, we will debate how understandings of medical and social care are (and might be) positioned in relation to media and cultural studies. This would be a significant first step toward building inter-disciplinary alliances and driving forward work within the as yet under-determined field of ‘visual medical humanities’.

The specific focus of the conference and anticipated publication/s is to explore the ways in which media do more than simply represent care and caring (although representation, of course,  remains an important issue). Taking a new approach, the conference will explore how media forms and media practices (the creation, exhibition and reception of media) may act as a mode of care. Thus we wish to explore how different kinds of media programming, media technologies and media practices present opportunities in which care is manifest as both an ‘attitude’ and  a ‘disposition’ (Feder Kittay).

The event will underpin at least one multi-authored publication. Through this conference we will explore the politics and ethics of care-relationships and contest binary understandings of autonomy and dependency amongst individuals with cognitive and physical disabilities, carers and medical professionals. We are particularly interested in the nexus of youth (the ‘child’), age (the ‘aged’) and disability as a way of opening up alliances and challenges to popular cultural notions and representations of care and dependency.

We are now looking for academics, care providers, and creative practitioners of all levels, periods, and fields to submit proposals for 20 minute conference papers. We invite papers on topics that include (but are not limited to):

• Relationships between care and media
• Definitions of care in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
• Autobiographical representations of and reactions to care
• Disability studies approaches to care and dependency
• Media practices and outputs as modes of care
• Care and the visual medical humanities
• Adaptive technologies and care
• Spectatorship, care, and media
• Care, media, and children
• Care, media, and ageing
• Use of media in health education and rehabilitation
• Consumer ‘choice’ and ‘autonomy’ in popular culture
• Screen cultures in our ‘institutions of care’ (e.g. the NHS and the BBC).

Please email an abstract of up to 300 words and a short bio (100-200 words) to the conference organisers (discoursesofcare@gmail.com) by Friday 3^rd June 2016. There are a limited number of travel bursaries available for postgraduate and/or early career presenters; the recipients of these grants will be asked to write a short reflection on the conference, which will be published on the Glasgow Medical Humanities Research Centre blog, and the conference website.

If you wish to be considered for one of the travel bursaries, please email us for an application form and submit it with your abstract and bio. We will contact all respondents on the outcome of their proposal by the end of June 2016. Thanks to funding from the Wellcome Trust, this conference will be free to attend.

The conference venue, the Gilmorehill Building, is fully accessible, and the conference will include accommodations such as pre-circulated papers and discussion topics, ending with an interactive roundtable discussion. For more information on access, transport, and the venue please visit our website. If you have any questions, please email the conference team at discoursesofcare@gmail.com, or contact us via @CareDiscourses.

Conference team: Prof. Karen Lury (Film and TV), Dr Amy Holdsworth (Film and TV), and Dr Hannah Tweed (English Literature).