The Antwerp Summer School in Philosophy and Society seeks to address philosophical issues and problems pertaining to recent developments in Western societies.
Description
Are narratives an important resource of ethical knowledge for medical scholars and moral philosophers? This summer school brings together research from medical and health humanities, feminist philosophy, philosophy of medicine, phenomenology, cultural studies, literary studies, decolonial and race studies and (bio-)ethics.
Target group: Master students in philosophy, economics or theology but open to advanced Bachelor, Master and PhD students in these three or closely related fields like Islamic finance, sustainable finance and others. Participants should have at least completed two full years of undergraduate education (Bachelor level).
Program
Illness uproots one's certainties, and therefore seems to ask for a new life narrative. While not everyone feels the need to tell a story of illness and (loss of) health, illness narratives have grown into a substantial literary genre of their own. There is a second way in which stories and illness have proven to be a fruitful combination: namely in how they make up a narrative medical ethics. It has become quite commonly accepted amongst medical practitioners that decisions (about treatment for example) should be informed by a patient's existential outlook, or their narrative framework, or their previous life decisions. This summer school wants to look at how illness and narrative constitute one another, both on an individual and a societal level, and at how insights from literary theory deepen or broaden standard conceptions of narrative ethics in health care.
We will address questions such as:
- Do narratives help to cope with illness?
- Is our individual self-consciousness narratively structured? Or does illness rather expose the illusion of the narrative self?
- Do social imaginaries in western culture ignore the importance and inevitability of illness and death?
- Do we need new ways to represent what illness means to our self-understanding?
Seminars and lectures will be given by Angela Woods, Havi Carel, Anna Gotlib, Daan Kenis, Arya Thampuran and the organizers of the summer school (Kristien Hens, Katrien Schaubroeck and Leni Van Goidsenhoven).
Remarks
6 ECTS credits are awarded upon successful completion of the programme.
Students need to attend the scheduled course contact hours, perform satisfactorily in the continuous assessment task of the course (including presenting the research outline for your individual paper and a following debate class) and complete the final assessment task (an individual research paper due four weeks after the end of the summer school) in order to qualify for a certificate of completion.
Participants who attend the scheduled course contact hours but don't complete the tasks will receive a certificate of attendance.
To include the credits in the curriculum at the home institution, participants need an agreement with the responsible person at the home institution.
