Suicide Cultures Conference 2023

As part of our ongoing project – Suicide Cultures: Reimagining Suicide Research – we are delighted to be able to host a dedicated, free-to-attend hybrid conference in June 2023. The conference will aim to provide a space where researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds can come together with policy-makers, practitioners and community-members to discuss, deliberate and reflect on the role of ‘culture/s’ in shaping suicide, suicide research, and suicide prevention.

We invite submissions particularly from those working within disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, who are working with methodologies that are less often seen or heard in discussions of suicide. We also welcome submissions from policy-makers, practitioners, or community-members which showcase approaches to responding to suicide or self-harm that address social or cultural issues.  

Indicative themes:

• Cultures and landscapes of suicide and self-harm
• Diverse narratives/stories and representations of suicide and self-harm
• Emotional, embodied and affective approaches to suicide and self-harm
• Methodological innovations in studying suicide from diverse perspectives
• Reimagining suicide prevention; the role of life promotion and structural change in creating liveable lives
• Creative and Decolonial approaches to researching and responding to suicide
• Community-based approaches to suicide and self-harm

Format:

Short talks (online or in-person) will be 15 minutes long, with 15 minutes per presenter for discussion and Q&A.

Posters will be presented online, with Zoom discussion rooms for each poster presentation.

Presenters are limited to one lead authored paper/poster, though up to two co-authored submissions are permitted.

Criteria for assessment:

• Academic quality of proposal: are methods, analysis, and conclusions clear and appropriate?
• Fit with conference aims and themes: going beyond or challenging conventional understanding of suicide and approaches to suicide prevention, exploring innovative new directions.

Cost:

This conference will be free to attend in person or online; as such, places for the in-person elements are limited. We will try to accommodate as many presentations as we can, but we do want to allow time and space for productive and meaningful discussion, so we are unlikely to be able to accept every submission.

A limited number of travel and accommodation bursaries will be available towards the cost of attendance. When you submit an abstract you can indicate whether you would like to be considered for this.

Submissions:

To offer a presentation in person or online, or an online poster, please submit a summary (abstract) using this online form: https://tinyurl.com/2zrrf2mn  

Your abstract should be 250 words long.

If helpful, you can use the following structure: Overview/argument; methods; findings; conclusions/implications.

Timelines:

Abstracts/summaries should be submitted by 31^st January 2023.

Notification of outcome: 1^st March 2023.

Registration for presenters: by 1^st April 2023.

Registration open for all: 2^nd April 2023.

Questions:

Please direct any inquiries or questions to Asia Podgorska, Suicide Cultures administrator  - suicidecultures@ed.ac.uk.  

Organisers:

The Suicide Cultures conference organisation committee comprises: Joe Anderson, Amy Chandler, Ana Jordan, Rebecca Helman, Sarah Huque, Hazel Marzetti, Alex Oaten, and Emily Yue, with administrative support from Asia Podgorska.