The conference seeks to bring together researchers to focus on the interaction of medical, legal and lay understandings of phenomena that are highly topical and political, namely rape and abortion.
Deadline for submission: 10 December 2023
Medicine and law are professions and systems of knowledge that carry great weight in society. While both are important in their own right, professionals working in these fields can only function by communicating their specialist knowledge and decisions to each other, to other professionals and to lay people effectively.
This conference will explore how medical and legal professionals reflect on and do such vital work of translation, and how communication of medical and legal reasoning and conclusions is received by a variety of parties involved in the interaction.
Medicine and law both exercise huge influence on society as a whole, at all levels of political, economic and social structure. They also directly impact the quality of individual lives and are deeply entangled with key issues such as justice and equity that are enshrined in the written and unwritten constitutions of most nations. Understanding medical and legal reasoning and decisions is vital to individual meaning-making, for example in terms of making sense of a personal crisis, and to the realisation of democratic principles. At the same time, medicine and law draw on highly specialised and technical languages, making it difficult to enhance literacy in them. The population is also not equally equipped to negotiate their way through both systems, and this mandates that we consider how communication can be improved upon to mediate the inequalities this produces, including the role of translators and interpreters. As medical and legal concepts and frameworks increasingly permeate all sectors of every society, this is a challenge that it is important to address.
Topics
We invite papers that shed light on these topics from any discipline. Indicative themes include but are not restricted to the following:
- The relationship between medical and legal knowledge and personal decision-making
- The impact of law on medical knowledge and vice versa
- Medicalization of legal rights and legal obligations
- The politics of translation and interpreting in the medical and legal fields
- Critical analysis of the concept of translation as deployed in the medical and legal fields
Keynotes
Dr. Julie C. Boéri, Translation and Interpreting Studies Department (TISD), College of Humanities & Social Sciences, Hamad bin Khalifa University
Dr. Tony Ward, Northumbria Law School, Northumbria University, Newcastle
Dr. Corinna Kruse, Department of Thematic Studies (TEMA), Linköping University
Submission process
Submission of abstracts for individual presentations:
Abstracts of 300–500 words should be sent by 10 December 2023 to May-Len Skilbrei (m.l.skilbrei@jus.uio.no)
Notification of acceptance will be given by 30 December 2023
Conference websites for registration and more information
Time and location for the conference
6.–7. March 2024 at the University of Oslo.
The conference is organized by May-Len Skilbrei, Eivind Engebretsen, Kari Solbrække, Mona Baker and Ane Elida Fonneløp.
ATSA 