Kategorie: Call for Papers

The Sixth Annual OISE Indigenous Education Network Mental Health Symposium, 26 May 2016, Native Canadian Centre of Toronto, Canada

The overarching goal of this Symposium is to build on our previous and current conceptions of Indigenous psychology and to provide new and innovative information, inquiry, and synthesis of mental health issues and solutions from Aboriginal knowledges. Through the development of new insights regarding Indigenous psychology throughout the Symposium, cutting edge and creative theories and models for addressing current mental health needs, including programming, counseling, and assessments of Indigenous peoples in Canada. This year’s symposium has a special focus on Healing and Education, taking a lead on discussing and strategizing implementation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report’s recommendations.

This Symposium will achieve several general central objectives. First, to get a clear understanding of the psychology of Indigenous mental health and healing by articulating conceptual foundations that expand the current deficit model of mental health, enriching knowledge by focusing on the social processes of socio-political contexts, culture, and traditional knowledges and medicines and how these are linked to psychology. Secondly, to bring together leaders and innovators in the fields of Indigenous mental health from traditional, academic, and practitioner backgrounds. The sharing of ideas and ensuing dialogue of the diverse expertise of these high profile speakers will allow all attendees at the Symposium to take part in the creation of Indigenous healing solutions to psychological challenges that will be developed out of the strengths and resources that Indigenous individuals and communities provide to explain the key intersections of mental health, socio-political realities, and Aboriginal knowledges. Thirdly, The Annual Indigenous Education Network Mental Health Symposium was developed in 2010 by Dr. Suzanne Stewart to address a dire need for the advancement of the psychology of Indigenous mental health from Aboriginal knowledges, given the overwhelming lack of culturally based theory and models and the growing population of Indigenous peoples migrating to cities, many of whom seek fruitless mental health services from non-Indigenous perspectives.

More specific Symposium objectives include:

• Reaching a diverse audience of those interested in Indigenous mental health, including educators, researchers, academics, students, practitioners, policy makers, and community service administrators.
• Developing new and refining existing traditional Aboriginal approaches to current mental health issues.
• Engaging Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals and communities in meaningful dialogue on Indigenous mental health and healing.
• Training and/or enhancing the careers of Aboriginal scholars, practitioners, policy makers, and administrators.
• Infusing Aboriginal ways of knowing into current applied psychology theories and practices.
• Preserving and documenting Aboriginal knowledges within the various levels of research, practice, and administration.
• Identifying knowledge mobilization tools to extend research and practice impact to Indigenous communities first, and then more broadly to non-Indigenous contexts.
• Considering diverse modalities for Indigenous psychology: e.g. traditional Indigenous, academic, Western, Eastern, African, hybrid, etc.

Specifically, the symposium will explore six key topic areas via oral presentations, workshops presentations, and cultural workshops by leading Canadian Indigenous health and healing practitioners. As well, we invite researcher, student, institutional, and community organization members to present posters within the following topics:

1. Indigenous counselling and psychotherapy theory and practice
2. Psychological assessment from Indigenous perspectives
3. Integration of Indigenous and Western healing in mental health
4. Traditional cultural healing in mental health service
5. Research and ethical issues
6. Policy, program, and administrative issues

You may submit abstracts for poster presentations in any of the above key topic areas until May 15, 2016. Please email name, title, and abstracts to this address.

For more information or to register please contact the Conference Committee.

Tickets are available here.

Registration fees:
$120 for academics, practitioners and professionals
$60 for students & community members

For registration, please visit the Conference Website.

International Conference, October 14 – 16, 2016, Toronto (ON), Canada

Between the 1930s and the 1970s, a community of intellectuals coalesced in the city of Toronto to discuss and investigate communication as a complex, interdisciplinary process that structures individuals, cultures, and societies. This scholarly community, that emerged in and around the University of Toronto achieved international recognition for its innovative and trans-disciplinary approaches to the evolving societal challenges.

„The Toronto School: Then – Now – Next“-Conference aims to bring together international scholars to engage in dialogue on the origins, rise, decline and the rebirth of the so-called Toronto School. Discussion will focus on its pioneers, champions but also its critics. It will examine the extent to which the Toronto School has provided a legacy that continues to offer insight on crucial and systemic issues facing contemporary society across various disciplines.

General areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• New understandings, approaches, comparative assessments of the major figures associated with the golden age of the Toronto School, including for instance Eric Havelock, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye, Edmund Carpenter, Walter J. Ong, Tom Easterbrook, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Carl Williams, Glenn Gould, and Harley Parker
• Innovative interpretations of theories in their historical context, and ideas emanating from the School and its intellecutal tradition
• Associations between core theories/ideas of the Toronto School of Communication and other schools/traditions, in the Humanities, in the Social Sciences and contemporary culture
• Germination of media studies in 1950s Toronto
• Canadian approaches to communications study and their impact on the twentieth-century intellectual debate internationally
• Role of communication in the history of civilization, and in the structuring of human cultures and the mind
• Time-biased and space-biased dialectical approaches applied to cultural ecology
• Sensorial, cognitive, and behavioural implications of the medium
• Interplay of orality and literary in today’s media environment
• Poetic, symbolic, and mythical thinking in contemporary cultures
• Aesthetic forms as a mode of critique and interpretation of cultural artifacts
• Interpretation, extension, and application of the theories central to thinkers from the Toronto School

Authors are invited to submit their abstracts by June 30, 2016, using exclusively EasyChair.

Abstracts of between 1.000 and 1.500 words, in English, and presented in pdf format should be uploaded into EasyChair along with: title of proposed presentation, five keywords, and for each author their name, title, position, name afffiliated institution and a short biographical statement (40 – 50 words each). In addition details for the corresponding author should be provided.

In case of acceptance, author(s) will be asked also to provide a condenses abstract (200 words for inclusion in the program), and to present the paper at the Conference (see registration deadline for authros).

A condensed abstract of each paper and a biographical statement of presenting author(s) will be published in the Conference Program.

All submissions will be reviewed by the Program Committee.

For more information, please have a look here.