[NOTE: The topics of interest for this conference aren’t all directly related to presence, but “The role of social media, online communities, and digital platforms in shaping and circulating illness narratives” certainly seems appropriate. For an example, see this May 2025 story from People about Syd Towle. –Matthew]

Call for Papers:

Illness Narrative Retold – Diversity, Temporality, and Digitization
June 1-2, 2026
Aarhus University
Aarhus, Denmark
https://conferences.au.dk/illness-narrative-retold

Deadline for submission of abstracts: February 1, 2026

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE:

Stories of illness are often understood as attempts to tame, navigate, and make sense of the ‘wreckage’ or ‘biographical disruption’ that the experience of serious illness or patienthood may occasion. Within illness narrative research, the storyteller is seen as a seriously wounded individual trying to master the disruptive existential event of falling ill – frequently with the (sometimes impossible) hope of restoring health. This dominant “crisis model” has shaped scholarly assumptions about what an illness narrative is, who can tell it, and for what reasons, as well as how to approach it analytically.

Against the background of this well-established tradition, this two-day interdisciplinary conference asks the key questions of where the academic field of illness narrative research is currently moving and how new experiences, discourses, mediations, and technologies shape the way illness narratives are told today. In other words, we wish to explore the multiplicity of ways in which illness narratives are currently understood, articulated, circulated, and used.

The conference particularly focuses on how new ideas, practices, and configurations of illness narratives emerge in cultural contexts shaped by anticipatory health technologies and the growing prevalence of chronic conditions, neurodiversity, mental illness, and increased medicalization. How are illness narratives crafted and shared if suffering is not only an acute and dramatic event but also something that lingers, changes from day to day, or looms as a potential future? What does it mean when illness and health become increasingly entangled and difficult to separate, when the narrator is not a patient in any conventional sense, or when diagnoses are replaced by risks and probabilities?

Another focus area for the conference is the public circulation of illness narratives on social media, in broadcast media, and on streaming platforms, which turn individual stories of illness and suffering into public concerns and raise the question of story ownership. This concern is also pertinent in forms of distributed storytelling where experiences and narratives are shared across, e.g., families, generations, and intimate relations. In this vein, we also welcome papers that investigate how illness narratives are told by multiple narrators, by relatives, or by (genetically) at-risk subjects entangled in family histories of pain.

The conference welcomes researchers at all career stages working within the fields of illness narrative, health communication, medical humanities, narrative medicine, and media and cultural studies.

TOPICS:

We invite contributions that address but are not limited to the following themes:

• Critical approaches to illness narratives
• Chronic illness
• Mental illness
• Illness narratives on (genetic) risk and risk technologies
• Disability and crip narratives
• Neurodivergence as illness narrative
• Contested illness narratives
• Illness narratives and epidemics
• Illness and story ownership
• Gender and illness narrative
• Metaphors in illness narratives
• Temporality
• Invisible illness
• Shared, collective, or distributed illness narratives
• Visuality in illness narratives (e.g., graphic novels, zines)
• Illness narratives in journalism and legacy media
• The role of social media, online communities, and digital platforms in shaping and circulating illness narratives
• Illness narratives as tools of professional or organisational learning
• Creative writing and illness narrative
• Collaborations between academics and practitioners in understanding the importance of illness narratives
• Illness narratives told by health professionals
• Illness narratives told by, through, or with relatives

KEYNOTES AND PROVISIONAL TITLES:

• Angela Woods, Professor of Medical Humanities, Durham University
  “Voice and Testimony in the Age of Generative AI” 
• Danielle Spencer, Senior Lecturer, Columbia University Narrative Medicine Programme
  “Metagnosis: Illness Narratives and Knowledges Retold”
• Stefania Vicari, Senior Lecturer in Digital Sociology, University of Sheffield
  “Social Media of Health and Illness: Platform, Narratives and Values”

INVITED PANELISTS:

• Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø, Associate Professor, University of Southern Denmark
• Karen Hvidtfeldt, Professor, University of Southern Denmark
• Ida Melander, Senior Lecturer, Örebro University
• Peter Simonsen, Professor, University of Southern Denmark
• Nora Simonhjell, Professor, University of Agder
• Lasse Raaby Gammelgaard, Associate Professor, Aarhus University
• Anders Juhl Rasmussen, Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen
• Jane Ege Møller, Associate Professor, Aarhus University
• Katarina Bernhardsson, Associate Professor, Lund University

PRACTICAL INFORMATION:

• Conference dates: 1–2 June 2026
• Abstract submission deadline: 01 February 2026
• Notification of acceptance: 15 February 2026
• Abstract length: Max. 300 words
• Submission: Send abstracts and a short bio (max. 100 words) to noraksn@cc.au.dk
• Organisers: Professor Carsten Stage and Assistant Professor Ann-Katrine Schmidt Nielsen
• Funding: The conference is funded by the research project Genetic hauntings. Pre-patient narratives in the era of direct-to-consumer genetic testing (IRDF 2023–2026).

If you are joining the conference, please also consider attending the large ISSN-conference in Aarhus later that week. It is organised by our great colleagues at the School of Communication and Culture, AU: https://conferences.au.dk/narrative2026