Medical and legal professionals' reflections
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
- 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
Keynote speakers
- 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
Practical information
This is an onsite conference and the conference takes place at the University of Oslo. The language of the conference is English.
Participation and meals are free, but participants will need to book and pay for travels, accommodation and meals outside the conference themselves.
Registration deadline: 15 February 2024.
Important dates
- 10 December 2023: Deadline for submission of abstracts for individual presentations
- 30 December 2023: Notification of acceptance for Individual presentations
- 24 January 2024: Preliminary program available
- 15 February 2024: Deadline for registration
Financing
The main financier for the conference is the research project "Medical, legal and lay understandings of physical evidence in rape cases" (Evidently Rape), which is funded by UiO:Life Science.
The conference is also co-financed by the research group "The Medicalisation of Democratic Rights in the Debate about Abortion" (MEDRA), which is funded by UiO:Democracy.