Call For Proposals

The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities' 12th Annual Meeting is scheduled for October 21-24, 2010, in San Diego, CA at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel. Sleeping rooms at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel can be secured at the ASBH group rate of $249 beginning in August. Reservations will be taken on a first-come, first-served basis.

Guidelines

• Submissions in any area of bioethics and humanities are accepted. Proposals that address provocative ideas and challenges from interdisciplinary perspectives will be given preference.
• Submit your proposal in one topic area only. Do not revise your proposal for multiple topic areas and submit it in more than one category.
• Preconference Workshops are arranged by the program planning committee.
• Presentation Rule: Presenters are not limited to one presentation at the meeting.
• Proposals should be submitted in Empirical Research when the focus of your presentation will be the empirical study. If your proposal has an empirical component but the focus of your presentation is not the empirical component, please select another category.
• Proposals should be submitted in the Interdisciplinary category when the work involves scholarship that crosses several academic areas. If your proposal has an interdisciplinary element but the focus of the presentation will not be the interdisciplinary nature of the work, please select another category.
• Proposals should be submitted in the Visual Arts and Poetry category when the focus of the abstract is for an exhibit of art work or a session such as a poetry reading.  If you wish to display your visual arts or hold a poetry session, please select this submission category.
• If you are eligible for the March of Dimes Young Scholar Award and choose to submit a proposal for consideration of this award, please submit your proposal in the Perinatal Ethics category.
  • Eligibility: To be eligible for this award, applicants must be early in their career development, including those who are actively enrolled in graduate school, post-doctoral programs or no higher in their career achievement than the assistant professorship level.  Applicants are invited to submit proposals on the topic of perinatal ethics in any of the submission categories offered in the ASBH Call for Proposals. Proposals about pregnancy, birth, lactation, prenatal causes of disability, neonatal decision-making, and other perinatal issues will be considered.  
  • Award: The award will be presented at the ASBH Annual Meeting in October to the applicant whose paper was selected to be of the highest quality and intellectual rigor among the submitted papers.  The award winner will be receive an honorarium of $1,000 and will be invited to present his/her paper at a plenary session at the ASBH Annual Meeting, which will feature an invited lecture by a distinguished scholar from the field of perinatal ethics.
• Anonymous/Not Anonymous Submissions: Panel Sessions are not anonymous proposals. Presenters' names and other identifying information for Panel Session proposals will be available to reviewers and may be included in the proposal's abstract. The other proposals are anonymous. Anonymous proposals are: 90-minute Workshop Sessions; 15-minute Individual Presentations (Paper Sessions); Posters. Do not include presenters' names or other identifying information in the abstracts for these proposals.
• Roles. In your submission, you will designate a role for each person as Contributor or Moderator as appropriate to the Submission Type. See each Submission Type below to see when these roles are optional or required.
• All submissions are final. Accepted abstracts will be printed in the annual meeting program book as submitted. We will not be able to accept changes to an abstract after the submission deadline on March 3.
• Presenters are responsible for all personal expenses. Presenters are required to register for the meeting and should register for the whole meeting or for the one day that he/she is scheduled to speak. One day registration entitles the presenter to attend all sessions (excluding extra-cost events) on the day he/she is registered only. All presenters must fill out a Meeting Registration Form from the conference brochure to register for the meeting. Submitting a proposal does not mean you are registered for the meeting. If the presenter is not an ASBH member and is coming in only to speak and then will leave and he/she will not attend another session, he/she is not required to register. The presenter will not be registered for the meeting and will not receive the meeting registration materials, including the program book.

The program committee may accept some proposals in a different format, e.g., a proposal submitted as an individual presentation may be accepted as a poster.

Program Theme: Health and Community

Bioethics has been particularly concerned with the rights and welfare of individual patients and has often been criticized for not attending sufficiently to problems related to the health of populations. But there is little doubt that bioethics and the humanities have much to contribute to concerns connected to groups as well as individuals. We thus invite scholars to address health, disability, and disease as it affects local, national, and global groups. Healthcare professionals, researchers, humanists, and lawyers, can bring experiences, expertise, and interests that shape our understanding of the health of communities as it informs and is informed by ethics, law, politics, medicine, and the humanities.  Proposals that critically examine issues related to social groups--such as the appropriate distribution of societal resources, the ways in which literature, film, and the arts inform concerns about the health of populations and our understanding of communities, healthcare professionals' duty to warn in cases of communicable disease (e.g., HIV/AIDS), the fair distribution of health resources (e.g., medical supplies, water, etc.) during a natural disaster, the various contributions of the arts and the humanities to the health of communities, the social determinants of health and disease, healthcare disparities, the ways historical perspectives can bear on present day policy issues, and conflicts of values between different populations--are welcomed. 

Call for Proposals

Submission Instructions (for all submission types)
All proposals will be accepted through 4:00 PM Central Time March 3, 2010.

• No proposals will be accepted after that time.
• Proposals that are complete will be sent automatically to the ASBH national office when the "submit" feature is chosen. You do not need to mail a hard copy to ASBH.
• Incomplete proposals and proposals received via fax, mail, or e-mail will not be reviewed.

Please make sure that you complete all of the information requested on the electronic submission tool:

Name, credentials, facility, mailing address, email address, telephone number for each person in your proposal.

One topic area:

• Arts, Literature, and Cultural Studies
• Clinical Ethics
• Education
• Empirical Research*
• Environmental Ethics
• Health Policy
• History
• Interdisciplinary**
• Law
• Organizational Ethics
• Perinatal Ethics***
• Philosophy
• Public Health
• Religious Studies
• Research Ethics
• Social Science
• Theme
• Visual Arts and Poetry****
• Other - Please designate "Other" if your proposal is on a topic that does not fit in one of the other topic areas.

*Important: Proposals should be submitted in Empirical Research when the focus of your presentation will be the empirical study. If your proposal has an empirical component but the focus of your presentation is not the empirical component, please select another category.

**Important: Proposals should be submitted in the Interdisciplinary category when the work involves scholarship that crosses several academic areas. If your proposal has an interdisciplinary element but the focus of the presentation will not be the interdisciplinary nature of the work, please select another category.

***Important:  In order to be considered for the March of Dimes Young Scholar Award, proposals should be submitted in the Perinatal Ethics category.  For eligibility requirements, please visit the ASBH website at www.asbh.org/meetings/annual/marchdimes.html.

****Important:  Proposals should be submitted in the Visual Arts and Poetry category when the focus of the abstract is for an exhibit of art work or a session such as a poetry reading.  If you wish to display your visual arts or hold a poetry session, please select this submission category.

• A title that clearly states the subject matter.
• An abstract (500-word maximum length) that describes the session's content or the nature of the study. This information will be included in the program book. Include sufficient detail to permit an independent evaluation of the potential effectiveness of the session. Provide only one abstract per proposal. Only one abstract should be submitted for panels or other group sessions, even though there will be multiple speakers.
• A description of how the presentation time will be used, including how the audience will be engaged.

ASBH Student Paper Competition Guidelines

If you are a student who would like to be considered for the Student Paper Award, submit your abstract via the on-line submission program in the Individual Presentation or Poster format and submit a copy of your full paper not more than 3500 words in length to the ASBH office electronically via email in Word or PDF format. A student is defined as one who is actively pursuing an advanced degree and has not received a doctoral-level degree (e.g., MD, PhD, JD or equivalent degree). Authors who are not students according to the definition above are not eligible for the Student Paper Award. Send your full paper, double-spaced and with 1-inch margins, in electronic format (Word of PDF format) to asaylor@connect2amc.com and put "ASBH Student Paper Competition" in the subject line. Papers must be received by March 3, 2010.

The Awards Committee will review all papers submitted that meet the following criteria: papers must not be more 3500 words in length; papers must be submitted as directed above; papers must be received by March 3; authors must be students according to the definition above.

Review and Notification

All submissions will be reviewed anonymously, except the Panels. Do not include presenters' or institutions' names, or other identifying information in the body of the abstract for any proposal other than a Panel. Proposals containing identifying information (except in Panels) will not be reviewed. Incomplete proposals will not be reviewed.

Except for Panels, each submission will be sent as an anonymous proposal to reviewers in the submission category selected. Evaluation will be based on the following:

• Contribution to existing knowledge; innovative, cutting-edge topic
• Presentation of innovative solutions to current issues in the fields of bioethics and humanities
• Significance, importance, and relevance to bioethics and medical humanities
• Multidisciplinary approaches
• Quality of the written communication

Notification of a proposal's status will be sent via email to all proposal submitters in the summer of 2010. You can check the status of your proposal by logging onto the electronic submission tool following the review period. Presenters for accepted proposals will also be notified vie email.

Submission Types

90-minute Workshop Sessions: Designed for instruction and interaction. This format is substantively different from the formats for panels and individual presentations. Presenters engage and involve the members of the audience for a significant portion of the session in small group activities, breakout sessions, role play, audience feedback or discussion of cases and other content, design of materials and models, and similar forms of interactions. This interactive component is rated in the post-session evaluations. Workshops should include participants from a variety of institutions and be multidisciplinary. Proposals for Workshops are anonymous; do not include presenters' names and other identifying information in the abstract. Workshops are limited to 4 presenters. There is a 3 Presenter minimum for a Workshop. The presenters are Speakers. You will not designate a Moderator.

60-minute Panel Sessions: A variety of perspectives are provided on a cohesive theme. An ideal panel compares and contrasts ideas of the panelists or includes presentations that build on one another. Priority will be given to panel submissions that include participants from a variety of institutions and are multidisciplinary. Proposals for Panel Sessions are not anonymous. You may include presenters' names and other identifying information in the abstract. There is a 3 Presenter minimum for a Panel. Panels are limited to 4 Presenters and 1 Moderator who will not present separately. You are required to designate a Moderator. The Moderator's name will be listed with the session in the program book. The Moderator may not serve as a Presenter in the session for which he/she is the Moderator.

15-minute Individual Presentations (Paper Sessions): Brief structured discussions or lectures based on a paper or work-in-progress. Only one author will present at the meeting even if the paper has several authors. The first author is the Presenter. 3-5 Individual Presentations will be grouped per time slot. Proposals for Paper Sessions are anonymous; do not include the Presenter's name and other identifying information in the abstract. You will submit one Presenter in your proposal.

Posters: Demonstrate or explain a concept, work of art, or research project. Proposals for Posters are anonymous; do not include presenters' names and other identifying information in the abstract. You will submit one Presenter in your proposal.

Follow this link to access the proposal online submission tool.