Narrative Symposium: Taking Bioethics Personally

Narrative Symposium: Taking Bioethics Personally    

Edited by Tod Chambers, PhD

Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics will publish an issue devoted to personal stories from bioethics about the experience of being ill or caring for a person who is ill. We are particularly interested in those stories that have affected how a bioethicist "does" ethics. We want true, personal stories in a form that is easy to read. 

In writing your story, you might want to think about:

• How did the experience of illness change your thinking on a moral problem in medicine? Did seeing issues such as informed consent played out in your own life alter how you would now advise health care professionals about caring for patients?
• How did your experiences teach you about an element of medicine that as an outsider you never fully understood? Has it changed how you see patients?
• Did this experience challenge some essential philosophical positions?
• How would your views about and work in bioethics have been different if you had experienced this illness before entering the field?
• Did you form any new ideas about how you think medicine should be practice? Bioethics?

You do not need to address these questions--write on the issues that you think are most important to share with others. You do not need to be a writer, just tell your story in your own words. We plan to publish 10 to 12 brief stories (800-2,000 words) on this topic. Additional stories may be published as online-only supplemental material. We also publish two commentary articles that discuss the stories in the journal. To see a finished symposium you may access Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics Vol. 1 issue 1 for free on Project MUSE. 

If you are interested in submitting a story, we ask you first to submit a 300-word proposal--a short description of the story you want to tell. Be sure to include a statement about how much time has passed since your illness experience.

Inquires or proposals should be sent to the editorial office via email: narrativebioethics@gmail.com. We will give preference to story proposals received by August 27th. 

For more information about the journal Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics, the guidelines for authors, and privacy policies, visit our webpage with Johns Hopkins University Press at: http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/narrative_inquiry_in_bioethics/guidelines.html 

Pubmed and Medline will not index a new journal until is has published 4 issues across at least a 12 month period. Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics will be submitted for indexing in 2012. We fully expect it will be indexed at that time and all indexing will include earlier articles published in NIB. (Note: All other medical ethics and humanities journals published by Johns Hopkins University Press are indexed in PubMed/Medicine)