WHAT: "Seeing the Difference/Seeing Differently," an institute exploring what it means to die in America in the 21st century. A goal is to produce video and print guides for training practitioners to work with the dying. WHEN: 9:15 a.m.-5 p.m., Thursday and Friday, June 1-2. WHERE: The University of California, Berkeley's Townsend Center for the Humanities. WHO: Participants will include artists and humanists, health care providers and clinicians from around the country.
BACKGROUND: "While death may be the vanishing point of medical knowledge and representation, it is also a point of meditation," says Christina Gillis, associate director of the Townsend Center, which is sponsoring the institute. "Neither doctors nor humanists, nor artists or policy-makers can provide all the answers where death is concerned; any inquiry into its cultural, scientific, and perhaps even spiritual contours must be a plural one."
Participants will address questions such as:
When is dying?
How does one speak the "unspeakable" and talk about time in the dying process?
What, and when, is the margin between living and dying?
How has technology altered our concepts of death?
How do we develop new forms of empathy for those facing imminent death?