KEY NOTE SPEAKERS

 Lesley Doyal is Professor of Health and Social Care in the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol and Visiting Professor in Public Health and Family Medicine in the University of Cape Town. Her main areas of research are international health policy and gender and health and she has published very widely in these fields. She acts as a consultant to a wide range of international organisations including WHO, United Nations, Global Forum for Health Research, European Institute for Women’s Health and the Commonwealth Secretariat.

Elliot G. Mishler is Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School.  After receiving his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan. (1951), he joined the Psychology Department at Princeton University and was also a Research Associate with the Study of Education at Princeton and the Office of Population Research (1949-57).  As a staff member of the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health (1957-59), he was responsible for reviewing epidemiological studies and evaluating new mental hospital programs for treatment of the mentally ill.  He established and directed the Laboratory in Social Psychiatry and directed the Postdoctoral Research Training Program in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, at the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (1959-94). Since 1994, he has been on the staff of the Harvard Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance, and is a research consultant to the department’s Victims of Violence program and Multicultural Research Center.  For the past twenty years his primary research and training interests have focused on the development and application of methods of narrative analysis and other qualitative research approaches to clinical and research interviews.  He initiated and leads two inter-university, inter-disciplinary narrative study groups, one now in its twenty first year and the other in its eleventh year.  He has published over 60 articles and book chapters, and is the senior author of three books, sole author of three, and a co-author of two. Titles of his sole-authored books are: The Discourse of Medicine: Dialectics of Medical Interviews (1984); Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative (1986); Storylines: Craftartists’ Narratives of Identity (1999).

Michael Murray is Chair of Applied Social and Health Psychology and Director of the Centre for Psychology Research at Keele University, UK.  Prior to that, he held appointments at St. Thomas’ Hospital Medical School (King’s College) London, the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland and Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. In addition, he has held visiting appointments at several institutions including Massey University, New Zealand and Durham University, UK where he was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Arts and Humanities in Health and Medicine.  He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Health Psychology and sits on the Editorial Boards of the Psychology & Health and Psychology, Health & Medicine.  He was a founding member of the International Society of Critical Health Psychology.  He has been involved in several projects exploring the role of arts in healthcare and of community arts in promoting health in rural areas.  Most recently he has co-edited with Ross Gray a special issue of the Journal of Health Psychology devoted to Health Psychology and the Arts.

Catherine Kohler Riessman is Research Professor in the Department of Sociology at Boston College, where she teaches post-graduate courses on "Health, Gender, and the Body" and "Narrative Methods in the Social Sciences." She is Professor Emerita at Boston University School of Social Work, and taught for many years at Smith College.  She has authored 4 books, including “Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences” (Sage, in press), "Narrative Analysis" (Sage 1993) and "Divorce Talk" (Rutgers Univ. Press 1990), and numerous book chapters and articles on narrative research.  She completed fieldwork in South India supported by a Fulbright in 1993-4 on the meaning and management of infertility by women and families. Her current research examines the performance of identity in narrative accounts of disruptive life events, such as infertility, divorce and chronic illness. Professor Riessman received her Ph.D. in 1977 from Columbia University, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She was Chair of the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association in 1998.