Announcing Inaugural Canadian Hermeneutic Institute

Announcing
Inaugural Canadian Hermeneutic Institute
June 17-19, 2009
Halifax, Nova Scotia


Dear Colleagues:

On behalf of our planning group, I would like to extend an invitation to you to attend the Inaugural Canadian Hermeneutic Institute, to be held in Halifax from June 17th-19th, 2009. Dr. David Jardine from the University of Calgary will be our guest speaker. The Institute will provide an opportunity for those interested in hermeneutics to explore selected papers with a focus on “Time, Experience, Practice”. Participants also will have opportunities to discuss their own work and, during the institute, to write and co-write about ideas and topics that emerge. We hope that you will consider attending.

Focus of the Institute: Time, Experience, Practice
These three terms will be the focus of the Institute as they are articulated in the work of H.G. Gadamer and as they appear in light of a hermeneutic understanding of our respective professions. These three terms affect how we understand research, the work of reading and writing (hermeneutically and otherwise), the work of living with others and coming to understand our way in the world. Implicated, here, are memory and its cultivation, composition and composure, knowledge as a gathering, whiling, and returning, and a formulation of understanding as a way of being other-wise.

These matters of time, experience and practice, will be considered in light of a particularly alluring idea in Gadamer’s work: unlike the natural sciences, whose goal in understanding is to make the matters under consideration less and less compelling, in hermeneutic work (reading, writing, and the practices of living with others), the goal is to make the matters under consideration more and more compelling.

The work from which this idea comes will be one of several primary sources that we’ll be discussing during the institute, along with supplemental material. A reading list will be provided in advance.

Cost to attend: $300 (includes breaks)

Deadline to Register: April 1, 2009

Contact for registration:
Pam Colbourne – phone: (902) 473-6020
Administrative Assistant, QEII Cancer Program
Email: pam.colbourne

Deborah McLeod RN, PhD
QEII cancer Care Program and Dalhousie University
Email: deborahl.mcleod

Both emails above at cdha.nshealth.ca.