Date: Friday October 31st, 2025
Deadline for submission abstract: Friday September 19th, 2025
Location: Zaal ‘t IJ, ADORE building, Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc
The Department of Medical Oncology is pleased to invite abstract submissions for the first interdisciplinary CCO symposium exploring the role of arts-based research in developing existential care for people living with incurable cancer. This symposium is grounded in the research line ‘Contingency, Culture & Oncology’ (CCO) that investigates how arts-based interventions – particularly co-creative processes involving patients, artists, and spiritual counsellors – can support people in navigating existential disruptions such as the loss of meaning, purpose, and identity.
A key concept is the experience of contingency: the existential disorientation that follows a diagnosis of incurable cancer, which disrupts the coherence of a person’s life narrative. Increasingly, innovations in cancer treatment (e.g. immunotherapy, hormonal therapy, targeted therapies) allow people to live longer with incurable disease. This gives rise to new challenges: how can the experience of disease-evoked contingency be integrated into a revised or renewed life story? What role can art, (popular) culture, spiritual care, and narrative reflection through arts-based interventions play in that process? And what epistemological, ethical and practical challenges do we engage with when developing, evaluating and implementing arts-based interventions?
We invite PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers from a wide range of disciplines to submit abstracts for presentations that critically engage with these questions – either theoretically, empirically, methodologically, ethically, or artistically.
Call for Abstracts can be found here
If you wish to sign up without an abstract, you can do so here
For more information, please reach out to Niels van Poecke ([email protected]).
Language: English.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
- Narrative, sociological, philosophical research into how people living-with incurable cancer make sense of their illness and its impact on their life story
- Philosophical perspectives on meaning-making, finitude, and contingency in the context of (severe) illness
- The development, evaluation and implementation of multimodal interventions aimed at supporting patients with cancer/severe illness in existential concerns
- The role of the arts (visual, performative, literary, etc.) in articulating, reshaping or making sense of existential concerns in the context of living-with cancer/severe illness
- The use of arts-based methods, such as Rich Pictures, photovoice, text-elicitation interviews, in research on the lived experiences of patients with cancer/severe illness
- Co-creation between patients and artists: epistemological, ethical, methodological, artistic reflections
- The integration of spiritual care into (arts-based) supportive oncology care
- Involving patients who hold stigmatized/marginalized social positions in research on narrative identity/developing supportive care interventions in oncology
- Evaluating the impact of narrative/arts-based supportive care interventions on existential or spiritual well-being
- Methodological innovations for interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary research at the intersection of healthcare, art, and existential meaning-making
- Methodological, practical and/or ethical challenges of conducting participatory, co-creative or arts-based research in clinical and palliative settings
Submission Guidelines
- Language: abstracts should be submitted in English
- Length: max. 300 words
- Content: clearly outline the topic, research aim(s)/question(s), methodology (if applicable), key insights or findings, and relevance to the symposium theme
- Deadline: Friday September 19th
- You can submit your abstract here.
Review process
Abstracts will be evaluated by the program committee based on originality, clarity, and relevance to the symposium’s theme. Presenters will be notified by Monday October 6th if they are selected for an oral presentation. All abstracts will be collected in a book of abstracts.
We look forward to welcoming a new generation of researchers into this important and emerging interdisciplinary field of inquiry.
If you wish to sign up for the symposium without submitting an abstract, you can do so here.
For questions, please contact: Niels van Poecke ([email protected])
Program committee
Prof. Dr. Hanneke van Laarhoven (Medical Oncology, Amsterdam UMC)
Dr. Niels van Poecke (Medical Oncology, Amsterdam UMC)
Mariana Gusso Nickel, MSc (Medical Oncology, Amsterdam UMC)
Dr. Michael Scherer-Rath (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Dr. Fabiola Camuti (HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht)
SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM
09:30 – Welcome and opening – Prof. Dr. Hanneke van Laarhoven & Dr. Niels van Poecke
09:45 – Lecture 1 – Drs. Kirsten Krans (Arts in Health Nederland)
10:15 – Lecture 2 – Dr. Erin La Cour (Graphic Medicine)
10:45 – Coffee break
11:00 – 3 x PhD candidates/PostDocs
12:00 – Lecture 3 – Drs. Lenneke Post (Spiritual Care within Palliative Oncology Care)
12:30 – Lunch
13:45 – Keynote 1 – Prof. dr. Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens (Transdisciplinarity in research, education and care)
14:30 – 3 x PhD candidates/PostDocs
15:30 – Coffee break
15:45 – Keynote 2 – Prof. dr. Louise Philips (Embracing the Messy Complexities of Co-Creation)
16:30 – Closing + drinks