The symposium was held at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and brought together a range of specialists from a variety of institutions and disciplines, including medicine, psychology, anthropology and philosophy. It focused on a number of topics that straddle the border between the medical and human sciences, such as the experience of living with a chronic disease, the relationship between pain and suffering, the therapeutic importance and benefit of touch, and extreme situations such as dementia and imminent death.

Escribano’s contribution came in the form of a paper, “The Fragility of Beauty and the Beauty of Fragility”, in which he examined the areas where vulnerability and expressiveness meet and interact. The UIC lecturer’s aim was to overcome the temptation of adopting fixed, excessively polarized dichotomies that generate reductionist stereotypes of the bodies of people who are older, ill or in some way vulnerable, as this tendency ultimately leads us to view fragile bodies as an impersonal "other" and thereby abandon the suffering person to the indignity of alienation.