I’m no bioethicist, but

When I first started teaching and then convening my own modules, there were several incredibly generous scholars who shared their syllabus, presentations, and module structures. It was really helpful for an overstretched ECR to have something to start with, and I'm enormously grateful for the care they've extended me.

I've been plucking up the courage to follow their example and share my reading lists publicly. Part of the courage-plucking is imposter syndrome: I’m not a bioethicist. I’m a feminist social scientist whose work collides with bioethics on many planes and spaces. Sharing my reading list opens me up to criticism - “this isn’t bioethics” and I worry about inviting even more pushback. Yet, it’s also important to open up the neoliberal academy, to open up “knowledge” and learning - to make (in whatever small way) it more accessible.

I'm about to convene my postgraduate Critical Bioethics module for the third year. I try to structure each week around a question, using it to help us interrogate concepts, ideas, contexts, conditions [...]. I aim to engage with mainstream bioethics first & then reflect on interdisciplinary work that builds on, refutes, challenges, critiques, complicates [...] it. This year, I've introduced a specific week on "autonomy" - while a key concept in Bioethics, it is also extremely fraught and contested. Many discussions on “sensitive” or “taboo” topics tend to fall at the “autonomy” argument, and I think it’s worth engaging more carefully in our understandings (and assumptions) of what it means, entails, requires, and supposes.

There are so many wonderful critical, feminist scholars whose work I've drawn on - bioethicists, anthropologists, sociologists [...]. I'm sure I've inadvertently left folks or texts out - my apologies. Please let me know & I'll consider it for next year.

Some of the readings may not - at first glance- feel like they're relevant to/for Bioethics, but following feminist bioethicists & scholars, I'm attempting to centre an expansive, capacious approach to what constitutes bioethical inquiry. We'll be engaging with writing/reports on Grenfell, the Birth Trauma Report, the COVID-19 inquiry, and Palestine/Gaza in our seminars, alongside entanglements with notions of solidarity, vulnerabilities, and care.

You can view the public reading list here.