The 5th UK and Ireland Postgraduate Bioethics Conference:

Social Scientific Approaches to Bioethics: Methods and Methodologies.
The 5th to the 7th of January 2011.
The Wellcome Conference Centre, Euston Road, London.

Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness and Cesagen.

Also Sponsored by Nuffield Bioethics, Wiley-Blackwell, and the School of Law, QUB.

More Details on Funders and Sponsors.

Guest speakers: Prof Alan Crib (CBAS, KCL); Leigh Turner (University of Minnesota); Dr Alexandra Plows (Bangor) and Dr Duncan Wilson (CHSTM, Manchester) [More Details]

Post the empirical turn scholars at work in bioethics have been making continually greater use of social scientific approaches. One the one hand this can be seen as a fulfilment of the promise of bioethics as a truly interdisciplinary area of research, on the other we risk becoming as a recent paper has it “Jack of all trades, master of none” (Clinical Ethics 3(4) 2008). This conference seeks to go some way to engaging with this issue through offering four masterclasses on bioethics and an area of social scientific research. These will be focussed on contemporary history; researching publics; sociology; and empirical ethics. Each of these masterclasses will be prefaced by an established academic giving a presentation on the methodological contours of their approach. We seek postgraduate participants for the proposed masterclasses as well as paper presentations which address the conference theme. There are also some limited audience member places. Preference may be given to those which address the conference them and fall within the four areas identified.

There will also be a plenary lecture and some ‘added value’ sessions on academic life. These will include talks by funders, a session by early career researchers and a dedicated networking event, will also form part of the programme.

The full Call for Papers is available here .pdf

The form to apply for a place in one of the masterclasses and to submit an abstract for presentation at the conference is here (.docx) and here (.doc). Please note there are limited presentation slots, places in the masterclasses and conference venue capacity. We will be making our decisions on the basis of addressing the topic at hand, presentation panel and masterclass coherence. There may be some audience only places available once the selction process has been completed.

(Download a .pdf of this Call)

Application form .docx and .doc

The Wellcome Trust
The Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness
Cesagen

and grateful for the generosity of our sponsors:

Wiley-Blackwell, publishers of Bioethics
Nuffield Council on Bioethics, who will be sponsoring the Plenary Speaker.
and the School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast who are providing secretarial support.

The Guest Academic Speakers and Masterclass hosts will be:

Prof. Alan Cribb of the Centre for Biomedicine and Society at Kings College London will be presenting on the methodology of empirical ethics.

Dr Leigh Turner, of the Centre for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota will be talking about the relevance of sociological research.

Dr Alexandra Plows of the University of Bangor will be discussing research ‘publics’ with reference to her recently published work on Genetics which she completed at CESAGEN, Cardiff.

Dr Duncan Wilson of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester will be considering Contemporary History with special reference to his research on the Warnock Committee.

We will also be having a talk and Q&A with two early career researchers. One of whom, Dr Caragh Brosnan (CBAS, KCL) is relatively new to bioethics but has experience on the sociology of medicine and the other of whom, Dr Mikey Dunn (Ethox, Oxford) is familiar with bioethics and social-legal studies and has recently begun a project on empirical ethics.

5th to the 7th of January 2011

The conference will take place at the Welcome Trust Conference centre, Euston Road,   London over 3 days and will involve presentations by academics, postdocs/ postgraduates and 4 masterclasses on specific social scientific topics in relation to bioethics and bioethical research. There will also be opportunity to hear from established and early career academics on career issues and from representatives of funding bodies regarding future opportunities.

For further updates you can join our mailing list by emailing us at: postgrad.bioethics@gmail.com

Or by following us on twitter: http://twitter.com/BioethicsUK

Or just keep checking back here!

The conference is generously sponsored by:

The Wellcome Trust.

Foundation for Sociology of Health &Illness.

School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast.

Two of the presentations given at the conferences have been published. One, by Julia Hynes, was published in the 2010 Irish Philosophical Society Yearbook, edited by Cyril McDonnell, and is titled: The Seeds of the Four Cardinal Virtues and ‘Medical Friendship’ in the Hippocratic Oath.

The other can be found in the Journal Bioethics. Titled ‘Literature, History and the Humanisation of Bioethics’ and authored by Nathan Emmerich. It is available through the Wiley-Interscience ‘online first’ early view service here: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123442691/abstract

The conference registration form is below.

A list of various types of accomodation near to Queen’s University Belfast is available here.