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- Convenors:
-
Luigigiovanni Quarta
(Università di Bergamo)
Lorenzo Urbano (Politecnico di Milano)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 02/026
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
What are the local articulations of moral concepts? This panel aims to explore the way morality and ethics "come to life" through relationships and creative acts of subjects, and to reflect on how key concepts in moral discourse are shaped and transformed through the experience of the everyday.
Long Abstract:
Since the so-called "ethical turn" at the beginning of the 21st century, anthropological interest in morality and ethics has exploded, with multiple authors and perspectives on the way people live their moral/ethical life (Laidlaw 2002; Zigon 2008; Fassin 2014; Keane 2016). Even with the variety of this relatively amorphous "field", one suggestion has been constant: if words like "good" or "right" have meaning, this meaning is determined by their situated and contingent use in everyday life.
In his introduction to the Companion to Moral Anthropology, Didier Fassin (2012) argues that an anthropology of morality, a "moral anthropology", must pay attention to how morality and ethics are embedded in the social, the political, the economical: these dimensions never come to us as disconnected. And they are never disconnected from our own practices and representations as ethnographers. We are agents in the field, and we help shape moral and ethical concepts and narratives as much as any other person that inhabits that field.
We invite contributors to problematise these two dimensions, and the different theoretical and ethnographic horizons they open, reflecting on their own fieldwork. What are the articulations of moral concepts that we find in the field, and where can we find them? What is the line that separates the descriptive and the prescriptive, when we talk about morality and the ethical life of subjects? We are, in particular, interested in the intersection between epistemology and (ethnographic) practice in the study of the moral and the ethical (Lambek 2015).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
What does "being responsible" mean in the context of bottom-up initiatives of research and technological innovation in healthcare? This contribution aims to explore articulations of the concept of moral responsibility among communities of patients and caregivers.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, the paradigm of "Responsible Research and Innovation" has taken root as a way of conducting scientific research and facilitating innovation in technology and services through the direct involvement of citizens or specific communities of end-users. RRI has become the framework of choice for projects that aim to foster the participation of lay people throughout processes of research and development. Especially in healthcare, RRI means paying attention to specific problems of specific people, and developing specific solutions that may apply to a relatively small group of patients.
But what happens if the idea of doing research and innovation "responsibly" is appropriated by entities that operate outside the boundaries of healthcare institutions, both public and private? This paper explores articulations of responsibility in three such entities, investigating the meaning of "being responsible" that emerges from representations, narratives, and practices of research and innovation in these contexts. The focus will be twofold. On the one hand, on responsibility as attention to the peculiar needs of patients and caregivers: this entails the shifting of priorities and perspectives from those of institutions and markets to those of communities and individuals. On the other hand, on responsibility as care: through the involvement of different groups of stakeholders in research and innovation, these processes cease to be just a way to find a solution to a problem, and become a way for these communities to take care of each other, and create relationships of solidarity and mutual aid.
Paper short abstract:
This paper shows partial results of a larger ongoing research project on embryo donation between Italy and Spain started in 2020. I will focus on comparing local articulations of moral concepts related to embryo donation and which narratives are used by my informants.
Paper long abstract:
As soon as in vitro fertilization (IVF) was established in 1970 (Banchoff, 2011), the practical legal and ethical question of embryos cryopreservation emerged. “Extra embryos” may be transferred immediately to other patients’ wombs, disposed of, or cryopreserved for embryo donation for family building (EDFB).
EDFB was first reported in 1983 (Trounsen et al., 1983), and since then it has been described as a controversial practice that raises many bioethical and moral concerns and questions around the globe. It an accepted practice in numerous countries, like in Spain (Bankowski et al., 2005), while it is forbidden in others, like in Italy (Calhaz-Jorge et al. 2020). Literature shows dominant discourse found was related to the life discourse, namely embryo as a human life (Goedeke et al., 2017). In anthropology, EDFB remains an understudied phenomenon, the exception being a few publications based on data literature on embryo donation based on data collected in California and examining Christian embryo adoption programs which relate to them as frozen souls needed to be saved (Collard et al., 2011). Interestingly, embryo donation programs prefer the language of adoption (Helm, 2008) with intended parents describing it as a “morally preferable alternative” and framing it as a salvific action towards early human life (Cromer, 2018). My paper shows partial results of a larger ongoing research project on embryo donation between Italy and Spain started in 2020. I will focus on comparing local articulations of moral concepts related to embryo donation and which narratives are used by my informants.
Paper short abstract:
In the field of organs’ donation decisions are the result of a breakage of clinical imaginary of physicians. Ethnographically grounded analysis show us that all ethical subjectivities concerned in the donation’s choice embed moral worlds legitimating or (de)constructing clinical practices.
Paper long abstract:
Focusing on my ethnographic research carried out on organs’ transplantation from December 2018 to march 2020, I will reflect on two aspects involved in the procurement’s process.
Firstly, in an intensive care, different subjectivities are engaged in donation, everyone using a specific lexicon and her own biographical path. There are physicians relating themselves to procurement’s process in terms of resources for care; nurses suspended between the clinical necessity of a well-done process of procurement and the safeguard of emotions of dead person’s relatives; the relatives living their dramatic moment, needing to elaborate the concept of death and taking a choice concerning the integrity of their relative’s body. We find also other forgotten subjectivities: far from our intensive care, there is someone – with his affective and family context – on hold of a form of care: an organ. Different orders of complexity pass through the social space of this encounter: legislative order, affective order, cognitive order.
Secondly, I want to underpin that choice in organs’ transplantation depends mainly on the moral imaginary of dead person’s relatives. In their choice, they find an outcome of their entire biography, discovering the affective sense of the history of their dead loved ones and of their moral projection in the future. Their decision is often the result of a breakage of clinical imaginary of physicians, obliged to force legislative protocols in order to legitimate the relatives’ affective experiences, and may become a generative mechanism of a different moral practices of all subjectivities involved in.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how ethics is shaped in two groups of philosophical practice. Practitioners of this emerging field aim to transform philosophy and embed it in everyday life. Through a concept of dwelling the paper suggests ethics is integrated in practice and subjectivity shaping.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I will examine the shaping of ethics as it manifests itself during the retreats of philosophical practice. I see the shaping of ethics as being more than “a modality of social action or of being in the world” as suggested by Lambek (2010: 10). Zigon (2014: 750-751) criticized this suggestion as ambiguous, rising to the Durkheimian equation of social with moral. He proposes instead a concept of dwelling that is continuous and requires an involved being-in-the-world, “to acknowledge that to be human is always to be concernedly intertwined in a world with others, and this being-together always manifests differently.” (2014: 758).
I study this intertwining through an emergent phenomenon of philosophical practice, a field that sprang out in Germany and USA in the early 1980’s striving to defy social anomie and alienation. This paper is based on fieldwork I conducted during 2018-2019 group retreats in Italy and Norway to understand how practitioners transform philosophy into everyday practice.
I argue that philosophical practice presents itself as an ethical endeavor that evolves continuously connecting different spheres of human existence like philosophical knowledge and everyday experience. Rather than distinctive guidelines, retreats offer an integrative being-in-the world, “inter- and intra-active” openness of dwelling (Zigon, 2014:758) that combines “ethical spirit” (Das, 2015: 116) with knowledge and practice. I propose that a different combination of ethics, knowledge and practice in each of the two groups has a unique impact on both the shaping of practice but also the self-making of the retreat participants.