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The international growth and influence of bioethics has led some to identify it as a decisive shift in the location and exercise of 'biopower'. This book provides an in-depth study of how philosophers, lawyers and other 'outsiders' came to play a major role in discussing and helping to regulate issues that used to be left to doctors and scientists. It discusses how club regulation stemmed not only from the professionalising tactics of doctors and scientists, but was compounded by the 'hands-off' approach of politicians and professionals in fields such as law, philosophy and theology. The book outlines how theologians such as Ian Ramsey argued that 'transdisciplinary groups' were needed to meet the challenges posed by secular and increasingly pluralistic societies. It also examines their links with influential figures in the early history of American bioethics. The book centres on the work of the academic lawyer Ian Kennedy, who was the most high-profile advocate of the approach he explicitly termed 'bioethics'. It shows how Mary Warnock echoed governmental calls for external oversight. Many clinicians and researchers supported her calls for a 'monitoring body' to scrutinise in vitro fertilisation and embryo research. The growth of bioethics in British universities occurred in the 1980s and 1990s with the emergence of dedicated centres for bioethics. The book details how some senior doctors and bioethicists led calls for a politically-funded national bioethics committee during the 1980s. It details how recent debates on assisted dying highlight the authority and influence of British bioethicists.
firing, commentators, politicians and university leaders alike were predicting that the war would reshape the world of British universities. 4 First, they anticipated that science would grow in importance; and second, they expected British networks to swing towards the United States. In the latter part of the war Nature magazine published several articles about the
continued inflow of returning staff and international students from former colonial institutions shaped new communities and cultures at the University of London (including LSE) from the late 1960s. These overseas students’ radical activities within Britain helped to highlight and challenge racial issues and postcolonial outlooks within British universities and among students. Britain
chap 1 23/9/03 1:14 pm Page 3 1 Uncertainty, economy and improvisation In 1973 the finances of most British universities lay at the mercy of politicians and were subject to capricious cuts in public spending. Their precarious situation was a consequence of the state-financed expansion of the previous decades. What taxpayers gave, their elected representatives could pare and trim when the economy wilted and crisis loomed. In the midst of high inflation both Conservative and Labour governments failed to compensate universities for increases in the cost of
complicated and sometimes ambivalent, imperial connections of students and higher education. 5 Changes in the British Empire from the early twentieth century had an impact on overseas students and British universities more generally. The networks that Pietsch described were destabilised in the interwar period and ‘finally unwound’ in the 1960s. 6 During the 1960s, as the ‘winds of change’ swept through Africa
’s reception of displaced German academics has thus been typically characterised as ‘a story to restore faith in humanity and in the fraternity of brains’.5 Against a backcloth of Nazi obscurantism has been set ‘the spontaneous rising of our [British] universities and those who worked and lived there in defence of free learning’.6 By early May the vice-chancellors of British universities had been fully alerted to the crisis in the German academy by a flood of applications for posts, many from established leaders in their academic fields. Some responded 35 ‘Jews and other
British institutions and students studying or preparing to study in the United Kingdom. First, the (usually temporary) migration of students to Britain was mainly a result of the unequal relationship in power between the two countries. What began as a bare trickle of Indian students to British universities in 1843 swelled to 100 in 1880, 336 by 1900, and between 1700 and 1800 in 1913
interdisciplinary ‘meeting ground’. Chapter 5 examines the growth of bioethics in British universities during the 1980s and 1990s. I show how figures such as Kennedy claimed that ‘non-medical’ input in ethics teaching would benefit student doctors during the early 1980s. This stance ensured that senior doctors supported new interdisciplinary courses in medical ethics, which were predominantly aimed at student doctors and healthcare professionals. I also show how the emergence of dedicated centres for bioethics was consolidated by government cuts in university funding, which
, democratisation and marketisation of university institutions. In order to situate current framings of campus conflicts, I therefore begin with a brief genealogical account of how the meanings attributed to Palestine–Israel activism within the British university context have changed over time. Student pro-Palestine and pro-Zionist campaigns first began to garner momentum in Britain during the Cold War and were deeply enmeshed in its binary ideological framework. Within international student arenas, the General Union of Palestinian Students, established in 1959, became aligned
For over four decades, events in Palestine-Israel have provoked raging conflicts between members of British universities, giving rise to controversies around free speech, ‘extremism’, antisemitism and Islamophobia within higher education, which have been widely reported in the media and subject to repeated interventions by politicians. But why is this conflict so significant for student activists living at such a geographical distance from the region itself? And what role do emotive, polarised communications around Palestine-Israel play in the life of British academic institutions committed to the ideal of free expression?
This book invites students, academics and members of the public who feel concerned with this issue to explore the sources of these visceral encounters on campus. Drawing on original ethnographic research with conflicting groups of activists, it explores what is at stake for students who are drawn into struggles around Palestine-Israel within changing university spaces facing pressures associated with neoliberalism and the ‘War on Terror’. It begins from this case study to argue that, in an increasingly globalised world that is shaped by entangled histories of the Nazi Holocaust and colonial violence, members of universities must develop creative and ethical ways of approaching questions of justice.
Tragic Encounters and Ordinary Ethics curates an ethnographic imagination in response to the political tensions arising out of the continuing violence in Palestine-Israel. It invites students and academics to attend to lived experiences within our own university institutions in order to cultivate ethical forms of communication in response to conflicts of justice.