School of Social and Political Science

Description

This Ethical Pressures of Thinking colloquium is dedicated to an interdisciplinary exploration of what is involved when we are listening for, or on the lookout for, ethics in our material and how this is parsed differently across philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. We are welcoming Dr Birgitte Schepelern Johansen and Dr Thomas Brudholm from University of Copenhagen together with UoE colleagues Professor Nichola Khan and Dr Lotte Segal who will each offer 10-minute interventions on how they approach ethics within and across these disciplines. Dr Steve Kirkwood will be acting as discussant, and the overall colloquium is held together by a shared emphasis on the ethical reflection occurring in the wake of harm, injury and violence. How do we listen for ethics and how is this expressed in our writing are the questions tying the different interventions together. There should be ample time for discussion as we have set aside 2 hours for this session.

Birgitte Shepelern Johansen, PhD (Sociology of Religion) and Associate Professor, Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Johansen’s work explores the normative structures of societal processes of in-and exclusion, currently with a focus on hate crimes and hate incidents targeting minoritized persons.
 
Thomas Brudholm, PhD (Philosophy) and Associate Professor, Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Brudholm’s research centers on philosophical contributions to the interdisciplinary study of the ethics and politics of responses to wrongdoing (from genocide to hate crime and offensive behavior). Together with Birgitte, Lotte and PhD student Marie Leine, Thomas is leading the project Afterthoughts https://ccrs.ku.dk/research/centres-and-projects/afterthoughts/.
 
Nichola Khan is an anthropologist and Professor of Human Geography and Ethnography at the University of Edinburgh. She has worked on contemporary and historical refugee migration in Pakistan and from Afghanistan. She is currently conducting research onto migrant psychiatry in Paris, following ways racial cleavages in rights and medicine, and ongoing imperial logics of border and immigration in France, move through migrant life and clinical encounters.
 
Dr Steve Kirkwood is Head of Social Work at the University of Edinburgh. His research explores: 1) the role of interaction in justice social work practice with people responsible for criminal harm; 2) the potential of restorative justice to enhance the response to criminal harm; and 3) the nature of discourse in relation to people who have experienced forced migration.
 
Lotte Buch Segal is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, UoE and has worked on issues of political violence, care, ethics and relationship among the families of political prisoners in Palestine. A second strand of her research ask what it means to live in the aftermath of torture, with an emphasis on survivors of torture now living in Denmark, also emphasising the personal and professional care they encounter.