Research

On-going Projects

 

2012-2017 Towards An Ethics of Bodily Giving

We can give of our bodies in new ways, to others, and this under our own life-time through live organ, tissue, gamete and blood donation as well as surrogate motherhood (when women give of their bodies as sites for embryos to grow) and participation in clinical research (where participants offer their bodies as sites for testing of new therapies and drugs). These forms of bodily giving evoke ethical questions, to be addressed within this research programme (in a way that both acknowledges similarities and differences between these forms of bodily giving). Furthermore, this research also examines so-called pre-reflective bodily giving where we give of our bodies without reflectively thinking about what and how we do so (Swedish Collegium for Avanced Studies, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond).

 

2011-2012 Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine (book project)

Both feminist theory and phenomenology of the body examine taken-for-granted norms and assumptions, and yet some suggest that these perspectives can be difficult to combine. Whereas phenomenologists have made valuable contributions to the analysis of the nature of medicine, the meaning of illness and health as well as clinical practice, there have been comparably few analyses of such issues that combine insights from feminist theory and philosophy with phenomenology. The edited volume Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine combine these perspectives in new ways. Editors: Kristin Zeiler and Lisa Folkmarson Käll. Authors: Abby Wilkerson, Cressida J. Heyes, Ellen Feder, Erik Malmqvist, Fredrik Svenaeus, Gail Weiss, Kristin Zeiler, Lisa Guntram, Lanei M. Rodemeyer, Linda Fisher, Lisa Folkmarsson Käll, Margrit Schildrick, Nikki Sullivan, Paul Qualtere-Burcher, Sarah LaChance Adams, Samantha Murray.

Selection of Previous Projects

2009- Spring 2012 Personhood and Dementia

The project’s aim is to examine the ways in which individuals with Alzheimer’s disease can maintain their identity and sense of self, in interactions with relatives and health care staff, at different stages of the disease. The philosophical part of the project involves an analysis of conceptions of personhood. It also presents and argues for an intercorporeal conception of personhood that acknowledges the role of  embodiment and relationality (financed by FAS).

Spring 2012 Relational Selfhood and Relational Autonomy in Dementia Care (project within CEDER)

The aim of the project is to elaborate a relational conception of the self, and a relational conception of autonomy. Recent feminist phenomenological work suggests that it is useful to examine the space in between self and other as an expressive space where both self and other are formed in relation to each other. Research on intersubjectivity has examined how individuals create meaning together – also when we live with dementia. The project draws on both of these perspectives, and examines implications of this conception of relational autonomy in the context of dementia care (financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond). Together with Lisa F Käll.

2009-2011 Doing Sex
The project examined how norms about female and male bodies are negotiated, strengthened and questioned in medical practice and everyday life, in different substudies. As an example, one substudy examined, phenomenologically, parents' experiences of having a child with unclear sex. Few parents-to-be consider that their child may be born with external and internal genitals, gonadal structures, sex chromosomes or hormone levels that are not typical only for one sex. Still, parents of a newborn child with unclear sex are expected to make a far-reaching decision for the child: should the child be operated upon so that it has either female or male genitals? (financed by LiU-Assistant Professorship grant).

2006-2008 The Ethics of Parental Live Kidney Donation
This project explored narratives of parents who are live kidney donors. It combined a narrative analysis of interviews with a philosophical analysis of conditions for decision-making – applied to this particular context (partly financed by Svenska Läkaresällskapet).

2006-2007 Self and Other in Global Bioethics
This project explored the conditions for global bioethics from within the perspective of critical hermeneutics. (financed by Strategic funding, Department of Health and Society, Linköping University).

2000-2005 Chosen Children
This project, on the ethics of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and germ-line gene therapy, combined qualitative analysis of interviews with Italian, British and Swedish geneticists and gynaecologists with a conceptual, philosophical analysis of the concepts of choice, autonomous choice and trust (financed by the ELSA National Research Program, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research).

Page responsible: kristin.zeiler@liu.se
Last updated: Fri Jul 06 14:20:21 CEST 2012