The ethics and politics of disability
The deadline for 2012 Doctoral College Studentships has now passed.
The Brighton Doctoral College is pleased to welcome applications from self-funded or externally sponsored students for programmes of research in this or a closely related area, beginning from September 2012. Applications are welcome from students wishing to study full time or part time, and applications are welcome from students in employment who have the support of their employers.
- Based in the Faculty of Arts
- Supervisors: Professor Bob Brecher; Dr Hannah MacPherson.
Application deadline
The university cannot guarantee that students can start at their requested date unless deadlines are met.
- UK/EU students: The deadline for the university to receive applications for an entry date of October is the 1 August, for January entry it is the 1 November and for May it is the 1 March.
- International students: The deadline for the university to receive applications for an entry date of October is the 1 June, for January entry it is the 1 September and for May it is the 1 January.
The arguments of disability groups concerning both assumptions about ‘the normal’ and the impact of such assumptions on people who are either ‘disabled’ or ‘differently abled’ – there is no neutral language here – raise fundamental issues both about the nature of personhood and the interplay between theorisations of personhood and everyday ethical and political practice.
This project seeks to explore these issues in a manner that brings together moral/political philosophy with one or more case studies of the lived experience of what is conventionally described as dealing with disability, whether physical or mental; its focus is precisely the question adumbrated above of the possibility of an inter-related set of conceptualisations that neither does violence to the realities of people’s lives nor to the very possibility of making those normative judgments on which policy cannot but instantiate. Arising out of the recently initiated Disability, Ethics and Aesthetics research project, and its associated seminars, hosted by CAPPE and coordinated by Dr MacPherson, the project seeks applications that combine relevant philosophical expertise with experience/interest in the everyday ethics and politics of disability. It is envisaged that the project will (a) complement a current doctoral project, supervised by Professor Brecher, analysing the distribution of economic inequalities brought about by recent advances in genetics that – rightly or wrongly – make possible decisions about ‘What sort of people should there be?” (Jonathan Glover); and (b) constitute a response to/development of Brecher’s ‘What is Wrong with Eliminating Genetically Based Disability?’, Public Health Ethics 4 (3) 2011,218-225. Candidates are invited to visit CAPPE.
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