Rigorous intervention in the public arena aims to extend the practice of philosophy beyond its academic boundaries.
CAPPE members bring research expertise across philosophy, critical theory, politics, and other disciplines, and investigate the relationships and the application of these to wider, applied and public contexts. We host regular public events, bringing debates on contemporary philosophy, politics and ethics to a wider audience. As an interdisciplinary centre, CAPPE works with colleagues across the university, in the city of Brighton and Hove, where we are based, and with institutions across the globe. Our collaborative work and partnerships extend from Brighton to Stockholm, Buenos Aires, Ghent, Johannesburg, San Francisco, Verona and other parts of the world.
The University of Brighton has a productive partnership with Hydrocracker, one of the foremost and critically acclaimed site-specific theatre companies working in the UK.
The university has worked with Hydrocracker over a number of years, through its Understanding Violent Conflict research cluster and the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE). Most recently we have worked with Hydrocracker on their production, Operation Black Antler, which explored the murky world of undercover policing and was a big hit at the Brighton Festival 2016. The University staged a wide-ranging debate about the morality and politics of state surveillance to accompany the production and students took part in the production. Before that, the University also helped Hydrocracker research ideas about revenge and violence for Wild Justice, which won an Argus Angel at the Brighton Festival 2014.
We are currently working with Hydrocracker to explore ways of understanding what a future National Health Service (NHS) might look like.
The Centre for Ethics & Value Inquiry (CEVI) is based at Ghent University in Belgium where it is part of the Department of Philosophy and Moral Science.
It focuses on research and teaching on aspects of the ethics of globalisation and on ethics under the conditions of globalisation and is a founding member of the International Global Ethics Association (IGEA).
Its current research streams include Moral Epistemology, Migration, the Social Responsibilities of Organizations and Sexualities: CAPPE contributes in particular to the Moral Epistemology and the Sexualities streams: we have both an Erasmus exchange scheme and a collaborative conference scheme in place, and have cross-representation on each other’s Advisory Boards.
CAPPE is negotiating a memorandum of co-operation to support research and academic collaboration with the University of Verona.
Our first PhD students travelled to Verona in January 2016 for a two day research workshop, and we welcome colleagues from Verona to Brighton. This collaboration is part of ongoing work across Europe in the area of contemporary critical theory. This particular collaboration arises from a common interest in the politics of critique, with particular focus on the limits of biopolitical approaches to understanding the political. It is a particular pleasure to be working with Professor Adriano Cavarero and Professor Lorenzo Bernini as well as a number of PhD students and researchers in the Department of Philosophy, Education and Psychology.
MEDACT is a charity for health professionals and others working to improve health worldwide, understanding ‘health’ in the broadest way through the lens of social justice.
CAPPE works with it as the only NGO in the UK that sees improving health as a fundamentally social, political and ethical task rather than one that can be accomplished independently of those realities. In particular, we are developing ways of making academic use of the extensive archives of its “Preventing Torture” section in order collaboratively to identify, analyse and address inter-related issues of identity and responsibility that arise for the various participants in the making of UK asylum decisions based on clinical evidence of torture.
Following the appointment of Samuel Chambers as the Leverhulme Funded Visiting Professor at CAPPE, an exchange programme for doctoral students and other staff associated within CAPPE has been constructed with a view to collaborating and sharing ongoing research between the University of Brighton and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, specifically within the fields of critical theory and political philosophy.
CAPPE also works with universities in Sweden, the Netherlands, Greece, France and Austria in the area of contemporary post Marxist theory.
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