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Public Engagement

Hello and thank you for visiting the engagement pages of Oxford Ethics and Humanities. Here you can find details on our current and previous projects, evaluation reports and information on our approach to engagement, which are all underpinned by our Public Engagement Strategy.

OUR APPROACH TO PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

Our public engagement programme is comprised of three closely related and interconnected sets of activities.

Through consultation we ensure that our research is informed by public views, concerns, and perspectives.

Through collaboration, we encourage and enable public involvement in our research.
Through informational activities we aim to inspire publics to engage in discussion of important ethical issues.

A key theme throughout this work is the use of different and innovative approaches to facilitating discussion and debate. Our public engagement programme places an emphasis on creative activities that provide opportunities for audiences to reflect and discuss issues with the researchers involved and therefore shape this research.

In its engagement activities, we work in close collaboration with the University of Oxford’s public engagement with research programmes. 

WHY WE DO PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

Developments in neuroscience, genomics, and data science, together with rapidly increasing global connectedness call for a radical rethinking of the norms underpinning the ethics of biomedical science and technological innovation. Oxford Ethics and Humanities complements its research activities with an integrated programme of public engagement to encourage varied and even polarising opinions on all our research themes from diverse public groups.

The development of effective solutions to the problems presented by advances made in these new areas of science and technology, requires multiple perspectives and experiences. It is vital for such deliberation to be inclusive and diverse if it is to be relevant to those in need and capable of commanding well-founded public trust and confidence. For these reasons, we pay particular attention to the engagement of underrepresented and underserved groups. We seek to understand the barriers that exist in engagement and to ensure we actively enable a variety of audiences and publics to shape and inform our work at the OEH.