Gender as structural and epistemic vulnerability in global health emergencies
Dr Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra, Chancellor's Fellow in Legal & Ethical Aspects of Biomedicine, Co-Director, Mason Institute for Medicine, Life Science and the Law, University of Edinburgh
Wednesday, 20 March 2019, 11am to 12.30pm
Ethox and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities are based at the Big Data Institute, University of Oxford, Li Ka Shing Centre for Health Information and Discovery, Old Road Campus, Oxford OX3 7FZ. The talk will be held in seminar room 0.
abstract
In this paper, I take cases from various Global Health Emergencies, such as the story of Salome Karwah Harris (the Liberian nurse who was at the forefront of the Ebola fight and died during childbirth in 2017) among others, to examine to what extent gender can be a marker of structural and epistemic vulnerabilities. While emergencies are sites of a range of health-related vulnerabilities, they are also contexts in which dispositional vulnerability can rapidly transform into occurrent vulnerability and injustice, if responses are not informed by existing inherent and situational factors. Using the lenses of structural and epistemic vulnerabilities, as well as non-ideal theory, I ask how responses and moral obligations can be developed that are both attuned to the demands of justice and of a non-ideal moral context.