The Ethics Center is enormously pleased to be a part of a recently awarded $1 million NSF grant to build a "Federal Advanced Data and Statistics Hub" (F-DASH)!
Scientific research increasingly points to the importance of “epigenetics” – factors that alter gene activity without changing the underlying sequence – to health. Epigenetic modifications can change when and how a gene expresses itself, for example, and can lead to increased risks of conditions ranging from metabolic syndrome to lupus to various cancers. Some of these effects appear to be reversible, but a body of research strongly suggests that early-life or even in utero exposure to some environmental factors can affect someone’s health for the rest of their lives, by changing...
Please join us for the annual Ethics Center Breakfast on Wed. Sept. 11, 7:30-9:00, Cone 112!
We'll have our annual opportunity to reconnect with one another, as well as announcements and discussion about Center programming for the upcoming year. We're very excited about some of what we've been able to line up, including an in-depth series on the emerging discipline of epigenetics, which studies how gene expression can be influenced by environmental and other factors, as well as programming in data science and other initiatives. As a Center supporter, your participation...
People that are socially dead are people that are denied the right to have rights; they are denied personhood and can be violated with little repercussions. Social death is produced through processes of social valuing, of considering some life more valuable than other, and the criminal legal system is essential to these valuing processes. In her presentation, Dr. Martha Escobar draws from the framework of social death and highlights some of the ways that Latinx (im)migrant lifers’ status of living dead shapes their experiences trying to obtain parole. This is part of a larger research...
Registration for the Annual Ethics and Social Work Conference is now open! The Conference theme is "Ethics of Trauma and Resilience in Integrated Behavioral Healthcare." Social work professionals participating in the conference will receive 4.5 continuing ethics-education credits sufficient to meet annual NASW requirements.
All conference events will be held at UNC Charlotte Center City Campus (320 E. 9th St.). Registration ($50; see below) includes parking, along with breakfast (networking session with professionals and...
This working paper is meant to be the introductory chapter of my forthcoming book “Embodied Politics.” In this chapter, I argue that there are two predominant theoretical approaches to health and its promotion, both of which are based in an activist politics. On the one hand, we think of health as a social justice “good,” especially for vulnerable populations living in a neoliberal system that produces inequity. Given this understanding of health, pro-migrant activists want to promote it wherever and whenever we can as a means to offset health inequities and as a matter of physical...
A lot of theoretical and applied discussion of biohacking has focused on either making an argument for its revolutionary potential to democratize access to biotechnologies or warn of the possible destructive and dangerous potential of the practice. This talk aims to move the conversation beyond these two binaries. Instead of making an argument about whether biohacking is “good” or “bad” for society, I want to look at how the practice discursively and affectively constructs bodies, communities, and politics. I argue that biohacking aims to disrupt bodily memory – or those affects and...
Justice Morgan will start with some remarks from the podium and then will sit down with two Pre-law Society leaders for a wide ranging conversation about the role of courts, his career and advice he may have for our students. Toward the end of the hour we will also allow audience members to ask him questions.