Narrative ethics and COVID-19
19 OCTOBER 2022
Timezones
- 8pm to 9:30pm, Melbourne Australia AEST
- 10am to 11:30am, London
- 11am to 12:30pm, Johannesburg
The zoomlink will be sent prior to the event.
Proportionality in public health ethics, fear and state of exception: a narrative ethics approach to lockdown in Italy in 2020
Silvia Camporesi, King's College London
In this paper I tackle the following question: to what extent is it ethically justifiable to interfere with individual freedoms to manage a novel infectious disease outbreak? This article focuses on lockdown in Italy in 2020 and discusses an under-explored angle to the debate: the ban on outdoor exercise, which was unique to Italy in the European context of Covid-19 lockdowns. The paper proceeds as follows. I first provide a background on lockdown measures in Italy in 2020 and on the institutional framework for crisis management in Italy. I then outline the public health principles of proportionality and least infringement, before moving on to present the public perception and lived experiences of the ban on outdoor exercise in Italy in 2020. I then present a critical narrative ethics analysis of the statement of Emilia-Romagna Governor Stefano Bonaccini speaking to the press about his decision to introduce the restriction on outdoor exercise. I conclude discussing the implications of specific narratives employed to frame the emergency for the mobilization of types of expert knowledge to manage the crisis, for construction of cultural memory of the pandemic, and for its biopolitical legacy.
Silvia Camporesi is Associate Professor (Reader) in Bioethics and Society at King's College London, in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. Since 2015 she is the Director of the MSc in Bioethics & Society programme. Silvia is an interdisciplinary scholar, with a longstanding interest in biotechnologies and health. Silvia is author of more than 50 peer review articles in a variety of medical ethics, bioethics and scientific journals, and two books – From Bench to bedside to track & Field: the context of enhancement and its ethical relevance (2014, University of California Medical Humanities Press) and Bioethics, Genetics and Sport (with Mike McNamee, Routledge, 2018). She also writes for the wider audience. You can find out more about her research here: https://silviacamporesiresearch.org/
Covid Autofictions
Maria Vaccarella, University of Bristol
This presentation will explore creative writing responses to Covid19, more specifically fake Covid narratives on social media and established writers’ literary responses to Covid. I am interested in investigating to what extent these narratives contribute to and interrogate the presence of a globalized medical, as well as literary, community, while relying on an intricate web of transhistorical intertextual references.
Bio: Dr Maria Vaccarella is Senior Lecturer in Medical Humanities at the University of Bristol. She works on the intersection of literature and medicine, and she is a member of the steering committee of the Centre for Health, Humanities and Science. Her research explores the genre of illness narratives, with a special focus on non-linear and non-triumphalistic plots. She has recently completed a British Academy-Leverhulme-sponsored project on fake illness narratives and is currently writing a monograph, Doctoring Stories. Biomedicine in Contemporary Western Literature, on what narrative theory can learn from illness narratives. She is also interested in narrative medicine, critical disability studies, narrative bioethics, comparative literature, and graphic storytelling.