Shaping A More Just Bioethics: A Celebration of the Work of Susan Sherwin

In collaboration with the Canadian Society for Bioethics, the Department of Philosophy at Dalhousie University is hosting a one day workshop celebrating the work of Susan Sherwin on May 26, 2018. The workshop will be held immediately after the annual meeting of the Canadian Bioethics Society (May 23-25, 2018), which is also taking place in Halifax.

Susan Sherwin’s career is a career of firsts. She wrote the first philosophy PhD thesis on feminist ethics in North America in 1974 and published the first book length treatment of feminist bioethics almost twenty years later with No Longer Patient (1992). Her treatment of relational autonomy has been taken up by scholars within and beyond feminist communities, and is now regarded as part of the ‘canon’ of bioethics. Those of us who teach her articles in our bioethics classes have seen how conversations change as a result of Sherwin’s efforts to re-orient issues toward the experiences, circumstances, and contexts of people operating within oppressive systems. Sherwin brings a sense of real-world urgency to her work, whether on reproductive justice or looming public health crises, and this is no small part of her influence on the field.

Susan Sherwin has shaped feminist theory, ethics, and bioethics not only through her scholarly contributions, but also through her extraordinary commitment to the professional organizations that shape our discipline, including the Canadian Bioethics Society, the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy, the Canadian Philosophical Association, and the International Network for Feminist Approaches to Bioethics as well as her intellectual home, the Department of Philosophy and the Gender and Women’s Studies Programme at Dalhousie University. It is thus fitting that this celebration of her work is part of the celebrations for the 200th anniversary of the founding of Dalhousie University.

For more information contact: Letitia Meynell ([email protected]) or Kirstin Borgerson ([email protected])