Project Title:
ANTITHESES - A Discovery Platform for Transformative Inclusivity in Ethics and Humanities Research

Funding Source:
Wellcome Trust – Wellcome Discovery
(in partnership with University of Oxford)

Quantum:
S$1,094,644

Principal Investigator:
Michael Parker (Oxford)

Co-Investigators:
Patricia Kingori (Oxford), Mark Harrison (Oxford), Ilina Singh (Oxford), Domnic Wilkinson (Oxford), Julian Savulescu, Errol Francis (Culture&), Caesar Atuire (Oxford)

Project Summary

The ANTITHESES Platform for Transformative Inclusivity in Ethics and Humanities addresses an urgent need for research able to engage meaningfully with the radical value disagreements, polarisation, and informational uncertainty characteristic of contemporary medical science, practice,
and policy.

Available approaches to ethics and humanities research lack the concepts, methods, and tools to do this work. They have insufficient diversity of voices, are overly safe and conservative, and overwhelmingly Western. They have tended to exclude some problems and values as not ‘worthy’ of investigation or ‘too difficult’. New approaches are needed.

The Platform’s activities, which will develop and test tools and methods for achieving this, are organised under six complementary and connected thematic programmes. Bringing together expertise from history, philosophy, the fine arts, design bioethics, sociology, and global bioethics, each programme addresses a different need for new concepts, methods, digital tools, and collaborative partnerships capable of engaging with radical value disagreements in medical science, practice, and policy. To ensure that they work effectively together, and benefit from expertise in other disciplines, our ‘connectors’ programme will engage with problems arising out of the convergence of these challenges to foster collaboration.