The Centre for Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Wrocław has the honor to invite you to another lecture in the series „International Voices in Children’s Literature Studies”. The lecture entitled “Ethical Choices of Health Care Practitioners About Future Children in Selected Young Adult Dystopia” will be delivered in English by prof. Anna Bugajska (University Ignatianum in Kraków).
The lecture will take place on 20 June at 18:00 on the MS Teams platform. Link to register: https://forms.office.com/e/XDGAnPYuF8.
About lecture:
The talk is the fruit of research into the intersections of bioethics, posthumanities, young adult literature, and medical humanities. It flows directly from the belief in the crucial role children’s and young adult literature plays in the formation of the attitudes that help shape the future world. It can sensitize and desensitize the future health care practitioners and the general public to a number of issues, in particular to those arising as a consequence of biotechnological progress. Among others, following the infamous child experiments (Hornblum, Newman, Dober 2013), the identification of the artificially created life as “vile bodies,” (Chamayou 2008) designed to be experimented upon, can be particularly harmful. Given the experiments involving human- animal hybrids, genetic modification of humans, and organoids, the children of the future might be what we now think of as posthumans: more or less artificially created beings that may be put outside the protective umbrella of rights that protect human patients, enabling various types of abuse. As the debate about posthuman rights and the relevance of posthumanities to the global public health is going on, I would like to show some ethical stances towards clones and hybrids in two series of dystopian books for young adults: Nancy Farmer’s Matteo Alacrån (2002; 2013) and James Patterson’s Maximum Ride. What emerges from both of these series is the necessity to rethink medical ethics in the face of the challenges that are nowadays encountered by traditional ethical models. In particular, the authors reach to veterinary ethics and the extended concept of care that would help answer doubts about the status of the newly created beings and the consequent code of conduct towards the future children.
Bio:
Associate Professor at the University Ignatianum in Kraków, where she is the Head of the Institute of Modern Languages and the Language and Culture Studies Department, and actively collaborates with the General and Applied Ethics Department. She received her Ph.D. from the Jagiellonian University for her work on 18th-century literature, and her post-doctoral degree (habilitacja) from the University of Silesia for her work on dystopian literature. She is a member of various organizations, like the Utopian Studies Society – Europe, and participates in expert groups and meetings within the fields of humanization in healthcare and utopianism. Her publications concern contemporary problems related to technological progress and biopolitics, also in young adult literature. Her book, The Evantropian Project in Young Adult Dystopias (2019), appeared in Ignatianum University Press.
