Research
Kristin Zeiler is the principal investigator of the interdisciplinary research project “Towards an Ethics of Bodily Giving and Sharing in Medicine” and will work on this project during her stay at CRASSH. The project examines ethical, social and cultural aspects of bodily giving practices (e.g. live kidney, uterus, tissue, and egg donation as well as surrogate motherhood) in medicine and investigates tensions in conceptions about giving, sharing, altruism, autonomy, and exploitation with the aim of elaborating an ethics of bodily giving in medicine. She will be working with a monograph with the preliminary title Sharing One’s Body: Corporeal Generosity and Its Ethical Limits.
About
Kristin Zeiler received a PhD from Linköping University in 2005 with the thesis “Chosen Children? An Empirical and Philosophical Analysis of Moral Aspects of Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis and Germ-line Gene Therapy.” She is Associate Professor and Docent of Ethics at Linköping University, Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala University, and has previously been Ethics Fellow at Cardiff University and postdoctoral researcher at the World Health Organization, Geneva. Her research examines how medical treatment, the use of new technology as well as experiences of pain and illness can form our self-understandings and ways of engaging with others and the world, intersubjective meaning-making in ethically loaded situations in health care, and ethical, social and cultural dimensions of the development and use of new medical therapy, technology and surgery. She has investigated philosophical, ethical and socio-cultural aspects of organ donation, the use of reproduction technologies, sex assignment and surgery on children born with intersex anatomies, and relational autonomy and intercorporeality in dementia care. Zeiler’s publications include: “A Phenomenology of Excorporation, Bodily Alienation and Resistance. Rethinking Sexed and Racialized Embodiment” in Hypatia (2012); “A Philosophical Defense of the Idea that Individuals Can Be Held in Personhood by Others: Intercorporeal Personhood in Dementia Care” in Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy (2014), and Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine (edited by Zeiler and Folkmarson Käll, 2014), State University of New York Press.
