The Exeter Istanbul Humanitarian Ethics research group investigates caring responses to human-made and natural disasters and their effects on people, especially current practices to provide medical aid for refugees and migrants.
Dimensions of human rights, gender perspectives, and religious/cultural difference are of prime interest, as well as the use and effects of new surveillance and therapeutic technologies. These themes define the frame of our current research. We also organise virtual seminars and post the recordings of these seminars online here and on our vimeo channel.
Our aim is to advance cross-cultural and comparative approaches to ethics and philosophy of medicine, exploring how socio-political and religious traditions and practices affect understandings of and responses to humanitarian crisis and clinical need. We cooperate with humanitarian aid organisations and conduct collaborative international research.
The Humanitarian Ethics research group is an interdisciplinary alliance of scholars in the Universities of Istanbul and Exeter, as well as at the BETIM Centre for Medical Humanities, also in Istanbul. The project has grown from the collaboration between the philosopher and ethicist Professor Christine Hauskeller at Exeter University and the late Medical Humanities Professor and physician Hakan Ertin at Istanbul University, who was also founder and Director of BETIM, the first Center for Medical Humanities in Turkey.