WCB ABSTRACT INFORMATION
The deadline for WCB abstract submission is Monday, 1 September 2025 at 24h00 (SAST)
Theme: Comforting and Disturbing Bioethics
In a recent open letter in Wellcome Open Research, Alenichev, et. al. problematise the notion of “invisibility”. They write: “In recent years, the global health community has been increasingly reporting the problem of ‘invisibility’ as aspects of health and wellbeing that are often overlooked and ignored, and predominantly affect the most marginalized and precarious people…. Moving forward, we argue that in dealing with an intersectional issue such as invisibility, twenty-first century global health bioethics could pursue a more ‘disturbing’ framework, challenging the narrow comforting solutions and sociomaterial inequalities of the sociopolitical status quo. We highlight that comforting and disturbing bioethical frameworks should not be considered as opposing sides, but as two approaches working in tandem in order to achieve the internationally set global health milestones of providing better health and wellbeing for everyone”.
(https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/8-191/v1).
With this as a backdrop, the proposed theme for the Congress is Comforting and Disturbing Bioethics.
Bioethics both comforts and disturbs, supports and challenges, reassures and disrupts. Sometimes it is the task of ethics to provide sufficient moral clarity and guidance to enable people to make sound choices, accept difficult outcomes, be considerate of others, act with integrity and relieve moral distress. At other times its task is to problematise assumptions, advocate for the vulnerable, speak truth to power, confront prejudice, challenge ignorance and combat injustice.
Bioethics provides comfort to the extent that it ensures that research participants are protected from harm and abuse through the many mechanisms of oversight that have been put in place. It disturbs when it insists that the benefits and burdens of research be justly distributed. Consider how in a clinical context bioethics may provide comfort to family members facing the prospect of removing a loved one from life support, by offering clarity that it is not the withdrawal of treatment that causes the death, but the underlying condition, or that continuing treatment that cannot improve the patient’s condition may be more harmful than withdrawing it. By contrast, bioethics might be a disturbing voice when a patient is being subjected to unnecessary treatment only for financial gain. Bioethics provided comfort in the form of relieving clinicians’ moral distress when choices had to be made on which patients to prioritise during the Covid pandemic by providing triage protocols; it disturbed when the hoarding of vaccines by wealthy nations was called out in the name of solidarity. Bioethics disturbs when it insists that all nations should work towards ensuring access to adequate healthcare and to the social determinants of health; it comforts when it requires all health workers to commit to treating patients with respect and compassion.
The theme of this conference invites bioethicists to present work that comforts or disturbs, or both comforts and disturbs, in any area of bioethics.
Themes
Theme 1:
Comforting or disturbing bioethical discourse on invisibility, discrimination, inequity or injustice
Theme 2:
Comforting or disturbing bioethics in global and public health
Theme 3:
Comforting or disturbing environmental bioethics
Theme 4:
Comforting or disturbing bioethical reflections on healthcare and clinical practice
Theme 5:
Comforting or disturbing engagement on the pluriversality of theories of bioethics
Theme 6:
Comforting and disturbing perspectives on research ethics and integrity
Theme 7:
Comforting and disturbing bioethics of emerging technologies
Sub-themes
1. COMFORTING OR DISTURBING BIOETHICAL DISCOURSE ON INVISIBILITY, DISCRIMINATION, INEQUITY OR INJUSTICE.
1.1. Bioethics and racial justice
1.2. Ethics and gender or sexual minorities
1.3. Disability ethics: Disability rights and the ethics of accessibility
1.4. Bioethics, aging and the elderly
1.5. Bioethics and the care and protection of children
1.6. Ethics and migrants/refugees/asylum seekers
1.7. Ethics and first nation and indigenous peoples
1.8. Building bioethics capacity in Africa, the global
South and beyond
1.9. Rural healthcare access and ethics
1.10. Mental health stigma and discrimination
1.11. Ethics of healthcare for displaced populations
1.12. Other
2. COMFORTING OR DISTURBING BIOETHICS IN GLOBAL AND PUBLIC HEALTH.
2.1. Bioethics of global health emergencies and
pandemic responses
2.2. Ethics and epidemiology
2.3. Ethics and the treatment and management of
infectious diseases
2.4. Ethics and health promotion interventions
2.5. Ethics and non-communicable disease management
2.6. Vaccine ethics: Vaccine equity, distribution, and
hesitancy
2.7. Bioethics and the social determinants of health
2.8. Poverty, inequity or neglect in global health
2.9. Global power structures, geopolitics, and their
impact on health and healthcare
2.10. Solidarity in global bioethics
2.11. Health system resilience and ethics
2.12. Ethics of health worker migration
2.13. Ethics in humanitarian health interventions
2.14. The role of bioethics in addressing poverty, inequity,
and neglect
2.15. Ethical challenges related to foreign aid for health
programmes
2.16. Bioethics, health and war
2.17. Other
3. COMFORTING OR DISTURBING ENVIRONMENTAL
BIOETHICS
3.1. Integrating environmental justice in the scope of
bioethics
3.2. Healthcare’s environmental impact
3.3. Climate change, ecological ethics, and human health
3.4. Climate ethics
3.5. Ethical implications of the Anthropocene
3.6. Inter-generational justice and responsibilities to
future generations
3.7. Food security and bioethics
3.8. Urban health and environmental justice
3.9. Bioethics and biodiversity loss
3.10. Ethical obligations to non-human life
3.11. One Health and One Planet approaches
3.12. Indigenous environmental philosophy and practice
3.13. Indigenous ecological knowledge and environmental
stewardship
3.14. Ethics of space exploration and exploitation
4. COMFORTING OR DISTURBING BIOETHICAL
REFLECTIONS ON HEALTHCARE AND CLINICAL
PRACTICE
4.1. Bioethics, autonomy and clinical practice
4.2. Beginning of life, reproductive health,
rights/responsibilities and bioethics
4.3. Paediatric ethics
4.4. End of life ethical issues (assisted dying, palliative
care, advance directives)
4.5. The ethics of clinical triage and resource allocation
4.6. Mental health ethics
4.7. Sustainability in healthcare
4.8. Health professional ethics
4.9. Ethical responsibilities towards health workers
4.10. Health worker well-being and moral distress/injury
4.11. Conscientious objection and professional obligations
4.12. Practice in a context of health system failure
4.13. Ethics of resource allocation in low-resource
settings
4.14. Cross-cultural medical decision-making
4.15. Emergency and disaster healthcare ethics
4.16. Medical ethics in contexts of failing health systems
4.17. Ethics and integrating traditional, alternative, and
indigenous medicine into ethical practice
4.18. Other
5. COMFORTING OR DISTURBING ENGAGEMENT ON THE
PLURIVERSALITY OF THEORIES OF BIOETHICS
5.1. De-colonising bioethics: moving beyond Western
paradigms
5.2. Principlism revisited
5.3. New approaches to bioethical decision-making
5.4. Indigenous bioethical theory and application
5.5. Communitarian bioethics and relational autonomy
5.6. Multi-cultural ethics
5.7. Feminist bioethics
5.8. Metaethical challenges in bioethics
5.9. Bioethical epistemicide
5.10. Scholarship vs activism
5.11. Procedural ethics versus reflexive discourse
5.12. Ethics and the law
5.13. Methods in bioethics research
5.14. African philosophical approaches to bioethics
5.15. Religious and spiritual perspectives in bioethics
5.16. Integrating local knowledge systems into bioethics
5.17. Ethics of knowledge production and epistemic
injustice
5.18. The intersection of bioethics, activism, and social
justice
5.19. Other
6. COMFORTING AND DISTURBING PERSPECTIVE ON
RESEARCH ETHICS AND INTEGRITY
6.1. Protection and care for research participants
6.2. Integrity in research
6.3. Ethics of research transparency
6.4. Ethics of use and transfer of human biological
materials
6.5. Conflicts of interest and commercialisation
of research
6.6. Issues related to research funding and funders
6.7. Data ethics
6.8. Ethical regulation and oversight of research
6.9. Cross-border research ethics issues
6.10. Research integrity in a digital, AI-enabled age
6.11. New methods and interdisciplinary approaches in
bioethics research
6.12. Other
7. COMFORTING OR DISTURBING BIOETHICS
OF EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
7.1. Ethical complexities of the use of Artificial
Intelligence in healthcare practice
7.2. Robotics and bioethics
7.3. Big data ethical challenges
7.4. Ethics of genomic medicine
7.5. Genetic engineering ethics
7.6. Bioethics and zenotransplantion
7.7. Neuroethics
7.8. Ethics of Neurotechnology
7.9. Ethics of space exploration and exploitation
7.10. Other