Associated Projects

Jenny Saul, Jules Holroyd, Robin Scaife, and Tom Stafford (psychology) have a two year project (from Jan 2019 – December 2020) working with the Cabinet Office to investigate workplace climate and improve diversity and inclusion.

Joshua Forstenzer and Vachararutai (Jan) Boontinand have a British Academy and Thai Research Fund two year project (September 2018 to September 2020) to investigate the pedagogic potential of philosophical enquiry for teaching critical thinking and democratic citizenship in Thai higher education.

Bob Stern’s project, Luther as Philosopher, aims to consider Martin Luther and his influence from a philosophical perspective. While Luther has been widely studied by theologians and historians, he has been largely ignored by philosophers who work on the history of ideas. The project engages issues such as the essence of faith, conscience, and the limits of reason.

Jules Holroyd was PI on the Leverhulme Bias and Blame Project, which investigated the question of whether moral interactions – such as blaming or exculpating – are effective in mitigating implicit bias. The project brought together philosophers and psychologists in order to develop experimental tools to investigate this question. The project team produced papers on their results, and the implications of them both for combating bias, and for our practices of holding each other responsible. The project also aimed to bring to bear these results on institutional practice and policy.

Robert Stern had an AHRC Fellowship for a project on ‘The Ethical Demand: K. E. Løgstrup’s Ethics and Its Implications’, which ran from September 2015 to February 2017. One of the aims of the project wass to consider Løgstrup’s relation to care ethics, which involved a seminar series on care ethics in general run in conjunction with Medical Humanities Sheffield, and an international conference, where both involved academics, practitioners, educationalists and health care users. Another focus was on Løgstrup’s treatment of the relation between ethics and theology in his work, and how far ethical matters can be treated independent of religious assumptions.

The Leverhulme Implicit Bias and Philosophy International Research Network, directed by Jennifer Saul brought together philosophers, psychologists and others to work together (2011-2013) on implicit bias and related issues. Two volumes resulting from this project have now been published by Oxford University Press, both co-edited by Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul.

Annamaria Carusi received funding from the Wellcome Trust for a new project, Crowdsourcing for Health: Scientists and Patients Reconfiguring Trials and Regulatory Practices. It examined the way that crowdsourcing is reshaping key gatekeeping mechanisms in healthcare such as regulatory tests and clinical trials. This project compared scientific and patient communities in order to identify the main opportunities and challenges for healthcare of this redistribution of knowledge for healthcare. The project focused on the inter-relationship between epistemic, social, pragmatic and ethical drivers.

Miranda Fricker (Sheffield/CUNY) and Boudewijn de Bruin (Groningen) received a research grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to fund two philosophy PhD students at Sheffield and Groningen to work on epistemic (in)justice and its detrimental effects in two professional fields: finance and healthcare. The healthcare branch of the project grew partly out of issues discussed in Miranda’s Medical Humanities Public Lecture ‘Epistemic Justice and the Medical Expert’ concerning the ways in which certain unwitting biases can affect the credibility that patients receive, and their ability to communicate their experiences. The finance branch grew out of work done by Boudewijn on the ethics of banking, and a former research project with Alex Oliver at the University of Cambridge.

Holly Lawford-Smith’s Marie Curie FP7 Grant “Modelling International Cooperation Between States” was a three-year project aiming to both model cooperation between state agents, and make recommendations about the conditions under which such cooperation is likely to be successful, with a final view to commenting on current negotiations over climate change. The first stage of the project focused on the nature of states as collective agents. The second stage focused on whether state agents behave sufficiently similarly to ordinary human agents in at least some contexts that certain lessons from the wide experimental literature on cooperation between human agents apply across. You can watch Holly give a talk about this project here (overview from 1.02-15.40).