Our Research

Current Faculty Research

Laura Asherman

Developing a new documentary project focused on the Atlanta Threshold Choir, a volunteer ensemble that sings at hospice bedsides for people in the final days of their lives.
In post-production on The Weight of Armor, a feature-length documentary about femme armored combat fighters competing in the male-dominated sport of Buhurt.
Creating Strata of Refusal, a series of mixed-media sculptures that examine human impact over deep time through representations of landfills in places I have lived.

Ira Bedzow

I am examining how purpose as a cultivated practice shapes moral perception, judgment, and action in personal, professional and organizational contexts
Investigating how experiential and embodied pedagogies can deepen awareness, attention, engagement, and competence.
I'm interested in how ethical decision-making occurs within diverse groups, and particularly how cognitive bias, positionality, and institutional context shape individual and collective deliberation.

Jonathan Crane

Developing a book-length manuscript on the Nuremberg Medical Trial, 1946-1947, during which the US Prosecution scrambled to defend American biomedical research on prisoners that appeared similar to what the Defendants did.
Building a suite of research projects at the intersection of Judaism, biomedical research, and eugenics.
Constructing a borne-digital experience of the Garden of Eden story that integrates Biblical text, Jewish and Christian midrashim and exegesis, and hundreds of visual depictions—all with a special focus on the nachash (aka, serpent).

Arri Eisen

Exploring trust: guest editing with diverse scholars The Erosion of Trust in the 21st Century: Origins, Implications, and Solutions, Frontiers in Communication. These 15 articles from across the world and across disciplines help identify and understand the origins of the recent decline of trust and strive for recommendations for its restoration.
Starting a new book project, with Tom Rogers in History, on ‘Memory, from the molecular to the historical: an investigation of how we remember and how we forget’ for a broad audience and grounded in interviews with experts who engage memory in their work—from professional musicians to athletes, historians to geneticists, geologists to neurosurgeons, and beyond.

Kathy Kinlaw

Ethical assessment of organ procurement practices when organ donation is considered after death is declared due to the irreversible cessation of circulatory/respiratory criteria.
Curriculum innovation with the Emory SOM, encouraging reflection on personal and professional values; moral attentiveness that builds relational and compassionate capabilities with patients, families, students, and colleagues.
The scope of Bioethics/Healthcare Ethics and the nature of clinical ethics consultation. What practices (consultation approaches, documentation, evaluation, etc.) are central?

James Lavery

I am currently completing a study funded by Pfizer to understand the role of “equity” in decision-making for global vaccine procurement and distribution. Next steps for this work is to assemble a consortium of organizations to develop improved practices for prioritization and ethical reasoning in vaccine discovery, development and delivery.
Active in investigation, funded by the Gates Foundation, to identify opportunities for greater cooperation between the fields of child survival and anti-microbial resistance to facilitate and increase innovation and improve the global integration of programming.
I am completing an evaluation of a community integration program for migrant agricultural workers for the Ministry of Health’s Malaria Elimination Strategy in the Dominican Republic, funded by The Carter Center.

John Lysaker

Defending a theory of friendship that not only articulates its broad contributions to human flourishing, but defends it as a site of significant and irreplaceable moral development.
Articulating a comprehensive account of moral perfectionism that favors its more recent proponents (Murdoch, Cavell, Baldwin), and argues that it marks a moment of moral maturity that is recognizable across ethical traditions and normative standpoints.
Developing a conception of shared deliberation for the clinical care of people diagnosed with complex psychiatric challenges.

Hilary Mabel

Comparing the U.S. model of clinical ethics with international models, as well as clinical ethics in secular U.S. health systems with Catholic health systems, with special attention to how differences contribute to or ameliorate career sustainability
Empirically understanding experiences of burnout in the clinical ethics profession
Describing the relationship between ethical issues in transgender health and existing and emerging legal restrictions

Edward Queen

Developing a pedagogical model of ethical formation and civic education that focuses on principled decision-making rooted in well-articulated and defensible norms grounded in facts and consequences.
Developing a model of approaching A.I. ethics that rejects the view of a “generic” A.I. ethics but demonstrates that developing ethical A.I. must act simultaneously on two axes (purpose and lifecycle).
Long-term research project on how the dominant historical interpretation of a society’s dominant religious tradition facilitates or hinders the development and maintenance of a viable, liberal, pluralistic democracy.

Gerard Vong

Evaluating the systematic fairness of historical allocations of healthcare resources by lottery in order to develop future implementation guidelines.
Identifying a neglected ethical problem in diagnostic orders and proposing a collective response.
Researching the impact of a multi-year, cross-institutional, funded sponsorship and mentorship program in bioethics.

Ju Zhang

Reconceptualizing the account of “evidence” in evidence-based medicine to systematically and meaningfully incorporate patients’ lived, subjective experience, drawing on contemporary epistemology and illness narrative.
Developing and defending a concept of neuroduty to preserve personal identity, to formulate actionable guidance for individuals and policymakers confronting rapidly evolving neurotechnologies,
Building an ethics-by-design framework for data science in injury and violence prevention that translates public health ethics into actionable standards for consent, privacy, responsible stewardship, and justice.

John Banja

Pursuing study on Richard Rorty’s arguments that classical philosophers  misunderstood the nature of language.  Rorty argued that language was an instrument of control, not representation, so that language does not picture the world.  This would mean that most philosophical attempts to “define” our most important, foundational terms will be fruitless.
Investigating the idea that academic philosophers suffer from a syndrome whereby they are determined to misunderstand many of our concepts.  An example I’d like to pursue is Saul Kripke’s take on Wittgenstein’s notion of rule-following, which I suspect is strangely wrong.