Volume “Enhancing Resilience and Preparedness in Future Pandemics: Ethical Challenges”
Edited by Veselin Mitrović, Michael Kühler and Bert Gordijn
This edited volume aims to bring together an international and multidisciplinary collection of essays examining the ethical issues during COVID-19 and the lessons that can be learned to enhance resilience and preparedness with implications for future pandemics. We welcome chapters that explore issues from a broad conceptual base or examine specific issues, cases, and events. This multidisciplinary volume aims to include chapters based on various methodologies, including philosophical analyses, empirical investigations, and case studies. COVID-19 has raised a number of ethical issues, many of which lie at the interface between public health ethics and clinical ethics. Starting from the COVID-19 pandemic, the volume aims at broadening the scope and engaging in a wider discussion of how to enhance resilience and preparedness in light of more or less similar situations. Hence, it could be worthwhile to discuss such DRR (disaster risk reduction) approach not only due to saving lives but also as a way to ethically respond to the next pandemic and avoid the social and political crises we have witnessed during the last three years.
The main issues opened in this volume will be looking forward or how to be well-prepared and more resilient in the future, partly using empirical findings from past learning. The general frame of this anthology is the theoretical and practical implications of the crisis/disaster understanding, addressing the ethical challenges of novel technological means like AI and discussing bioethical issues in trial challenges.
Abstracts addressing any of the issues mentioned below will be favored, although abstracts on other topics can also be submitted:
- Scientific communication, esp. misinformation/disinformation
- Trust in science vs. denial
- Role and use of preprints and peer reviews (and scientific publication)
- Novel technologies, including risks involved (e.g., unknown unknowns)
- Issues of public health ethics, like triage and how best to avoid it in the first place
- Dealing with death and the dead
- Dealing with medicine shortages / scarce resources
- Quarantines and lockdowns and vaccine passports (curtailing individual freedoms)
- Mandatory vaccination
- Equality or solidarity concerning different, esp. vulnerable, social groups
- Challenge trials and altruism and solidarity
- Advance directives in light of unforeseen pandemic
- Privacy, surveillance, and technological means
- Novel technologies to substitute risky practices, like online teaching/business etc.
Submission of abstracts
Those interested in submitting a chapter should submit an abstract by 20 October 2023. Abstracts may be unstructured or structured according to the methodology of the chapter. The abstract should summarize the proposed content of the chapter. The descriptive summary should not exceed 500 words. In addition, the abstract should include the title of the chapter and the names and affiliations of all authors. Abstracts should be written in English and sent as a Word document attached to an email to Dr Veselin Mitrović (mitrove@gmail.com), Dr Michael Kühler (michael.kuehler@kit.edu), Professor Dr Bert Gordijn (bert.gordijn@dcu.ie).
Authors will be informed by 20 November whether they are invited to submit a chapter to the edited volume.