starvingfordignity

A political approach to thinking about self-harm

This is a post by Dr. Guy Aitchison and Dr. Ryan Essex introducing their recent paper, ‘Self-harm in immigration detention: political, not (just) medical’. It appears on the Journal of Medical Ethics blog. In April 2016, the Iranian refugee, Omid Masoumali, set himself on fire in front of UN inspectors at the Nauru island detentionContinue reading “A political approach to thinking about self-harm”

Self-starvation: From the Suffragettes to Guantanamo, pt. 2

This is a follow up to part 1, exploring in more detail some of the more famous or niche examples of hunger strike and self-harm protests

Offshore detention: A warning for the UK from Down Under

Guy Aitchison: I have a new article in openDemocracy looking at the UK’s latest scheme to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda for offshore “processing”. The piece draws on my interviews over recent months, as part of this project, with victims of Australia’s failed experiment in offshore detention in the Pacific: The first 50 asylum-seekers in theContinue reading “Offshore detention: A warning for the UK from Down Under”

Self-starvation timeline part 1: the Suffragettes and Irish republicanism

Brief overview of early cases of self-starvation

Publication in ‘The Journal of Political Philosophy’

I’m very pleased to share a new paper on the ethics of hunger strikes, which has just been published in The Journal of Political Philosophy (edited by Professor Robert Goodin): ‘Fragility as Strength: The Ethics and Politics of Hunger Strikes’. The paper explains the distinctive political role of the hunger strike in terms of threeContinue reading “Publication in ‘The Journal of Political Philosophy’”