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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”

Guy Aitchison did a short video interview on hunger strikes for faculti, a global research repository that talks to academics about their work. In the interview, Guy unpacks some of the ethical issues raised by political self-starvation and other themes from his paper published in the Journal of Political Philosophy. You can watch it here.

We are happy to announce that the latest research paper is out from this project co-authored by Guy Aitchison (Loughborough) and Ryan Essex (Greenwich). It looks at the ways in which self-harm by detainees caught up in the misery of immigration detention can count as a form of political resistance. The paper draws on debatesContinue reading “New publication in ‘Journal of Medical Ethics’”

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”

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’”

Hello! Thanks for checking in. We’ll be using this blog to post updates about the ‘Starving for Dignity’ project, giving a taste of the research as it progresses and linking to relevant material. We’ll also be posting details about planned future events. The hunger strike and other extreme methods of protest, such as self-immolation, areContinue reading “‘Starving for Dignity’ research project launches”