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The recent pandemic has shown us, on a large scale, that bioethics is much more than a field of theoretical research. Leaders had to make numerous difficult decisions at the political, health and economic levels, which strongly impacted both society and individuals. We as bioethics scholars must better understand the need, role and performance of ethical decision-making tools and bioethics reference frameworks that are designed to help decision-makers form well-reflected and well-justified choices to benefit society as a whole. But just as importantly, we need to help citizens understand key bioethical concepts so they can engage in a constructive, nuanced public discourse on the management of the current and potential future pandemics or other public health crises to foster societal resilience.
Financed by: SNF
Duration: 2022 - 2025
"The recent pandemic has shown us, on a large scale, that bioethics is much more than a field of theoretical research. Leaders had to make numerous difficult decisions at the political, health and economic level, which strongly impacted both society and individuals. We as bioethics scholars must better understand the need, role and performance of ethical decision-making tools and bioethics reference frameworks that are designed to help decision-makers form well-reflected and well-justified choices to benefit society as a whole. But just as importantly, we need to help citizens understand key bioethical concepts so they can engage in a constructive, nuanced public discourse on the management of the current and potential future pandemics or other public health crises to foster societal resilience.
Our project, ""Pandemics & Bioethics: Co-Designing a Graphic Novel"", aims to document, illustrate and communicate bioethical concepts in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic to better prepare ourselves for similar situations that are bound to occur in the future. The project will inform and encourage a mutual instructive and educational dialogue surrounding several bioethical challenges caused by pandemics while using the current pandemic as a starting point. The goal is to co-create a graphic novel to provide a defined audience - Generation Z - with a clearer understanding of these central bioethics concepts relevant to pandemic management. To do so, we will create spaces for dialogue between our researchers, a graphic designer and user groups. We will then use this dialogue to co-design key messages and storyboards and test them with users. This process will be part of the communication project before leading to the final product (i.e., the graphic novel).
We will base the graphic novel and the dialogue on the latest research from the University of Zurich. The team at our institute — the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine — has published peer-reviewed articles on pandemic-related topics such as: ICU triaging, vaccine allocation, self-experimentation, preventive measures, access to health care and economic implications, dealing with the anti-vaccination community, information needs, as well as risk and crisis communication.
We strongly believe this research needs to be shared with a larger audience since data suggest COVID-19 may not be the last pandemic we will experience. Using this research, we will set up a dialogue component using mini-publics. A mini-public refers to “an assembly of citizens, demographically representative of the larger population, brought together to learn and deliberate on a topic in order to inform public opinion and decision-making” (Escobar 2017). Members of Generation Z, the target demographic we have chosen for the mini-publics, together with a designer, our researchers and assisted by a facilitator will create a dialogue surrounding these topics, which will serve as a basis for the co-designed graphic novel.
See also:
The Outbreak
