Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of short blog posts about the bioethics summer school in Groningen, the Netherlands, which is focused on the role of family in the delivery and consumption of health care. Look for others in this series for about the author and the program itself.
Dr. Jackie Leach Scully, philosopher and bioethicist
Whereas yesterday’s blog post focused on small group interaction with my fellow grad students, today’s blog post builds around an idea that came from one of our class wide discussions – in particular, Dr. Jackie Scully’s discussion on “Doing Family”.
The basic idea with thinking about family as a kind of activity is that family is not just something that can be identified in virtue of its having some particular structure, but can be recognized when a group of people display certain actions that mark that group as family (both to themselves and to others). Although already an intriguing idea, one of the points that Dr. Scully made during her talk involved the notion of passing. When there is a lack of social recognition towards how particular families display themselves (e.g., non-nuclear families), such that their displays are not even recognized by others within a society as being displays of family, then certain non-traditional families can be faced with having to try to pass as a more traditional family in order to even be acknowledged as one. This leaves these families with a myriad of challenges that those families not regarded as conventional do not have to face.
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This reflection on how my ideas about passing have expanded is a great example of what I have been enjoying about my time here during the summer school. At different points during my journey as philosophy student, there have been times where I’ve attended a lecture or seminars, and have been left with the thought that “this is an interesting intellectual puzzle, but I’m not sure how to relate this back to my own ideas, experiences or research”. This has not been my experience during the three days I’ve spent here. Whether it’s been because of a light bulb that clicked on because an idea made sense, or a new line of thinking that has been sparked by reflecting on why something didn’t settle right with me, these discussions haven’t just felt like intellectual detours, but have felt like they are helping to provide further orientation for the trajectory of my socio-political thought. It certainly helps to have such a collaborative (as opposed to competitive) and open-minded group of people to be working through these ideas with.
Four of the participants in the bioethics summer school on the family and medicine relax at a venue in Groningen.
Relaxing with bioethics summer school cohort does not rule out beer and sun.
