Fordham Interdisciplinary Seminar Series: Laura Specker Sullivan

Join us for a lecture from Laura Specker Sullivan, titled “Situated Personhood: Insights from Caregivers of Minimally Communicative Individuals.”

For caregivers of minimally communicative individuals, providing support in the absence of clearly meaningful responses is ethically fraught. We conducted a secondary analysis of qualitative data from caregivers of individuals who are minimally communicative, including persons with advanced dementia and individuals with disorders of consciousness. Our analysis led to two central claims: (1) Personhood is a threshold concept that is situated, relational, and dynamic; (2) In circumstances in which personhood is difficult to judge, caregivers can “fill the gap” to reach the threshold through a repertoire of strategies. Because personhood is in part an attribution from others, a situational loss of personhood does not preclude restoration, nor does it eliminate moral status.

About the Speaker
Laura Specker Sullivan is an assistant professor of philosophy. She is a specialist in interdisciplinary and cross-cultural ethics who incorporates her experience in clinical ethics consultation and qualitative research into her philosophical work. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii, focusing on informed consent in Japan. She is the former director of ethics at the Medical University of South Carolina and a previous assistant professor of philosophy at the College of Charleston. She has held fellowships at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering at the University of Washington, Neuroethics Canada at the University of British Columbia, and the Kokoro Research Center at Kyoto University.

This event will take place in a hybrid format and will have live captioning. Attend the lecture virtually.