At the Intersection of ‘‘the Family’’ and Health Care: Bioethics, Family, and Summer School

Editors' note: In this issue, we launch "From the IJFAB Blog," an occasional section featuring reprints of blog posts of interest. "At the Intersection of 'the Family' and Health Care: Bioethics, Family, and Summer School" is a six-part series in which Benjamin Kenofer, PhD candidate in philosophy at Michigan State University, responds to What about the Family?, an interdisciplinary course on the role of the family in the delivery and consumption of health care he attended during summer 2017 at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. To preserve the liveblog nature of "At the Intersection of 'the Family' and Health Care," tenses have not been changed, and editing has been kept to a minimum. The IJFAB Blog can be found here. Please consider contributing to it. Your voice will be very welcome.

Part 1: Introducing Ben Kenofer

Posted August 23, 2017: Hi there! As Jamie Nelson mentioned in her introduction post for this summer school liveblog series, my name is Ben Kenofer. I'm a graduate student in philosophy at Michigan State University, going into my fourth year this fall. When Professor Nelson first brought the possibility of participating in the summer school to my attention, I was excited about the prospect of attending (aside from visiting the Netherlands) because of my interest in feminist care ethics. Although caring practices occur throughout all different sectors within societies and are certainly not limited to the family, our relationships with intimate others have been one locus of caring responsibilities on which the care ethics literature has focused. Because I am going to be taking comprehensive exams later in the fall, I thought the summer school would provide some nice supplementation to the reading list for my comprehensive exams, and that this would happen in a more interactive environment than that in which much of my studying will occur.

In addition, I taught a course on Ethical Issues in Healthcare last fall, and I am scheduled to teach that course again during the upcoming fall semester. Although the course last year was an overall success, I am looking for ways to improve how I teach the course as I come back for a second round with it. I am hoping that participation in this summer school will be very helpful toward that end by giving me greater awareness about challenges for delivering and receiving care that stem from the interactions between health care and familial social structures. Several of my students in particular last year expressed either interest, questions, or concerns about issues such as what parents could be held responsible for when it comes to their child's health or whether children should be allowed to refuse treatment when their parents want to continue treatment. I am hoping that the summer school will help me be more prepared to discuss such challenges or similar ones with my students through my offering them more perspectives or angles on family related health issues for them to consider—even if that consists in just having us appreciate how complicated coming up with answers for these questions can be.

I hope that you'll find this blog series to be worth your time, and if you are a fellow graduate student and you like what you end up reading, maybe consider whether this summer school might be worth attending next time it is held.

Part 2: Day one is intellectually thrilling

Posted August 24, 2017: One of the main points that stuck with me today is how exciting it is to be among this group of intellectuals. We began the summer school with all of the graduate student participants (myself included) taking turns introducing our projects and ourselves. The different perspectives that the students alone have brought here intrigue me—and that is not even counting the faculty participants! Represented backgrounds include psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and nursing. Despite the fact that we have all gathered here to discuss the intersection of family and health care, and even though some of us share the same discipline (such as philosophy), our projects all sounded distinct. In...