Ethics and British public health law, 1920-2020

This research will investigate the ethics of British public health over the period 1920-2020, through the lens of public health law.

In so doing, it will develop the ‘public health humanities’ as a mode of designing and implementing interdisciplinary research in public health.

My goals are to discover how the implicit and explicit ethical frameworks of public health law have changed over the period in question; to analyse how and why these changes came about; and to explore methods for investigating public health ethics from interdisciplinary perspectives.

I will use documentary and archival sources to locate and interrogate moments of morally inflected controversy in public health law, and will work collaboratively with public health practitioners and researchers to explore novel methods of data generation and analysis.

Attention to ethics and public health law in Britain 1920-2020 disrupts assumptions that ethics in this time and place has been neutral and unchanging, and examines relationships between shifting ethical frameworks and factors including the post-war welfare state and its subsequent roll-back, decolonisation, migration, epidemiology, HIV/AIDS, and bioethics.

The project will historicise ethics, connect past and present, and provoke cross- disciplinary interrogation and integration, for the benefit of the humanities and public health alike.