Summer School 2021: Risk Decisions in the Contexts of Care and Law
The 2021 Autonomy Project Summer School will be held online on the 20th-24th July.
This year’s summer school is partly funded by the CHASE Cohort Development Fund and all CHASE PhD’s are warmly invited to attend.
About the Autonomy Project
The Essex Autonomy Project is a research and public policy initiative, based at the University of Essex, and investigating the ideal of self-determination (autonomy) in the context of care (health care, social care, eldercare, psychiatric care, etc.). Led by Professor of Philosophy, Wayne Martin, it involves extensive intramural and extramural collaboration with jurists, clinicians, service users, activists, civil servants, and policy makers. It is affiliated with the Wellcome-funded Mental Health and Justice project and the award-winning Essex Human Rights Centre.
About the Summer School
The Autonomy Project Summer School is an annual event, held each July, which brings together a group of researchers, activists, students, clinicians, social workers, service-users, and public officials in order to work together on the challenges of embedding respect for autonomy and human rights in the practices of care.
The Format
This year, the Summer School will take place across 5 days from the 20th to the 24th July, with sessions running for 2 hours each day. The structure aims to keep attendees active and engaged, shifting between panel discussions and conversations in breakout rooms.
This Year’s Theme: Risk
This year issues of risk have loomed larger than ever across every sector of civil society. The pandemic has meant that we’ve all had to be especially vigilant about – and more ingenious than ever in negotiating – the risks that pervade our private and professional lives. In our 11th Annual EAP Summer School we intend to highlight and explore the role risk plays across a number of legal and care contexts. Among other things, we will explore the following topics: risk work and the relative advantages of formal and post-formal approaches to risk assessment in care settings; the role of risk in mental capacity assessment and how that role is moderated by the severity of the risks involved; the place of risk in Mental Health Policy and psychiatric decision making; the precautionary principle and what it means for people who do frontline risk work; the wider background conditions that shape which risks feature in our decision making and which get ignored. As always, our presenters will come from a variety of backgrounds – e.g., law, philosophy, sociology, psychiatry, and more – and we will foster interdisciplinary problem-focused conversations with a diverse group of academics, lawyers, psychiatrists, frontline care workers, and other professionals with a stake in these issues. We look forward to another vibrant summer school experience!
