Ndidi Nwaneri is a trained philosopher and social
development policy expert, based in Nigeria, West Africa. She received
her doctorate from Loyola University, Chicago with her dissertation
titled " Human Rights and Global Justice: A Normative Critique of Some
Rawlsian Approaches." Her current research project is titled, "Pandemic
Agency and Justice: A Socio-Political Analysis of the Global COVID-19
Pandemic." Her overarching purpose in this project is to develop a
normative framework that reconciles the actions of agents (global,
national, community and individual) during the COVID pandemic, with
prevailing social and global justice theories. According to her, social
or global crises provide a unique opportunity to examine the 鈥渇it鈥� of
theory and reality. This two-pronged assessment 鈥� examining responses to
the pandemic through the lens of theory, and examining dominant
theories through the lens of actions 鈥� could provide a means to assess
the adequacy of (or lack thereof), of extant social and global justice
theories.
Cain Shelley recently received his
PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science. His
thesis was supervised by Lea Ypi. He describes his current research
project as follows: "To date, the philosophical debate about global
health justice has overwhelmingly focused on two issues: specifying the
best principles of global health justice on the one hand and specifying
the institutional changes best suited to advancing these principles on
the other. Whilst both debates are clearly important, much less
attention has been paid to a third set of issues: the question of which
political agents are best suited to implementing the changes justice in
global health requires. To help fill this gap, this research project
aims to provide an extended philosophical examination of several
grassroots agents of health justice, such as the Treatment Action
Campaign, ACT UP and the People鈥檚 Health Movement. One question I am
particularly interested in investigating is the following: what virtues
of character - hope?, creativity?, prudence? - do those who participate
in the activities of group agents like these need to contribute
effectively to processes of just social change?"
