TrueSciPhi

Podcast Profile: Bioethics in the Margins

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45 episodes
2021 to 2026
Median: 49 minutes
Collection: Philosophy

Description (podcaster-provided):

Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):

This podcast brings together bioethics scholars and interdisciplinary guests to examine health, medicine, and technology from the vantage point of people and problems often sidelined in mainstream bioethics. Across conversations, the focus stays on structural inequity and the ways policy, institutions, and professional norms shape who is protected, harmed, heard, or excluded in healthcare and public life. The show frequently draws on intersectional approaches—racial justice, disability ethics, LGBTQ ethics, reproductive justice, and the medical humanities—to question traditional individual-focused bioethics frameworks and to consider bioethics as a tool for social change.

A recurring theme is how racism, immigration enforcement, and carceral systems create predictable patterns of health risk and moral injury, including harms in detention settings, the ethics of sanctuary and “safe zones,” and the health consequences of policing and state violence. The podcast also explores inequities in clinical communication and decision-making, including serious illness and critical care, and considers how clinicians and institutions might respond through trauma-informed practice, community engagement, and medical-legal partnerships.

Another major strand examines emerging and entrenched technologies—risk prediction algorithms, pulse oximetry, GIS in disaster response, genomics and polygenic scores, and generative AI—showing how bias can be embedded in data, devices, and research agendas, and how historical myths about race and biological determinism continue to influence science and policy. Episodes also take up broader political-economic forces such as corporate influence on health, nonprofit healthcare missions, and philanthropy as power, alongside discussions about censorship, education, and efforts to “remake” bioethics to better address systemic injustice.