 | Ari Gandsman Assistant Professor - University of Ottawa |
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03.07.2014-30.07.2014
Debating the Right to Die in Canada: an anthropological analysis of a legal and social movement
The right to die is a topic in which the voices of bioethicists passing judgment dominate while the nuanced voices of social scientists are largely absent. Most analyses depart from invested positions (Somerville 2001). In this way, a voluminous literature on euthanasia and assisted suicide exists within philosophy and bioethics (e.g. Gormally 2006; Hartling 2006). In this research project, I will take an ethnographic position in which the goal is not to advocate for a side but to understand what is at stake within such debates. Using this ethnographic approach will allow me to understand how the actors involved view the issues and what motivates them to action. An extensive medical literature on the topic also exists, largely from the perspectives of families, patients, and medical practitioners. This project’s novel contribution is to view the issue not from a narrow medical perspective but from the legal and social arena. Currently, there are few empirical studies on the topic that attempt to look at the issue from the perspective of a social movement. There are several sociological analyses of the composition of right to die organizations (Judd & Seale 2011;Crossman et al. 2002) and several histories of the topic (Dowbiggin 2007;Fox, Capek & Kamakahi 1999). None attempt to situate these movements within the broader theoretical concerns that I set forth above.
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