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Welcome to PAPER, the Practical And Public Ethics Research group.

 

PAPER is a research group which produces and disseminates work in practical and applied ethics. It promotes the public good by helping individuals, communities, and professions make ethically informed decisions.

The group was established and is supported by the Faculty of Arts and Education at Charles Sturt University.

The group aims to:

  • Promote research activity in practical and public ethics
  • Bring together academics and students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds who share research interests in practical and public ethics
  • Nurture areas of research focus in practical and public ethics
  • Support applications for external funding on topics in practical and public ethics

PAPER is interested in all issues related to practical and applied ethics. However, we have particular research strengths in:

  • Biomedical ethics
  • The ethics of new technology
  • Practical ethics in the human services
 
Our Team
 

 

We have over 25 members working in Australia and around the world.

 

Leaders

 

Steve Clarke

stclarke@csu.edu.au

Steve Clarke is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Charles Sturt University and a Senior Research Associate of the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is currently a chief investigator on an Australian Research Council discovery grant project on 'Religion, Pluralism, and Healthcare Practice: A Philosophical Assessment'. He was lead investigator on two previous Australian Research Council discovery grants. Steve is the author of two books, co-editor of five books, and the author of over eighty journal articles and chapters in books. His papers have appeared in such journals as the American Philosophical Quarterly, the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Synthese and the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.

Publications

 

Morgan Luck

moluck@csu.edu.au

Morgan is an Associate Professor at Charles Sturt University. He completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Nottingham and a PGCE in Religious Education at the University of Cambridge. His areas of research include philosophy of religion (in particular, divine action), ethics of technology (in particular, the ethics of virtual actions), metaphysics, applied ethics and epistemology.

Publications

 

Members

 

Yeslam Al-Saggaf

yalsaggaf@csu.edu.au

Yeslam is an Associate Professor in Information Technology at Charles Sturt University. He has been an academic at Charles Sturt University since 2003 and has been successful in the prestigious Australian Research Council (ARC) grants three times so far including in one as the Lead Chief Investigator. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree (with honours) in Computer and Information Engineering from Malaysia and a Master of Information Technology and a PhD from Charles Sturt University, Australia. His research interests lie in the areas of social media and ethics in computing.

Publications

 

Emma Atherton

eatherton@csu.edu.au

Emma’s research interests are interdisciplinary and diverse. She is especially interested in the philosophy of gender and sexuality, sexual consent, sexual ethics, online communities, intersectionality studies, and diversity and inclusion. Emma is also an experienced academic teacher, and values community education and increasing community access to academic ideas and methodologies.

Publications

 

Christopher Bartel

bartelcj@appstate.edu

Christopher is a Professor of Philosophy at Appalachian State University, and an adjunct at Charles Sturt University. His research interests primarily lie within aesthetics and ethics. Bartel mainly focuses on video games, the philosophy of music, and media ethics. He has additional research interests in perception (especially sound), philosophy of technology, and methodological issues in experimental philosophy.

Publications

 

Wendy Bowles

wbowles@csu.edu.au

Wendy is a Professor at Charles Sturt University. She has been lecturing and researching in social work and human services since 1991. Prior to commencing at CSU, Wendy worked mainly in the disability field and taught in social work at the University of New South Wales. Wendy's PhD is in quality of life of people with spina bifida as an issue of equality. Wendy also convenes the Australian Association of Social Work's National Education and Knowledge Development Committee.

Publications

 

Tamara Browne

tamara.browne@deakin.edu.au

Tamara is a Senior Lecturer in Bioethics at Deakin University and an adjunct at Charles Sturt University. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge and later served as Lecturer in Bioethics at the Australian National University, winning three teaching awards. Her primary research expertise is in the ethics of non-medical sex selection, gender and mental illness. Her book, Depression and the Self: Meaning, Control and Authenticity, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2018.

Publications | Website

 

Oliver Burmeister

oburmeister@csu.edu.au

Oliver is a Professor at Charles Sturt University. His research is focused on health information systems in the area of ageing using an approach called value sensitive design (VSD), which puts ethics into practice.

He is the Presiding Officer of the CSU Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) and a member of the Australian Computer Society’s Ethics Committee.

Publications

 

Daniel Cohen

dcohen@csu.edu.au

Daniel is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Charles Sturt University. His research interests include ethical theory, free will and moral responsibility, and moral psychology.

Publications

 

Anna Corbo Crehan

acorbocrehan@csu.edu.au

Anna is a Senior Lecturer at Charles Sturt University’s Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security. She is a philosopher by trade and has been with Charles Sturt on a full-time basis since 1999. She has published papers about a number of aspects of policing, including police ethics, obedience to authority, policing domestic violence, the policing of vulnerable people and professional boundaries.

Publications

 

Hakan Coruh

hcoruh@csu.edu.au

Hakan is a lecturer, and supervisor of HDR students at CISAC at Charles Sturt University. He completed his PhD at Australian Catholic University in 2015. His PhD research is on early modern exegesis of the Qur’an (Said Nursi, Muhammad ‘Abduh, and Sir Ahmad Khan).

His main interests are the classical and modern Qur'an exegesis, Islamic Ethics (akhlaq) and Virtue Ethics, contemporary Islamic thought, Islamic Legal Theories (usul al-fiqh) and Jurisprudence (fiqh), Islamic theology (kalam), and Comparative Theology.

He is interested in ethics in general, particularly virtue ethics in the medieval period, focusing on Islamic, Christian and Jewish virtue ethics, and their relevance in today's context. Religious ethics and virtue ethics, happiness, and the ethical virtuous life in various traditions from the classical to the modern period are his some of interests.

Publications

 

Wendy De Luca

wdeluca@csu.edu.au

Wendy lectures in Adult and Vocational Education at Charles Sturt University. She has been a practitioner in adult education for over 25 years, both within the Defence and university environments. Wendy’s research focus is on how adult learners develop expertise, particularly in terms of professional ethics. Her PhD explored ethics education within the Australian Defence Force, with an emphasis on soldier training. Wendy is also Co-Chair of Charles Sturt University’s Grounded Theory Special Interest Group.

Publications

 

Alberto Giubilini

alberto.giubilini@gmail.com

Alberto is a Senior Research Fellow on the Oxford Martin Programme on Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease. He is also an adjunct at Charles Sturt University. He has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Milan, and prior to joining the Uehiro Centre he worked in Australia at Monash University, University of Melbourne and Charles Sturt University. He has published on different topics in bioethics and philosophy, including the ethics of vaccination, procreative choices, end of life decisions, organ donations, conscientious objection in healthcare, the concept of conscience, human enhancement, and the role of intuitions and of moral disgust in ethical arguments

Publications

 

Daniel Halliday

daniel.halliday@unimelb.edu.au

Daniel is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and an adjunct at Charles Sturt University. He works mainly on topics in political philosophy, particularly on markets and other aspects of economic justice.

Publications | Website

 

Clive Hamilton

chamilton@csu.edu.au

Clive is an Australian author and public intellectual. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra.

Publications | Website

 

Khondker Jahid Reza

kreza@csu.edu.au

Khondker completed PhD in “Data Mining”. He is currently working at Charles Sturt University as a Policy & Records Officer. His research interests include the ethics of new technology.

Publications

 

Matthew Kopec

m.kopec@northeastern.edu

Matthew is a Professor at Northeastern University, and adjunct at Charles Sturt University. He completed his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and previously has held teaching and/or research positions at The Australian National University, The Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (Canberra, Australia), Northwestern University, and The University of Colorado – Boulder. His research covers a range of topics at the intersections of applied ethics, social epistemology, and philosophy of science.

Publications | Website

 

Michael Mawson

mmawson@csu.edu.au

Michael teaches systematic theology and ethics at the Parramatta campus of the Charles Sturt School of Theology. He holds a BA Hons (First) and MA (Distinction) from Victoria University of Wellington, and a PhD in Theology from the University of Notre Dame, USA. He is interested in all areas of theology and ethics.

Publications

 

Doug McConnell

douglas.mcconnell@philosophy.ox.ac.uk

Doug is a research fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics where he works on the Wellcome Trust project, ‘Individual Responsibility and Healthcare’, and as part of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. He is also an adjunct at Charles Sturt University. His research interests include moral psychology, bioethics, neuroethics, and applied philosophy, particularly in relation to addiction and psychiatry.

Publications

 

Seumas Miller

semiller@csu.edu.au

Seumas is a senior research fellow in the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and Professor at Charles Sturt University. He also holds a research appointments at TU Delft (The Hague). In 1994 he was appointed Foundation Professor of Philosophy at Charles Sturt University and in 2000 Foundation Director of the Australian Research Council's Special Research Centre in Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics.

Publications

 

Francesca Minerva

minervafrancesca@googlemail.com

Francesca is a research fellow at the University of Milan, and an adjunct at Charles Sturt University. Between 2011 and 2020 she worked as a post-doc at the University of Melbourne, at the University of Ghent, and at Warwick University. She is the co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Controversial Ideas. Dr. Minerva's research focuses on applied ethics, including lookism, conscientious objection, abortion, academic freedom, and cryonics.

Publications | Website

 

Piero Moraro

pmoraro@csu.edu.au

Piero is a Lecturer at the Centre for Law and Justice art Charles Sturt University. He works mainly in political and legal philosophy. His articles have appeared in in The Philosophical Quarterly, the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Law and Philosophy and Res Publica. His book Civil Disobedience: a Philosophical Overview was published in 2019. Piero’s research interests centre around issues in democratic theory, social protest and criminal justice ethics.

Publications | Website

 

Justin Oakley

justin.oakley@monash.edu

Justin is a Professor of Bioethics at Monash University and is Deputy Director of the Monash Bioethics Centre. He is also an adjunct at Charles Sturt University. He is the author of Morality and the Emotions (Routledge, 1993, re-issued 2020, Routledge Library Editions, Ethics), and Virtue Ethics and Professional Roles (with Dean Cocking) (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and is editor of Informed Consent and Clinician Accountability: The ethics of report cards on surgeon performance (with Steve Clarke) (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Bioethics (Ashgate, International Library of Essays in Public and Professional Ethics, 2009).

Publications

 

Emma Rush

erush@csu.edu.au

Emma is a lecturer in philosophy and ethics at Charles Sturt University. She completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne. Her research encompasses three main areas: professional ethics, with a particular strength in social work and human services ethics and a developing project on resilience; applied ethics, including her nationally significant work on the sexualisation of children, and a developing project on ethics in the creative industries; and environmental ethics. Emma is a member of the International Network of Co-operative Inquirers and a member of the Environmental and Social Justice research group at Charles Sturt University.

Publications

 

Anne Schwenkenbecher

A.Schwenkenbecher@murdoch.edu.au

Anne is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Murdoch University, and an adjunct at Charles Sturt University. Before joining Murdoch in June 2013, she held appointments at The University of Melbourne, the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) at Australian National University, the University of Vienna, and Potsdam University. Her PhD in Philosophy (2009) is from Humboldt University of Berlin.

Publications

 

Monica Short

mshort@csu.edu.au

Monica is a lecturer at Charles Sturt University. She has a degree in Social Work and a Master of Social Welfare (Welfare and Social Policy). Monica completed her Ph.D. by publications through Charles Sturt University on 'The Australian Anglican Church engaging with people living with disabilities and from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in rural, regional and remote communities'. She has worked for over 20 years in large government organisations, including professional, project management, and managerial roles.

Publications

 

Ruth Townsend

rtownsend@csu.edu.au

Ruth is a lecturer in law, ethics and professionalism at Charles Sturt University. Ruth has most recently practised as a general senior legal officer for a large government institution. Ruth has also practiced as in-house counsel on commercial law matters for the NSW government. Ruth has a special interest in administrative law and governance, having previously acted in the role of University Ombudsman. Ruth also has an interest in health law and ethics and is the co-editor and author of the text, ‘Applied Paramedic Law and Ethics’ as well as numerous other book chapters and published articles on areas of health and the law. Ruth has a PhD in law from the ANU and has supervised a number of honours students on a range of different topics.

Publications

 

William Tuckwell

wtuckwell@csu.edu.au

William Tuckwell is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Future of the Professions Research Group. He recently completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne. He works primarily in epistemology and social and political philosophy. His work has been published in Social Epistemology, Hypatia, Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, and The Oxford Handbook to Consequentialism.

Publications

 

Suzanne Uniacke

suniacke@csu.edu.au

Suzanne is a Professor in Philosophy at Charles Sturt University. Previously, Suzanne was Director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, CAPPE (CSU), July 2013 - December 2016. Prior to commencing at CSU in July 2013, Suzanne worked in philosophy departments in Australia and England and held research fellowships at the University of St Andrews, Harvard University, and the University of Stirling. Suzanne was Joint Editor and Chief Editor of the Journal of Applied Philosophy, June 2001- June 2013. Suzanne is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

Publications

 

John Weckert

JWeckert@csu.edu.au

John is Emeritus Professor in philosopher at Charles Sturt University. He has been an influential figure in, and substantial contributor to the field of information and computer ethics. John has published many books and journal articles outlining his research in this field.

Publications

 

Garry Young

garry.young@unimelb.edu.au

Garry is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales, an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne and an Adjunct at Charles Sturt University.

His research interests include the ethics of virtual actions.

Publications

 
Our Research Groups
 

 

Our research groups focus on biomedical ethics, the ethics of new technology, and practical ethics in the human services.

 

Biomedical ethics

Ethical issues related to issues in biomedicine have long been a core area of work in both practical and professional ethics. Issues regarding the creation and destruction of human life raise a cluster of ethical challenges and make moral demands on workers in the healthcare professions that workers in other areas do not often face. Our work in this area will focus on a number of related topics including conscientious objection, the ethics of vaccination, conceptual issues related to the idea of moral status and emerging disputes between liberals and conservatives regarding contentious issues in bioethics.

Group members

  • Tamara Browne
  • Steve Clarke
  • Daniel Cohen
  • Alberto Giubilini
  • Hakan Coruh
  • Michael Mawson
  • Doug McConnell
  • Francesca Minerva
  • Justin Oakley
  • Emma Rush
  • Ruth Townsend
  • Suzanne Uniacke
 

The ethics of new technology

The ethics of new technology is a branch of applied ethics concerned the ethical implications of new and future technologies. We consider how best to meet the ethical challenges posed by technologies such as: AI, GMOs, robotics, human enhancements, cyber-security, virtual reality, space travel, nanotech, terraforming, social media (including fake news and conspiracy theories), computer games, and drones. As technological progress rapidly expands the limits of what humanity can do, it is with often increased urgency that we must consider what we should do. The ethics of new technology seeks to establish such limits; balancing the fantastical opportunities such technologies grant, with the horrific threats they may also pose.

Group members

  • Yeslam Al-Saggaf
  • Christopher Bartel
  • Oliver Burmeister
  • Steve Clarke
  • Khondker Jahed Reza
  • Matthew Kopec
  • Morgan Luck
  • Anne Schwenkenbecher
  • John Weckert
  • Gary Young
 

Practical ethics in the human services

Participation in the professions has long been regarded as a source of significant moral issues. Society often grants specific professions monopoly or cartel control of a range of services, and as a matter of reciprocity professionals are expected to provide those services while abiding by codes of ethics and exercising fiduciary responsibilities towards their clients and other people in their care. Our work in this area will focus on practical ethical issues arising in the human service professions, defined broadly to include areas such as social work, policing, law, politics, and ministry.

Group members

  • Wendy Bowles
  • Tamara Browne
  • Daniel Cohen
  • Anna Corbo Crehan
  • Hakan Coruh
  • Daniel Halliday
  • Clive Hamilton
  • Matthew Kopec
  • Seumas Miller
  • Piero Moraro
  • Emma Rush
  • Anne Schwenkenbecher
  • Monica Short
  • Ruth Townsend
  • Suzanne Uniacke
 
Our Projects
 

 

We are involved in a number of externally funded projects.

 
 
Our Partners and Affiliations
 

 

We are affiliated with a number of Research Centres and Universities.

 
 
 
Our Events & Media
 

 

We host events to help disseminate work in practical and public ethics.

 

Upcoming Events

  • Call for Papers: 2022 Murdoch Colloquium "Philosophy, Violence, and Human Rights" - 4 November 2022 at Murdoch University, South St Campus. Please send abstracts to alandtapper@gmail.com
 

Past Events

  • 5/2/22 - Steve Clarke - Conspiracy Theory Conference

  • 13/10/21 - Ethics of War and Peace Conference - Suzanne Uniacke

  • 15/9/21 4-6pm (AEST) PAPER Workshop - Oliver Burmeister - Minimising coercive research practices

  • 17/07/21 - 9pm - 11pm (AEST) Sacred values and pluralism about the sanctity of life - Steve Clarke

  • 24/03/21 - 7pm (CST) UMM MPC Public Lecture - Steve Clarke - The New Conspiracism and the Old Conspiracism

  • 17/03/21 - 4pm (AEST) CSU HUMSS Public Lecture - Steve Clarke - The New Conspiracism and the Old Conspiracism

 
 
Contact Us
 

 

We welcome inquiries from potential industry partners, researcher collaborators, and PhD students.

 

Email or call us

Steve Clarke

stclarke@csu.edu.au
02 6933 2049
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Charles Sturt University

Morgan Luck

moluck@csu.edu.au
02 6933 2326
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Charles Sturt University

 

Visit us

School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Charles Sturt University
Wagga Wagga

 
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