Date: 21st August 2025, 9.30 AM to 5.00 PM
Venue: F23, Michael Spence Building, Auditorium (2) 105, University of Sydney
Dinner: 6.30 to 8.00 PM
In Person
This research symposium at the University of Sydney and co-organised with the Shame and Medicine Project critically interrogated the role of self-conscious emotions in health, medicine, and well-being discourse. Emotions are not merely internal states; they are shaped by overlapping structures of power deeply influencing ethical theory and healthcare practice. Social hierarchies such as race, gender, class, caste, disability, and migration status shape how emotions are experienced and expressed. Emotions are not neutral but are entangled with systemic inequities—determining whose pain is taken seriously, whose suffering is medicalized or dismissed, and whose expressions of grief, anger, humor, humiliation, shame, or care are deemed appropriate or disruptive. By examining emotions through this lens, we uncover how they function as both tools of control and acts of resistance, shaping healthcare interactions, ethical norms, and the possibilities for more just and equitable forms of care.
How do emotions mediate moral evaluations and values in healthcare spaces? How do they reinforce or disrupt hierarchies of knowledge, authority, and care? Whose emotions are legitimized, and whose are dismissed as irrational or excessive? Symposium speakers engaged with these questions to uncover the ways emotions shape health outcomes, ethical affordances, and the broader politics of care, calling attention to how emotions operate within systems of power, marginalization, and resistance in healthcare.
Objectives
The symposium’s main objective was to initiate interdisciplinary discussion about emotions and values within healthcare debates, and its significance to ethical theory, practice and ethics education. A symposium such as this one provided a unique opportunity for humanities, artists, healthcare professionals, and social research scholars to discuss the significance of emotions towards health, wellbeing and in general in medicine discourse.
We explored the following questions in this symposium:
- What are the current debates on medical, cultural, and moral understandings of emotions, and their implications for health and wellbeing?
- In current discourses how are emotions and affective experiences understood?
- What are the implications of understanding emotions for theory and practice in varied disciplinary and non-academic spaces?
Confirmed Speakers
- Angelina Hurley, Humour in Aboriginal Wellbeing and Survival
- Alex Broom, Vital Grief: Everyday hauntings
- Claire Hooker, TBC
- Kane Race, Reducing Stigma: treatments of stigma in global HIV/AIDS
- Luna Dolezal, Anticipating Shame in Healthcare
- Mark Alfano, Stolen Grief
- Meagan Brennan, Experiences of shame in clinical encounters for breast cancer treatment – Who do you think you are – Angelina Jolie?
- Nathan Moore, Leveraging innovative technologies to train healthcare professionals in difficult conversations
- Pat McConville, TBC
- Shiva Chandra, Exploring ‘Urgency’ as Affect in the Context of Antibiotic Resistant STIs
- Supriya Subramani, Everyday Indignities: Phenomenology of Humiliation
- Vic McEwan, TBC
This event was made possible with funding from: Sydney Health Ethics, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney, the Shame and Medicine Project and SSSHARC, University of Sydney.