The call for papers for this year’s IAB conference is now available here: it’s worth noting that there’s a change of venue, and it’ll now be held in Bengaluru (Bangalore), not Delhi. (The notification of the change of venue is here. Given what’s been on the news recently about pollution levels in Delhi, the alteration is probably to be welcomed.)
From the call:
The Congress Organising Committee takes great pleasure in inviting you all to the 14th World Congress of Bioethics and 7th National Bioethics Conference. The Congress theme is Health for All in an Unequal World: Obligations of Global Bioethics.
2018 marks the 70th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights which laid a foundation for the highest attainable standards of health. It will also mark the 40th anniversary of the Alma Ata Declaration, in which the world pledged “Health for All” by 2000. More recently the chief of WHO issued a call for universal health coverage, drawing attention to issues around equity in health systems, including health systems research.
Despite several gains in health research and healthcare, we as a global community have not been able to achieve equitable healthcare systems so far. Global bioethics ought to be squarely addressing health inequity in an interconnected but unequal world. We are witnessing the emergence of the stronghold of the private corporate sector on the one hand and health conditions requiring huge investments in research on the other hand. Alongside, we observe growing inequities in the health status of human populations, growing conflicts, increasing episodes of natural disasters and adverse economic situations directly impacting the purchasing capacity of common people. The inequity in access to healthcare continues as much in the global North as the global South. In this context, the global bioethics community needs to engage with and strengthen the scholarship in the field of enquiries such as ‘justice’ and ‘solidarity’ in the coming times.
We sincerely hope that you will join us to bring your own voice into multidisciplinary conversations on the Congress theme. Needless to say, the Congress is open, as has always been the case, for debates and conversations on other wide-ranging themes from the broader discipline of bioethics.