Sachdev Vorathep, Bandara Kumeri, Swana Matimba
The University of Edinburgh The Roslin Institute, Edinburgh, UK
Black and Brown in Bioethics, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.
Med Humanit. 2025 Jul 11. doi: 10.1136/medhum-2025-013421.
This paper presents the Global Bioethics Library (GBL), an initiative developed by Black and Brown in Bioethics in response to recurring requests for more inclusive bioethics reading lists-requests that reflect deeper, structural gaps in the field. These gaps persist in mainstream bioethics pedagogy, literature and frameworks, which remain dominated by Western paradigms and the interests of global North countries, thereby marginalising knowledge and concerns from the global South and minoritised communities in the global North. Positioned as an epistemic justice project, the GBL was envisioned as a crowd-sourced, open-access resource that decentralises knowledge production and expands what is recognised as bioethics. However, the process of developing the library revealed deep tensions and limitations: most contributions came from the global North and continued to reflect dominant frameworks, despite efforts to adopt inclusive and democratic methods. These outcomes expose a controversial paradox-namely, that the very tools and structures used to 'decolonise' bioethics may be shaped by the same epistemic paradigms they aim to critique. This paper argues that intention alone is insufficient to redress epistemic injustice. Methods left critically unexamined and without reconfiguration risk reproducing exclusion under the guise of inclusion. The GBL thus serves as a case study in the controversies and contradictions of doing epistemic justice work within institutions and infrastructures built on unequal foundations. We offer this reflection not as a conclusion, but as an invitation for collaboration, critique and reimagining the politics of decolonial work in global bioethics.
本文介绍了全球生物伦理学图书馆（GBL），这是由生物伦理学领域的黑人和棕色人种发起的一项倡议，旨在回应人们反复提出的建立更具包容性的生物伦理学阅读清单的请求，这些请求反映了该领域更深层次的结构性差距。这些差距在主流生物伦理学教学、文献和框架中依然存在，这些领域仍由西方范式和全球北方国家的利益主导，从而使全球南方以及全球北方少数族裔社区的知识和关切被边缘化。作为一个认知正义项目，GBL被设想为一个众包的、开放获取的资源，它将知识生产去中心化，并拓展被认可为生物伦理学的范畴。然而，图书馆的建设过程揭示了深刻的矛盾和局限性：尽管努力采用包容性和民主的方法，但大多数贡献仍来自全球北方，且继续反映主导框架。这些结果暴露出一个有争议的悖论，即用于使生物伦理学“非殖民化”的工具和结构，可能会受到它们旨在批判的相同认知范式的影响。本文认为，仅靠意图不足以纠正认知不公正。未经严格审视和重新配置的方法，有可能在包容的幌子下再次造成排斥。因此，GBL成为了一个在建立在不平等基础上的机构和基础设施中开展认知正义工作时所产生的争议和矛盾的案例研究。我们提供这一反思并非作为结论，而是作为一种合作、批判和重新构想全球生物伦理学中去殖民化工作政治的邀请。
