Research Interests

• rhetoric
• ethical studies
• biopolitics and bioethics
• critical theory and media
• medical humanities
• phenomenology

Research

My research contributes to an understanding of ethics in light of the ethical challenges raised by burgeoning biotechnologies and biopolitical forms of governance. The increasing “biologization” of bodies and political identities renders obsolete traditional forms of ethics, based on the principles of human reason and autonomy. This program of research addresses the constitution of subjectivity through biotechnology, biopolitics, and global media networks. More specifically, it interrogates the ways in which the concept of “life” is constituted and deployed as an ethical good, from human rights to biophysiology, and from civil society to bioethics.

By drawing on and incorporating the lessons of rhetorical theory and criticism, textuality studies, and poststructuralism, I hope to contribute to a better understanding of ethical life, relationality, and sociality. This perspective is better able to address subjectivities constituted in the wake of advanced biotechnologies, healthcare systems, and communications networks and practices. The objective is to reorient ethical discourse and practice away from the tradition of liberal humanism, and instead to look at the ways that ethics is a rhetorical practice located in and through bodies, political identities, and communicative networks and their effects.

CIHR-Funded Research

“Solitary Space: Seclusion Rooms and the Ethics of Body and Place”

The purpose of this study is to shift the terms of ethical discourse in a manner that will be commensurable with the lived experience of patients and with nursing staff who care for them. Through a critical ethnography and semi-structured interviews with patients and nursing staff, we employ a phenomenological analysis to gain a better understanding of the seclusion room as a lived and relational space. This is an original project because very little research has addressed the subjective dimensions of body and place in the study of ethical practice. Moreover, the project answers the growing need for an alternative approach to bioethics, one that extends beyond the abstract coordinates of analytic philosophy. Such an examination could help healthcare providers to consider the emotional and bodily impacts of seclusion on patients, and encourage them not only to better understand the experience of patients but also to actively find alternatives to this controversial intervention.

SSHRC-Funded Research

“Ethics and Mental Health Care: An Analysis of Professional Practices in Correctional Institutions”

This research project is situated at the crossroads of two disciplinary fields: health sciences and ethics. From an ethical perspective, it explores the practices of healthcare providers with respect to the care that they offer to a vulnerable population (psychiatric inmates) within specific psychiatric care milieus (forensic psychiatric units). Several authors have described the challenges faced by healthcare providers, such as nurses and social workers, who work in forensic psychiatry. However, few have addressed the ethical stakes of a professional practice that is subordinate to the security measures that govern forensic psychiatric milieus. Healthcare providers are constantly confronted with the opposing imperatives of care and security (including correctional operations). This study addresses the causes and consequences of this ethical dilemma. In doing so, it seeks to represent the ethical tensions experienced by specific healthcare professional groups, including nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers.

Honours and Awards

• SRC Award, Ryerson University 2009-2010
• Undergraduate Teaching Award, University of Toronto 2005-2006
• SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Toronto 2004-2006
• Chancellor’s Fellowship, UC Berkeley 2003-2004
• Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, UC Berkeley 2002-2003
• SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, UC Berkeley 2001-2002
• ERASMUS Scholarship, Bergische Universität-Gesamthochschule Wuppertal, Germany 1995

Grants

• SSHRC Standard Research Grant 2009-2012
• CIHR Operating Grant 2011-2013
• New Faculty SRC Development Grant, Ryerson University 2008-2010
• SSHRC Institutional Research Grant, Ryerson University 2008-2009

Books

S.J. Murray & D. Holmes (eds.), Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Healthcare: Challenging the Principle of Autonomy in Bioethics (Ashgate Publishing, 2009)

Selected Recent Publications

S.J. Murray, “Coming to Terms: Ethics, Motherhood, and the Cultural Science Fiction of the Gene,” in Mediated Moms: Mothering and Popular Culture, ed. E. Podnieks (McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming 2012)

S.J. Murray, “Phenomenology, Ethics, and the Crisis of the Lived-body,” Nursing Philosophy (forthcoming 2012)

S.J. Murray, “Rhetorical Insurgents: Biopolitics and the Insurrectionary Rhetoric of McLuhan’s Cool Media,” Canadian Review of American Studies (forthcoming 2012)

A. Guta, S.J. Murray, & A. McClelland, “Global AIDS Governance, Biofascism, and the Difficult Freedom of Expression,” APORIA: The Nursing Journal, vol. 3, no. 4 (2011): 15–29, see <http://www.aporiajournal.com>

D. Holmes & S.J. Murray, “Civilizing the ‘Barbarian’: A Critical Analysis of Behaviour Modification Programs in Forensic Psychiatric Settings,” Journal of Nursing Management, vol. 19 (2011): 293–301

S.J. Murray, D. Holmes, A. Perron, & G. Rail, “Towards an Ethics of Authentic Practice,” Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, vol. 14, no. 5 (2008): 682–689

S.J. Murray, “Thanatopolitics: Reading in Agamben a Rejoinder to Biopolitical Life,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (2008): 203–207

S.J. Murray, D. Holmes, & G. Rail, “On the Constitution and Status of ‘Evidence’ in the Health Sciences,” Journal of Research in Nursing, vol. 13, no. 4 (2008): 272–280

Selected Recent Presentations

“Biopolitics and the Possibility of an Ethical Bioethics: Treating Mentally Ill Prisoners,” National Communication Association Annual Convention, New Orleans, LA, 17–20 November 2011

“Reading Ethics in J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year: Notes Toward a Rhetoric of Emergence,” 3rd Conference on Rhetorical Theory, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 13–15 October 2011

“Making Live and Letting Die: Media, Technoculture, and the Global Biopolitics of Death,” International Conference McLuhan Galaxy: Understanding Media Today, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain, 23–25 May 2011

“The Social Science Fiction of the Gene: Towards an Ethics of Non-autonomous Life,” Cambridge Interdisciplinary Reproductive Forum, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge University, UK, 17 May 2011

“Incompatible Bodies of Law: Incarcerated and Mentally Ill,” Association for the Study of Law, Culture & the Humanities, UNLV, Las Vegas, NV, 11–12 March 2011

“No Right to Die: Media, Guantánamo, and the Biopolitics of Free Speech,” Writers Table, Arts & Letters Club, Toronto, ON, 1 October 2010

Recent Graduate Courses

ENGL 5900: Rhetorical and Textual Ethics (winter 2012)

Affiliations

Director, Rhetoric & Ethics Research Lab

Email: rhetoric@carleton.ca

 

 

The Rhetoric & Ethics Research Lab fosters transdisciplinary research, teaching, and community dialogue on the discursive production and limits of “life.” The Lab’s activities focus on critical ethical and textual inquiry at the following intersectional sites:

• the body, subjectivity, and identity
• biopolitics and the critique of institutional power
• thanatopolitics or the “politics of death”
• health: biotechnology, subjectivity, and the biosciences
• biocitizenship, nationalism, transnationalism, and postnationalism
• textual production and mediation, including rhetorical criticism and theory
• networked subjectivities and the post-human

For updates on the Lab’s activities, ‘Like’ the Rhetoric & Ethics Research Lab on Facebook.

 

Founding Editor, MediaTropes eJournal

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