Title: Patient Narrative, Endangered Coral Projects Win Undergraduate Bioethics Showcase

Projects by Maddy Rice (C’20) and Sam Lee (C’18) won this year’s Bioethics Research Showcase, a juried exhibition of Georgetown undergraduate research and scholarship sponsored by the university’s Kennedy Institute for Ethics (KIE).

Rice won for a project on how patient narratives may be recounted through safe medical waste, and Lee focused on the growing disappearance of coral in the world’s oceans.

“Undergraduate research and scholarship provides the impetus for students to dig deeply into important subjects that apply and test the knowledge they gain in classrooms, and which allow them to address real-world, practical problems,” explains showcase founder Laura Bishop, associate teaching professor and academic program manager at KIE.

Discarded Narratives

Rice, a Justice and Peace Studies major, was one of two “Grand Champions” at the April 10-11 event for her project, “Discarded Narratives,” which addresses stigma surrounding safe medical waste and the use of such items as storytelling tools that represent the experience of illness.

“One of my closest friends has Type 1 diabetes, and in high school, she injected herself with insulin every day at lunch,” explains Rice, of from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The leftover plastic tabs that came from the packaged sterile needles her friend used were ubiquitous, and Rice turned more than 200 of them into a wreath that now sits in the friend’s Utah apartment.

The Georgetown student wrote a paper for the event that argues that artists can challenge negative connotations of long-term illness and treatment while reclaiming patient narratives.

Keren Hammerschlag, assistant director of the Center for Jewish Civilization, mentored Rice. Hammerschlag is also an assistant teaching professor and researcher of art and art history and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program as well as a faculty affiliate at KIE.

Addressing Coral Destruction

Lee, the other Grand Champion, submitted a mural, video and theses relating to the 25 species of coral considered “endangered” or “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Lee created the project as a way of dealing with the emotional force of discovering and learning about anthropogenic effects on the world’s oceans, specifically coral reefs.

“I have grown up loving and fearing oceans, in poetry, art and reality,” says Lee, an English major from Shanghai, China. “To know we are destroying them, and at such an unbelievably ridiculous rate, is gut-wrenching, terrifying, even guilt-inducing.”

Nathan Hensley, assistant professor of English, served as Lee’s mentor for the project.

Qatar Submissions

Student work this year included projects by 33 students from 17 different majors mentored by 13 faculty members across the disciplines.

Academic papers, multimedia projects, rhetoric and argumentation, journalistic reporting, literary and creative writing pieces, policy proposals, business plans and performing arts were presented at the event, Bishop explains.

This year, three students – Hunain Ali (SFS’18) Maddie Vagadori (SFS’19) and Chaïmaa Benkermi (SFS’21) – from Georgetown University Qatar submitted work, with Ali traveling all the way to Washington for the event.

The three students were in a course taught by associate research professor Ayman Shabana.

Ali, who spent last semester on the main campus, wrote a paper for the showcase on “Human Cloning: A Critique of Prevailing Arguments in Islam.”

Vagadori wrote a paper arguing that certain key influential leaders will be most conducive to creating a space for future Islamic world rulings on transgender rights, while Benkermi explored Islamic bioethics related to life-extending treatments.

Climate Change Theater

In addition to the more traditional categories, this year students submitted a dance number, an eight-foot mural (by Lee), a podcast and a book for children with chronic illness.

KIE also partnered with the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics to feature some plays for the event on the topic of climate change.

“The issue of climate change raises several ethical concerns,” says Bishop, “including those of justice and responsibility toward other humans, animals and natural places around the world, and asks us to think globally and temporally across generations of life. Both bioethics and theater cross disciplinary boundaries to think deeply about these difficult problems.”