Monthly Archives: June 2025

Thinking About Drinking: Rethinking Alcohol, Addiction, and Recovery

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On 11 April 2025, the Centre for Philosophy of Epidemiology, Medicine, and Public Health (CPEMPH) hosted an interdisciplinary workshop at Durham University titled Thinking About Drinking. Supported by the Wellcome Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, the event brought together scholars, practitioners, and those with lived experience to critically re-examine assumptions about alcohol use, addiction, and recovery.

Key themes included:

  • The limitations of dominant epistemological and methodological approaches in alcohol research, and the case for methodological pluralism.
  • Revisiting the concept of addiction, including challenges to the disease model.
  • Embracing plural and inclusive understandings of recovery.
  • Exploring the positive and pleasurable dimensions of drinking in ethical and policy contexts.
  • Understanding alcohol use as culturally and locally situated.

The workshop exposed profound differences in how alcohol is understood across sectors, raising pressing philosophical and ethical questions: Who defines harm, recovery, or misuse? What does it mean to live well with or without alcohol? And whose vision of the good life shapes public discourse and policy?

Future directions include collaborative research bridging philosophy, public health, and lived experience.

Read the full report here

New Grant Awarded: Strengthening Contextualised Evidence Use in Public Health

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We are thrilled to announce that the Centre for Philosophy of Epidemiology, Medicine and Public Health (CPEMPH) has been awarded a prestigious British Academy grant under the Evidence-Informed Policymaking Programme, funded by the UK’s International Science Partnerships Fund.

The project, “Integrating Evidence for Contextualised Public Health Policy: Lessons from South Africa”, will run from April 2025 to March 2026. Led by Professor Alex Broadbent, Nancy Cartwright, Herkulaas Combrink, Benjamin Smart, and Sarah Wieten, the project is a partnership between CPEMPH at Durham and UJ, Durham University’s CHESS, and the University of the Free State. The project aims to improve the integration of two increasingly important types of evidence in public health policymaking:

  • Model-based projections, which forecast intervention outcomes.
  • Social listening reports, which track public sentiment and identify misinformation.

Using the South African COVID-19 response as a focal case, the project will test and refine the Evidence Mapping Framework (developed by Cartwright, Munro and Kelters) to assess how these evidence types can be better contextualised and used to support effective policy design, implementation, and evaluation.

The research responds to key challenges identified during the pandemic—particularly the difficulties in combining technical modelling outputs with real-time information about community attitudes, needs, and values. By developing practical tools and refining existing methodologies, the project aims to offer transferable lessons for other countries and contexts grappling with similar challenges.

What This Means for CPEMPH

This award supports our mission to advance philosophical engagement with real-world challenges in public health, evidence use, and justice. It reinforces our role as a key international player in the field of evidence-based policy and showcases our ongoing commitment to equitable collaboration—especially through our strong partnerships with South African institutions.

What Comes Next?

Over the coming year, the project will deliver:

  • Case study analyses of modelling and social listening in South Africa
  • An extended Evidence Mapping Framework adapted to diverse evidence types
  • Policy briefs and practical guidance for public health stakeholders
  • A hybrid workshop in late 2025 bringing together researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to test and refine the tools developed

Stay tuned for updates, workshop invitations, and outputs. We’re excited to contribute to better public health policymaking—not only in South Africa, but globally.

For more information please get in touch

Philosophy of Medicine Reading Group (online)

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This term we will be tackling a variety of articles rather than a monograph. I hope this added flexibility can encourage new people to join, even if they cannot make the meeting every week.

Each week there will be two online meetings of the group to discuss the same section of text, one on Wednesday night at 5pm UK time, one on Thursday morning at 9 am UK time, in hopes of accommodating group members in a variety of time zones. There is no need to attend all meetings-please come when you can.

Schedule

May 21 and 22

Pappalardo F, Russo G, Tshinanu FM, Viceconti M. In silico clinical trials: concepts and early adoptions. Brief Bioinform. 2019 Sep 27;20(5):1699-1708. doi: 10.1093/bib/bby043. PMID: 29868882

May 28 and 29 

Serrahima, C., Martínez, M. The experience of dysmenorrhea. Synthese 201, 173 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04148-9

June 4 and 5 

Dings R, Strijbos DW. Being in a position to know: attuned responsiveness as the hallmark of experiential knowledge and expertise in mental healthcare. Front Psychiatry. 2025 Jan 13;15:1490489. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1490489. PMID: 39872434; PMCID: PMC11770679.

June 11 and 12

Zhou, J. (2025). Pregnancy Is a Survival Pathology: A Biostatistical Approach. Philosophy of Medicine, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.5195/pom.2025.214

June 18 and 19

Allen, H. (2024). Forsaking Fortune: Luck and Its Limited Utility to Cancer Diagnosis. Philosophy of Medicine, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.5195/pom.2024.188

June 25 and 26

Woodward, J., & Kendler, K. (2023). Polygene Risk Scores: A Philosophical Exploration. Philosophy of Medicine, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.5195/pom.2023.156

If you would like to join the group please go to https://groups.google.com/g/philmed-rg/

Negligent Racism in COVID-19 Lockdowns

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We are pleased to announce the publication of a new article by CPEMPH members Alex Broadbent (Durham University) and Pieter Streicher (University of Johannesburg), titled “Was Lockdown Racist?”, in Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.

In this paper, the authors introduce the concept of negligent racism—a form of racism that does not require intent but arises when policy choices foreseeably cause disproportionate harm to certain racial groups, and alternatives are available but ignored.

Focusing on the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns in sub-Saharan Africa, the article argues that these measures, regardless of intention, were ill-suited to the region’s socio-economic realities. The authors contend that the adoption of lockdown policies, modeled after responses in wealthier nations, led to significant harm in African contexts, where factors such as overcrowded housing, reliance on informal economies, and limited access to essential services made strict lockdowns particularly detrimental.

The paper challenges the notion that the adverse effects of lockdowns were merely consequences of existing inequalities. Instead, it posits that the global implementation of such policies, without adequate consideration of their suitability for diverse contexts, exemplifies negligent racism.

This publication contributes to ongoing discussions about equity in global health policymaking and underscores the importance of context-sensitive approaches.

📄 Read the full article here

Or listen to an AI-generated podcast about the article here…

Methodological Pluralism in Epidemiology: Lessons from Covid-19

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We are pleased to share a commentary published in Global Epidemiology by CPEMPH members Pieter Streicher and Alex Broadbent, with co-author Joel Hellewell (EMBL-EBI), titled “The need for methodological pluralism in epidemiological modelling.”

This paper examines two high-profile failures in Covid-19 forecasting by the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), during the Delta and Omicron waves of 2021. In both instances, projections proved not only inaccurate but too vague to be practically useful—hospitalisations were overestimated by an order of magnitude, and deaths by even more.

The authors argue that a key contributor to these failures was SAGE’s reliance on a single modelling approach: mechanistic simulation. By contrast, the South African Covid-19 Modelling Consortium adopted a pluralistic strategy—combining mechanistic and descriptive methods, learning iteratively from outcomes, and achieving far greater predictive accuracy despite far fewer resources.

The commentary makes a strong case for adopting methodological pluralism in epidemic modelling, highlighting the value of multiple, complementary perspectives when dealing with uncertainty in high-stakes contexts. The paper calls for diverse methodological inputs, critical evaluation of past performance, and more open-minded engagement with data from a variety of global contexts.

📄 Read the full article here