Heather Bradshaw is an IEET Affiliate Scholar. Ms. Bradshaw spent her early childhood in the remote hills and dusty towns and villages of Iran, Pakistan, and Libya where her father often worked to use technology to bring clean drinking water, refrigeration, employment, skills, and more sustainable livelihoods to people who had not yet experienced these benefits. Her own appreciation of the power of technology to bring positive change on an individual and social level led her to study (automotive) engineering at university back in the UK and then, after a short period working for a small British manufacturing company, to work for the UK Government’s trade promotion agency, British Trade International. Through this she also developed an interest in and links with China.
She has been privileged to study as a mature student at the Universities of Oxford (BA Hons PPE—politics, philosophy and economics) and Bristol where she currently is completing a PhD on human enhancement technologies and disability. This involves qualitative research with people with a variety of differences including Deafness, visual impairment, chronic illness and different mobility modes.
Ms. Bradshaw retains interests in the automotive industry, civil engineering, and in aid work. As well as her academic qualifications, she holds a Chartered Institute of Marketing Diploma, the Institute of Export Advanced Certificate in International Trade, and qualifications in business and management.
Work Plan
In cultivating popular appreciation of the impacts of technoprogressive ideas, it is important to reach out to groups who see such technologies as threatening and to communicate to them how the technologies, under suitable governance structures giving them democratic control, might benefit them and even transform the social conditions they and their children will experience. This work has both theoretical and empirical elements.
The groups with whom I seek to communicate are those with experience of difference, impairment and disability in society. Often ostracised from the channels through which technological and intellectual progress flow, these groups, in many existing cultures and political systems, are especially vulnerable to the sorts of misuse of technologies which the IEET is working to prevent. It is these groups whose views and needs must be fully incorporated, in their own voices, if realistic risk mitigation policies are to be developed.
This kind of risk mitigation is a key part of what is needed for the realization of the potential benefits of technologies with as few unforeseen and negative side effects as possible. Our obligations to other humans include those for whom existing political institutions fail as well as the citizens of developed countries. Implementation of rights to healthcare for all are a key part of a commitment to a progressive future. But often it is extremely difficult for those who have not experienced life without legal rights, or life with non-conforming body morphologies, or without access to technology and technical information, to understand how this affects one’s life, experience, attitudes and decision-making constraints.
My current role is to try to address these communication challenges by improving the communication of technological information to groups whose access to it has traditionally been limited, and to try to learn more about their ways of life and thus to provide more opportunities for them to put their views and requirements into the technoprogresive debates. At the moment my focus is on disability rights and people who experience difference and disability within developed societies.
A project which I hope to devote more time to in 2010 is the development of greater exchange and interaction between the Anglo-Saxon and other philosophical traditions in bioethics. The debates over human nature and dignity are important because they shape the goals and priorities different cultures have for using technology. Greater intercultural understanding and communication is crucial to maximizing the benefits of technology and to enabling us to move beyond the distractions of different conceptual schemes and linguistic terminological disagreements and towards the more productive work of establishing how we can, together, best govern, research, develop and implement existing and new scientific and technological knowledge for the benefit of all people alive today and of their children.
Home Page |
Twitter
IEET Blog