Lisa Bortolotti

Taking advantage of a concentrated period of research, I have planned a series of talks on my research on delusions, conspiracy beliefs, and epistemic injustice and a series of talks in or for schools. Academic talks Medical reasons to promote epistemically just communication in mental health clinical encounters. OZSW Conference , Eindhoven, 30-31 August 2024. Epistemically just medicine is good medicine. Bioethics and Social Justice , Prague, 12-13 September 2024. Conspiracy Beliefs and Delusions as Implausible and Unshakeable Identity Beliefs. Conspiracy Beliefs Between Secret Evidence and Delusion . Berlin, 26-27 September 2024. Are conspiracy theories epistemically innocent? Pre-talk with Egenis graduate students. Exeter, 30 September 2024. Medical reasons to promote epistemically just interactions in healthcare. Egenis seminar . Exeter, 30 September 2024. Epistemically just interactions are good medicine. PhenoLab . Online, 1 October 2024. Speaker and panel member at the Annual Me...

The resources available at The Philosophy Garden have significantly expanded in recent months, thanks to the generous support of the University of Birmingham AHRC Impact Acceleration Account. In particular, new videos address issues surrounding disagreement and the difficulty and importance of trusting reliable sources and being socially connected in order to gain the information we need and achieve our most basic goals. These videos can be conversation starters, prompting reflection and discussion, and introducing some interesting concepts in concrete and engaging ways. We have been using them with primary school children, from age 7, and with secondary school students and sixth-formers as well. We use them in class with our undergraduate and Masters students to test intuitions and contextualise problems.  On the site, there are recommendations for readings, games young people can play online to challenge themselves, a video library, and handouts, worksheets, and slides for teach...

This year, World Philosophy Day was for me an opportunity to bring to young people some philosophical reflections on how we make decisions, arrive at explanations, and interact with each other in challenging contexts. In the morning I visited a primary school and talked to year 5 and 6 students about how we seek an explanation when something unexpected happens. We started by considering some definitions of philosophy and accounts of the value of philosophy ("What is philosophy for?") and then we watch two brief videos together.  The Ant and the Grasshopper  is about how we tend to blame others (especially people and institutions we don't like) when we find ourselves in a crisis; and The Fox and the Owl  is about how we often prefer to arrive at the solution of a problem by ourselves, without consulting with other people, even when they may have relevant knowledge to share. In the discussion after watching the videos, children recognised in the various animal characters di...

Four years after the end of project PERFECT, funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant, I am happy to be involved in another major project, this time funded by the Wellcome Trust.  It's EPIC (another gorgeous acronym), a multidisciplinary project on epistemic injustice in healthcare made possible by a Wellcome Discovery Award and led by Havi Carel at the University of Bristol. Most of the work we will be contributing to at the University of Birmingham will be on epistemic injustice in mental health, with a special focus on psychosis, dementia, and depression. If you want to learn more about the project, check our provisional website, at epicproject.org.uk . We will soon advertise for research fellowships and other posts.