Oxford Global Health & Bioethics International Conference

Overview of the Conference

The 2024 edition of the Oxford Global Health & Bioethics International (OGHB) Conference was held from the 8th to the 10th of July 2024. It brought together scholars from all over the world whose research focus on ethical issues arising from global health policy and practice. The topics covered at this year’s conference include ethical issues arising in humanitarian crisis, climate change, genomic research, decolonisation and global health justice. These issues were considered by scholars from various disciplines such as public health, social work and law. The conference generated robust discussion on ethical issues in global health, and this was further enriched by the diversity of the participants in attendance.

Summary of My Contribution

I presented a Lightning Talk on the topic ‘On the Need to Center Racism in the Reform of Mental Health Law: England and Wales as a Case Study’. ‘Lightning Talks’ were to be delivered in 5 minutes and were geared towards stimulating conversation on the specific topic covered or the overall theme of the session. In my talk, I drew from my ongoing PhD research which focuses on how racism shapes the way the Mental Health Act 1983 operates towards Black people and demonstrated that there was a need for bioethicists to play a greater role in the process of legal reform. I emphasised that bioethicists can contribute to the legal reform process by applying their analytical skills and expertise to bring greater attention to how racism affects Black people’s mental health and how this can be ignored and even exacerbated by the law. I argued that such insights can feed into the legal reform process, thereby enhancing the quality of the law and improving the experience of Black people with mental disorders. My talk generated considerable discussion on how bioethicists can get involved at the structural level – that is, in the broader law-making process – as well as at the institutional level.

Key Takeaways

Although I benefitted immensely from the discussions generated by my talk and other sessions at the conference, my major takeaways were from the Early Career Researcher events which took place before the conference began. While the panel discussions for early career researchers covered several topics ranging from career pathways to finding the right mentors, the session that resonated the most with me was titled ‘How to Get Published’. In this session, the panellists shared practical tips on how to overcome the fear of publishing. Although several points stood out to me, the five points that I found most valuable were:

• Write; not weekly or monthly, but daily, even if all one can muster is an hour’s worth of writing.

• Have confidence in your ideas and always put them down in writing.

• Persevere in your work, even in the face of rejections.

• Have a clear sense of who you are as a scholar and where you want to be, and let this guide your decision about the journals you publish in.

• Submit – Do not be too much of a perfectionist. Once your draft has gotten to a point where another person can say ‘Well, this is alright’, you should submit.

In all, it was a deeply insightful and timely conference. It was particularly valuable for me as an early career researcher who had been struggling with the fear of having my first academic paper rejected. I took the learnings from the conference with me as I returned to Edinburgh and spent the next few days working on the draft of my first paper. Whilst my fears about rejection did not completely dissipate, I resolved that I was going to ‘just write’ as I had been told at the conference, even if it meant doing it afraid, and I succeeded at doing that. My first draft is finally complete and regardless of the feedback that I receive, I will not stop writing. More importantly, I will not lose confidence in the fact that my ideas are worth sharing.