Race, Medicine, and Moral Disagreement

EVENT DESCRIPTION

The publication of the first Anti-Racist Medicine textbook provides an opportunity to reflect on how medicine engages with questions of race, justice, and professional responsibility. Debates about race in medicine are often framed as empirical or technical questions, yet they frequently reflect deeper disagreements about values, evidence, and explanation.

The book examines how concepts such as race and ethnicity, while socially constructed and historically shaped, continue to influence clinical practice, medical education, research, and healthcare institutions. It explores how racialised inequities arise through complex interactions between racism, social and economic disadvantage, migration, culture, and other structural factors, rather than any single cause. These debates raise important questions about how race and ethnicity should be understood and used in medicine, when (if ever) they should inform clinical or research decision-making. 

This event will bring together scholars and clinicians from across disciplines to explore how these disagreements emerge, how they shape medical education, research, and practice, and what it means to engage with them openly and responsibly. Rather than seeking premature consensus, the discussion will consider how medicine might learn to work constructively with ethical disagreement.

This event is part of the ANTITHESES Platform programme of events - engaging in disagreement, polarisation and uncertainty.

Special podcast

"Is it my job to teach you?" - Race education in medicine.

Many of you attended the ‘Race, Medicine, and Moral Disagreement’ panel event with the launch of the Anti-Racist Medicine textbook. Thank you for the overwhelming support.

If you have missed the event, you can check out this BMJ student podcast where Prof. Mehrunisha Suleman talks about race and racism and her work on this book with medical students.  

Is it the job of minority students to teach their peers, or even staff, about race in medicine? In this episode, Zaynah Khan sits down with expert guests and doctors Mehrunisha Suleman and Zeshan Qureshi, along with panellist and medical student Judy, to discuss how race is taught in medical education.

Also on Apple Podcasts.

SPEAKER INFORMATION

• Chair Professor Sir Aziz Sheikh, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford
• Professor Joseph Graves, North Carolina A&T State University
• Professor Mehrunisha Suleman, Ethox Centre, Oxford Population Health
• Dr Zeshan Qureshi, NHS doctor and philosopher
  
  

PROGRAMME

Doors open  5:30 pm;  Panel discussion followed by drinks reception 6-8 pm.

• Keynote (20 mins): Professor Joseph Graves
• Panel (30 mins): Professor Joseph Graves, Professor Mehrunisha Suleman, Dr Zeshan Qureshi
• Chair: Professor Sir Aziz Sheikh
• Q&A (30 mins)
• Drinks reception

Location: The Divinity School, Oxford, OX1 3BG

Please note: This event is in-person only.

BOOKING INFORMATION

If you would like to attend, please register.

If you can no longer attend the event after registering, please email us to let us know, so we can provide your place to someone else. Thank you.