Interdisciplinary Ethics and Society Research Group

AdSoLve

Addressing Socio-technical Limitations of LLMs for Medical and Social Computing is an RAI UK, RCUK funded project. It addresses the socio-technical limitations of LLMs that challenge their responsible and trustworthy use, particularly in the context of medical and legal use cases.

Future Democracy investigates how democracy can be shaped to address the challenges posed by technological development and climate change. In particular, it asks what sort of democratic innovations can address short-termism in democracy, foster responsiveness to local needs, and foster international cooperation. Various forms of citizens assemblies and future-oriented institutions are considered, along with technological enhancements to democratic arrangements.

Games as a Multi-layered Security threat

GEMS (Games as a Multi-layered Security threat) is an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods and cross-sectoral project bringing together academic researchers, AI specialists, policy experts and a range of police authorities from across Europe. The project aims to understand the contribution of the video-gaming ecosystem to the process of radicalisation, and to propose measures to prevent the radicalization process.

2025-2029, Horizon Europe, 'GRECO', Co-Investigator, €7,563,000 (with research and policy partners from Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Slovenia, France, Finland, Netherlands, Thailand, Turkey)

GRECO will introduce the food packaging industry to groundbreaking bio-based, SSbD, and fully circular PLA-based materials, that meet diverse application needs. These alternatives aim to replace fossil-based, complex, and multimaterial structures prevalent in the industry, improving packaging end-of-life through biodegradation in various environments like industrial and home compostability, anaerobic, marine, and soil. The design will ensure recyclability and avoiding of chemical interactions that hinder overall biodegradation. GRECO aims to demonstrate the life cycle and techno-economic feasibility of greener & safer bioplastics value chains for the food packaging sector, based on a safe and sustainable by design (SSbD) strategy. To this aim, innovative bio-based, biodegradable, and recyclable packaging based on new PLA copolymers, coatings, additives and catalysts accompanied by surface treatments will be produced. Regulatory compliance will be demonstrated while contributions to new or modified standards and proper labelling will be proposed. GRECO is a collaboration between research, innovation and policy partners from Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Slovenia, France, Finland, Netherlands, Thailand, and Turkey. IERG will work on Work Packages around ethics and user engagement as part of the project.

2025-2029, Horizon Europe, 'HYDROHEAL', Co-Investigator, €6,453,740 (Warwick €799,859) (with research and policy partners from Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Portugal, Ireland and Germany)

Bone atrophy and fractures, resulting from trauma, infections, osteoporosis, or cancer, are global health concerns. Standard care with cement and bone grafts has limitations. Synthetic polymers like polymethyl methacrylate risk leakage, spinal issues, and poor healing. Donor shortages for allogenic bone grafting and invasive procedures pose risks such as rejection and viral transmission. HYDROHEAL innovates with hydrogel formulations to address bone strength challenges by treating vertebral and alveolar fractures. HYDROHEAL aims to develop safe, sustainable scaling, and cost-effective formulations using renewable biomaterials for targeted drug delivery, aligning closely with the EU Circular Economy Action Plan and Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability. The self-solidifying hydrogels release active pharmaceutical ingredients locally upon external stimulation, potentially improving treatment efficacy, preventing infections, and speeding up fracture healing. HYDROHEAL is a collaboration between research, innovation and policy partners from Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Portugal, Ireland and Germany. IERG will work on ethics and user engagement as part of the project.

Indigenous Peoples globally face profound threats from climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation — threats that are rooted in discrimination, land dispossession, and colonization, and span all of the IPCC’s representative key risks. It is primarily through the nexus with Indigenous food systems that these stresses converge and interact to affect health and well-being. Indigenous knowledges and practices underpin resilience across the food-climate-health nexus, yet they are overlooked and undermined by government policy. New ways of working with Indigenous communities and informing decision making are needed if we are to make sense of and address these interlinked stresses. The Indigenous Peoples Observatory Network (IPON) transforms and rethinks how we understand the food-climate-health nexus from the bottom-up, building on multiple ways of knowing embodied in Indigenous knowledges and science, and in ways that strengthen community resilience to multiple stresses and support actions that benefit Indigenous Peoples. The project works with research, policy and Indigenous partners in Canada, US, India, Uganda, Ghana, South Africa, Germany, Namibia, Australia, and Peru.

IPON websiteLink opens in a new window

The project is a collaboration with the University of Cape Town and with Cape Town city’s climate adaptation department to look at how issues of ethics and justice can be incorporated into responses to climate-related risks and city policymaking more generally. Cape Town has already come perilously close to a city-wide drought and regularly suffers from flooding: the project seeks to ensure that the most vulnerable communities such as informal settlements are incorporated in an ethical manner into city-level protection plans. By doing so, it aims to model a pathway to inserting ethics into adaptation and resilience policy that can be utilised in other settings.

Ethical deliberation in video and toolkitLink opens in a new window

KEEPCARING aims to (re-)build wellbeing and resilience of the healthcare workforce in EU hospitals in the surgical pathway, to promote onboarding as well as staying in the workplace by systematically researching factors and signals of job stress and novel mitigating solutions and by co-creating a multi-faceted non-digital, digital and AI-supported solution package to prevent burnout among (aspirant) healthcare professionals on the individual, team, and organisational level.

KeepCaring websiteLink opens in a new window

AI and big data are fundamentally interwoven into our societies, culture and conceptions of democratic governance and exchange. They pose risks to our democracies at the same time as they have the potential to enhance it. KT4D will explore how these technologies can foster more inclusive civic participation in democracy, and how AI and big data can facilitate new democratic innovations and enrich democratic deliberation within participatory fora. To achieve this, we will develop and validate tools, guidelines and a Digital Democracy Lab demonstrators platform. These results will be validated across three user needs scenarios: 1) building capacity for citizens and citizen-facing Civil Society Organisations; 2) creating regulatory tools and services for Policy and CSOs; and 3) improving awareness of how to design ethical and democratic principles in academic and industrial software development.

KT4D WebsiteLink opens in a new window

Focusses on Community Policing, looking at new capabilities for European policing. 19 partners from Law Enforcement, Research and industry will work together until 2027, test casing the capabilities in pilot areas. IERG supplies an ethics advisor for this project.

Boosting work abilities for people with disabilities

People with disabilities have the potential to engage with advanced technology. However, it is essential to identify the elements that successfully enable individuals with disabilities to interact with technology. With this context, the EU-funded NewWorkTech project enhances the work-related capacities of both individuals with disabilities and the general workforce, focusing on technology-mediated tasks and interactions. It involves empirical research on how people with disabilities (who often lead in technology use) perform functions at work, alongside theoretical innovations related to technology and socio-material assemblages. The project will provide policy recommendations, develop new tech solutions and actively engage people with disabilities, adhering to the principle of ‘nothing about us without us.’

PREEMPTER

SUNRISE (Strategies and Technologies for United and Resilient Critical Infrastructures and Vital Services in Pandemic Stricken Europe) is a major three-year project funded by Horizon Europe.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the fact that pandemics and similar events are not only a threat to health but also represent a considerable risk to the interdependent critical infrastructures(CIs) upon which societies depend for their well-being.

SUNRISE will facilitate the active collaboration of CIs across Europe to share best practices and jointly tackle future pandemics. This collaboration will result in a new stable working group for CI resilience to pandemics with at least 100 members. With a group of 4 CI authorities, 16 CI operators, 3 other CI stakeholders, 4 experts in social sciences and ethics, 2 experts in epidemiology and climate extremes, and 12 security researchers and software developers.

Complex climate-health emergencies are crises caused by co-occurring and compounding medical, social, political, and environmental risks that overwhelm health systems. Climate change is a major emerging driver of these emergencies, intersecting with diverse regional and global challenges such as biodiversity loss, land degradation, food and nutrition insecurity, and emerging diseases. Indigenous Peoples who make up 5% of the global population have been badly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and are among the most vulnerable to climate change impacts. The overarching aim of this research programme is to document, understand, and monitor the factors affecting the creation, evolution, and impact of complex climate-health emergencies among Indigenous communities in the Global South, examining the interaction between climatic and non-climatic stresses, and co-generating knowledge and capacity to build resilience in health systems and support pilot interventions.

Anthropogenic Global Catastrophic Risk: The Challenge of Governance

Investigating the key challenges of governance for Anthropogenic Global Catastrophic Risk (AGCRs)

An anthropogenic global catastrophic risk (AGCR) is a human-induced risk that threatens sustained and widescale loss of life and damage to civilisation across the globe.

Central to the danger posed by future AGCRs is the problem that technological progress and uptake has proceeded much more rapidly than commensurate understanding and implementation of effective governance. The present project aims to address this deficit by investigating the key challenges of governance for AGCRs, and by identifying practical and ethical guidelines within which new governance solutions for specific AGCRs will be advanced. Three case studies are developed: synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence.

AIO: Assuming Identities Online - description, development and ethical implications

The project aims to contribute an understanding of inequality as a driver of vulnerability in an international development context.

It is an interdisciplinary collaboration across humanities and social sciences, with participants from India, UK, France and Norway. The project is funded in the UK by the ESRC (EqUIP).

The project seeks to integrate cutting edge philosophical work on the salient ethical dimensions of inequality with social scientific approaches, both quantitative and qualitative, to measuring and addressing inequality. It examines inequality from three different perspectives:-

1. The project addresses how inequality should be defined and measured.

2. The project looks at attitudes to inequality and inequality-reducing policies.

3. The project investigates the experience of inequality and looks at the effects of inequality on livelihoods and policy interventions.

The two challenges of urban violence and of climate change adaptation for urban development in the Global South have been of increasing concern to the humanitarian, security, and development communities. But these two challenges have so far been treated in parallel, without a strong analytic basis for understanding the interlinkages between the two, and implications for policy interventions in both fields. The aim of the project is to develop new understanding about the interactions between urban violence and climate change risks in urban areas of the Global South. Climate and development policy in areas of urban violence raises a number of difficult ethical questions about legitimacy and authority, and about the ethics of working with ‘gangs’, which are at the core of the project.

Visit the Climate Change and Urban Violence WebsiteLink opens in a new window

Data Lakes: Emerging Ethical Issues

This is a pump-priming project, funded under a Call that seeks to prepare the ground for more UK Humanities research in Artificial Intelligence. It builds on the ethics research contributed by IERG to the Innovate-UK funded PathLAKE project in computational pathology. This project concerns the use of large pathology data sets to train and test algorithms cancer diagnostics, prognostics and tumour-grading.

Detecter: Detection Technologies, Terrorism, Ethics and Human Rights

Ethics and Rights in a Security Context

Ethics of Border Security

FASTPASS

FOCUS: Foresight Security Scenarios

Tags: Technology, AI/Digital

Advances in emerging technology including artificial intelligence and biotechnology will transform the security and economic landscape. Governing AI and Biotech Risk explores the ethical, political and psychological underpinnings of effective governance that can meet the challenges posed by technological risks.

HECTOS: Harmonized Evaluation, Certification and Testing of Security Products

IDENTITY

IDENTITY aims at consolidating the integration of multimedia forensics into forensic science. Multimedia forensics is concerned with the development of scientific methods to extract, analyse and categorize digital evidence derived from multimedia sources, such as imaging devices. For example, developing technologies to identify, categorise and classify the source of images and video, as well as to authenticate and verify the integrity of their content. Since the enabling technologies in multimedia forensics are similar to those used for identification and verification purposes in biometric forensics, the integration of these areas is seamless.

IDIRA: Interoperability of data and procedures in large-scale multinational disaster response actions

INDECT: Intelligent information system supporting observation, searching and detection for security of citizens in urban environment.

Institute of Risk Management

IERG (Tom SorellLink opens in a new window and Duncan Hine) have contributed teaching material to a distance taught course offered by the Institute of Risk Management on Digital Risk Management.

Media4SecLink opens in a new window

In today’s social media landscape, Facebook remains one of the most important platforms for businesses. However, it is no longer sufficient to simply create pages and post content. To be successful on Facebook, you need engaging content that appeals to your target audience and encourages participation.

This article presents effective strategies to increase the reach of your content and promote interaction with your followers.

Moral Obligation, Epistemology and Public Health: The Case of Vaccine Hesitancy

This two-year project, funded by the AHRC and the German Research Council (DFG), considers philosophical issues related to the rationality of vaccine opposition and hesitancy, and the question of how science communication should address vaccine hesitancy, especially in the face of campaigns of misinformation.

Tags: Global Development, Sustainability

A variety of behavioural and structural factors impact individuals’ ability to think and act in resilient ways. Based on field research in Kenya, the first aim of this project is to shed new light on key psychological factors that drive resilience, and determine whether this information can facilitate predictive modelling of resilient behaviour. The second aim of the project is to understand the ethical implications of individual differences in resilient behaviour. For example, are there reasons to direct particular attention and resources to those who, by virtue of psychological characteristics, do not easily adopt resilient behaviours?

PAVE

Improving communication tools for law enforcement to prevent violent radicalisation.

The EU research project PAVE (Preventing and Addressing Violent Extremism through Community Resilience in the Western Balkans and the MENA) aims to tackle the global issue of radicalisation by examining its root causes and driving factors. Based on a comparative assessment of local communities with features of vulnerability or resilience to violent extremism across seven case study countries, the 13 international partner institutions will develop concrete policy recommendations to inform citizens and stakeholders within and beyond the regions under study.

PERICLES

Improving communication tools for law enforcement to prevent violent radicalisation.

PRISMALink opens in a new window

PRISMA has delivered a toolkit for companies that aspire to develop innovative products and services with which genuine societal needs are addressed and a contribution is made to both environmental and economic sustainability. Warwick worked with Warwick Manufacturing Group on 3 pilot projects: in connected vehicles; synthetic biology; and secure data-storage and exchange.

Tags: Global Development, Sustainability

Indigenous communities are especially vulnerable to risks associated with climate change, yet their voices are often marginalised in climate adaptation planning. This project investigated ethics and equity aspects of the relationship between indigenous communities, climate change, and adaptation policies, bringing together both philosophical and social scientific research. It asked how adaptation policies that integrate indigenous voices into climate adaptation planning can work to reduce the unequal and inequitable distribution of climate impacts on indigenous populations. The project worked closely with collaborators at Makerere University and the Indigenous Health Adaptation to Climate Change research network, and included fieldwork with Batwa Indigenous communities in South West Uganda.

Read the full project report for "Remedying Injustice"Link opens in a new window

SIIP

Tags: Global Development, Health

The project works with the organisation Slum Dwellers International and its Youth Federation members in eight Sub-Saharan African cities (Lagos, Freetown, Nairobi, Lusaka, Harare, Johannesburg, Gqeberha and Cape Town) to understand inequalities and injustices associated with COVID-19 impacts and policy responses in informal urban settlements. The project will facilitate the creation of a series of video-diaries informed by ethical analysis, co-designed and produced with youth groups in the cities, which will provide the foundation for research articles and policy work with local authorities.

Supporting Just Response WebsiteLink opens in a new window

SURVEILLE

Tags: Global Development, Technology

Food insecurity poses a major risk to human lives and well-being in the Global South, especially in the face of climate change. In this project, we investigate how technologies that have been introduced as solutions to food insecurity have contributed to the creation of new risks, and ask how such technologies should might be governed ethically to reduce these risks. We focus on the loss of biodiversity as a result of the introduction of GMO crops, and the rise of antimicrobial resistance as a result of the overuse of antibiotics to combat communicable diseases in crops and livestock.

Tags: Global Development, Health, Sustainability

Indigenous Peoples are believed to be at particularly high risk from COVID, exacerbated by climate risks and socio-economic stresses. There is emerging evidence that national responses to the pandemic are compounding the vulnerability of Indigenous Peoples, exacerbated by little—if any—understanding on the unique pathways through which COVID will affect them. This project addresses this knowledge and policy gap by documenting, monitoring, and examining how COVID is interacting with multiple stresses to affect the food systems of Indigenous Peoples globally, and by examining issues of ethics and justice associated with policy responses. The project works with 20 Indigenous peoples in 13 countries.

Covid Observatories WebsiteLink opens in a new window

Tags: Global Development

The Politics of Papua Project at the University of Warwick conducts research on Indigenous rights in Papua and provides informed political analysis to policymakers, in order to facilitate a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Papua. We collaborate with researchers around the world, including at the Papuan Cenderawasih University. We have advised UK and international parliamentarians, the Leader of the Labour Party, the FCDO, and the Indonesian Ambassador to the UK. Our research has been cited by several policymakers and politicians, including MPs.

Since 1969, Papua has been part of Indonesia. However, a movement in Papua led by Indigenous Papuans asserts an ongoing right to self-determination. The ongoing conflict in the region, between the Indonesian military and Indigenous Papuans, is estimated to have killed at least a hundred thousand Papuans. Our aim is to provide informed and rigorous academic analysis, in collaboration with Papuan and other researchers, that can help all parties move closer to a peaceful and sustainable resolution of the conflict, and to help build institutions to support development in Papua.

Politics of Papua WebsiteLink opens in a new window

UNDERWARE: UNDERstanding West African culture to pRevent cybercrimEs

Tags: Global Development, Sustainability

The concept of resilience is increasingly used in urban planning and disaster risk reduction. While resilience may appear consensual to some, disagreements exist regarding wh\ at urban resilience should look like. Some approaches to resilience focus on infrastructure and materials, whereas other approaches are more inclusive of social and environmental concerns. WhyDAR identified different ways in which urban resilience is understood while investigating the role of science, technology, ethics and expertise in the making of resilience strategies in the Global South. It examined key ethical questions arising from disagreement about conceptions to resilience, and asked what an equitable approach to resilience would look like in the face of this disagreement.

WhyDAR websiteLink opens in a new window