For World Book Day 2021, we’re delighted to feature some of the books that Reuben Fellows have written or contributed to over the years. These books illustrate the diversity of research and perspectives to be found within the College, including topics on healthcare, ethics, environment and artificial intelligence. Published variously over the past 15 years, the books have often been recognised as seminal works that continue to be cited widely.
Listed in alphabetical order by author, our featured publications are:
Timothy Clack – environmental impacts on vulnerable societies
Timothy Clack gives a voice to the local people Ethiopia’s lower Omo Valley, and describes the ways that they have been affected negatively by external interventions in their lands, including tourism, conservation, oil prospecting and water management.
Clack also has a new book coming out in May this year. In this book, he outlines the threats from information warfare faced by the West and analyses the ways it can defend itself. He looks at fake news, disinformation campaigns, and the use and abuse of emerging technologies, including social media and Artificial Intelligence, in democratic participation and a resulting “information war”.
Katrien Devolder – ethical arguments in biomedical research
Embryonic stem cell research holds unique promise for developing therapies for currently incurable diseases and conditions. In this book, Devolder provides an in-depth ethical analysis of the major philosophical and political attempts to resolve tensions around the destruction of early human embryos for biomedical research. Her arguments have important implications for the stem cell debate, as well as for policies inspired by this debate.
Peter Drobac – interdisciplinary approaches to healthcare
Peter Drobac’s contribution to the book “Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction” explores the experiences of Partners In Health, an institution that seeks to strengthen health systems in the rural reaches of some of the most underserved parts of the developing world. Through this, he is able to show how an understanding of the local context enabled PIH to design (and redesign) an effective health system capable of delivering care in settings of poverty and disruption.
Angeliki Kerasidou’s chapter in the book, "Marketisation, Ethics and Healthcare: Policy, Practice and Moral Formation", examines the two dominant healthcare models, public and private, to discuss the extent to which each model can promote empathetic care. She makes the argument that the healthcare system as a whole, rather than reliance on individual professionals, needs to embrace empathy as one of its principles and make it the basis on which it operates.
Fredi Otto – climate change and attribution science
Fredi Otto’s book provides an evidence-filled historical account of weather through the ages that is anchored in a gripping, day-by-day story of Hurricane Harvey, which caused over a hundred deaths and $125 billion in damage in 2017. Through her account of the hurricane unfolding, Otto reveals how attribution science works in real time, and determines that Harvey’s terrifying floods were three times more likely to occur due to human-induced climate change.
Lionel Tarassenko –interdisciplinary research and artificial intelligence
Tarassenko presents an overview of multidisciplinary research that illustrates how a growing understanding of living cognitive systems can be applied to the design of artificial systems. The book is of considerable interest to researchers and students in information science, neuroscience, psychology, engineering and adjacent fields.
Monika Zurek – environmental and ecosystem change
Monika Zurek is co-editor and author of a book published as part of the "Millennium Ecosystem Assessment", which provided the first ever assessment of global environmental change, its consequences for human well-being and options for responding to those changes. The book details four global scenarios exploring plausible future changes in drivers, ecosystems, ecosystem services, and human well-being.
