Workshop “Ethics of Food and Nutrition and Ethics of Science” in Mainz

From April 7th to April 11th, 2014, 24 students from 13 countries attended a workshop on the “Ethics of Food & Nutrition and the Ethics of Science” in Mainz.
The workshop, co-organized by the Food Security Centre (FSC) at the University of Hohenheim and the Centre for Development Research (ZEF) at Bonn University, aimed at providing guidance to students in regards to the ethical clearance process of food and farming research activities. Research activities, such as data collection, compiling and sharing as well as the communication of scientific findings to various stakeholders, comprise many critical ethical issues. Indeed, they not only concern human beings, which are studied or impacted by the research activities (interviewed populations, co-workers, policy-makers, etc.), but also plants and animals at local and global scales.

The workshop was given by brilliant bio-ethic experts, such as Dr. Kate Millar (Centre for Applied Bioethics at the University of Nottingham and Eursafe) and Dr. Thomas Potthast (International Centre for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities, University of Tübingen and Eursafe) and Denisse Cordova (Gender and Human Rights specialist at FIAN).
Interactive lectures and practical working groups, as well as fierce discussions between the training sessions, allowed the students to discuss ethical issues that arise in their respective fields of research, as well as in their research practices.
By the end of the workshop, the students had gained a clear understanding of some basic ethic principles and were able to use specific tools, such as the Ethical Matrix, to support their research activities. This workshop was also a time for reflective thinking and trans-disciplinary exchanges as it took place in the city of Mainz, where active resistance against the Nazis had been carried out.