Kristin Zeiler

Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Reader (Biträdande Professor), Department of Thematic Studies: Technology and
Social Change, Linköping University


Kristin Zeiler received a Ph.D. from Linköping University in 2005 for the thesis Chosen Children?
An Empirical Study and a Philosophical Analysis of Moral Aspects of Pre-implantation Genetic
Diagnosis and Germ-line Gene Therapy
. She has been an Ethics Fellow at Cardiff University and
a postdoctoral researcher at the World Health Organization, Geneva.

Zeiler’s research examines philosophical, ethical, and socio-cultural aspects of the development and
use of medical technology, therapy, and surgery, and how these – as well as experience of pain and
illness – can form our ways of engaging with others and the world and inform our self-understandings.
Much of her research combines analytic moral philosophy with phenomenological philosophy; several
of her projects also blend philosophical analyses with analysis of empirical data, such as interviews.
Zeiler’s publications include, for example, the volumes Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine (eds.
Zeiler and Käll, SUNY Press, 2014) and Bodily Exchanges, Bioethics and Border Crossing: Perspectives
on Giving, Selling and Sharing Bodies
(eds. Malmqvist and Zeiler, Routledge, 2016).

Zeiler is the principal investigator of the research project ‘An Ethics of Bodily Giving and Sharing in
Medicine’ and is working on this as a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow. The project examines ethical
reasoning in different practices of bodily exchanges (organ, tissue and egg donation, surrogate
motherhood and clinical research) in medicine. It explores the implications of conceptualizing
these exchanges not as transfers of gifts or commodities, as is often the case, but in terms of sharing;
it highlights tensions in conceptions of altruism, autonomy and exploitation, and systematically
investigates these concepts with the aim of elaborating an ethics of bodily exchanges in medicine.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2016-17.