2025 Lectures: Kimberley Brownlee

We are delighted to announce that Professor Kimberley Brownlee has kindly agreed to deliver the 2025 Annual Uehiro Lectures.

The three-part public lecture series, entitled 'Reproductive Rights', will take place in Keble College's H B Allen Centre (Banbury Road, Oxford) on Thursdays 6, 13 and 20 November 2025 at 16:30. All are welcome to join us for these free, in-person lectures (registration required, see below).

These three lectures scrutinize different profiles of reproductive rights. The first lecture focuses on men. It examines men’s gestational inability and consequent dependency on others for reproduction and parenting opportunities. The second lecture focuses on women. It looks at the ramifications of reproductive dependency, first, for fertile women’s personal relationships with gestationally dependent partners and, second, for women’s relations to their society and to the species, which also depend on them taking on the risky labour of gestating. That lecture explains that we may acknowledge the normative significance of dependency without overstepping a key line in the sand, that women have a categorical right to control their own gestational labour. The final lecture focuses on girls. It shows that girls’ concerns are distinct in key ways from women’s concerns. It defends girls’ rights as children to be protected from gestational labour.

Kimberley Brownlee holds the Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political & Social Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Prior to this, she was a Professor in the University of Warwick Law School and Philosophy Department, and before that an Associate Professor in the Manchester Centre for Political Theory. She works in moral, political, and legal philosophy, with a focus on 1) loneliness, belonging, social human rights, and freedom of association, and 2) conscience, conviction, civil disobedience, climate activism, punishment, and restorative justice. She is the author of Being Sure of Each Other (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience (Oxford University Press, 2012) as well as several edited volumes. She has held visiting positions at All Souls College, Oxford (2019-20, 2025); Australian National University (2019), Vanderbilt University (2008); University College, Oxford (2009); St Andrews University (2009); and Monash University (2015) among others. She is the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2012) and the Kitty Newman Memorial Award from the Royal Society of Canada (2022). She is a Rhodes Scholar, Commonwealth Scholar, and Fulbright Fellow.
https://philosophy.ubc.ca/profile/kimberley-brownlee/

Details of Professor Brownlee's book for the Series will follow in due course.

Link to the Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics on the OUP website: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/category/academic/series/philosophy/uspe.do