Assessing Relational Ethics in Oxford and Singapore

© 2013 EPFL
With the financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Doc.Mobility program, Shin Koseki, doctoral candidate in Architecture and Sciences of the City (EDAR) will conduct a research project with two research groups from the National University of Singapore's Department of Geography (NUS, Singapore) and the University of Oxford's Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology (Oxon. UK). The research project's main objective, as part of Mr. Koseki's doctoral dissertation work, is to understand the role of urban spaces on relational ethical reasoning in socialization practices.
Friendships geographies offer a novel meso-scale of analysis to the study of spatialized social phenomena such as the city. This new field allows to revisit known object, but also to create new découpages of the political and economical challenges of today, unveiling unforeseen social mechanisms embedded in the globalization process; technological developments; the dematerialization of information; and great national and transnational mobility. These conditions have resulted in a restructuration of the social fabric at both local and global scale, and now call to revise the epistemological and ontological constructs that have prevailed. A new paradigm is on the rise in geography, as sociality processes (kinship, friendship, virtual mediation) are becoming more and more determinant in social, political and economical behaviors.
To address this upcoming challenge, we purpose to engage in a interdisciplinary research project that connects the methodological framework of friendship geographies, and tools and concepts derived from the study or relational ethical reasoning as developed in critical and evolutionary moral anthropology. This project takes place in the Cities Research Cluster of the National University of Singapore, with a short intermediary stay at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology of the University of Oxford, both world-class leading institutions in their domain of research.
Using data previously derived from fieldwork in Geneva on the ethical analysis of spatial practices, and partial results from a series of achieved research projects conducted in Singapore by the Cities Research Cluster on identity, citizenship and perception of globalization, we intend to produce an harmonization of languages between key concepts of critical urban geography and moral anthropology and moral psychology; to compare the spatial incentives to relational ethical reasoning; and define a methodology to evaluate the geographical attributes of certain mechanisms of individual ethical reasoning. These will provide insightful openings on relational ethics, ethical reasoning and the role of sociality processes in the production if the city.