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Assisted Lab is a research group based at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland, with university affiliates in Canada, the UK, and the Netherlands. It investigates cultural productions, including film, texts and other media that influence legal and political processes around medically assisted dying. The principal Investigator is , Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and an Associate Member of the Centre for Humanities and Health at King鈥檚 College, London. The Senior Investigator who contributes conceptual oversight to Assisted Lab鈥檚 projects, Vanessa Rampton, was interviewed by Devon Phillips.

Devon Phillips (DP): Congratulations on the launch of the . Can you tell me about the purpose and goals of this site.

Vanessa Rampton (VR): We envision this site as a growing archive. The substance of the site is stories around medically assisted dying from many different genres, both fiction and non-fiction. The site really started with literature, and the idea that there are literary memoirs of assisted dying. We started working on collecting these stories, then we turned to film and short videos, as well as plays and radio. So, it grew a lot both in genres and media. There are textual, visual, performative, and audio entries.

DP: What is the thread that links this collection?

VR: The thread linking all of these entries dealing with the practice of medically assisted dying is that they have been cited or referred to in a legislative context. We want to understand how stories feed into law making, and I could add, conversely, how a specific jurisdiction and its constraints shape the stories that are told. There are some stories that we feature 鈥� very topical, very new 鈥� that have not yet been cited in a legal context but we nevertheless included with the idea that perhaps they will go on to be cited. And we gave ourselves the prerogative of updating citations as we go along. We are trying to highlight, first of all, how the stories have been heard societally and legally, and secondly, to point to some of the complexities in the stories. To give you an example, there are stories that are cited in a legal context as a kind of straightforward right to die story, a story that's in favor of assisted dying. But this is done in a way that effectively removes extra dimensions or complexity, for example, a family member that is not comfortable with that decision, or the way the story was mediatized. The aim of our site is to discuss critically as academics, the content and then the context in which these stories were either written, recorded or filmed.

DP: When you say we and our project, let's frame that a bit. Explain who 鈥渨e鈥� refers to.

VR: Anna Elsner is the principal investigator of this project, which grew out of a European Research Council grant. This is a 5-year project and Dr Elsner has created a team of five. I'm the Canadian branch, Anna is based in Switzerland with two others, and we have a colleague in Northern Ireland. We also have some associate members involved in producing archival entries, for example a collaborator with expertise in the Netherlands because there are so many cultural products there. When we started out trying to track the stories around assisted dying that have a connection to law making processes, we received many recommendations. Our team is in the process of creating an archive of all that material.

DP: Ok, so this is a dynamic project. It's ongoing. There are still more entries coming in, is that correct?

VR: Absolutely, yes.

DP: How do you want people to interact with this site?

On the bottom right-hand corner of the site, there's a button labelled 鈥減articipate鈥�. That allows any user to effectively suggest a story that they think is relevant for the archive. So that's one way in which we've envisaged a kind of citizen science component. This is an academic project but we have nevertheless tried to make these entries as accessible as possible. Our idea is that if someone is interested in assisted dying stories in cross cultural perspective, they would be able to navigate our site and read an entry in a way that is accessible to them. Many of the cultural products were originally produced in German, French or Spanish, but we have them on our site in English. On our other social media accounts, we post information about our entries in multiple languages to enhance the cross-cultural aspect.

We also want to work with actors. For example, in an interactive workshop at the 9I制作厂免费 International Palliative Care Conference in October 2024, our lab members will use patient stories to explore the relationship between palliative care provision and assisted dying in Canada.

DP: It's very exciting and I'm making this assumption that this site is totally unique. Are you aware of any other vehicle that has sourced and compiled products such as these?

VR: We felt that there was quite a lot available on the clinical and bioethics side in terms of ethics and dilemmas around assisted dying. We are coming from the humanities, and our aim is to take these discussions into the legal humanities and, in particular, to look at how personal stories about assisted dying come to function as evidence or exemplars. This does not exist elsewhere as far as we know. It has been nice to see that our interdisciplinary project has a home among, and a certain affiliation with projects in the digital, legal and medical humanities.

DP: Looking to the future 鈥� where do you hope to take this project?

VR: It is exciting to think of different future possibilities. Because we've really tried to emphasize the cultural and aesthetic elements of these contributions, we're very interested in artistic collaborations, such as integrating an artist in residence into our team. But we鈥檙e also thinking, could we eventually publish a book based on these entries? How could our collection take different forms? I will say that the stories are wonderful sources for us. They're primary source material for presentations, and for research questions for publications. We're in the process of analyzing the richness that we find in this archive. So that's something that will keep us busy as researchers for a while.

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For more information, please contact Dr Vanessa Rampton, Affiliate member of the Department of Equity, Ethics and Policy, 9I制作厂免费: vanessa.rampton [at] mcgill.ca