Special Section: Quo Vadis? Mapping the Future of Bioethics Bioethics, Social Class, and the Sociological Imagination LEIGH TURNER Last year I published a short article 1 urging bioethicists to carefully examine the question of what ought to constitute the canonical issues topics and ques- tions driving research and teaching in bioethics. Why some subjects dominate the field whereas other topics are regarded as matters for scholars in other dis- ciplines is a question that has intrigued me for nearly a decade. How are the boundaries of bioethics established? What factors influence research agendas and the creation of bioethics curricula? How do funding agencies, editors, and leading scholars shape the field of bioethics? These questions are increasingly receiving scrutiny from Charles Bosk, Raymond De Vries, and other researchers as they explore the sociology of bioethics and the “construction” of the “ethical enterprise.” One of the first papers I published 2 explored why particular topics are addressed or neglected by bioethicists. I wrote “Bioethics, Public Health, and Firearm-Related Violence: Missing Links between Bioethics and Public Health” during my time as a graduate student in the School of Religion and Social Ethics at the University of Southern California. When I wrote the article, I was living in one of the poorer, more socially disadvantaged neighborhoods of Los Angeles. My time in that social environment played a formative role in leading me to wonder why bioethicists pay relatively little attention to social inequal- ities, urban poverty, homelessness, firearm-related violence, and the disintegra- tion of inner cities and the relationship of these topics to health, illness, and moral experience. At the time, anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural geog- raphers were publishing detailed studies of homelessness, urban gangs and gang-related violence, and the collapse of inner city social infrastructures. Their work considered the relations among poverty, unemployment, ill health, and lack of access to basic healthcare and social services. In contrast, the literature of bioethics placed tremendous emphasis on ethical issues in end-of-life care, organ transplantation, and other topics associated with high-technology med- ical interventions. Bioethics, it seemed to me, was becoming fixated on an odd menagerie of dramatic, “cutting-edge” topics and neglecting the social, political, and economic contexts within which important ethical issues were unfolding. Living at the time in a low-income area, where community problems extended to the most basic social institutions, the literature of bioethics seemed domi- nated by middle-class preoccupations and fears. These issues were important — and remain significant today —but their dominant status pushed to the periphery of bioethics crucial aspects of health, illness, social life, and moral experience. When I was riding public transit and walking the streets of this low-income Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics (2005), 14, 374–378. Printed in the USA. Copyright © 2005 Cambridge University Press 0963-1801/05 $16.00 374