Prof. E.A.V. Matthies-Boon (Vivienne)

Persoonlijke website: www.viviennematthiesboon.com

Prof. Vivienne Matthies-Boon is Socrates Professor by special appointment in "Europe, humanism and global justice. She is also head of the Department of Ethics and Political Philosophy at Radboud University. She coordinates the Research Centre for Philosophy and Society of the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies. She leads academic research on postviral ethics, as well as the NWO funded project on living death, social death and euthanasia/suicide amongst Long Covid patients in the Netherlands and Germany.

With an interdisciplinary philosophical background in German critical theory and phenomenology, she is interested in dimensions of social and political violence – in particular, how social and political violence relates to disability and chronic illness. Her research is therefore at the intersection between the phenomenology of health, critical disability studies and ethics of care, as well as the philosophy of death.

While her previous work provided a critical theoretical account of the political trauma (including near-death, being-against-death, and deadliness) amongst activists in Egypt (see Matthies-Boon, 2022), her current work focuses on the experience of violence, trauma, and deadliness in patients with severe chronic post-viral diseases such as MECFS, Long Covid, Qfever, and other PAIS. She is interested in the deep existential but also social consequences of violence - such as experiences of near-death/deadliness, extreme isolation, discrimination and exclusion. She is therefore interested in both the existential subjective consequences of such traumatic experiences and the social and political questions about justice that these experiences raise.

Rooted in philosophy as a (practical) way of life, she also actively contributes to the public debates in the Netherlands and Germany about Long COVID.