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

Prof. dr. Vivienne Matthies-Boon is Professor by Special Appointment in the Department of Ethics and Political Philosophy at Radboud University. She coordinates the Research Centre for Philosophy and Society at the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies.

She also leads the Ethics Platform within the National Network of Excellence for Post COVID (PCNN) and coordinates an ethics committee that advises and guides the establishment of Long Covid outpatient clinics in the Netherlands.

With an interdisciplinary philosophical background in German critical theory, existentialism and the phenomenology of political violence, she is particularly interested in the affective and embodied dimensions of illness and health, and especially the struggle for recognition and epistemic injustice.

It was also because of these interests that she wrote the book "Breaking Intersubjectivity: Towards a Critical Theory of Counter-Revolutionary Trauma in Egypt" (2022, Rowman and Littlefield). In it, she not only develops a radical new understanding of trauma (based on German critical theory), but also examined how the Egyptian military destroyed the potential of self-manifestation and creative collective genesis of Egyptian activists.

She is currently interested in similar themes of vulnerability, (in)justice, existential crisis and politics related to Long Covid patients. She studies the experiences of Long COVID patients from a critical humanistic and phenomenological perspective, and actively contributes to the public debate in the Netherlands about Long COVID.