The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (KIEJ) is pleased to announce the lineup for its upcoming special issue on cross-cultural and global bioethics. The KIEJ has long featured “special issues” as part of its quarterly publication schedule: topical collections of essays, often collected in collaboration with special guest editors. (Head to the KIEJ website for a complete listing of past special issue topics.)

This year’s special issue is edited and introduced by KIEJ Editor-in-Chief Rebecca Kukla together with guest editors Jing-Bao Nie and Ruth Fitzgerald and will feature pieces that operate in disciplines ranging from Asian and Chinese studies, indigenous studies, psychiatry and medicine, literature, and medical humanities. The initial two articles–one by Jing-Bao Nie and Ruth Fitzgerald, the other by Neil Pickering and Nie–present a methodology of “transculturalism” for bioethics, the former an outline of its key elements and the latter its application to a practical bioethical issue. An article by Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner conceptualizes how East Asian bioethics might operate as a platform of debate. Grant Gillett works in his article to spatialize moments when ethical transcultural connection occurs between people otherwise separated by different cultural and ethnic contexts. Finally, an article by Solomon Benetar, Ibrahim Daibes, and Sandra Tomsons attempt to develop an “inter-philosophies” dialogue between eastern and western methodologies that might generate a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and power-balanced space for consideration of intersecting world-views.

Taken together, this collection of essays offers new insights into and new operational methodologies for the development of the transcultural bioethics research agenda, a process the KIEJ is excited to take part in. The Journal is as always proud to continue to press the frontiers of interdisciplinarity in bioethics, including philosophers of science, public health researchers, political scholars, and environmental scientists in important conversations about our collective future.