Camillia Kong is a new Strategic Senior Lecturer and Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences Fellow at Queen Mary. She talks to us about herself, and her research.
My academic background is principally philosophical, where I have a longstanding interest in the conceptualisation and normative framing of moral and legal agency in ‘contrast cases’ - the non-ideal circumstances, such as disability, mental disorder, and oppressive contexts. I am interested in how different philosophical traditions (i.e. African) and frameworks (i.e. feminist) can enrich these conceptual frameworks. After completing my PhD at LSE in 2010 I undertook a British Academic Postdoctoral Fellowship between 2012-2015 which sought to provide a philosophical and legal grounding for a more relational concept of mental capacity. I was the Principal Investigator of the Judging Values and Participation in Mental Capacity Law project, which was funded by the AHRC (between 2018-2022). This project utilised an interdisciplinary approach to explore how values in professional practice and the framing of mental capacity law itself can impact decision-making in cases within the Court of Protection.
We produced some very exciting outputs from the Judging Values project and these are continuing. For example we will be publishing an edited volume providing a cross-jurisdictional comparison of mental capacity regimes through the thematic prism of values and participation. I will be completing our final project report for public dissemination as well as other academic outputs, such as a normative examination of values within mental capacity law (which will draw on our empirical data with legal practitioners and retired judges). We will have a professional toolkit that will also be published on the Advocate’s Gateway very soon. Lastly, I am also developing a follow-on funding project with the Judging Values project team which will interrogate legal agency in cases of severe cognitive impairment.
Other non-mental capacity law areas of work that I’m hoping to develop: Currently I am leading a small project looking at the linguistic idioms of intellectual disability and mental disorder in certain minority languages in Ghana. Along with my project partners we will be producing work from this study. I am also part of another project as co-Investigator looking at the experiences of bereaved peoples in inquests and the data there has many resonances with our findings from the Judging Values project. I’m hoping to develop some comparative work that draws together the insights from these different courts.