My name is Bryan Kibbe. I am currently a graduate student in the PhD Philosophy program at Loyola University Chicago. I have particular interests in health care ethics, especially the intersection of media and technology with medicine. Here in Chicago, I live in the wonderfully diverse neighborhood of Rogers Park.

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A Brief Autobiography

Although I have traveled and lived in quite a few areas of the country, I spent most of my time growing up in the Northern Virginia area just outside of Washington D.C. in Fairfax County. I graduated from my high school as a valedictorian and captain of the rowing team. With mountains and Washington D.C. about an hour away from my home, I explored and developed interests in hiking and mountain biking as well as art and music in diverse settings.

Beginning in 2004, I attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan as an undergraduate student. I earned my bachelor of arts as a double major in philosophy and media production in 2008. While at Calvin I benefited from a rich liberal arts education that taught me to learn from different fields of study and to constantly seek connections. Philosophy became a mainstay of my education, while I then sought to find ways to express and utilize its problems, questions, and tools in other fields of study as well.

In addition to my academic studies at Calvin, I also invested significant time and energy in working with the Service-Learning Center on campus, which seeks to develop meaningful, reciprocal exchanges between students, faculty, and staff in the college and the Grand Rapids communities and neighborhoods through service activities. This work helped attune me to systemic injustices while instilling in me a yearning to see the myriad of human relationships repaired and flourishing. As a result, I remain very interested in organizations and individuals that are serving communities while also, myself, striving to become a contributing member of my own neighborhood and communities.

I graduated from Calvin College with a double major in Philosophy and Media Production. You may wonder, what in the world is a philosophy major doing operating expensive equipment and producing short films?

 

I believe that one of the strengths of philosophical study is that it can serve as an invalubale companion to other fields of study. In my undergraduate studies, I discovered that my philosophy training could enrich studies in media production. This offered me a fascinating and novel synthesis that has since shaped and continues to shape much of my thinking about a variety of subjects, but especially the phenomenon of language and communication.

 

Media production involves a tremendous amount of technical knowledge about camera operation, light setup, audio recording, and non-linear video editing. But without thoughtful reflection on the "Why?" and "For what purpose or effect?" all of that very technical work amounts to little or nothing. Philosophy aided me in two key respects.

 

First, philosophy equips me with certain analytic habits that allow me to process complex material and break it down in a meaningful manner. It also augments my ability to formulate and articulate crucial questions at key junctures in the production process. Thus I am able to buttress the technical aspects of media production with some thoughtful analysis and reasoning that seeks to answer the ongoing questions of "Why?" and "For what purpose or effect?" But philosophy also does more than just equip me with general tools that aid me in injecting meaning into the technical.

 

Philosophy, secondly, provided me with specific content to enrich the media productions that I worked on. As a historically driven discipline, philosophy offers up a tremendous tale of human reflection and argument concerning some of life's most puzzling and troubling issues (i.e. free will, the good life, the existence of God and evil, the requirements for knowledge, etc). Throughout my media production studies, the history of specific ideas and conceptual themes operated in the background of my mind, offering me avenues into new projects and connecting discrete projects from the present moment with a long trajectory of thought passing from person to person throughout time. As such, philosophy offered me a way to utilize and share in the resources of those that had come before me for the sake of the present and still to come.

 

However, my studies in philosophy and media production were not a one way exchange. Instead, the techniques and tools of media production offered me new models and mechanisms to apply to abstract concepts and problems in the field of philosophy as well. In one class in particular, Philosophy of Language, it was fascinating to think about how the video camera  mediates the exchange between subjects, and how this can serve as a particularly good metaphor for human communication in general.

 

Though I have now graduated from Calvin where I began my studies in philosophy and media production, I continue to develop and explore how these two fields of study can interact and offer up something new. In fact, this web site is one such example of my dedication to exploring the synthesis between media productions or digital media and philosophy. I am also working on honing my skills in photography, video recording, and all manner of digital computer editing and creation. I hope that I can continue to bring a technical expertise with some advanced technologies to bear on my philosophical studies and also my training in philosophy to influence how I approach and carry out media production.

As a graduate student at Loyola University-Chicago, in addition to pursuing a broad and well rounded education in philosophy, I am particularly focusing on the study of health care ethics and philosophy of medicine. This area of study excites me as I continue to experience the ways in which philosophy can interact with and affect the lives of real and present people. Far from being merely an abstract discipline probing sometimes obscure problems, I believe that philosophy has a crucial role to play in mediating and navigating a path through the profound and transformative moments wherein we wrestle with difficult questions and dilemmas.

 

It is not surprising that such profound moments tend to arise in the context of health care where we encounter monumental events such as birth and death, along with the difficult struggles of illness and impairment. It is my goal to bring my training in philosophy to bear on the real issues and problems of patients and caregivers, hospitals and health plans in such a way as to provide thoughtful and accessible ways of thinking about and analyzing felt problems and urgent choices.

 

With this broad view in mind, my particular interests are oriented to understanding how new technologies are transforming the health care environment, especially the caregiver-patient relationship. This has led me to consider such technologies as virtual reality and online virtual communities, electronic medical records, medical imaging technologies, and telerobotics. Technology is all around us, and much of it is taken for granted, but to do so would be a mistake. The tools that we use reflect on who we fundamentally are as persons, as a culture, and as a society. In my work I hope to bring some illumination to the ways in which human persons and technology enter into a profound feedback loop, wherein we cannot help but influence and be influenced.

To see some examples of bioethics oriented things going on at or relevant to Loyola University Chicago, tune in to this blog that I try to keep updated with announcements.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have about my work. Below you will also find a PDF version of my resume.

To contact me, send email to bryan.info@gmail.com

For a copy of my resume, please click here to download a PDF version