Recently, I have been working on several projects around ethical issues related to the issue of homelessness.

The first is a paper that engages with some of the more recent philosophical debates on the nature of homelessness. Building on some of my doctoral work on relational autonomy, I have published one paper (Fice 2025) that discusses the nature of autonomy and homelessness. This manuscript was developed with support from an internal grant at Trent University.

A second project related to homelessness, currently underway, aims to think about the notion of safety and how it has been used in the context of homelessness. For this project, I consider whose safety matters and why the safety concerns of some people get prioritized over others. This project was funded by an internal grant at Western University.

Finally, I am currently the Principal Investigator for a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, titled “The Ethics of Encampment Evictions”. This project considers ethical issues in encampment evictions, understood primarily as the enforcement of municipal bylaws that restrict sheltering in public spaces. This eviction approach to encampments has been criticized in a variety of ways, including via legal challenges, economic and sustainability critiques, and analyses of the effects that evictions have on the wellbeing of residents. One important, yet underdeveloped, area of analysis relates to the ethical justifications and implications of encampment evictions. Key ethical questions include: Is this the right approach to take in responding to homelessness? How are moral concepts, like autonomy, human dignity, and rights, used to support and/or criticize this approach? Are these concepts adequately understood? What are additional ethical dimensions of encampment evictions? I am currently investigating these questions with a team of interdisciplinary researchers at Western University. Outcomes of this project include policy scans on how municipalities respond to encampments and their ethical bases, a qualitative study interviewing service providers and other stakeholders on their perspectives on encampments, and, in the future, a report on the ethical dimensions of this response to encampments.

My work in bioethics primarily involves thinking about issues in public health ethics. This includes work in my dissertation on vaccine hesitancy and my current work on homelessness.

What I find most interesting about public health ethics, and what distinguishes it from other areas of bioethics, is that it grapples with practical issues that affect the health and well-being not just individuals, but of entire communities. Further, because public health aims to protect and promote the health and well-being of entire communities, the ways through which public health aims are brought about is through the development and implementation of public policies. This often brings my work to reflect on the ethical justification and implications of public health policies.

In addition to working in public health ethics in my research, I have also written on pedagogical practices for teaching public health ethics (see Fice 2025).

My dissertation focuses on feminist philosophy, moral philosophy, and applied ethics. It is an integrated article thesis, meaning the chapters focus on discrete but related issues.

The first chapter of my dissertation focuses on privilege and attempts to provide general accounts of privilege in philosophical literature. My second chapter analyzes feminist relational theory and issues relating to how it addresses privilege. The third chapter focuses on vaccine hesitancy and early childhood vaccinations.

Part of my doctoral work has been published here: Fice 2026.

From 2018 - 2019, I was a research assistant for the Time to Attach project, which calls for equal EI parental leave benefits for adoptive parents, kin, and customary caregivers in Canada. I was responsible for researching psychological literature on attachment theory.

I am a co-author on the Time to Attach report, completed for Adopt4Life: Ontario’s Adoptive Parent Association and the Adoption Council of Canada. The report calls for the creation of a 15-week “attachment leave” for parents and caregivers to support families grown through adoption, kinship, or customary care.

I attended meetings with federal MPs from every major political party in Ottawa in October 2018 and April-May 2019 to advocate for the policy changes suggested in the report above.

I also managed the website and social media accounts for the project, which included networking with community partners and the promotion of the survey portion of the report across social media platforms.

In 2023, MP Rosemarie Falk introduced a private member’s bill to amend the Employment Insurance Act and the Canada Labour Code (Bill C-318), which succeeded several readings in the House of Commons. The Federal Government implemented some relevant changes in Bill C-59 (see Division 12), which received Royal Assent in June 2024.

I have two publications that discuss philosophical themes and issues in pop culture.

The first is a chapter titled “‘I will never, ever turn my back on people who need me’: Repairing the World Through Care” in Avatar: The Last Airbender and Philosophy: Wisdom From Aang to Zuko (edited by Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt), published in 2022. It explores care ethics in the universe of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

The second is a co-authored chapter with Melanie Rosen, titled “Woah, That’s Deep! Tool and Pseudophilosophy” in ‘90s Alternative and Philosophy: Modern Rock Meditations (edited by Joshua Heter and Richard Greene), published in 2026. This chapter investigates the philosophical depth of Tool lyrics.