Fewer than 50 face transplants have taken place around the world since 2005 – none as yet in the UK. As an experimental and innovative form of organ transplantation, face transplants have physical and emotional effects – on patients and their families, on surgical teams and society as a whole. AboutFace explores these impacts in history, and in the present.
Funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship awarded to historian of emotion Prof Fay Bound Alberti, AboutFace is the first major interdisciplinary project to consider the meanings of face transplants as surgical and psychological processes. We work with extended surgical teams, patients and families, institutions, organisations and policy makers to evaluate the impacts of face transplants on patients, medical practitioners and donor families, and how the media representation of face transplants influences policy and opinion.
AboutFace creates important insights into face transplants as a form of innovative surgery, and benefits extended surgical teams seeking to understand links between ethics, emotion, identity and facial appearance. It will create a new, historically-informed framework for evaluating the psychological impact of facial difference and transplantation. And it will show how, and why, the meanings of the face in the Selfie Age are more complex than ever before.
In January 2023, AboutFace moved to King’s College London, where its work encompasses a wide range of technologies of the face. See the new project website here.
'Bern,' Image courtesy of Lucy Burscough
Who are we?
We are a team of researchers working on the history, ethics and practice of facial transplantation. We are interested in the emotional and physical dimensions of the face, as an organ of the self and identity, and in its treatment in surgery and society.
AboutFace collaborators come from a variety of perspectives to share their insights and experiences. This includes people with lived experience of facial difference, including face transplant recipients, as well as families and carers, surgical innovators, ethicists, policy makers, artists, writers, and researchers in the arts, sciences and social sciences. Our surgical and non-surgical collaborators are, like the members of our Advisory Board, international leaders in their fields.
This kind of interdisciplinary research can be challenging. It requires us to work across different methods, systems and belief systems. Face transplants are emotive and emotional subjects, and interdisciplinary research necessarily involves taking risks and seeing things from another angle. Building trust, with surgical teams, policy makers, people with lived experience of facial difference, takes time, as well as openness, sensitivity and transparency: principles that we commit to in this project. You can read more about our position and approaches by reading about our values.
This website is intended to provide a hub for information, knowledge exchange, conversations and the dissemination of our findings. If you’d like to know more, or have any queries, please get in touch by emailing us at aboutface-project@york.ac.uk or follow us on Twitter @AboutFaceOrg
