Su gentile richiesta dei Proff. Natascia Bobbo e Daniele Bruzzone, segnaliamo la Call for Paper della Rivista “Journal of Health Care Education in Practice – JHCE” dal titolo “The epistemic gaze of education in the healthcare setting. Human needs caught amid contrasting perspectives”.
Every action we perform, whether in life, work or study, is driven by an epistemic gaze, which defines the essential stance that people sometimes choose intentionally and at other times adopt unconsciously, based on common sense, their cultural background or their professional training. These can be considered that “worldviews that define the nature of the world, the individual’s place in it and their possible relationships with it” (Guba et al., 1994). Within the natural and social sciences, the positivist view has gradually been replaced by other approach: interpretative, critical-emancipatory, participatory and post-critical. The positivist perspective dominates the epistemic gaze of political and health governance bodies that view innovation and growth (in knowledge and profit) as the only values to consider (Giroux, 2018). The interpretative paradigm, instead, try to see the world as something humans contribute to by giving it meaning.
Both constructivism and phenomenology focus on describing and understanding a reality consisting of what a person experiences day after day in their life and the meaning they give them (Siti et al., 2019; Van Manen, 1990). The critical, emancipatory perspective observes social reality as a permanent theatre of power dynamics and tries to make oppressed aware of their oppression, stimulating them to make emancipatory choices (Giroux, 2020). The participatory approach is both provocative and humble. It fosters a sense of shared responsibility and enables people to engage in political participation through collaborative action (Mertens, 2007; Bastian, 2017). The post-critical approach of Polanji (Turkis, 2024) proposes to see world starting from the fiduciary basis of our knowledge, restoring relevance to the human gaze. In healthcare settings, education and training define contexts of action and encounter characterised by a variety of perspectives — positivistic, critical, post-critical and participatory.
However, we must reflect on the most appropriate stance to take to address, understand, improve and support the complex social and healthcare realities of our industrialised countries, where the neoliberal, profit-driven perspective contrasts with the increasing demand for empathy and understanding expressed by patients and healthcare professionals. Furthermore, we should ask ourselves how we will ever be able to sustain healthcare expenditure, which is largely due to an ageing population — a desirable but difficult-to-manage side effect resulting from medical and scientific knowledge that has turned many once-fatal diseases into chronic conditions. Taking these reflections into account, the May 2026 issue of HCEinP will focus on educational contributions that provide some theoretical, methodological or empirical input to the construction of knowledge about illness and disease. A situated, participatory, biographically based knowledge which can considers the point of view of patients, healthcare professionals and, more generally, the governances that decide how healthcare spending is allocated. This is not just a private, personal or ideal issue, but also a concrete, public issue of political significance that we, as pedagogists, educators and trainers, cannot fail to take responsibility for.
The deadline for submitting abstracts is 10.02.2026.
Abstracts of no more than 1,000 characters should be emailed to hcep.fisppa@unipd.it.
For more information https://jhce.padovauniversitypress.it/
