The Social and Human Sciences in Health facing contemporary challenges: science, coloniality, whiteness, and epistemic arenas

Abstract

This essay addresses the contemporary challenges facing the Social and Human Sciences in Health (SHSH). It analyzes how contexts marked by social, health, environmental, political, and epistemic crises—along with intensified scientific production and the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI)— strain disciplinary identities, visibility regimes, knowledge legitimacy and authority, and educational processes. It argues that the SHSH provide the tools to understand and denaturalize structures, yielding situated knowledge that is ethically and politically engaged. Engaging with debates on science, the coloniality of knowledge, whiteness, and epistemicide, the essay posits that modern science has entrenched persistent epistemic hierarchies. When analyzed through the lens of critiques regarding the coloniality of knowledge, scientific racism, and whiteness, epistemic asymmetries emerge not as occasional deviations, but as structural dimensions of science. Engaging with the concepts of epistemic arenas and ontopolitics reveals that health objects are produced through practice, ethically entwining researchers and educators in the creation of the very worlds they investigate and teach. It examines the automation of thought and the widening of epistemic inequalities. By articulating decolonial perspectives, situated epistemologies, and the Latin American concept of sentipensar (feeling-thinking), it suggests that a pluralistic Collective Health demands dismantling privileges, challenging whiteness, and fortifying educational processes committed to cognitive justice and social equity.