Centre for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity, Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Institute of History and Ethics in Medicine, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany.
Med Humanit. 2023 Dec 19;49(4):511-520. doi: 10.1136/medhum-2022-012536.
Calls for solidarity have been an ubiquitous feature in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, we know little about how people have thought of and practised solidarity in their everyday lives since the beginning of the pandemic. What role does solidarity play in people's lives, how does it relate to COVID-19 public health measures and how has it changed in different phases of the pandemic? Situated within the medical humanities at the intersection of philosophy, bioethics, social sciences and policy studies, this article explores how the practice-based understanding of solidarity formulated by Prainsack and Buyx helps shed light on these questions. Drawing on 643 qualitative interviews carried out in two phases (April-May 2020 and October 2020) in nine European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, German-speaking Switzerland and the UK), the data show that interpersonal acts of solidarity are important, but that they are not sustainable without consistent support at the institutional level. As the pandemic progressed, respondents expressed a longing for more institutionalised forms of solidarity. We argue that the medical humanities have much to gain from directing their attention to individual health issues, and to collective experiences of health or illness. The analysis of experiences through a collective lens such as solidarity offers unique insights to understandings of the individual and the collective. We propose three essential advances for research in the medical humanities that can help uncover collective experiences of disease and health crises: (1) an empirical and practice-oriented approach alongside more normative approaches; (2) the confidence to make recommendations for practice and policymaking and (3) the pursuit of cross-national and multidisciplinary research collaborations.
呼吁团结是应对 COVID-19 大流行的一个普遍特征。然而，自大流行开始以来，我们对人们在日常生活中如何思考和实践团结知之甚少。团结在人们的生活中扮演什么角色，它与 COVID-19 公共卫生措施有什么关系，以及它在大流行的不同阶段如何变化？本文位于医学人文科学领域，位于哲学、生物伦理学、社会科学和政策研究的交叉点，探讨了 Prainsack 和 Buyx 提出的团结实践理解如何帮助回答这些问题。本文利用在九个欧洲国家（奥地利、比利时、法国、德国、爱尔兰、意大利、荷兰、德语区瑞士和英国）进行的两个阶段（2020 年 4 月至 5 月和 2020 年 10 月）进行的 643 次定性访谈，数据显示人际团结行为很重要，但如果没有制度层面的持续支持，它们是不可持续的。随着大流行的进展，受访者表达了对更制度化形式的团结的渴望。我们认为，医学人文科学从关注个人健康问题和集体健康或疾病经验中可以获得很多收益。通过团结等集体视角分析经验，可以为理解个人和集体提供独特的见解。我们提出了医学人文科学研究的三个重要进展，可以帮助揭示疾病和健康危机的集体经验：（1）实证和实践导向的方法与更规范的方法相结合；（2）为实践和决策制定提出建议的信心；（3）追求跨国和多学科的研究合作。
