Carole Faucher

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought to our awareness the depth of health inequalities across populations. The burgeoning global civil society has been over the past two years increasingly active in its search for collective solutions, pushing, among other things, for more research connecting economic, social, political and historical structures at both global and local levels. However, global solutions, to be effective, should reflect an unceasing engagement with a large diversity of resources and expertise.  The epistemological imbalance in health and wellbeing education is an issue that has already captured a lot of attention over the past decade, inciting several researchers in the field to duly revisit their approach. We have witnessed, for example, an increasing awareness towards intersectionality and the effectiveness of teaming up with researchers and practitioners originating from different cultural backgrounds. Any research project conducted in non-Western settings is nowadays expected to involve harnessing local knowledge and questioning the suitability of taken-for-granted key concepts. However, despite such a commendable shift towards a greater equity in knowledge production, we may ask ourselves: are we doing enough?

This keynote will address the following questions: have we succeeded in tackling the epistemological divide in health and wellbeing education research? Does the local/global dichotomy that informs our collaborative research designs truly support the integration and recognition of different forms of knowledge?  This keynote will conclude with a discussion around the decolonisation of knowledge production movement and some of its practical implications for educational research addressing students’ health and wellbeing.