Research: Democratic participation and health policies. Health between social initiatives and ethics of care
Health as a fundamental social right. Between theory and practice, the research project intends to follow two axes: on the one hand, an ethical-political reflection on the paradigm of care; on the other hand, the study of health policies and specific cases of social initiatives that, by encouraging health from below, promote the improvement of the quality of health through the direct participation of citizenship. Since the 1980s, the ethics of care has developed as a feminist critical perspective on traditionally understood morality and politics. As an alternative to neoliberalism, this paradigm highlights a different way of thinking about subjectivity and forms of associated living, rearticulating concepts of democracy, welfare and justice. In Italy, cuts in public spending on healthcare, the privatisation of social and health services and the commodification of care have led to the weakening of an important milestone for the Italian welfare state: the National Health Service (SSN, 1978). The result of an unprecedented transformative season from below that changed the way of understanding illness, scientific knowledge and medical practices, the SSN made the right to health a substantial right. By bringing the analysed cases into tension with the theory, the aim is to reconstruct Italian policies and experiences, past and recent, and to evaluate measures included in the PNRR. Offering strategies to strengthen public, territorial, participatory health and retracing approaches to social medicine, as well as expanding studies on the ethics of care, demonstrating its moral and public ethics value, are among the main objectives of the research, which also looks at emblematic European initiatives.
keywords
ethics and politics of care; feminist philosophies; social initiatives; medicine; public policy; health; welfare state; theories of justice