Decoloniality is gaining increasing traction in efforts to change the colonial-rooted structures and practices within global health. In Global Health Research (GHR), decoloniality challenges historical injustices, power dynamics, and epistemic injustices in research practices with reformative options. While some recent initiatives towards decolonising GHR draw on solidarity as a guiding value, there are limited works that connect decolonial conceptualisations of solidarity to decoloniality in GHR. This article links a decolonial account of solidarity from the global South to the call for decoloniality in GHR. Using a beehive allegory as an example of conceptualising solidarity in African culture, it argues that such an account has profound implications for addressing the problems of power hierarchies and epistemic injustice in GHR. Linking a decolonial account of solidarity to decoloniality in GHR helps to re-orient the logic of supremacy and promote humility. This paper considers possible objections against a decolonial account of solidarity and calls for more decolonial conceptualisations of solidarity and other values that can further drive the GHR decoloniality agenda.
Thursday July 9, 2026 11:00am - 11:55am AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
In philosophical literature on dementia, a key question is how to determine what is in the best interest of people with dementia. Two opposing views exist: one appeals to a person's former values, while the other suggests that past values matter little, focusing instead on current perspectives. Franklin Hall recently proposed a third alternative: the "revision model”. This model holds that we only consider past values if they have been revised and the person is answerable for why. I make a case for modifying Hall’s answerability requirement. I draw a distinction between a direct answer and a demonstrable answer. I argue that even when the requirements of answerability are not directly met, requirements can still be met indirectly: we may identify answers through epistemic resources and contextual clues available to us. In some cases, where epistemic access is limited and the person cannot offer a direct response, all we have is the absence of evidence that the answerability requirement has been met, not evidence that it has not been met. The upshot is that, in a wider range of cases, people with dementia may still meet the requirements of answerability, or at least, it may remain undetermined whether those requirements are unmet.
Thursday July 9, 2026 12:00pm - 12:55pm AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Recent debates on the ethical use of AI in medicine have gradually shifted from asking whether explainability as an epistemic property matters morally in terms of adopting a medical AI that cannot be fully understood by humans to determining how much explainability is required across different clinical contexts. This shift recognises that explainability is a matter of degree, and that the ethical adoption of medical technologies does not always require a full understanding of their underlying mechanisms. Following this view, some suggest that the level of explainability required should be determined by how a medical AI system would affect a person’s life — the greater the irreversibility, invasiveness, or risk of an intervention, the higher the demand for explainability.
This paper challenges that position. Using recent research on sepsis scoring systems and their use in the clinical context as a case study, I argue that the level of explainability required for adopting a diagnostic tool do not track these clinical factors. Instead, the degree of explainability ethically required should depend on the epistemic objectives the tool is designed to fulfil. In some contexts, a high level of explainability may be essential even when clinical risks are low.
Thursday July 9, 2026 2:00pm - 2:55pm AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
Pain asymbolia is a rare condition in which patients report the experience of pain but do not exhibit characteristic motivational/behavioral and emotional responses to a noxious stimulus. Such cases pose a challenge to a characterisation of pain derived from typical episodes in which pain sensation is intimately associated with aversive response and negatively-valenced affect. Pain asymbolia is thus test case for neuroscientific and philosophical theories of the nature of pain experience. Those theories can be described as disconnection, depersonalisation and eliminativist (pain asymbolia is not real pain) accounts. None entirely preserve the phenomena, satisfactorily account for the role of neural correlates.
We argue that pain asymbolia represents a failure of emotional transcription of a nociceptive signal. This explanation depends on the idea that the insula cortex anchors distributed processing that subtends a form of interoceptive active inference. As well as explaining pain asymbolia this account also explains the enigmatic and cognitively ubiquitous role of insula processing. We discuss a recent case in which the patient was subject to a full battery of modern investigative techniques. This is helpful since philosophical discussion often relies on classic neuropsychological reports, especially the original 1931 study.
Thursday July 9, 2026 3:00pm - 3:55pm AEST Steele-2373 Staff House Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia
