A critical perspective on pandemics and epidemics: building a bridge between public health and science education

Abstract

This academic position paper focuses on building a bridge between public health and science education in order to recognize the relationships between science and society-politics, economics, and ideology-in a pandemic context. To do this, we first present the contemporary dispute between the ways of understanding and explaining public health problems in light of a historical-territorial critical perspective; then, we show the configuration process of the formal and hegemonic concept of pandemic that has taken place over the period of the pandemics of the 1918 flu and the 2019 coronavirus disease; later, we give way to a historical-territorial understanding of the genesis of the 2002 and 2012 epidemics in relation to the coronavirus in the twenty-first century; and lastly, we indicate the key points from the historical-territorial critical perspective of public health that science education can use in order to contribute to a critical and reflective understanding of epidemics and pandemics. In this framework, "configuration process" is a category we propose and use in order to explain that specific events such as epidemics and pandemics are interwoven in a social, historical-territorial, trajectory of world power relations.