Presentation Schedule
Moral Agency, Epistemic Justice, and the Institutional Limits of Centralized Healthcare Systems: A Humanistic Inquiry into Viral Hepatitis in Vietnam (106786)
Session Chair: Pujaningsih Pujaningsih
Tuesday, 12 May 2026 09:30
Session: Session 1
Room: Room G404 (4F)
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
In Vietnam, viral hepatitis and liver cancer affect millions of people, yet the crisis is not only medical but also humanistic, raising questions about how healthcare systems enable or obstruct access to knowledge, whose forms of knowledge are institutionally recognized, and how authority over care decisions is unevenly distributed. This paper examines viral hepatitis as a moral and social condition shaped by institutional authority, hierarchies of knowledge, and lived experience. Grounded in the humanistic concepts of moral agency and epistemic justice, it analyzes how a centralized healthcare system reaches institutional limits when authority structures restrict people’s capacities to know, decide, and act responsibly in relation to their own health. The inquiry is informed by qualitative engagement with community health education initiatives, frontline healthcare provider training, and digital decision-support practices in Vietnam, which together reveal a recurring pattern: community members possess experiential knowledge but lack decision-making power, while healthcare providers hold clinical expertise yet remain constrained by top-down mandates. From a humanistic perspective, education and participatory knowledge exchange are interpreted not as technical interventions, but as ethical practices that redistribute authority, restore voice, and enable responsibility. By reframing disease elimination as a question of moral agency and epistemic justice, this study demonstrates the distinctive contribution of humanities scholarship to debates on health and governance, showing how institutional arrangements shape the human capacity to act.
Authors:
Diem Dao, Southern Methodist University, United States
About the Presenter(s)
Ms Diem Dao is a University Doctoral Student at Southern Methodist University in United States
See this presentation on the full schedule – Tuesday Schedule
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