Framing the Relationship between Healthcare, Social Love and Solidarity.

This session explores the relationship between healthcare, social love and solidarity, focusing on love as a constitutive dimension of care relationships. In professions centred on helping others, such as healthcare, education, and social work, love has increasingly been recognised as an essential component of professional practice (Vincent, 2016). Studies on nursing, medicine, and paramedical professions have highlighted how caring relationships involve emotional engagement, responsiveness, and commitment that extend beyond technical competence (Willer, 2014).

While concepts such as compassion, altruism, philanthropy, and solidarity have received considerable scholarly attention, the specific contribution of social love to healthcare practices remains underexplored (Rad, Mirhaghi & Shomoossi, 2016; Sena, 2022).

Building on the argument that healthcare and loving care are intrinsically interconnected (Klaver & Baart, 2011), this session seeks to advance sociological debate on social love as a fundamental social process shaping healthcare relationships, organisations, and policies.

The session welcomes both theoretical and empirical contributions addressing questions such as:

• How can social love be conceptualised and operationalised in healthcare settings?
• What distinguishes healthcare social love from related concepts such as compassion, care, altruism, and solidarity?
• How does social love influence professional identities, caregiving practices, and patient-professional relationships?
• What organisational, institutional, and policy conditions enable or hinder loving care?
• How do healthcare workers negotiate tensions between emotional engagement, professional boundaries, and bureaucratic constraints?
• In what ways does social love shape healthcare practices and care relationships in contexts characterised by health crises, health inequalities, vulnerability, chronic illness, ageing, disability, and end-of-life care?