Recently I travelled to Colombia for vacation, but I returned with a lot of thoughts that were difficult to ground at first. They were not thoughts about the country, its politics, or its people. These were thoughts about how we converse, make sense of the other's experience, and overall, of how limited my understanding of those living otherwise truly is, and how easily imagination can be mistaken for understanding. I did not expect a vacation to reshape how I think about my work in global health, but in retrospect, it made sense that it did.

I had gone for joyous reasons, and I did find myself enjoying the weather, scenery, and food. But I also found myself immersed in something I had not anticipated: the constant conversations about politics.

The way politics showed up was not limited to formal debates or news programs. It was at family gatherings where I was present, over dinner, in passing remarks, in jokes, in moments of tension, on the streets, and plenty more. People spoke about the present with urgency, but always through the emotionally heavy eyes of the past, whether recent or many years ago.

At first, I listened in a way that felt familiar to me: by trying to place myself in their position. I asked myself how I would feel if I had lived their experiences. I tried to imagine how I would interpret the world if I had grown up there. This felt like empathy. It felt like an effort to understand.

But gradually, I started to notice that even in these attempts, I remained at the center. I was not stepping outside of my own perspective. When someone argued for a certain policy or a political candidate, at first, I kept failing to understand how they could feel that way, because in their shoes I would feel differently. But then I began to hear their personal stories - stories of violence, fear, exile – and this made me begin to shift gears. I found myself returning to something I already knew but was now confronting more directly: that I could not understand something I never had to live (Shah et al. 2025).

To these conversations, I was bringing with me my own assumptions and experiences, which shaped the prism through which I interpreted everything I heard. I realized that no matter how hard I tried, I could not fully inhabit the experiences of others. I could hear them. I could acknowledge them. But I could not fairly reconstruct them.

I had often relied on imagining myself in their place as a strategy for which to approach understanding. The phrase all of us have heard when encouraged to empathize, "put yourself in their shoes," always seemed like something positive, a strategy that helps you understand how the other feels. I thought that this gesture could help bridge the gap in some of these cases: that if I tried hard enough, I could arrive at their perspective from within my own mind. But what became more apparent to me in these conversations were the limits within such efforts.

When we imagine ourselves in another person's position, we do not arrive as blank slates. We arrive carrying ourselves, our assumptions, our histories, and situated experiences. We do not access their experience; we translate their experience through the language of our worldview.

I began to understand that some experiences cannot be accessed through imagination alone. There are fears you do not inherit. Histories that did not shape you. Emotional realities that exist outside your frame of reference. This realization did not bring me any clarity. It brought me humility. Not because these limits were entirely unfamiliar to me, but because I was encountering them in lived, concrete form rather than as abstract ethical commitments to ‘practice humility’ in culturally or otherwise unfamiliar settings.

Understanding another person does not always mean being able to fully make sense of their perspective from your own. There are limits to how far empathy, as I had practiced it, could take me.

Being immersed in this environment, there was something else I began to become more attentive to as I made this shift. I also noticed the ease with which people dismissed those who disagreed with them. Opposing viewpoints were described not simply as mistaken, but as ignorant, immoral, or manipulated. This was not unique to any one side. It existed across conversations, across positions. This made me realize some of those instincts within myself. It can be comforting to believe that disagreement can be explained by a lack of information or clarity. That if others saw the world as we do, they would reach the same conclusions. But this assumes that our perspective is neutral, that it exists outside of history, outside of context.

Each of us speaks from within a particular position shaped by experiences others have not experienced. What I began to understand is that dialogue does not require us to fully inhabit another person's experience. It requires something simpler, and more uncomfortable, the acceptance that we cannot.

This thought applies beyond political conversations. I think it is relevant to how we deal with each other every day. It applies to the way we relate to friends, to family, to anyone whose experiences differ from our own. We often approach disagreement as something to resolve, something to correct. But not all disagreement can be resolved through explanation, because it does not emerge from abstract reasoning alone. It emerges from different situated experiences; it emerges from different lives.

This does not mean abandoning our own beliefs. It does not mean that all perspectives are equally valid, or that truth does not matter. It means recognizing that our access to others' experiences will always be partial.

Coincidentally, soon after I arrived, a colleague shared an article that helped give language and structure to many of the thoughts this experience had already brought into sharper focus. Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán's The Broken Mirror of Solidarity (2016) explores a parallel insight: the dangers of assuming we can fully inhabit another person's perspective. Drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young and Hannah Arendt, the article argues that projecting ourselves into others' shoes often leads not to understanding, but to subtle erasure: a failure to recognize the other as fundamentally shaped by their own history, fears, and context.

Reading this article helped situate what I had been observing in everyday conversations in Colombia within a much larger pattern. Young (1997) calls for humility and what she calls "asymmetric reciprocity": the willingness to recognize differences without expecting them to disappear, and to listen without trying to translate someone else's reality into our own. In other words, understanding does not require identification, it requires respect for the distance between our perspectives.

In global health, this is not a peripheral concern. Practitioners and researchers regularly enter communities shaped by histories of colonialism, structural violence, and exclusion — histories they did not live. The instinct to imagine oneself in another's position, however well-meaning, can reproduce the very erasure it seeks to overcome, centering the outsider's frame at the expense of the community's own. Questions of whose knowledge counts, who defines the problem, and who designs the solution are at the heart of global health equity, and epistemic humility is not just a personal virtue in that context. It is a methodological responsibility.

These reflections overall connect to the work of Donna Haraway (2013). Her essay Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective provokes the reader to re-think objectivity by rejecting what she calls the "god trick": the illusion that we can see the world from nowhere, detached from the limits of our own position. She argues that knowledge is always situated, that it is seen from somewhere, and is shaped by histories and experiences. According to Haraway, interactions across differences are acts of translation rather than perfect understanding; they are interpretive, incomplete, and influenced by the viewpoints we bring with us. Therefore, what matters is what she refers to as partial connection—the ability to listen and engage without claiming to be the other—rather than the impossible objective of fully inhabiting another's experience (Haraway, 2013). In this way, the humility I experienced during those discussions turns into a responsibility to remain aware of the limits of my own viewpoint and bring that awareness to my approach to communication, interpersonal relationships, and my work in global health.

What threatens dialogue is not simply that people disagree, but that they stop recognizing each other as shaped by different experiences. Listening cannot eliminate these differences. But it can make it possible to coexist with them. Not by dissolving distance, but by respecting it.

The question, then, is not whether we can eliminate these gaps. We cannot. The question is whether we are honest about them. In global health work, that honesty shapes everything: how we listen to communities, how we design research, and whose knowledge we choose to trust.

References

Haraway, D. (2013). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective 1. In Women, science, and technology (pp. 455-472). Routledge.

Martínez-Bascuñán, M. (2026). The broken mirror of solidarity. Barcelona Metròpolis. https://www.barcelona.cat/metropolis/en/contents/the-broken-mirror-solidarity

Shah, S., Bora, S., Longley, E. S. G., Valtierra, E., & Pai, M. (2025). "You can't see what you've never had to live"-Cultivating imagination and solution spaces in global health and development. PLOS global public health, 5(9), e0005242. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0005242

Young, I. M. (1997). Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought. Constellations: An International Jo

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