A thick description of love’s contours for health professions education

Affective, relational, and humanistic approaches are well represented in health professions education (HPE) literature. Within this landscape, love offers a distinctive and expansive way of relating—one that can challenge hierarchical or extractive dynamics and create space for shared humanity in HPE. Such an approach holds the possibility of fostering both personal transformation for students and educators and HPE systems (e.g. curricular, programmatic). The purpose of this critical review paper is to explore how love can be described and understood, offering a thoughtful and nuanced foundation for considering its potential as a HPE educational approach. In this critical review paper we answer the question, ‘what is love and what is love’s promise?’, as a foundation to explore love as an educational approach in HPE. We drew on a poststructural feminist perspective, which is attentive to how gender and power intersect within relationships. We situated this work in embodied inquiry, intuitive inquiry and hermeneutic phenomenology. 12 texts were selected drawing from disciplines including philosophy, education, and theology. We provide a thick description of what love is, what love requires, love in action, and what love offers through the following contours of love: love is transcendent, the “tangibilities” of love, the groundwork for a love practice, a love practice, and love’s promises. Findings highlight love’s transcendent power, the intentional work needed to practice love, and love’s potential to facilitate deep transformation in HPE. Love has begun to emerge within HPE literature as a potentially transformative educational approach. Our paper offers a critical descriptive foundation and invites others to build on and expand this work through a diversity of perspectives.