Answers to commentaries: implications and challenges in the frontier of epidemiology.

I have been asked to respond to the comments of three of the most important Brazilian critical thinkers with regard to my short essay about cyber determination. In the first place, I am deeply thankful to the journal Revista Brasileira de Epidemiologia for providing its valuable platform to publish this enriching dialogue raised by the commentaries. Secondly, I must also thank my commentators for their deep insights which definitely add relevant arguments to better position a crucial debate for contemporary epidemiology. An array of reflections arise from the crucial arguments posed by Ayres, De Oliveira, and Soares, all of which tend to complement my main thesis: the need to consolidate an innovative critical epidemiology paradigm; the resulting challenges for the construction of a counter-hegemonic conception of health and its determination; and, more specifically, the need to inscribe in this intellectual and political movement a new theory about the social space, power relations and the role of virtual cyberspace processes. All the commentaries imply a recurrent agreement about the need to penetrate, with this opportunity, in the understanding of the rol of sociability, the existence of virtual forms of false sociability and their implications in the determination of unhealthy or healthy processes. Hence, Ricardo Ayres suggests that in order to rethink present forms of sociability , heaviliky influenced by phenomena and resources of the cybernetic space, we should apply the intellectual arsenal of different schools of critical thinking, and imprpove our understanding of the varied forms of collective resilience which strive to overcome the forms of false sociability which are reproduced under capitalist social relations. In this effort to understand the mechanisms of intersubjective relations, he recommends to apply perspectives and categories which have proven useful in the fight for adolescents’ health, such as those of “acknowledgment”, “disrespect” and “non-acknowledgment”. For this commentator, Honneth ́s, acknowledgment/non-acknowledgment analysis as an essential tool for explaining the dynamic development of subjectivity, the construction of identity in interpersonal relations, the empowerment, awareness and collective self-esteem, needed for the exercise of rights and agency in the face of oppression.