The twenty-first century has welcomed significant progress in the battle against deadly infectious diseases through investment programmes (e.g., the Global Fund) and new treatments (e.g., bedaquiline), yet yawning gaps remain. Through the lens of tuberculosis (TB) – a preventable and curable disease exacerbated by inequality – this article revisits Paul Farmer’s insights from Infections and Inequalities on the relationship between disease, inequities, and colonialism in the political and economic order. Assessing the chronic inadequacies in the international financial architecture and failures of global health decolonization to address macroeconomic structures that undermine governments’ ability to fulfill human rights obligations, this article explores two remedies that center economic equity: (1) fair taxation rights; and (2) debt cancellation and reform. The article proposes taking direct aim at colonial financial structures driving TB burden and ill health to decolonize global health and realize robust, sustainable, country-financed health systems — built from community decision-making and power — and a world free of TB and diseases of poverty.
This article examines the crisis of care emerging in the post COVID-19 era, characterized by donor retrenchment, austerity, militarization, and renewed authoritarianism and argues that HIV affected communities offer critical lessons for reclaiming care as a political practice. Drawing on feminist ethics of care and the long-standing programmatic and advocacy experience of the World Council of Churches, the article traces how HIV responses have evolved from palliative accompaniment amid neglect, to collective political agency securing treatment and rights, and now once again to survival under conditions or renewed precarity. It interrogates the systemic offloading of care from states to communities, the gendered depletion of care labour, and the ambivalent rise of self-care under neoliberal development. Ultimately, the article presents care as a form of resistance, grounded in solidarity, accompaniment and shared responsibility; it argues that reclaiming care is essential for justice, dignity and just liveable futures.
The rapid platformization of healthcare in the Global South is reorganizing elder care, yet workers’ experiences remain underexplored. This article investigates algorithmic control and care quality through lived experiences of Indian care workers across three arrangements: hospital-based referral networks, subscription platforms, and on-demand platforms. Findings reveal that digital labour platforms attract a younger, migrant workforce through a veneer of professionalization, but this façade conceals enduring precarity and exclusion from social security. On-demand workers face commission deductions, income volatility, and self-financed costs. Algorithmic control fragments care into short-term transactions, undermining relational continuity and trust. Platformization reinforces social hierarchies: Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe workers remain concentrated in routine tasks. Platforms externalize risk onto workers. Addressing the care crisis requires public investment and labour protections, not technological fixes.
The pandemic crisis has marked a significant modification in the way diplomatic negotiations are conducted at the World Health Organization. These changes reflect a subtle yet visible shift in the governance of the UN health agency, whereby the attempt to make powerful private actors, backed by highly industrialized countries, entities that come to be institutionalized in the UN system and that can further determine the course of negotiations around a new pandemic treaty, and its operationalization. Such private actors include the global health partnerships which have all too easily been entrusted the management of COVID-19, during the health emergency between 2020 and 2022. This decision entailed several negative externalities in terms of access, such as to force the WHO Director General to speak of ‘a vaccine apartheid’. This article aims to feature such geopolitical dynamics at the WHO as a key factor in the crisis of care, globally. In the face of increasing viral threats, societies often struggle to make essential medicines available and affordable in a timely manner. The WHO needs to re-engage again to secure the new pandemic agreement fully complies with existing international law and with the need to create a new enabling environment to share knowledge and the benefits of this knowledge.
This article argues that health crises, ecological degradation, and social conflict are not separate issues, but symptoms of a systemic care deficit rooted in predatory, exclusionary neoliberal development. Drawing on degrowth, decolonial thought, and multispecies justice from the Global South, and using the digital platform Observactiva as a case study, it explores how coalitions are building a new politics centered on collective care. Observactiva acts as a coalition-builder by documenting and defending the right to health, territory, and a life free from violence, linking environmental destruction to public health crises and broadening the concept of social conflict. As a digital repository, it makes visible siloed care crises and shows how feminist and environmental justice movements use technology to amplify marginalized voices. Resolving these intertwined crises requires moving beyond biomedical fixes toward a coalition-based ethic of care that confronts an economic system undervaluing life and colonial legacies severing people from their territories. Since 2021, Observactiva has published six research reports and collaborative documents across Latin America and the Caribbean, identifying major conflicts in health, labour, environment, housing, and public security.
This article argues that a largely disengaged postmodern citizenship praxis is responsible for the contemporary ‘crisis of care’. It posits a participatory citizenship praxis grounded in what I term the palliative imaginary, to regenerate polities where the care crisis is destroying the oikos, or the household, the private sphere structures on which all life depends. Citizenship grounded in the palliative imaginary of the private sphere reconceives and refines the ancient androcentric citizenship virtues of honor, honesty, and friendship formerly the province only of the public sphere. Palliative care praxis, advocacy, and discourses challenge the well documented contemporary crises of care characterized by a neoliberal gaze that treats public sphere abandonment the poor, older persons, the seriously ill, and individuals living with disabilities and mental health disorders, as negative externalities. While the dominant rationality consigns such ‘ungrievable’ lives in Judith Butler’s memorable formulation, to the rubbish heap, the palliative care imaginary seeks to retrieve citizenship practices that incorporate lamentation and relief of preventable suffering to regenerate the latent life force in modernity’s trauma-damaged polities.
The failures of the formal social protection system in Nigeria have made the extended family a widely relied-upon actor in the social security of Nigerians. Despite this enormous value, the extended family’s importance, contributions, and roles in the welfare of Nigerians, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, are not always highlighted. Filling this recognition gap triggers this study. Specifically, this study focuses on extended family welfare care, intergenerational care flow patterns such as traditional downward, reversed upward, sandwich, and horizontal, and the pattern of care provision from the extended family to women-led households. Using a cross-sectional quantitative methodology, the study surveys households in Warri, an oil-rich region in Nigeria. Findings suggest that a large population of Nigerians rely on an extended family welfare system, with the intergenerational care flow pattern being sandwiched, where an adult simultaneously supports both younger and older relatives.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the deep impact of socioeconomic inequalities on health outcomes. This article adopts a health-focused political economy perspective to analyze pandemic vulnerability. It argues that structural determinant, rather than individual factors (which exist and remain relevant of course), shape health disparities. Chronic stress is examined as a key mechanism linking socioeconomic inequality to health outcomes. Addressing future crises requires structural policy change and more equitable global cooperation.
The rapid shift towards the virtualization of care in India, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has transformed not only how care is delivered but how it is valued. In a context of underfunded public health infrastructure and deep social inequality, virtualization of care risks reproducing existing hierarchies of class, caste, gender, and digital access. Drawing on three theoretical frameworks of feminist political economy, Judith Butler’s concept of grievability, (2009) and the capability approach, this article examines how digital mediation can affect relational care while shifting responsibility for care from the state onto individuals and families. Particular attention is paid to youth engagement and the growing invisibility of mental distress within platform-based models of care. The article argues that digital innovation must be anchored in a rights-based public health framework that centres equity, accountability, and trust rather than the logic of market profitability alone.
Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) is a complex crisis of our time. Its evolution is not only driven by the microbes adapting to medicines designed to kill them, and by behavioural and structural drivers, but is also deeply entrenched in the historical inequities in the global health system. This article explores how concurrent crises, comprising armed conflict, climate change, and rising economic inequalities are actively accelerating resistance by eroding public health buffers and straining already fragmented health systems. It further examines the impact of a shrinking pie of global health funding and mounting national debt, which forces low-and middle-income countries to navigate impossible choices between competing priorities. As we navigate through this landscape it is important that we address AMR in a strategic manner, by adopting a ‘better care’ model and a ‘hot spot’ approach. To ensure this, any effective response should include civil society organizations, who can act as watchdogs to bring accountability to the global AMR response and ensure that global health delivery is inclusive of the most vulnerable populations.
This article examines how the concept of care is negotiated by marginalized women migrant farm workers in the drought-prone region of Marathwada, India. Using an intersectional lens, the research explores the link between healthcare and bodily autonomy in relation to gender, caste, economic status, and climate vulnerability. Through a mixed-methods case study approach, it draws on semi-structured interviews with nineteen married women aged 25– 60 from migrant farm worker households. Crucially, it documents the phenomenon of widespread hysterectomies among sugarcane cutters, with six women reporting surgeries in their early to mid-30s. The article examines coerced decisions, revealing how exploitative labour regimes and harsh conditions intersect and force women to prioritize survival over their bodily autonomy and reproductive health.
This article examines how expressions of gratitude among migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Malaysia operate as an affective mechanism that shapes labour relations and constrains self-advocacy. Drawing on data gathered on the lived experiences of Filipino and Indonesian MDWs in Malaysia, through five focus group discussions (n = 30) and a quantitative survey (n = 313), it argues that MDWs’ perceptions of employer care, manifested through job security, fair wages and support, generate feelings of gratitude which obscure deeper structural inequalities. Gratitude becomes an emotional context that sustains unequal employer-employee power relations as MDWs discipline their own expectations, perpetuating precarity by denying workers the conceptual understanding needed to recognize their grievances as rights violations. In further exploring how feelings of gratitude influence MDWs’ capacity to self-advocate and assert labour rights, this article situates it at the intersection of structurally precarious migration regimes to demonstrate how these emotions can normalize compromised labour protections. Findings reveal that MDWs are unable to recognize their self-regulation as a response to structural inequalities or frame their dissatisfaction as a rights violation. Thus, gratitude serves to mask inequality and suppress self-advocacy. These findings underscore the critical role of collective spaces to foster agency amongst MDWs.
In the summer of 2024, a wave of extremist right-wing violence swept across the United Kingdom, fuelled by anti-migrant, Islamophobic, and racist vitriol. This moment symbolized wider tensions in the contemporary British landscape: polarizing debates on immigration, race and class, the long-term impacts of neoliberal austerity politics, and the continued dehumanization of minority communities. This article places radical care at the centre of analysis, exposing how marginalized communities mobilize to fill the gaps where the state has failed to provide and protect. In histories of structural violence and state neglect, radical care emerges as a necessity to resist, survive and thrive on the ‘island of strangers’. As the affective, relational resistance against an oppressive, violent politics, radical care is not only a form of survival but cultivates the collective capacities and skills necessary to envision and enact political transformation.
The article analyzes the crisis of care as a crisis of social reproduction with a political economy approach that centres the working-class. It traces the emergence and evolution of the crisis within the context of a neoliberal hegemonic framing of the social organization of care and social life in its totality. Noting the critical place of concerted struggle for a progressive resolution of the crisis, it highlights the need for this to be based on a feminist anti-capitalist agenda.
Humanitarian food aid is often positioned as a neutral and scientific response to crises, designed to secure biological survival most efficiently. However, especially in today’s reality of protracted displacement, hunger cannot be reduced to a technical problem alone. This article examines humanitarian food aid through the lens of culture to explore how its care logic is shaped by the underlying structure of power and knowledge. It argues that nutritionism, a reductionist view of food as nutrients, underpins the biomedicalized and standardized design of food aid, and interrogates what such approaches leave behind. Contemporary humanitarian food aid, while lifesaving, reframes hunger not as a political and historical condition but as a matter of biological management. This completely obscures the social, cultural and embodied dimensions of hunger and human beings; through practices like nutrient and anthropometric measurements, care becomes selective, operating through regulation and exclusion, while risking dehumanizing recipients and reinforcing dependency. By foregrounding culture as a constitutive of care, this article reconceptualizes food aid as a site of power and epistemic violence, contributing to the depoliticization of hunger. It concludes by proposing pathways toward the repoliticization of hunger through culturally responsive approaches essential for sustainable and decolonial humanitarian practices.
This article examines frictions emerging between faith-based environmental activism and secular climate governance in Latin America and the Caribbean. Drawing on diverse spiritual traditions, it shows how integral ecology influences policy while negotiating tensions with UN-led frameworks and rights-based paradigms. Case studies from the region reveal three key fractures: holistic views of nature, inclusive participation, and resistance to technocratic models. Using policy analysis, fieldwork, and discourse analysis, the article evaluates the extent integral-ecology-inspired hybrid governance models balance moral authority with secular commitments to rights and inclusion, enriching debates on faith-based environmentalism in the Global South.
This article analyzes the contemporary and emerging identity of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) as the Church delicately navigates between digital media representation, public fascination, and global spread. The popular representation of Mormons has been significantly altered by recent representations in reality-television and in digital media spaces– often highlighting taboo lifestyles that are rather antithetical to traditional LDS doctrine and behavior. The sex scandals and infidelity covered in The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives as well as the questionable choices of absurd characters in The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City directly contrast other popular images of Mormon women, like ‘TradWife’ influencer Hannah Neeleman, more popularly known as Ballerina Farms on social media platforms. This article aims to question whether any of these public caricatures accurately represent authentic Mormonism, or perhaps, whether there even exists any singular model of Mormonism in the modern age. By examining the Church’s demographic shifts— most notably that the majority of the 17.5 million members reside outside of the United States, many in African and Central/South American nations— it highlights the complex cultural negotiations faced by both international members, and the Church itself. By revisiting former concessions at the attempt of cultural assimilation, a hypothesis is constructed regarding the long-term negotiation between eternal doctrine and cultural survival.
Africa stands at the crossroads of a climate crisis it did little to create but suffers disproportionately from. Amid escalating vulnerabilities and widening gaps in adaptation financing, a quiet revolution is unfolding: the greening of religion. This article examines the rise of eco-spirituality and faith-based environmental movements across Africa, tracing their roots from indigenous cosmologies to contemporary interfaith coalitions shaping regional and global climate discussions. It argues that religious institutions, as custodians of moral authority, with vast landholdings and deep community trust, represent an underutilized force for ecological transformation. However, their potential is riddled with paradoxes such as doctrinal tensions, tokenistic inclusion of indigenous voices, and fragile operational sustainability. Are interfaith climate initiatives transformative agents or mere symbolic gestures? Can spiritual narratives align with scientific imperatives to achieve measurable ecological outcomes?
There is a class-based divergence in narratives about economic opportunities for women. This article examines a key distinction between Income Generating Activities and Income Generating Assets in dominant development rhetoric and wealth-building discourses. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in development and entrepreneurial ecosystems in Rwanda and Nigeria, respectively, this research analyzes how neoliberal paradigms create divergent economic paths that often reinforce structural inequalities. Using a Pan-African feminist framework, the article demonstrates how economically disadvantaged women are channeled into labour-intensive activities with limited scaling potential, while wealthy women access asset-based strategies that generate significant wealth. Middle-class women encounter professionalization narratives emphasizing ‘hard work’ without commensurate rewards. This research challenges dominant development narratives by centering African women’s knowledge and experiences, revealing how women across socioeconomic classes develop strategic responses to structural barriers. The findings call for moving beyond individual entrepreneurship toward structural reforms that prioritize asset building, address care work burdens, and challenge the neocolonial political economy that constrains women’s wealth creation.
