Social Sciences

To redress systemically biased approaches to health interventions and service design, it is critical that public health researchers employ frameworks that are intentional in their approach to recognizing and working against existing power structures to advance equity in public health. Design Justice represents an approach to design which centers marginalized people and uses collaborative design processes to address community needs and challenges. The purpose of this paper is to describe our process for applying a Design Justice framework to Project XX. Project XX is a study funded by XX designed to develop and test an eHealth-enhanced peer navigation intervention to improve engagement in substance use and HIV-related services for young adults with recent carceral system involvement. We situate the project within the theoretical foundation of Design Justice and community-engaged research, describe its development and implementation, and analyze the application of Design Justice principles from an implementation science perspective by overlaying them with Stanford University’s Center for Dissemination and Implementation’s five key dimensions of dissemination and implementation methods. We highlight successes, challenges, and lessons learned, offering recommendations to guide more equitable and inclusive approaches for future research and practice.

Under the Eighth Amendment, prisons are legally mandated to provide constitutionally adequate standards of medical care to the incarcerated. But how do we make sense of a carceral structure in which the very delivery of medical care results in preventable death? This article offers a carceral case study of how prison medical care during the era of mass incarceration generates racialized mortality at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison. By analyzing caselaw documents drawn from the docket of Lewis v. Cain, an ongoing lawsuit alleging inadequate medical care at Angola, this article seeks to address the limits of pursuing relief from prison conditions through legal interventions and reforms that are always yet to arrive. Rather than examining prison medical care and preventable death as problems to be reformed, this project aims to develop theoretical insight into how Angola Prison enacts “medical violence” against its captive population. This refers to the use of prison healthcare capacities to harm rather than affirm the lives of the incarcerated. As this case study argues, medical violence operates through organized abandonment, disregard, and carceral extraction, which together extend the life of the prison through the deaths of its captive population.

This article explores urban ‘societal resilience’ during the global pandemic of 2020–2021. This health crisis involved a complex interweaving of social, cultural, political, and economic processes which involved both top-down measures undertaken by nation-state governments and bottom-up actions by local residents. In a research study undertaken in two European cities—Stuttgart and London—we focussed on two migrant minorities and the involvement by ‘experts’ and ‘non-experts’ in the meso-level where these top-down measures and bottom-up actions met. Our study provided a grounded understanding of ‘layered resilience’ where resiliency develops through the disjunctive order of communication patterns, public service delivery, institutionalized dialogue, narratives, and values. Through distinguishing between resiliency and resilience, we seek to illustrate the ‘elastic’ character of urban modes of integration. Our study suggests the need for more empirically grounded investigations into the continuity and difference between adaptation and adjustment, normality and normalcy, and resilience and resiliency. It also highlights the importance of context-specific and path-dependent notions of resilience and resiliency.