Explore the vast range of titles available.

The European refugee crisis has gained worldwide attention with daily media coverage both in and outside Germany. Representations of refugees in media and political discourse in relation to Germany participate in a Gramscian “war of position” over symbols, policies, and, ultimately, social and material resources, with potentially fatal consequences. These representations shift blame from historical, political‐economic structures to the displaced people themselves. They demarcate the “deserving” refugee from the “undeserving” migrant and play into fear of cultural, religious, and ethnic difference in the midst of increasing anxiety and precarity for many in Europe. Comparative perspectives suggest that anthropology can play an important role in analyzing these phenomena, highlighting sites of contestation, imagining alternatives, and working toward them. [refugee, media, immigration, crisis, Germany, Europe]

BackgroundThe influence of societal inequities on health has long been established, but such content has been incorporated unevenly into medical education and clinical training. Structural competency calls for medical education to highlight the important influence of social, political, and economic factors on health outcomes.AimThis article describes the development, implementation, and evaluation of a structural competency training for medical residents.SettingA California family medicine residency program serving a patient population predominantly (88 %) with income below 200 % of the federal poverty level.ParticipantsA cohort of 12 residents in the family residency program.Program DescriptionThe training was designed to help residents recognize and develop skills to respond to illness and health as the downstream effects of social, political, and economic structures.Program EvaluationThe training was evaluated via qualitative analysis of surveys gathered immediately post-training (response rate 100 %) and a focus group 1 month post-training (attended by all residents not on service).DiscussionResidents reported that the training had a positive impact on their clinical practice and relationships with patients. They also reported feeling overwhelmed by increased recognition of structural influences on patient health, and indicated a need for further training and support to address these influences.

Migrant workers in the United States have extremely poor health. This paper aims to identify ways in which the social context of migrant farm workers affects their health and health care. This qualitative study employs participant observation and interviews on farms and in clinics throughout 15 months of migration with a group of indigenous Triqui Mexicans in the western US and Mexico. Study participants include more than 130 farm workers and 30 clinicians. Data are analyzed utilizing grounded theory, accompanied by theories of structural violence, symbolic violence, and the clinical gaze. The study reveals that farm working and housing conditions are organized according to ethnicity and citizenship. This hierarchy determines health disparities, with undocumented indigenous Mexicans having the worst health. Yet, each group is understood to deserve its place in the hierarchy, migrant farm workers often being blamed for their own sicknesses. Structural racism and anti-immigrant practices determine the poor working conditions, living conditions, and health of migrant workers. Subtle racism serves to reduce awareness of this social context for all involved, including clinicians. The paper concludes with strategies toward improving migrant health in four areas: health disparities research, clinical interactions with migrant laborers, medical education, and policy making.

This article considers the ways in which empathy for patients and related solidarity with communities may be trained out of medical students during medical school. The article focuses especially on the pre-clinical years of medical school, those that begin with orientation and initiation events such as the White Coat Ceremony. The ethnographic data for the article come from field notes and recordings from my own medical training as well as hundreds of hours of observant participation and interviews with medical students over the past several years. Exploring the framework of language socialization, I argue that learning the verbal, textual and bodily language of medical practice contributes to the increasing experience of separation between physicians and patients. Further considering the ethnographic data, I argue that we also learn a form of empathy limited to performance that short circuits clinical care and the possibility for solidarity for health equity. The article concludes with implications for medical education and the medical social sciences and humanities.

Several countries have implemented mobile apps in an attempt to trace close contacts of patients with COVID-19 and, in turn, reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2. However, the effectiveness of this approach depends on the adherence of a large segment of the population. The aims of this study were to evaluate the acceptability of a COVID-19 contact tracing mobile app among the French population and to investigate the barriers to its use. The Health Literacy Survey 2019 questioned 1003 people in France during the COVID-19 pandemic on the basis of quota sampling. The survey collected sociodemographic characteristics and health literacy data, as well as information on participants' communication with caregivers, trust in institutions, and COVID-19 knowledge and preventive behaviors. The acceptability of a mobile app for contact tracing was measured by a single question, the responses to which were grouped into three modalities: app-supporting, app-willing, and app-reluctant. Multinomial logistic regression analysis was performed to identify the factors associated with the acceptability of a mobile app during the COVID-19 pandemic. Only 19.2% (193/1003) of all participants were app-supporting, whereas half of them (504/1003, 50.3%) were reluctant. The factors associated with willingness or support toward the contact tracing app included lower financial deprivation (app-willing: adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 0.8, 95% CI 0.69-0.93; app-supporting: aOR 0.7, 95% CI 0.58-0.84) and higher perceived usefulness of using a mobile app to send completed health questionnaires to doctors (app-willing: aOR 2.3, 95% CI 1.70-3.26; app-supporting: aOR 3.1, 95% CI 2.04-4.82). Furthermore, the likelihood of supporting the mobile app increased with age over 60 years (aOR 1.9, 95% CI 1.13-3.22), trust in political representatives (aOR 2.7, 95% CI 1.72-4.23), feeling concerned about the pandemic situation (aOR 2.2, 95% CI 1.47-3.32), and knowledge about the transmission of COVID-19 (aOR 2.0, 95% CI 1.39-2.96). The most socioeconomically precarious people, who are at a higher risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection, are also the most reluctant to using a contact tracing mobile app. Therefore, optimal adherence can only be effective with a targeted discourse on public health benefits to adopt such an app, which should be combined with a reduction in inequalities by acting on structural determinants.

The papers in this special section work together to move toward a global social medicine for the 22nd century. They envision a global social medicine that confronts and moves beyond the traditionally colonial, xenophobic, heteronormative, patriarchal, gender-binary-bound, capitalist, and racist histories of the fields of global health and human rights. They seek to instantiate a global social medicine that centers knowledge and experiences from the Global South and works toward social justice and health equity at scale. In this special section, the authors are particularly interested in understanding, challenging, and expanding our perspectives and enactments of the right to health. Unlike neoliberal perspectives on health that often limit their explanatory capacity to how individuals behave in the world, the papers here move beyond the focus on lifestyles and on the phantasmagoria of a sovereign subject with supposedly free agency. Instead, authors work toward critical consciousness that accounts for structural processes—with their inequities and disruptions, as well as their effects on individuals—and how this consciousness can open new horizons for collective transformation and social emancipation in health.

This article considers ethnographic field research in order to analyze the violence and exploitation inherent to our transnational agro-food system and the ways in which temporality and statistics may aid in making visible and invisible certain experiences of migrant farmworker injury as well as individual and collective actions for wellbeing. Based in long-term, in-depth ethnographic research, this article utilizes theories of temporality and events in order to highlight social and health inequalities in agricultural labor and encourage agricultural, food and health scholars to consider critically the effects of our methods. Juxtaposing the injury and health care experiences of one Mexican migrant farmworker with statistics on the health and health care of migrant and seasonal farmworkers more generally, the article confronts both the normalization of migrant farmworker injury and the taken-for-granted helpfulness of quantitative and qualitative research alike. In addition, the argument acknowledges the everyday, individual practices and collective actions migrant farmworkers engage into demand and build wellbeing for themselves, their families and beyond.

Reports of a cluster of people with pneumonia of unknown etiology surfaced in Wuhan City, China, on December 31, 2019. In early January 2020, the novel coronavirus was isolated and identified as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2) and the epidemic quickly spread beyond Wuhan City. In the United States, the first case was reported on January 22. By March 1, US cases had increased to 30. After one more month, US cases multiplied drastically to more than 163 000 with almost 3000 dead. On March 11, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a global pandemic. The virus proved to be extraordinarily contagious, and the disease it produces, COVID-19, has caused higher mortality than that from previous related viruses; and the death rate is significantly higher among older populations, those with preexisting conditions, and minoritized and marginalized communities. Because the current health crisis is caused by the intersection ofa virus, preexisting medical conditions, and the social conditions ripe for the virus's spread and development into severe disease, we recognize this pandemic also as a syndemic.1To slow the spread of the virus, public health experts and governments have recommended several measures, including widespread testing, frequent handwashing, and physical distancing-including staying at least six feet away from others (except those with whom one lives) and avoiding groups. On March 16, Governor Newsom of California issued a statewide stayat-home order in which all residents were directed to avoid leaving their homes except to engage in \"essential\" activities. Other states and the federal government followed suit as the severity of the pandemic became evident. It is especially clear at this historic moment that the actions of governments have far-reaching impacts on the health of pop-ulations, especially those most structurally vulnerable.2

The original version of this article was revised due to missing institute information in the “Context: methods and positionality” section. Where it says “there is IRB approval from X University”, it should specify “there is IRB approval from the University of California Berkeley”.