(Re)imagining research, activism, and rights at the intersections of sexuality, health, and social justice

ABSTRACT

The Covid-19 pandemic inaugurated a new global order of public life and health marked by death, despair and alienation. As a crisis of a global scale, it made the task of (re)imagination simultaneously necessary and extremely difficult. It is this double bind of the difficulty and imminence of imagination that motivates the curation of this special issue. In this introduction, we map the connections between the theme of this volume and the key ideas that constitute its varied contributions, which we organised under three broad mobilising ideas: Rights and Resilience; Sexuality, Health and Justice; and Politics of Knowledge Production and Collaborations. Contributions cover myriad issues, engage in methodological innovations and play with diverse genres. Alongside more traditional academic writings, there are community-based research papers, activist conversations, visual essays, reflective pieces and interviews. The geographical span of the contributions brings insights from around the world and the number of topics covered in this issue are equally vast including, among others, mental health, disability, environment, sex work, violence, queerness, LGBTQ+ experiences, love and anger. The aim of this special issue, then, is to challenge the Manichean distinctions that are often drawn between research and activism, and by extension, between theory and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge production
• activism
• participatory research
• social justice
• sexuality

Acknowledgements

Debolina Dutta would like to thank Oishik Sircar for his close reading of this paper and comments; Katyayani Suhrud for her invaluable research assistance; and David Kennedy and the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School for the time and resources to work on this GPH Special Issue. Elsa Oliveira would like to thank Jo Vearey for the countless hours spent thinking, writing and talking about sexual rights, health and the politics of knowledge production; the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) for always providing a home for critical thinking and doing; and the National Research Foundation for the time and resources to work on this special issue. Laura Murray would like to thank her colleagues at the Coletivo Puta Davida, CasaNem and Prostitution Policy Watch/Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, for years of dialogue and exchanges that both inform, and are featured in, this special issue. All special editors would like to thank the contributors to this special issue. We learned an immense amount in putting it together and are honoured to have had the opportunity to learn from and feature their important work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Different acronyms are used in different locations and movements to refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, and non-binary populations, often with the + to note that there are possibilities even beyond those named. This diversity is also reflected throughout the contributions in the Special Issue. We have chosen to use the shorter LGBTQ+ with the recognition that the + can include a multitude of possibilities.

2 Laura Murray and Richard Parker are anthropologists; Elsa Oliveira is a migration scholar; and Debolina Dutta is a legal scholar.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.