Sameness across Difference: A Postcolonial Feminist Analysis of Gender-Affirming Health Care in Thailand and the United States

Joining a growing body of research calling for the integration of social analysis and postcolonial theory, recent work in medical sociology has analyzed health, illness, and medicine from a postcolonial lens. In this article, I argue for a postcolonial feminist approach to medical sociology that builds on this extant work while challenging methodological nationalism and cultural essentialism. Based on an analysis of gender-affirming health care for transgender and gender diverse (TGD) people in Thailand and the United States, I propose "sameness across difference" as a framework to analyze commonalities in the health care experiences of marginalized populations across nations as the products of imperial legacies. Drawing on 83 interviews with health care providers, TGD patients, and TGD activists, I demonstrate the role of imperialism in sustaining barriers to gender-affirming health care through the uneven geographic distribution of care across rural and urban areas and the reinforcement of racial and class hierarchies within cities.

Epistemic Justice in International Social Work Research: Postcolonial Theory and Analytic Strategies

Scholars have long grappled with the ways in which unequal power relations influence the creation and circulation of international social work knowledge. I outline a robust postcolonial theoretical framework to elucidate complexities of global knowledge and power and extend possibilities for considering such questions of epistemic justice. Drawing on my own research with service providers in Nepal, I suggest three analytic strategies to apply postcolonial insights in international social work research: reflexivity, critical discourse analysis, and postcolonial translation. Postcolonial theory and the strategies provided support social work researchers to comprehend, generate, and disseminate knowledge that can disrupt colonial assumptions.

Thinking against empire: Anticolonial thought as social theory

Sociology was born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a project in, of, and for empire. This essay excavates a tradition of social thought that grew alongside metropolitan sociology but has been marginalized by it: anticolonial thought. Emerging from anticolonial movements, writers and thinkers, anticolonial thought in 19th and 20th centuries emerged from a variety of thinkers (from indigenous activists in the Americas to educated elites in the American, Francophone and British colonies). I argue that this body of thought offers distinct visions of society, social relations, and social structure, along with generative analytic approaches to the social self, social solidarity and global relations-among other themes. Anticolonial thought offers the basis for an alternative canon and corpus of sociological thinking to which we might turn as we seek to revitalize and decolonize sociology.

Anticolonial thought, the sociological imagination, and social science: A reply to critics

This essay responds to commentaries (this issue) on Go's "Thinking Against Empire: Anticolonial Thought as Social Theory" (this issue). The essay addressed shared concerns and underlying themes of the commentaries, most of which pivot around the problem of the anticolonial and the status of disciplinary sociology as a knowledge project. Is there a need for sociology to incorporate anticolonial thought? How does anticolonial thought as social theory differ from other epistemic projects? Is the distinction between sociology's imperial episteme and anticolonial thought fruitful or obfuscating? And what are the possibilities and limits of a social science informed by anticolonial thought? Ultimately, the essay maintains that anticolonial thought offers a powerful sociological imagination that can be fruitfully tethered to a project of realist social science. It also maintains that realist social science can be emancipatory; provided that it is reoriented by anticolonial thought.

The gendered and racialized politics of risk analysis. The case of Frontex

This article develops a feminist postcolonial approach to risk analysis as an increasingly central security practice in the EU's emerging border management and security regime. For this purpose, we theorize risk analysis as a sense-making practice embedded within colonial power relations. As such, risk analysis problematizes migrants and migration in gendered and racialized ways that make them amenable to border management and other, potentially violent security practices, such as detentions, returns, surveillance, and Search and Rescue. In an exemplary frame analysis of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency's (Frontex) risk analysis report 2016, we show how conceptualizations of risks and solutions by this key actor are informed by gendered and racialized framings of 1) chaos and violence, 2) exploitation of the EU economic and welfare system, and 3) humanitarianism towards 'vulnerable' migrants. With this study, we seek to strengthen feminist and postcolonial interventions into critical security studies on knowledge, power, and expertise. By conceptualizing risk analysis as political, this article pushes critical security theory beyond understandings of security as socially constructed and towards systematically unpacking the meanings of (in)security as implicated in the reproduction of gendered and racialized power relations.

Understanding access to healthcare among Indigenous peoples: A comparative analysis of biomedical and postcolonial perspectives

As nursing professionals, we believe access to healthcare is fundamental to health and that it is a determinant of health. Therefore, evidence suggesting access to healthcare is problematic for many Indigenous peoples is concerning. While biomedical perspectives underlie our current understanding of access, considering alternate perspectives could expand our awareness of and ability to address this issue. In this paper, we critique how access to healthcare is understood through a biomedical lens, how a postcolonial theoretical lens can extend that understanding, and the subsequent implications this alternative view raises for the nursing profession. Drawing on peer-reviewed published and gray literature concerning healthcare access and Indigenous peoples to inform this critique, we focus on the underlying theoretical lens shaping our current understanding of access. A postcolonial analysis provides a way of understanding healthcare as a social space and social relationship, presenting a unique perspective on access to healthcare. The novelty of this finding is of particular importance for the profession of nursing, as we are well situated to influence these social aspects, improving access to healthcare services broadly, and among Indigenous peoples specifically.

Indigenous Health and Human Rights: A Reflection on Law and Culture

In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples bear a greater burden of disease and have lower life expectancy than their non-Indigenous counterparts. These combined indicators are evidence of an entrenched health crisis in the Indigenous population that is linked to systemic disadvantage over many decades. In an effort to improve life expectancy and lessen the burden of disease, a number of strategies and national frameworks now embed a human rights-based approach to achieving health equality. This paper explores the application of human rights to Indigenous health and examines the inherent tensions that exist in engaging a system of law based on universal assumptions of the Enlightenment to advance Indigenous rights. What becomes apparent through this exploration is that the strategic approach of Indigenous peoples’ use of human rights, despite its genesis in a system of law that justified colonisation, has opened up opportunities to reframe fixed ideas of law and culture.