The three-class model was the preferred solution based on the adjusted Bayesian information criterion, which favored the three-class structure over models with two, four or five classes, and the Bayesian information criterion. Its entropy value was 0.79, indicating reasonably clear but imperfect separation among the inferred classes. The first class, labeled “Syndemic Adversity Experiences,” contained 160 participants, or 9.2% of the sample. The second, “Psychological Distress Primary,” was the largest class, with 1,208 participants, or 69.7%. The third, “Lower Adversity Experiences,” included 364 participants, or 21.0%. Because latent classes are inferred from response patterns rather than assigned through clinical diagnoses, the labels describe shared statistical profiles within this survey.

Each class had a distinct indicator profile. Within the syndemic class, 91.9% reported sex work, 82.5% met the study’s definition of psychological distress, 78.8% reported hazardous alcohol or substance use, 75.6% met the housing-insecurity definition and 64.4% reported violence victimization. Self-reported HIV-positive serostatus was reported by 21.9% of this class, compared with 9.1% of the lower-adversity class and 0% of the psychological-distress-primary class. The latter group was distinguished by a very high probability of psychological distress—reported for 98.7%—along with substantially lower probabilities of most other measured adversities. The lower-adversity class had low-to-moderate probabilities across the indicators overall, although it was not uniformly free of adversity.

All six adversity indicators were self-reported and covered different, sometimes broad time windows. Hazardous substance use combined hazardous alcohol consumption with misuse of prescription medications or use of cocaine, crack, heroin, methamphetamine, hallucinogens or ecstasy. Psychological distress was defined as a score of at least 13 on the six-item Kessler Psychological Distress Scale or endorsement of suicidal ideation, a suicide attempt or self-harm. Violence victimization referred to unwanted physical violence since March 2020. Housing insecurity included reporting a temporary or unsafe living arrangement, not remaining in the same place or feeling unsafe where currently living; it also included sleeping somewhere not intended for sleeping. Sex work was measured by reporting intercourse in exchange for money, drugs, alcohol, food, a place to sleep or another material good.

The participants were predominantly young, with a median age of 23 years and an interquartile range of 20 to 29 years; 62.8% were between 18 and 25. The sample was largely White: 73.0% identified as White, 11.3% as Black and 15.7% within a combined category for other people of color. A majority reported incomes below $35,000, including 30.1% with household income under $15,000 and 33.2% with income from $15,000 to $34,999. Among respondents with evaluable insurance data, 12.9% lacked health insurance and 35.6% had public coverage, while 51.6% had private insurance. Of 1,544 participants with gender-affirming care data, 42.4% reported barriers after attempting to obtain care, 24.3% reported attempting access without barriers and 33.4% had not attempted to access it.

Discrimination was also common in the sample. Overall, 78.9% of participants with discrimination data reported high or extreme anticipated discrimination, while 38.5% of those with transphobia data reported moderate or extreme enacted transphobia. In multivariable multinomial regression models, participants in the syndemic class had 3.51 times the odds of reporting household income below $15,000, 1.95 times the odds of reporting income from $15,000 to $34,999 and 2.46 times the odds of having no or public rather than private insurance, compared with the lower-adversity class. They also had 2.58 times the odds of reporting barriers to gender-affirming care. Extreme anticipated discrimination was associated with 7.61 times the odds of syndemic-class membership relative to low or moderate anticipated discrimination, while moderate or extreme enacted transphobia was associated with 8.28 times the odds. These are adjusted associations, not causal estimates for individual exposures.

Racial and ethnic marginalization showed a strong association with class membership. Compared with the lower-adversity class, Black participants had 2.16 times the odds of being in the syndemic class, participants grouped as other people of color had 2.79 times the odds and Hispanic or Latine participants had 2.64 times the odds. When the syndemic class was compared directly with the psychological-distress-primary class, Black participants had 9.93 times the odds of syndemic membership, while participants grouped as other people of color had 2.41 times the odds and Hispanic or Latine participants had 2.06 times the odds. Trans feminine participants had 3.85 times the odds of belonging to the syndemic class rather than the psychological-distress-primary class. By contrast, bisexual or queer participants had 2.35 times the odds of belonging to the psychological-distress-primary class than the lower-adversity class and 0.52 times the odds of syndemic membership relative to the psychological-distress-primary class.

The study applied a combined syndemic and intersectional framework. Syndemic theory concerns conditions that cluster within a population because social and contextual factors create the conditions for their co-occurrence and can increase collective burden. Intersectionality examines how overlapping systems of power and identity shape unequal exposure to harm. In this analysis, the statistical clustering of adversities coincided with differences in social capital, economic resources and social processes. The authors emphasize that race, ethnicity, gender modality and sexual orientation are not themselves direct measures of discrimination and should not be interpreted as biological causes. Rather, the findings are consistent with how identities linked to unequal access to resources, protection and opportunity can correspond to distinct adversity profiles in a society structured by White supremacy, cisgenderism and heteronormativity.

Several limitations restrict how the results should be interpreted. The cross-sectional design cannot establish causality, changes over time or the sequence in which adversities occurred. The analysis used an online convenience sample recruited through community-based organizations, so it cannot be generalized to all transgender and nonbinary adults in the United States. The investigators could not determine participants’ motivations for sex work or whether they regarded it as an adversity; the indicator instead reflected the study’s concern with workforce precarity, criminalization and associated risks of violence and incarceration. Collapsing diverse racial and ethnic communities into broad analytical categories may also obscure important differences. The survey was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, with data collected from June 14 to December 16, 2021, and the authors noted that pandemic conditions may have contributed to the high level of psychological distress. In addition, all adversity and social-process measures depended on self-report.

The central result is that adversity was not distributed in a single pattern across the sample. Although the syndemic class represented a minority of participants, it contained the most frequent combination of several reported harms and was most strongly associated with racial and ethnic marginalization, low income, limited insurance coverage, barriers to gender-affirming care, anticipated discrimination and enacted transphobia. The psychological-distress-primary class showed a different pattern: severe psychological distress was nearly universal within that group, while most other measured adversities were less common. The authors said the results support public-health and policy responses that address several co-occurring conditions together as well as the surrounding conditions linked to them, including healthcare access, socioeconomic stability and protections against discrimination. They also called for longitudinal research to examine trajectories over time and qualitative research centered on the lived experiences of transgender and nonbinary people.

Subject of Research: Cross-sectional latent class analysis of clustered structural and psychosocial adversities among transgender and nonbinary adults in the United States

Article Title: Characterizing patterns of syndemic structural and psychosocial adversities in transgender and nonbinary, adults in a U.S. nationwide sample: A latent class analysis

Article References: Dobson-Seo, B. F., Silva, S. G., Mulawa, M. I., Wirtz, A. L., Reisner, S. L., Cole, S. W., Adams, D., Brown, C., Miller, M., & Poteat, T. (2026). Characterizing patterns of syndemic structural and psychosocial adversities in transgender and nonbinary, adults in a U.S. nationwide sample: A latent class analysis. SSM – Mental Health, 10, Article 100715. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2026.100715

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmmh.2026.100715

Keywords: transgender health, nonbinary health, syndemic adversity, latent class analysis, psychological distress, housing insecurity, transphobia, structural discrimination, gender-affirming care, intersectionality, social determinants of health, Characterizing

The review, led by Martina Roes of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases and colleagues across Europe, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: which intersectionality frameworks have actually been applied in dementia care research published between 2015 and 2025? The team followed Arksey and O’Malley’s six-stage scoping review methodology, extended with PRISMA reporting guidelines, and searched six databases—PubMed, PsycINFO, Scopus, CINAHL, Embase and Web of Science. Their search string combined terms for dementia and Alzheimer’s disease with terms for intersectionality, structural inequality, migrants, minority groups and social determinants, and then with care-related and framework-related vocabulary. From 870 retrieved articles, 320 duplicates were removed, 550 went through title and abstract screening, and 110 survived to full-text review. Thirteen articles ultimately met the inclusion criteria, which required a clear link to dementia care, an intersectional framework or intersectional focus, and publication in English or German.

The framework counts tell their own story. Crenshaw’s original concept was cited in eight of the included publications, McCall’s framework in seven, and Hankivsky’s and Collins’s frameworks in three each. McCall’s contribution is particularly important for the technical architecture of the field: she distinguished anti-categorical, inter-categorical and intra-categorical approaches to studying inequality. Anti-categorical analysis questions the very categories society uses; inter-categorical analysis compares patterns across groups defined by existing categories; and intra-categorical analysis zooms in on a single marginalized intersection to examine it in depth. Hankivsky’s Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis extends the lens to power relations and operational structures across micro, meso and macro levels, while Collins defines intersectionality as a critical social theory built on constructs such as relationality and complexity. Bowleg’s public health perspective, which emphasizes how interlocking systems of power and oppression shape lived experience, rounds out the theoretical toolkit.

Why does this matter for dementia specifically? The review’s authors argue that dementia is not only a neurodegenerative disease but also a social construct—a label that shapes how people living with dementia are treated by society. Experiences such as stigma, the removal of autonomy and citizen rights, and the dismissal of personhood and decision-making capacity suggest that the diagnosis itself interacts with social positioning. The experiences of people living with dementia are heterogeneous and differ at the intersection of axes of identity such as age and ethnicity, social geography such as where one lives, and societal context such as income. Analyzing these complex individual experiences through an intersectional lens can uncover inequalities that would otherwise remain invisible within the health care system.

The target groups of the included studies clustered around migrants, ethnicity and race, and sex and gender. One qualitative study of migrant family carers used life-story interviews and shadowing to show how gender, migration trajectories, class and legal status interact to distribute and constrain care roles—revealing that migrant women more often work as unpaid carers while navigating precarious employment and restrictive welfare services. Another study applying Collins’s framework to ethnographic observations in UK acute hospitals found that privilege and marginalization are products of power dynamics between identity axes and institutional regulations, with institutional power systems driving inequalities in whether care needs are even recognized. A Canadian interview study of immigrants living with dementia and their caregivers identified how racism, cultural norms, immigration histories and cognitive impairment interact to produce layered stigma, social exclusion and barriers to support.

Quantitative work appeared too, though in limited form. A logistic regression analysis of informal caregivers found that ethnicity and gender intersections yield distinct caregiving burdens, calling for tailored interventions. A US study of geographic patterns of dementia used a life-course and social health-disparity lens to show that disadvantage is embedded within place of residence, place of birth and subpopulation groupings. And a selective literature review on Black female Americans with Alzheimer’s disease examined how social and biological factors—poverty, education, discrimination, allostatic load, vascular risk factors, access to care and under-representation in trials—intersect with female biological sex and Black American race to increase disease risk. Studies of sexual and gender minority older adults with dementia found compounded discrimination at individual, interpersonal and institutional levels, with risk magnified for those who are also transgender, racially minoritized or HIV-positive, and with facility and staff knowledge often remaining inadequate.

Here is the review’s most striking technical finding: none of the thirteen included articles directly addressed power dynamics with a specific intersectional focus. The authors searched each study for mentions and descriptions of power relations between axes of identity and the social or health care system, and found that detailed analysis of how power operates within the healthcare system or society was mostly not conducted—or only mentioned as a need. Most studies treated race, ethnicity, migration status, sex, gender, age or socioeconomic status more as separate covariates or descriptive subgroups than as interlocking categories embedded in systems of power. The review distinguishes inequality, an unequal distribution of resources, from inequity, which refers to unfairness and injustice produced by human behavior, social structures and policies—and is therefore avoidable. The included studies documented inequities in access to diagnosis and services, in care burden, in double discrimination, and in institutional ignorance, but rarely traced them back to the power structures that produce them.

The authors identify four research gaps: underrepresentation of minority groups in dementia care research, a primary focus on intersections rather than underlying power dynamics, unclear methodology for how frameworks are applied, and undefined theoretical backgrounds. They also call for critical reflection on the coloniality of power and its ongoing impact on knowledge production—including Eurocentric diagnostic norms, care models, research priorities and dementia strategies in Europe. Without this reflection, psychosocial interventions will not be tailored to care recipients with intersecting marginalized identities, and assessments will lack validation for diverse populations. The review notes that almost all included articles combined at least two intersectionality frameworks, but methodological details on how the frameworks were operationalized were missing—with one exception, a study theorizing intersectionality and cultures of control in acute hospital settings.

The recommendations are concrete. Methodologically, the authors urge moving beyond simple group comparisons toward analyzing the combined impact of overlapping intersections—for example, living in a rural and poor neighborhood with a biography of migration—on patient-related outcomes. They highlight MAIHDA, multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy, as a quantitative intersectional approach to socio-demographic inequalities, alongside mixed-method designs that capture the how and why of intersecting experiences. Structurally, they call for analyzing how structural determinants impact disparities in dementia incidence, prevalence, diagnosis, treatment and care, including the double jeopardy faced by people holding multiple marginalized identities. And in research design, they recommend rethinking recruitment strategies for populations facing high levels of inequity—LGBTQI+ communities, ethnic minority groups, indigenous communities—through community-based participatory research, which ensures that research topics are relevant to marginalized communities, and developing longitudinal datasets to understand structural determinants such as neighborhood deprivation.

As a first attempt to critically analyze the application of intersectionality frameworks in dementia care research, the review offers a clear benchmark for what genuine intersectional power analysis would require: an explicitly defined system such as sexism or migration regulations that interlocks with observed outcomes of oppression; a connection between individual experiences such as stigma and exclusion and organizational norms, admission practices, national dementia plans and professional guidelines; and an understanding of identity axes and power dynamics as historically situated and relational. The authors believe the recent increase in intersectional adoption will enable research that analyzes not only social categories but also the dynamics and relations between them, embedded in specific context and produced by their conjunction. For a field built on the principle that real lives are too complex for single-lens analysis, that is the direction the evidence now points.

Subject of Research: Use of intersectionality frameworks in dementia care research over the past decade

Article Title: Mapping intersectionality in dementia care research: a decadal scoping review

Article References: Roes, M., Laporte Uribe, F., Felding, S. A., Charlesworth, G., Müller, N., Berdai, S., Bhatt, J., Altinok, K., & Peters-Nehrenheim, V. (2026). Mapping intersectionality in dementia care research: a decadal scoping review. Frontiers in Dementia, 5, Article 1779670. https://doi.org/10.3389/frdem.2026.1779670

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frdem.2026.1779670

Keywords: dementia, dementia care, intersectionality, scoping review, health disparities, power dynamics, health equity, migrants, sex and gender, Crenshaw, research gaps, caregiving

The research team, led by Rosália Garcia Neves and colleagues, set out to answer a question that has long troubled public health researchers: when diabetes and hypertension strike certain groups far more often than others, how much of that excess is explained by social position rather than biology or chance? To do this, they turned to an analytical approach that has gained momentum in epidemiology over the past decade—intersectionality. Rather than treating sex, race, and education as separate, independent risk factors, intersectional analysis examines what happens when these dimensions of social identity overlap and compound one another in real lives.

The framework the researchers employed is known as the “multiple jeopardy” hypothesis, operationalized through a Jeopardy Index. The logic is intuitive but powerful: a person who belongs to multiple socially disadvantaged groups at once—say, a Black woman with low educational attainment—faces risks that are not simply additive but potentially multiplicative, because discrimination, material deprivation, and reduced access to quality healthcare interact and reinforce each other. The reference group in the analysis was the most advantaged combination: white men with high educational attainment, against whom all other intersections of sex, race, and schooling were compared.

The data came from Vigitel 2023, Brazil’s ongoing national surveillance system that interviews adults aged 18 and older by telephone in state capitals. With 21,690 respondents, the survey offered enough statistical power to dissect the population into fine-grained intersectional groups. The outcomes of interest were self-reported diabetes mellitus, self-reported hypertension, and—critically—the co-occurrence of both conditions in the same individual, a combination that dramatically raises the risk of cardiovascular disease, kidney failure, and premature death.

The headline finding is stark. Black, Brown (mixed-race), Asian, and Indigenous women with low educational attainment had a four-fold higher probability of presenting with both diabetes and hypertension compared with white men holding high educational attainment. Their probability of diabetes alone was three times higher, and their probability of hypertension was 2.3 times higher. These are not marginal differences detectable only in statistical models; they represent gaps of the kind that translate directly into years of life lost, amputations, dialysis, strokes, and heart attacks concentrated in the most vulnerable communities.

Education emerged as the dominant axis of inequality. Across every combination of sex and race, individuals with low educational attainment showed a higher prevalence of all the morbidities assessed. This pattern held regardless of whether the person was a man or a woman, or whether they identified as white, Black, Brown, Asian, or Indigenous. In other words, schooling did not merely add to the effect of race or sex—it acted as a powerful, pervasive social determinant in its own right, shaping everything from occupational conditions and income to health literacy, dietary options, and the ability to navigate the healthcare system.

The most policy-relevant numbers in the study are the population attributable fractions, which estimate how much of the disease burden would disappear if the exposure—in this case, low educational attainment—were eliminated. The researchers calculated that 34.6 percent of diabetes cases, 21.6 percent of hypertension cases, and 44.2 percent of cases in which diabetes and hypertension coexist were attributable to low educational attainment. To put that in perspective: if the health risks associated with low schooling were somehow neutralized, nearly half of the country’s double burden of diabetes plus hypertension could, in principle, be prevented. That is an extraordinary figure for a modifiable social characteristic rather than a biological risk factor.

The statistical machinery behind these conclusions was relatively conventional but rigorously applied. The team used chi-square tests to compare prevalence across groups and Poisson regression to estimate prevalence ratios, the standard tool for cross-sectional prevalence data. Poisson regression with robust variance allows researchers to model how the probability of a condition varies across exposure categories while adjusting for the complex interplay of covariates. By structuring the exposure variables as intersectional categories rather than separate terms, the models could capture the joint effect of belonging to multiple disadvantaged groups simultaneously—something that traditional additive regression approaches tend to underestimate or obscure.

The authors are careful about what the study can and cannot show. As a cross-sectional analysis of self-reported data, it captures disease and social position at a single point in time, so it cannot fully disentangle whether low education causes disease or whether some of the association flows through pathways that unfold over a lifetime—childhood poverty, poor nutrition, stressful work, and limited healthcare access all cluster together. Self-reported diagnoses also depend on people having been tested and told their status, which itself varies with healthcare access, meaning the true inequalities could be even larger than measured, since undiagnosed disease is likely concentrated among the most disadvantaged.

Even with those caveats, the implications are hard to ignore. Diabetes and hypertension are among the leading drivers of death and disability worldwide, and Brazil, like many middle-income countries, faces a growing epidemic of noncommunicable diseases layered on top of persistent racial and socioeconomic disparities. The study’s conclusion is explicit: prevention and control strategies should incorporate actions aimed at addressing structural vulnerabilities into public health policy. In practical terms, that means programs that treat a Black woman with low educational attainment not as one risk factor at a time but as a person facing compounded jeopardy—and that invest in education, income support, and equitable healthcare access as genuinely preventive medicine. The findings suggest that the classroom, the workplace, and the neighborhood may matter as much as the clinic in determining who develops Brazil’s next case of diabetes.

Subject of Research: Intersectional social inequalities in the burden of diabetes and hypertension in Brazil

Article Title: How much the burden of diabetes and hypertension is attributable to social inequalities? an intersectional analysis in Brazil

Article References: Neves, R. G., Moraes, N. G. D. R., Brum, B. L., Miranda, L. P., Buffarini, R., Saes-Silva, E., & Saes, M. D. O. (2026). How much the burden of diabetes and hypertension is attributable to social inequalities? an intersectional analysis in Brazil. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29369-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29369-8

Keywords: diabetes, hypertension, health inequalities, intersectionality, social determinants of health, education, Brazil, Vigitel survey, noncommunicable diseases, public health, epidemiology, racial disparities

The concept of a wicked problem originated in the 1970s to describe social challenges like poverty and urban decay that governments could not easily define, measure, or solve. Wicked problems are fundamentally unique, lack a linear timeline or exhaustively describable set of solutions, and are often symptoms of other problems. They are systemic, ambiguous, complex, and conflictual. Hernández and Munz contend that violence against women and girls fits this profile precisely: it is sustained by intersecting cultural, institutional, and structural conditions that no single policy, campaign, or newsroom guideline can untangle. Scholars have applied the wicked problem framing to domestic violence policy cascades, workplace sexual violence in Australian mining, and violence against queer communities, each time finding that solutions must address systemic and cultural shifts rather than isolated incidents.

Against this backdrop, the researchers trace decades of scholarship showing how news coverage of gender violence repeatedly falls into damaging patterns. Foundational work by Meyers demonstrated that news representations construct women and victims as deviants worthy of condemnation rather than focusing on perpetrators. More recent analyses of UK newspaper coverage of domestic violence found techniques that blamed victims, sexualized violence, and invoked discourses of deserving or undeserving victims. Australian studies of high-profile sexual assault cases revealed how routine journalism practices—the inverted pyramid method, quoting strategies, and story structuring—objectified victims, minimized their experiences, and framed violent acts graphically and salaciously while emphasizing negative impacts on accused perpetrators.

Content analyses reinforce these trends across contexts. In Indonesia, more than half of nearly 700 news articles about violence against women and girls failed to reveal the social roots of gender violence or provide informational support for survivors. Australian research found that news coverage infrequently situated violence within broader social contexts, rarely included information on how and where to seek help, and disproportionately emphasized law enforcement and criminal justice spokespersons over survivors, advocates, and educators. By using episodic framing that depicts violence as isolated events, the authors argue, journalists distance such acts from the structures that perpetuate them, contradicting public health discourses that position gender violence as systematic and rooted in patriarchy, male dominance, and misogyny.

To counter these patterns, Hernández and Munz review existing gender-sensitive reporting principles, including checklists that ask who sources are, whether double standards and stereotypes appear, whether loaded language sways opinion, and whether stories are contextualized. Yusuf’s do and don’t principles urge journalists to provide relevant background information, balance representation of men and women as sources, mention the social roots of gender violence and society’s responsibility, and include local contact information for support organizations. UN Women’s guidance on gender and age-sensitive media reporting adds recommendations on survivor-centred representation, intersectional lenses, journalist training, and dedicated spaces for human-rights-related news. The authors note that thematic framing—which links violence to larger social and structural contexts—raises audience awareness and promotes social response in ways episodic framing cannot.

Building on these guidelines, the scholars advance space-making as a praxis-based framework for more humane and socially responsive journalism. Originally conceptualized in critical communication pedagogy, space-making encourages people to see the world differently and challenge status quo conceptions, deeply held beliefs, values, and ways of thinking. Applied to journalism, it asks reporters to examine how their reporting practices reproduce inequity, connect individual cases to systemic conditions, and create opportunities for survivors and communities to exercise voice and agency. Space-making intentionally foregrounds cultural context, structure, and intent as a starting point, calling on journalists to reflexively interrogate how their practices recreate discursive violence in covering gender violence.

The framework draws on ethical witnessing, which involves three points of interaction: the agent who bears witness, the utterance or moment itself, and the audience who witnesses. Peters describes witnessing as an intricately tangled process raising fundamental questions of communication—truth and experience, presence and absence, death and pain, seeing and saying. Tait and others argue that bearing witness provides a rationale for journalistic practice because it should incite public response, an ethos of response-ability that encourages shared responsibility for the suffering of others. Feminist media witnessing networks, as Rentschler documents, create crucial spaces of justice for victims and survivors, bolster their credibility, and facilitate social change by connecting coverage to social movements and networks of care.

To illustrate how space-making operates in practice, the authors analyze news coverage surrounding the 2021 murder of Gabby Petito, who was reported missing during a trip with her fiancé Brian Laundrie. The case received hyperfocused media attention and saturated public discourse, amplified by social media, documentaries, and armchair investigators. A content analysis found that the disappearance of women of color around the same time resulted in fewer words per story, fewer stories, and less coverage overall compared to Petito’s disappearance. The authors contend that this hyperfocus on a young white woman washed out other news stories and dominated headlines at the expense of coverage of violence against women of color, trans women, and other minoritized communities—a phenomenon known as missing white woman syndrome. They stress that Petito’s case should have been covered, but that articles could have linked her story to other cases of missing women of color, highlighted structural factors that obscure resources dedicated to finding missing women, and utilized thematic framing to call attention to social causes of such violence.

Space-making builds on intersectionality as a guiding analytic, drawing on Crenshaw’s seminal work to uncover complex, systematic prejudices related to race, ethnicity, class, ability, gender, and religion. The authors point to investigative journalists like Kent Patterson, who revisits stories of violence against women because the issues are not just a headline for one day, and Connie Walker, who stresses that women are more than the violence inflicted upon them. Journalism about gender violence, they argue, should balance coverage of violent acts with larger conversations about resistance, change, and anti-violence efforts, honoring the strength and resilience that survivors hold.

Ultimately, Hernández and Munz conclude that reflexive, relational, and intersectional reporting can strengthen journalism’s democratic role, improve representations of gender violence, and support collective witnessing and social change. They acknowledge critiques that existing media guidelines face questions of development, acceptability, uptake, and effectiveness, particularly in local contexts and across all forms of media, and that gaps persist between academic scholarship and practitioner implementation. Still, they advocate for space-making as one praxis-based solution that responds to Sustainable Development Goals on gender equality and peace, justice, and strong institutions. While their approach is influenced by US journalistic concepts and case examples, they contend there are meaningful implications for international contexts, and that journalists, practitioners, and scholars alike can utilize their training in discourse, structures, patterns, and systems to address wicked problems and enable social change.

Subject of Research: Media Ethics and Communication Research

Article Title: Wicked problems, gender violence, and media ethics: Reflections on improving journalistic coverage of violence against women and girls

Article References: Hernández, L. H., & Munz, S. (2026). Wicked problems, gender violence, and media ethics: Reflections on improving journalistic coverage of violence against women and girls. Frontiers in Communication, 11, Article 1759634. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1759634

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2026.1759634

Keywords: journalism ethics, gender violence, media framing, intersectionality, wicked problems, Gabby Petito, witnessing, Wicked, problems, gender, violence, media

The distinction at the heart of the collection is deceptively simple. Sex refers to the biological attributes that differ among female, male, and intersex individuals, while gender refers to the socially constructed roles, norms, and relations that vary across societies and shape behavior, access, and expectation. Both influence who becomes ill, how illness manifests, who seeks care, who is tested, and ultimately who is diagnosed and treated. Gender is widely recognized as one of the central social determinants of health, yet the editorial’s authors point out that diagnostic pathways, the moment when a symptom becomes a named condition, remain among the least examined stages of the entire care continuum.

One detail from the editorial is particularly striking for anyone who assumes the scientific literature is systematically organized. Gender does not exist as a standalone MeSH term, the controlled vocabulary used to index biomedical research. The word always appears attached to other concepts, such as gender-affirming care or gender identity. The authors read this absence as telling: even in the architecture of scientific knowledge, gender is treated as a modifier rather than a determinant in its own right. If the indexing system cannot name gender as a driver of health, they suggest, it should not be surprising that diagnostic tools struggle to account for it.

Several contributions trace the biological roots of sex differences that diagnostics routinely overlook. Lodde and colleagues examined how microRNAs encoded on the X chromosome regulate immune responses, offering a mechanistic explanation for the sex disparities observed across infectious and autoimmune diseases. Hong and colleagues reviewed the role of estrogen in bacterial infection, showing how hormonal context can alter susceptibility and, by extension, the interpretation of diagnostic findings. The implication is uncomfortable for standard practice: reference ranges and risk models built on male-default physiology may be contributing to diagnostic inaccuracies in women, because the biological baseline against which results are compared was never representative in the first place.

Cardiovascular disease, long framed in the public imagination as a male problem, emerges as a recurring theme. Dakhil and colleagues argue for rethinking cardiovascular risk prediction in women through precision medicine, challenging diagnostic tools that systematically underestimate the risk women face. López-Ferreruela and colleagues, working with a large Spanish cohort, found that women receive less intensive monitoring and follow-up after acute myocardial infarction, a gap that begins with under-recognition and propagates through every subsequent stage of care. Gao and colleagues added a preventive dimension, analyzing sex-specific associations between dietary carotenoid intake and heart failure risk using data from the United States National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The combined message is that closing the cardiovascular gender gap requires intervention at every step, from initial risk estimation to secondary prevention.

Large-scale analyses of chronic conditions reinforce the pattern. Li and colleagues modeled the global burden of polycystic ovary syndrome from 1990 to 2021 with projections to 2035, quantifying a condition whose diagnosis is frequently delayed. Liu and colleagues mapped gender disparities in occupational noise-induced hearing loss, a reminder that occupational exposures and the diagnostic systems that capture them are themselves gendered, shaped by who works in which environments and whose hearing complaints are taken seriously. Faulstich and colleagues identified sex differences in the clinical risk factors for early- and late-onset Alzheimer’s dementia, informing more tailored diagnostic assessment. The editorial highlights a shared methodological strength across these studies: they disaggregate their data by sex rather than statistically adjusting it away, preserving the very differences that conventional analysis tends to erase.

Therapeutics and surgical care are not exempt from the pattern. Hu and colleagues conducted a scoping review of sex- and gender-specific differences in the efficacy and safety of traditional Chinese medicine, an area in which such stratified analyses remain rare despite the enormous populations these treatments serve. Ripoll-Romero and colleagues reported gender differences among patients presenting for hip arthroplasty, showing how clinical presentation and referral patterns can diverge well before a patient ever reaches the operating room. In both cases, the diagnostic encounter, not the treatment itself, appears to be where inequity first enters the pathway.

Two contributions speak directly to the infrastructure and equity of diagnosis in global health settings. Atiomo and colleagues described a study protocol to establish a dedicated women’s health biobank in Dubai, grounded in the recognition that sex- and gender-stratified diagnostics depend on representative biological resources. Gandigbe and colleagues took an intersectional approach, examining how gender and disability interact to shape inequities in communities endemic for neglected tropical diseases in Benin and Côte d’Ivoire. Their work anchors the collection in settings where diagnostic gaps carry the highest cost, and where the compounding of gender with disability, poverty, and geography is not an academic abstraction but a daily determinant of whether someone reaches care at all.

The editorial distills several threads that run across the diverse articles. First, sex and gender operate together rather than in isolation: biology sets differential susceptibility, while gender norms govern whether a person reaches a clinic, is believed when they describe symptoms, and is offered a test. Second, intersectionality matters; gender rarely acts alone, and disability, poverty, and geography compound one another, reinforcing gender’s role as one of the main socioeconomic causes of disparities in health status. Third, the male default persists quietly across reference ranges, risk scores, biobanks, and clinical suspicion, shaping who gets diagnosed, how, and when, without anyone explicitly deciding that it should.

The authors are candid about what the collection does not resolve. Much of the evidence remains observational, and several studies analyze sex and gender as binary variables, leaving the diagnostic experiences of intersex, transgender, and gender-diverse people largely unaddressed. Data from low- and middle-income countries, where diagnostic capacity is scarcest, remain under-represented, and while many studies document disparities, interventions and implementation strategies to close them are areas future work must tackle. Still, the direction is clear: better diagnostics will not come from adding sex and gender as an afterthought, but from designing studies, tools, and health systems that expect difference from the start, with sex- and gender-disaggregated reporting as standard practice, gender-sensitive care pathways, representative biobanks, and diagnostic technologies validated across the populations that will actually use them.

Subject of Research: The influence of sex and gender on disease diagnosis and health equity in global health

Article Title: Editorial: The impact of sex and gender on disease diagnostics in global health

Article References: Marbán-Castro, E., Sem, X., Dacal, E., & Manzanares-Céspedes, M. C. (2026). Editorial: The impact of sex and gender on disease diagnostics in global health. Frontiers in Global Women's Health, 7, Article 1969320. https://doi.org/10.3389/fgwh.2026.1969320

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fgwh.2026.1969320

Keywords: sex differences, gender, diagnostics, global health, health equity, cardiovascular disease, intersectionality, polycystic ovary syndrome, Alzheimer's disease, biobanks, non-communicable diseases, women's health

The scale of the underlying evidence base is striking. Following the PRISMA reporting standard, the researchers searched nine academic databases in March 2026, including Web of Science, Scopus, ERIC, and African Journals OnLine, using 70 keyword combinations that paired physical education terms such as school sport and physical education teacher training with exposure terms including racism, anti-racism, critical whiteness, and critical race theory. The search surfaced 3,346 publications, of which 56 met five inclusion criteria covering peer review, language, study population, and thematic focus. Twenty-three of those publications centered specifically on the perspectives of practicing physical education teachers and physical education teacher education students, and it is this subset that formed the analytical core of the review. Seventeen of the 23 studies were qualitative, one was quantitative, one used mixed methods, and four were theoretical or conceptual contributions.

Methodologically, the review was unusually transparent about its own construction. Each empirical study was quality-assessed using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme checklist for qualitative work and the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool for quantitative and mixed-methods research, with two authors scoring independently and reconciling disagreements by consensus. Most empirical studies were rated high quality. The team then applied a hybrid analytic strategy: template analysis, a codebook-driven form of thematic analysis, was used for descriptive themes, while reflexive thematic analysis in the tradition of Braun and Clarke guided the more interpretive themes. Consistent with the epistemology of Critical Race Theory, the authors explicitly documented their own positionality—the first and last authors identify as white men, the second and third as Black women—and described how their Black female colleagues challenged their white colleagues’ assumptions throughout the process. This reflexive architecture matters, because the review’s central argument is that no analysis of racism escapes the racial position of the analyst.

Four themes emerged from the coding process, and the first concerns how racism is understood in the first place. Rather than converging on a shared definition, the reviewed studies deploy a fractured vocabulary: Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies, colorblindness, structural racism, the racialized other, biological racism, and gendered racism all appear, often within the same body of literature. Whiteness figures prominently in eleven of the 23 publications. In this framework, whiteness is not simply an attribute of white individuals but a racial discourse that structures a hierarchy of embodied capital and rights, deciding whose movement styles, bodies, and sporting knowledge count as normal and whose are read as deficient. The review also found that these conceptual choices track geography and authorship: the eight United States-based studies, for example, differed markedly depending on whether first authors identified as scholars of color, with approaches ranging from colorblindness frameworks to gendered racism.

The second theme documents the lived experiences of teachers and trainees, and here the picture is bleak. Marginalized physical education teacher education students reported stereotypes, exclusion, everyday racism, and microaggressions in every study that addressed their experiences, supporting Critical Race Theory’s core claim that racism is endemic in predominantly white educational systems. Navigating white-dominated institutions demands substantial emotional labor and strategic self-presentation—burdens the review notes were never described for white students. Institutional machinery often compounds the harm. One participant quoted in the review described feeling uncomfortable after racialized comments but did not even know whom to report them to. A 2025 study found that Black and Latine pre-service teachers faced material gatekeeping in the form of licensure exams costing roughly 90 dollars per attempt, with no institutional financial support, illustrating how classism and ableism intersect with race to filter who enters the profession at all.

Intersectionality runs through the findings like a structural beam. Female teachers of color described sexism intensified by racism, with their bodies and competencies scrutinized in ways their white colleagues rarely experienced. The review cites a Norwegian study in which teachers perceived the movements and bodies of female students of color as deficient and out of place, and interview data from Germany in which racialized and gendered perception patterns converged in teachers’ talk about students from refugee backgrounds. Even educators who explicitly championed inclusion were shown to carry unconscious stereotypes: one frequently cited study of white physical educators, titled after a participant’s declaration that she treats everyone the same, found that negative stereotypes about racialized others were woven into teachers’ self-descriptions despite their egalitarian intentions. Only one study, a quantitative survey from Spain, reported broadly positive attitudes among trainee teachers toward diversity—a stark outlier against the qualitative record.

The third theme, unveiling whiteness, is perhaps the review’s most consequential. Sixteen of the 23 publications describe whiteness as a system of norms governing physical education across Western countries. The profession’s demographic composition is itself a signal: most physical education educators are white, often teaching dramatically more diverse student populations, and leadership roles skew toward young white men. This overrepresentation creates what the authors call a feedback loop, in which white normativity reinforces exclusion, restricts mentorship for students and teachers of color, and ultimately impoverishes learning for everyone by narrowing the range of perspectives, teaching methods, and cultural knowledge in the gym. The critique extends to knowledge production itself. Among the studies reporting first-author racial positionality, white first authors predominated, and the review’s authors—including its own white male lead—interrogate why white scholars so often hold the access and resources to narrate the experiences of marginalized students, echoing calls for research grounded in the communities most affected.

The final theme addresses what can be done, and the evidence here is sobering but not hopeless. Multiple studies criticized the absence of any dedicated course on race in physical education teacher education curricula. Yet pilot interventions suggest structured reflection can work: as far back as 1990, a two-semester equity-focused course led one participant to admit, I have become aware that I am racist to some extent. Service-learning interventions combining coursework, teaching practice in multiethnic schools, and reflective journals helped trainees deconstruct stereotypes, though authors cautioned that single-semester experiences cannot overcome a lifetime of socialized beliefs, and one study found no evidence of lasting impact from a short course. The review argues that the scarcity of anti-racist training reflects institutional resistance to confronting whiteness itself, and points toward culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies as a promising framework, alongside global strategies adapted to local contexts.

The review’s limitations are candidly stated. It was restricted to English and German publications, focused on specific databases and keywords, and drew predominantly on qualitative studies from English-speaking countries, leaving a scarcity of large-scale quantitative surveys. The themes were initially developed from a white male perspective, a bias the authors attempted to mitigate through critical reflection within the team. Still, the conclusions are pointed: institutions and journals should support scholars from racially minoritized groups through inclusive funding, collaboration, and mentorship, and teacher training must equip educators—especially white educators—to examine bias, reflect on their racial identity, and challenge norms of whiteness. For a field that aspires to build tolerance through movement, the message is uncomfortable but clear: the path to an anti-racist physical education begins not with fixing racialized students, but with turning the analytical lens on the invisible whiteness of the gym itself.

Subject of Research: Racism and anti-racism in physical education from the perspectives of teachers and physical education teacher education students

Article Title: Whiteness and (anti-) racism in physical education considering teachers’ and physical education teacher education students’ perspectives: a systematic review

Article References: Abel, L., Galle, A. C., Ojo, I., & Vogt, T. (2026). Whiteness and (anti-) racism in physical education considering teachers’ and physical education teacher education students’ perspectives: a systematic review. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 8, Article 1903712. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2026.1903712

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fspor.2026.1903712

Keywords: physical education, racism, anti-racism, whiteness, critical race theory, teacher education, systematic review, microaggressions, intersectionality, PETE, social justice, pedagogy

The study, led by Katharine Sarikakis and colleagues at the University of Vienna’s Department of Communication, was conducted within the REBOOT project on European film competitiveness, funded under the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme. Participants came from Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Ukraine, and worked across directing, producing, editing, screenwriting, acting and film promotion. The researchers combined focus groups and semi-structured interviews, each lasting 40 to 60 minutes and producing 295 pages of transcription, with a short survey to map demographic patterns. The analysis followed an inductive thematic approach, and the team was deliberately reflexive about its own position: three of the five researchers fall within the same age bracket as their participants, and one is a young filmmaker herself.

What emerged from the transcripts is a portrait of an industry whose entry points are governed less by merit than by access to financial capital and informal networks. Over half of the respondents cited involvement in independent projects and on-the-job learning or apprenticeships as their primary route into the industry, while only 11 participants had formal film education as their point of contact. When asked about initial support, 19 of the 27 said they had relied on family or friends, and 15 on industry networking opportunities. Just three participants had obtained governmental funding or grants. The pattern is stark: the resources that should, in principle, be distributed through public policy are in practice distributed through private relationships and personal wealth.

The interviews document the human cost of this filtering with uncomfortable precision. One director described waiting nearly five years after graduation for her first directing job, recalling that during her studies “the worst fears of nobody being interested simply came true.” A producer described working in a supermarket after finishing his degree and only finding a foothold in the industry when a post-pandemic production boom opened temporary gaps. An editor reported that peers on university internships earned 420 or 450 euros at best, and that most were not paid at all. Others described working days of 10 to 16 hours without compensation that covered basic living expenses, treating exhaustion as the entry fee to a career.

The most quoted voice in the study belongs to a producer who identifies as autistic and who gave the paper its title. “I feel like I slip through the cracks,” he said. “The criteria are so tight. For example, there is support for non-academics—that is not me. There are many programmes for women—that is not me either. Diversity and minorities are considered, and I present myself as an autistic filmmaker, but there is no lobby for that yet, at least not in my country. I honestly do not know how I can finance my work.” The researchers read this not as an anomaly but as evidence that current diversity frameworks lack the nuance to address intersectional identities, leaving individuals who fall between categories without any route to support.

That sense of falling between categories extends to the funding architecture itself. The European Union operates an elaborate apparatus for the audiovisual sector: the Creative Europe programme and its MEDIA strand, the Audiovisual Media Services Directive requiring on-demand platforms to carry at least 30 percent European works, the Cinema Communication allowing member states to fund culturally significant works, and the Media and Audiovisual Action Plan launched in December 2020. Between 2016 and 2019, direct public funding accounted for an average of 26.3 percent of European film budgets, and 91.7 percent of films received some form of direct public sponsorship. Yet the young filmmakers in the study described Creative Europe funding as perceived to be intended for bigger productions, its application procedures opaque and its co-financing requirements prohibitive. “The requirements are crazy, and it’s scary, so it repels people from attempting to get those funding,” one young producer said. “As a young producer, all I want is just a place where I can go, I say, this is what I have, this is the message I want to show, how can you help?”

The data on remuneration reinforce the picture. Among audiovisual directors in Europe aged under 35, less than 20 percent had received full remuneration for project development, less than 30 percent for pre-production, and less than 20 percent for promotion, according to figures cited in the study. Among emerging screenwriters, only around 20 percent were fully paid for project development and roughly 10 percent for writing on their own initiative. Previous research cited by the authors found that over 80 percent of young creatives had performed unpaid labour within a two-year research period, a considerable share of it illegal. Against this backdrop, the study’s finding that 19 of 27 participants regarded unpaid internships or low-pay opportunities as necessary stepping stones—while simultaneously naming financial constraints as their biggest challenge—illustrates how thoroughly such conditions have been normalised as an unquestionable component of career progression.

The researchers frame this normalisation through the concept of precarity under post-Fordist labour regimes, in which the risks of freelance, project-based work are shifted entirely onto the individual. The “catch-22” their participants describe—needing connections to get work, but needing work to build connections—is, they argue, not a logistical accident but a structural mechanism of exclusion that reproduces the dominance of white, middle-class men in the screen industries, a pattern documented in both European and Hollywood contexts. Female participants described gendered power dynamics on set, feeling intimidated in technical roles, and being hired to satisfy gender expectations while men still secured the large-budget productions. “If you look at who does the big budget film in this country, it is still the men,” one director said. “I think you get projects but not the same projects that men get.”

The study also documents a persistent disjuncture between policy intention and lived experience. EU initiatives nominally aim to support emerging talent and diversity, and Creative Europe co-funded 16 platforms highlighting emerging artists between 2021 and 2023, paying over 1,000 artists for around 7,000 days of work between 2017 and 2020. Yet participants reported that national funds, where they existed, were more accessible than European ones, and that citizenship or residency requirements created funding disparities between countries and restricted cross-border collaboration. Some called for smaller, less bureaucratic grants of around 50,000 euros specifically for emerging filmmakers and pan-European productions; others asked for diversity quotas, youth representation on funding committees, mentorship programmes and film education in schools. One participant argued the EU should foster “artistic innovation, rather than wide audiences and profit-oriented productions.”

The authors’ conclusion is deliberately pointed: public policy and funding mechanisms alone will not fix a system whose problems are rooted in industry practice. They argue the film sector should treat emerging talent as its future leaders, with advancement guided by creative vision rather than a strictly linear climb based on age and experience, and they warn that if “life-friendly” conditions do not materialise, talented people will simply leave. The stakes extend beyond individual careers. Young audiences, research suggests, prefer authentic storytelling that showcases diverse voices, and a homogenised industry risks growing detached from the very audiences it needs to survive. Without targeted governance reforms that simplify access and address intersectional barriers, the study warns, the European film industry will keep filtering out the diverse worldviews that make its output worth watching—leaving a generation of skilled filmmakers, in the words of one participant, to conclude that “in the end, it all comes down to money.”

Subject of Research: Governance gaps and precarity among young filmmakers entering the European film industry

Article Title: “I feel like I slip through the cracks”: governance gaps and the precarity of young filmmakers in Europe

Article References: Sarikakis, K., Chatziefraimidou, A., Haslauer, S., Ramadani, G., & Yeroshkina, M. (2026). “I feel like I slip through the cracks”: governance gaps and the precarity of young filmmakers in Europe. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 16, Article 16374. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16374

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16374

Keywords: young filmmakers, European film industry, precarity, Creative Europe, film funding, governance gaps, cultural industries, meritocracy, diversity, unpaid labour, intersectionality, University of Vienna

The research, published in the European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy by Lilja Lehmuskallio of the Sibelius Academy at the University of the Arts Helsinki, examines the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture’s 2023 action plan ‘Art, Culture and Diverse Finland’. The plan sets out measures for the country’s three national arts institutions: the Finnish National Gallery, the Finnish National Theatre and the Finnish National Opera and Ballet. These organisations matter far beyond their box offices. Founded at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century to forge a Finnish national identity, they remain the official curators of what the nation sees, hears and calls its own.

Lehmuskallio’s central claim is technically ambitious: structural discrimination in the arts cannot be dismantled without examining the epistemology on which policies, institutions and practices are built. She argues that European art institutions rest on what she calls a europatriarchal understanding of difference as hierarchical, a worldview produced by centuries of colonialism that positions white, European, able-bodied, cisgender, heteronormative perspectives as the neutral default and everyone else as the Other. Drawing on decolonial theory, including the well-known warning by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang that ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, she insists that diversifying an existing field is not the same as decolonising it, which requires materially disrupting the epistemic and institutional infrastructures that maintain hegemonic power.

To test how these abstractions play out in policy text, Lehmuskallio adapted a four-phase critical discourse analysis tool. First she identified a social question that can be meaningfully approached through language; then she analysed the action plan text and prior policy research; next she examined who wrote the policy and how their power positioning connected to the discourses under study; and finally she searched for discourses that could counteract the dominant ones. The method draws on Michel Foucault’s conception of discourse as a system of knowledge that both reflects and reproduces power. Discourses, in this view, are never neutral: they define what can be said and thought, and thereby shape how material resources flow through the cultural sector. Institutions, in Foucauldian terms, operate as dispositifs, interconnected assemblages of discourse, regulation and practice, that internalise policy language in recruitment, programming and governance.

A telling detail emerged early in the analysis. While the original working group behind the ministry’s 2021 final report included individuals from diverse backgrounds, the action plan itself was written and edited by a senior ministerial adviser, and the measures for each national institution were drafted by the institutions themselves. The result was three starkly different sets of measures: six for the Opera and Ballet, nine for the National Gallery and seventeen for the National Theatre, differing in number, tone and critical depth. As the study notes, following scholarship on policy writing, who is allowed to write what testifies to the real power of the document itself, and policies drafted without diverse epistemologies risk failing the people they are meant to serve.

The analysis identified four discourses threading through the measures. Two of them, the discourse of tolerance and difference-blind universalism and the discourse of tokenism, reproduce hierarchical difference. Tolerance, the study argues, is a nationalist practice of inclusion that reserves the power to permit or deny the Other access to spaces the majority continues to control; phrases like ‘opening doors’ and ‘giving voice’ betray structures still owned by the dominant group. Difference-blind universalism compounds this by treating all diversities as interchangeable, so that stating that cultural diversity ‘is taken into consideration in recruitment’ can mean nothing changes at all. Tokenism, meanwhile, treats marginalised individuals as symbols rather than people, singling out and elevating them above their own groups while leaving structural hierarchies untouched.

The Finnish National Opera and Ballet illustrates the tolerance problem most clearly. Its six measures are brief, impassive and vague, relying only on the terms ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘diversity’, with phrases such as ‘regularly implement diversity training’ and ‘maintain an open diversity discussion’. Because opera and classical ballet still carry the weight of perceived elitism and ongoing struggles with gender equality and misuse of power in leadership, the study argues, stronger measures are needed. Notably, anti-racism is entirely absent from the institution’s measures, a significant omission in the context of recruitment. Encouragingly, the FNOB has developed a four-page representation policy acknowledging problems such as exoticisation and racialisation, and recognising that the institution does not merely reflect society but actively constructs it, but keeping that policy as a separate document outside the public action plan limits its visibility and makes monitoring difficult.

The National Theatre, by contrast, shows how tokenism can hide inside genuine progress. The institution hired Finns born abroad into its ‘Communities and Inclusion’ unit and publicly named a writer-in-residence with a foreign background whose successful production reached the main stage, marking several firsts for Finnish theatre. Yet individuals already othered in Finnish society were thereby placed in the position of transforming institutional structures, often relying on personal experience of the very discrimination they were hired to tackle. Meanwhile, the monitoring report revealed that 0 percent of the theatre’s permanent ensemble of actors came from diverse backgrounds, even after a 2023 recruitment round, because the diversity measure specified no concrete implementation strategy. The National Gallery’s nine measures leaned heavily on accessibility, including safer-space principles, economic access and anti-racism training for all staff, but conspicuously avoided diversity in artistic programming, a gap the study links to collections historically shaped by the assumption that artists are white men.

From this evidence, Lehmuskallio builds a conceptual map connecting systems of inequality to strategies for transformative change. Colonialism, in this account, laid the foundation for europatriarchal norms in which difference is understood hierarchically, producing systemic discrimination in the forms of racism, classism, ableism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. These structures create barriers to participation that are maintained in institutions through tokenism and difference-blind universalism, rendering marginalised groups absent from recruitment, decision-making and programming, what she terms absent Others. The pathway out begins with the radical deconstruction of colonial knowledge production, proceeds through analysis of discourses to identify embedded privileges and stereotypes, then shifts to decolonial, antiracist, intersectional and accessibility-oriented strategies, ultimately enabling new knowledge systems, policy instruments and institutional reform.

The study’s conclusion is blunt: Finnish cultural policy currently adds diversity into existing systems rather than dismantling the structures that perpetuate hierarchical difference, and policy documents can present an inspirational vision while ultimately preserving the status quo. The emerging discourses of intersectionality and accessibility, rooted in the BIPOC feminist tradition from the Combahee River Collective to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coining of the term in 1989, offer transformative potential, but remain underdeveloped. What is required is radical inclusion, an approach that does not merely admit marginalised groups into unaltered structures but reimagines and restructures those structures to dismantle discriminatory barriers. As the article closes, quoting Audre Lorde’s famous line, ‘Master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’ For national arts institutions charged with projecting a nation’s identity, that may be the most demanding policy prescription of all.

Subject of Research: Decolonial and intersectional analysis of diversity discourse in Finnish cultural policy and national arts institutions

Article Title: From tolerance and tokenism to radical inclusion: decolonial and intersectional approach to diversity in arts organisations and cultural policy

Article References: Lehmuskallio, L. (2026). From tolerance and tokenism to radical inclusion: decolonial and intersectional approach to diversity in arts organisations and cultural policy. European Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, 16, Article 16054. https://doi.org/10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16054

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ejcmp.2026.16054

Keywords: cultural policy, decoloniality, intersectionality, diversity, arts institutions, tokenism, radical inclusion, critical discourse analysis, Finland, racism, museums, accessibility

Toprak is primarily known for her short stories. Her first collection, Letter in the Suitcase (Valizdeki Mektup), appeared in 2007, followed by a second collection, Which Language is Love (Hangi Dildedir Aşk). She then shifted to novel writing with The Children of July (Temmuz Çocukları) in 2011, and went on to publish The End of Lament (Ağıtın Sonu), The Whisper of Bees (Arı Fısıltıları), and Déjàvu. From her earliest stories onward, the study notes, Toprak has created introspective characters and returned persistently to themes of gender, identity, and the experiences of migrant women. That consistency across nearly two decades of publication is precisely what makes her body of work suitable for a sustained analytical treatment rather than isolated readings of individual books.

The theoretical core of the study is intersectionality, a framework that originated in legal and feminist scholarship and has since spread across the social sciences and humanities. Its central methodological claim is that categories of identity and disadvantage do not operate in isolation. A person’s experience of, for example, gender discrimination cannot be fully understood without also considering how migration status, class, language, and cultural background interact with it. In the context of literary analysis, this means that a character who is both a woman and a migrant is not simply subject to two separate pressures added together; she inhabits a distinct social position created by the intersection of those structures, with its own emotional and political texture.

Applied to Toprak’s fiction, the framework allows the researchers to ask a precise question: how are these overlapping axes of identity narratively constructed, emotionally expressed, and structurally encoded in her texts? The distinction among those three modes is one of the study’s technical contributions. Narrative construction refers to how characters’ intersecting identities are built into the plot, setting, and point of view. Emotional expression concerns how the psychological consequences of intersecting power structures are rendered in the characters’ inner lives. Structural encoding, in turn, refers to the way the architecture of the fiction itself—its organization, recurring motifs, and patterns of characterization—carries the imprint of those same structures.

The researchers employed thematic close reading as their primary method. Close reading is the traditional instrument of literary scholarship: the sustained, line-by-line attention to how a text makes meaning through word choice, imagery, narrative sequence, and silence. By making it thematic, the analysis directs that attention specifically toward recurring clusters of meaning connected to gender, displacement, and belonging. This method is well suited to a corpus like Toprak’s, in which the same preoccupations surface across short stories and novels written over many years, because it allows patterns to be traced across the whole body of work rather than within a single text.

What emerges from this approach, according to the study, is a picture of fiction in which the personal and the collective are continuously intertwined. Toprak’s protagonists do not experience migration merely as a change of location. The analysis suggests that her work offers nuanced literary insight into the interplay between personal and collective forms of displacement, belonging, and agency. In other words, the individual character’s sense of who she is—her language, her memory, her relationships—is depicted as inseparable from the larger histories of movement, settlement, and cultural negotiation that surround her. This is a hallmark of what scholars of migration literature look for: writing in which the private interior life becomes a lens on transnational experience.

The authors’ own biography is relevant to this reading, and the study treats it as such. As a migrant woman writer, Toprak does not simply observe transnational experiences from the outside; the researchers argue that she reflects them in her protagonists from a position of lived knowledge. This does not mean the fiction is autobiographical in a simple sense, but it does mean that the emotional register of the work—the texture of displacement, the negotiation between languages and cultural affiliations—carries an authenticity that the study identifies as central to its literary significance. The double position of author and characters, both navigating gendered expectations and cultural displacement, creates what the researchers describe as a mutually illuminating relationship between the writer’s perspective and her fictional worlds.

The study also situates its contribution within a broader scholarly landscape. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, the journal that published the work, has in recent years featured a cluster of interdisciplinary research on migration, including ethnocultural and sociological analyses of historical migration documents and artificial-intelligence-based studies of how migrants are visually portrayed across different countries. Against that backdrop, the new analysis adds a literary dimension: where sociological and computational approaches measure migration’s external patterns, Toprak’s fiction—and the intersectional reading of it—documents its internal, psychological, and emotional dimensions. The researchers explicitly state that their interdisciplinary approach illuminates the emotional, political, and psychological dimensions of migration in her work.

Methodologically, the study demonstrates how a social-science framework can be imported into literary criticism without losing the specificity of the literary object. Intersectionality supplies the analytical categories—gender, migration status, cultural affiliation—but close reading supplies the evidence, drawn from the texts themselves. The researchers report no competing interests and note that the article involved no studies with human participants, which is typical for textual analysis. The work was received in late 2024, accepted in September 2026, and published as an open-access article, making the full analysis freely available to other researchers working on Turkish literature, migration studies, or feminist literary theory.

The significance of the study extends beyond a single author. Contemporary migration literature is one of the fastest-growing fields in the comparative study of world literature, and scholars have increasingly sought rigorous frameworks for reading fiction written from within the migrant experience rather than about it from a distance. By demonstrating that intersectionality can be operationalized through thematic close reading—tracking how intersecting identities are constructed, expressed, and encoded across a coherent body of work—Dervişoğlu and Bilecen provide a transferable model for analyzing other authors who write at the intersection of gender and transnational displacement. Their conclusion that Toprak deserves recognition as a significant voice in contemporary migration literature is thus both a claim about one writer’s achievement and an argument about where the most illuminating questions in migration literary studies are now being asked.

Subject of Research: An intersectional literary analysis of gender, migration, and identity in the fiction of Turkish author Menekşe Toprak

Article Title: An intersectional approach to the literary universe of contemporary Turkish author Menekşe Toprak

Article References: Dervişoğlu, E., & Bilecen, T. (2026). An intersectional approach to the literary universe of contemporary Turkish author Menekşe Toprak. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09071-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09071-1

Keywords: Menekşe Toprak, intersectionality, Turkish literature, migration literature, gender studies, female protagonists, thematic close reading, displacement, belonging, contemporary fiction, literary analysis, transnational identity

The framing of a youth mental health ‘epidemic’ that places the onus of suicide on the young person has, in the authors’ analysis, inadvertently siloed the entire conversation into clinical interventions. While mental health care is undeniably important, this reductionist lens obscures the structural inequities that young people in India continue to navigate: rampant militarization, caste violence, Indigenous land erasure, ableism, and anti-trans discrimination. The timing of the argument is pointed. Recent student deaths surrounding the National Eligibility-Entrance Test, or NEET, have pushed schools back into the suicide prevention discourse, alongside ongoing student protests. Data reported in 2026 indicated that NEET-linked deaths reached their highest recorded level in 2025, with 93 student suicides reported over five years, and reporting by Al Jazeera documented the despair that followed a major examination paper leak. These events, the authors contend, cannot be treated as isolated tragedies but as symptoms of an education system and a policy apparatus that have repeatedly failed their most vulnerable participants.

One of the most technically provocative sections of the analysis traces the intellectual genealogy of suicide prevention itself. The authors note that the language of global public health often presents suicide prevention as a universal, value-neutral enterprise designed for holistic well-being. Yet the foundations of this movement borrow from colonial histories, in which self-inflicted death as an act of liberation among enslaved and colonized peoples was routinely interpreted through biopolitical frameworks centered on the preservation of enslaved labor, state ownership over bodies, and the pathologization of anti-colonial resistance. Drawing on recent scholarship such as Donovan Calhoun’s The Suicide Archive, the authors show how that framing has evolved but never fully disappeared. The insistence on biomedical models to understand suicide, they argue, continues to obscure present-day structural violence. This is not merely an academic quibble; the historical framing determines which interventions receive funding, which populations are deemed at risk, and crucially, which institutions are excused from scrutiny when young people die.

India’s policy landscape illustrates the gap between legislative intent and implementation. The Mental Health Care Act of 2017 and the National Suicide Prevention Strategy launched in 2022 both emerged as public health priorities, yet their execution has remained weak due to a lack of coordinated intersectoral collaboration and, in many cases, insufficient political will at both national and regional levels. The authors point to the National Education Policy 2020 as a case study in well-intentioned failure. On paper, the policy aimed to strengthen institutional capacity to respond to youth mental health crises through counselors and targeted interventions. In practice, its rollout did not account for the absence of basic infrastructure in schools and higher education institutions across low-resource settings. Six years after its launch, entire communities remain excluded from conversations about access to education and psychosocial support, including young people who are queer, trans, disabled, currently unhoused, incarcerated, living under active armed conflict and increased militarization, forcibly displaced, or facing immediate climate crises.

The analysis is particularly sharp on the question of whose deaths register as preventable tragedies and whose do not. De-politicized narratives around youth mental health flatten identity to a single axis, age, and homogenize young people into a singular category. The authors insist that an intersectional lens is essential to understanding the heterogeneity of experience within India and the specific impact of institutional violence on particular communities. They cite two cases that became national flashpoints. S. Anitha was a 17-year-old Dalit student from a government school in a low-resource setting in Tamil Nadu who died by suicide in 2017 after resisting NEET before the Supreme Court, an examination the authors characterize as rooted in meritocracy over equity. A year earlier, Rohith Vemula, a 26-year-old Dalit PhD student, died by suicide after resisting caste injustice on his campus. Their deaths, the authors argue, are two among many examples of institutional violence that remain detached from any larger systemic accountability around youth suicides.

Into this vacuum of state responsibility, civil society organizations have stepped, and the authors document the consequences of that overextension. Youth suicides and mental health crises in India are typically met with what they describe as a ‘firefighting response,’ in which care infrastructures emerge from grassroots initiatives and civil society organizations overextend their role as de facto intermediaries, offering crisis intervention, psychosocial support, and aid. For some communities, notably LGBTQIA+ young people, these organizations fill a gap that the state refuses to acknowledge, placing the burden of care on already stretched groups, especially those heavily reliant on foreign funding. Informal care infrastructures are not new to India; during the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous collectives emerged as short-term, accessible pathways to mobilize support, from mutual aid campaigns to pro-bono psychosocial and legal aid. Today these services are re-emerging as youth suicides gain visibility, but they carry unintended costs, including burnout within organizations that were never designed to meet the scale of current demand.

The legal landscape has shifted, though not uniformly in practice. Only recently did India remove provisions criminalizing attempted suicide through the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita of 2023, a reform that explicitly endorses decriminalization. The authors caution, however, that decriminalization does not automatically translate into destigmatization at the grassroots level. Meanwhile, they observe, suicide prevention strategies are often created without consultation with young people themselves, deploying an individualistic conception of resilience that places the young person in a deficit position in need of correction. Recent dialog-based research on community factors shaping resilience in youth suicide prevention points in a different direction, framing resilience as action taken together rather than as a personal attribute. The distinction matters technically: interventions designed around individual deficit tend to produce clinical referral pathways, while interventions designed around collective action produce community-led, decentralized programs that can address the upstream determinants of distress.

What the authors propose instead is a systems approach with formal mechanisms of accountability, and they are explicit that a systems approach without such mechanisms risks abstraction and tokenism. Their prescription calls for young people with intersectional lived experience to stand at the forefront of change, for interventions to be community-led and decentralized, and for intersectoral collaboration spanning media, law, social work, health services, and public policy. States, they argue, must be held accountable for implementation gaps in rights-based frameworks, for caste violence in educational institutions, for anti-trans discrimination, for ableist policies, and for the routine curbing of dissent. At the same time, public health researchers and civil society organizations must ensure that the intersectionality of lived experience remains central to intersectoral collaboration, and that the dispersion of accountability in youth suicide prevention is explicitly defined and evaluated. Evidence from related work, including repeat content analyses of print media reporting on suicide in Tamil Nadu, suggests that even upstream levers such as responsible journalism can be systematically improved when treated as measurable public health targets.

The analysis closes on an unambiguous ethical claim: youth mental health is inherently political, and every death by suicide attributable to oppressive and unjust systems was avoidable. The authors, who identify as people with intersectional lived experience and acknowledge that their own perspectives are shaped by caste capital and access to education and employment, affirm the lived experiences of oppressed communities as legitimate forms of evidence. That methodological stance, treating community testimony as data rather than anecdote, is itself a departure from conventional epidemiological practice and one of the reasons the piece has drawn attention. Its lasting contribution may be the reframing it demands: accountability, not pathology, as the organizing principle of youth suicide prevention. For a country where nearly three in ten global suicides occur, and where the majority of those deaths fall within the working ages of 15 to 39, the question of where accountability lies is not rhetorical. It is, the authors argue, the most urgent public health question of the decade.

Subject of Research: Reframing youth suicide in India as a public health crisis driven by systemic and structural factors

Article Title: Reframing youth suicide as a public health crisis: Where does accountability lie?

Article References: Mosur Sridhar, A., & Sharma, P. (2026). Reframing youth suicide as a public health crisis: Where does accountability lie?. PLOS Global Public Health, 6(10), e0007368. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0007368

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0007368

Keywords: youth suicide, India, public health, suicide prevention, mental health, NEET, intersectionality, caste discrimination, education policy, civil society organizations, decriminalization, systemic accountability