New Special Issue of Social Science & Medicine – “Migration, ‘illegality,’ and health: Mapping embodied vulnerability and debating health-related deservingness”

Sarah Willen
University of Connecticut

Earlier this month, the journal Social Science & Medicine published a Special Issue — “Migration, ‘illegality,’ and health: Mapping embodied vulnerability and debating health-related deservingness” — that showcases the ongoing work of both the Initiative on Unauthorized Immigration and Health within the Society for Medical Anthropology’s Critical Anthropology of Global Health Special Interest Group and the AccessDenied community.

We are delighted to recap that volume here, and we encourage interested readers to access the individual articles via the journal’s website.[1,2]

In this new collection, we propose the time is ripe for rigorous interdisciplinary conversation about two urgent matters: first, the complicated but largely under-investigated matter of health-related deservingness, and second, the ways in which “illegality,” like other forms of marginalization and exclusion, can become literally embodied.