What do disciplinary social sciences have to contribute to the study of politics, power, and inequality in global health? How does the inclusion of voices and findings from the Global South unsettle foundational theory that social science disciplines in the Global North take for granted? What can the disciplines gain by moving comparative study of health problems, particularly those in the Global South, from the periphery to the fore?
This special issue on global health seeks to critically challenge the absence of race and racism in mainstream international relations theory (Dionne and Turkmen 2020) and the “epistemic parochialism” of major social science disciplines (Farber and Harris 2022) by highlighting important new work in the emergent sociologies and political sciences of global health (Noy 2019; Harris and White 2019; McInnes, Lee, and Youde 2019).