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Community Psychology colleagues may be interested in this call! Cathy Campbell and I are co-guest-editing a special issue of the journal Critical Public Health on the topic of public health activism for contemporary times. We think that the discipline of public health needs to update its understandings of how change comes about, and perhaps some scholars on the list can help us to do that?! Publichealth activism in changing times: Re-locating collective agency Special issue of Critical Public Health, GuestEditors Flora Cornish, Catherine Campbell. Call for abstracts, deadline 1 May 2019. Contemporary socio-political shifts areproducing crisis conditions for health justice. Rising economic and socialinequalities, increasingly precarious work and housing tenure, andausterity-driven cuts in public services and welfare benefits are coupled withresurgences of nationalist populism, intolerance, authoritarianism andcynicism. The devastating impacts of these conditions for health andwell-being, especially amongst excluded groups, prompts urgent action. In many ways this divisive and unequalenvironment creates hostile conditions for public health activism. Yet thereare suggestions that the hegemony of competitive individualism fuelling thesedismal contexts is itself in crisis. New, conflictual and often uncompromisingforms of resistance and politics are emerging. Spaces are opening up for thedevelopment of novel forms of health-promoting collective agency. These offer newpotential to resist the ever-expanding forms of health damaging socialdisadvantage that characterise our changing times. The special issue will examine emerging newforms of public health activism, and associated novel sources of collectiveagency, that are evolving in the fight for health-enabling conditions.Attention to structural forms of power, and the strengths and weaknesses ofindividual agency have long been cornerstones of critical public health, rootedin a long-established structure-agency binary. We seek to disrupt this binaryby calling for papers that draw attention to alternative, distributed,networked, disruptive, prefigurative or bottom-up sources of agency thatcharacterise emerging new forms of activism. New and resurgent social movements includeattention to issues of anti-austerity, disability rights, new feminisms,defence of public services, housing justice, urban regeneration, anti-racismand advocacy targeting commercial determinants of health. Alternative forms ofhealth-enhancing agency ‘in the cracks’ are evident in the form of ‘wilfulsubjectivities’ (e.g. transgender and queer politics), non-human agency (e.g.communication technologies, built environment), distributed agency (e.g.emergence of common causes, new networks, emergent protest), occupation ofspace, evidence-based activisms and artistic expressions. Evident too areefforts to connect grassroots collective agency to traditional axes of power,e.g. social enterprises using capitalist business models, or grassroots partypolitical activism. Papers on any of these, or other, locations of collectiveagency with potential for innovative public health activism would all be suitedto the special issue. We invite papers from the full range ofpublic health disciplines, exploring the possibilities of public healthactivism in contemporary conditions, especially papers with strong empiricalbases in studies of recent/contemporary activism. Creative responses to crisisare most often generated in practice rather than theory, and we particularlywelcome papers rooted in activist and collaborative praxis. A two-round review process will take place.Please submit abstracts (250-300 words) to Flora Cornish ([log in to unmask]) by 1 May 2019. Following review, selected authors will beinvited to develop their papers, with the option of taking part in an unfundedworkshop in December 2019 in London. Deadline for submission of full paperswill be 1 Feb 2020. ___________________________________ The list is jointly managed by David Fryer [log in to unmask] and Grant Jeffrey [log in to unmask], either of whom are able to deal with queries. To unsubscribe or to change your details on this COMMUNITYPSYCHUK list, visit the website: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=COMMUNITYPSYCHUK