Public health has long relied on quantitative indicators to document suffering and guide action. In contexts of mass violence, however, statistical approaches alone may be insufficient to capture the full scope of population-level harm. This reflective essay engages Zahir Raihan's 1971 short documentary film 'Stop Genocide', produced during the Bangladesh Liberation War, as a case study in visual testimony. The film is examined as a form of public health witnessing that documents harm through proximity, narrative, and moral insistence rather than epidemiologic measurement. 'Stop Genocide' depicts civilian targeting, forced displacement, and collective trauma in ways that anticipate contemporary public health concepts, including structural violence and health system collapse. The film foregrounds patterns of harm that are recognizable at the population level, even in the absence of formal surveillance data. Revisiting 'Stop Genocide' raises critical questions about what forms of evidence public health recognizes as legitimate, particularly when data systems are disrupted or politically constrained. Situating epidemiologic data within a broader epistemic framework that includes art, testimony, and witnessing may strengthen ethical public health practice in times of mass violence.

This article analyzes migratory resilience as a dynamic process of adaptation and resistance, through the life story of a Nigerian woman on her transnational journey from Nigeria, through Mexico, to her settlement in Germany. The study employs a qualitative approach with a narrative focus, using in-depth interviews as the primary data collection instrument. It considers the concepts of "structural violence," "intersectionality," and "otherness" as factors of exclusion, and "transnational perspective" and "resilience" as elements of agency. The study identifies how the adversities faced in both the countries of origin and transit not only represent obstacles but also function as catalysts for adaptive skills, ultimately enabling her successful settlement in Germany, identifying as complementary impact factors the close network (husband) as the mesosystem level and the external network (clerical community) as the exosystem level of the Heise Model.

This article analyzes digital narcoculture in Mexico as a system of symbolic power governed algorithmically that seduces youth through the articulation of necropolitics, hypermasculinity, and platform logics. From a qualitative and interpretive approach, the study combines critical discourse analysis of highly viral cultural products—narco-corridos, corridos tumbados, narco-series, and social media content—with a documentary meta-synthesis of academic literature and technical sources (2000–2025). The theoretical framework integrates contributions from critical violence theory, gender studies, symbolic economy, the neuroscience of adolescence, and platform studies. Findings show that contemporary narcoculture has shifted from a local counterculture to a high-performance symbolic economy in which violence is aestheticized and converted into status capital, amplified by algorithms that prioritize content with high affective impact. Hypermasculinity operates as an ideological engine that organizes hierarchies of prestige, while necropolitics turns death into a legitimizing spectacle. Digital platforms, far from acting as neutral intermediaries, function as active producers of visibility that normalize these narratives among adolescent audiences who are particularly sensitive to immediate social rewards. The article concludes that digital narcoculture not only reflects structural violence but also produces and stabilizes it by offering legible identities, rapid symbolic rewards, and senses of belonging in contexts of institutional exclusion. It proposes implications for platform governance, the design of competitive counter-narratives, and an applied research agenda focused on mechanisms of algorithmic seduction.

Memory of violence.

Environmental disasters are inherently political phenomena, shaped by systemic inequalities and entrenched power dynamics. This article analyzes how the securitization paradigm and slow violence frameworks explain the disproportionate impact of Hurricane Katrina on marginalized communities. While the territorial securitization paradigm focuses on reactionary military preparedness, it fails to address the long-term systemic issues-such as racism, socioeconomic inequality, and inadequate -infrastructure-that exacerbate vulnerability to environmental events. Using qualitative case study analysis, this article draws on federal reports, congressional records, academic literature, and media sources to examine structural neglect and racialized disaster response, and it draws parallels between Hurricanes Katrina and Maria. The disproportionate impact of Katrina on New Orleans' Black and low-income communities underscores the intersection of structural violence, slow violence, and environmental vulnerability. By reframing environmental security within the context of systemic inequities, this article calls for a renewed focus on resilience-building measures and inclusive disaster planning to address the root causes of vulnerability and mitigate future disasters.

ABSTRACT Current conceptualisations of compounding crises often frame it as the convergence of large-scale contemporary disruptions – particularly climate change and violent conflict – occurring simultaneously. While valuable, these framings often neglect the temporal depth of crisis, overlooking how shocks accumulate as structural violence and neglect over generations. This paper introduces a temporal understanding of compounding crises as the historical layering of material dispossession, resource scarcity, political marginalisation, violent conflict, and ecological degradation. Building on this, resilience is reconceptualised not merely as recovery from singular shocks, but as a dual capacity: first, to adapt to long-term disruptions and endure; and second, to bear and transmit the memory of these crises across generations. Drawing from intergenerational storytelling and ethnographic vignettes in a rural village in Northern Mindanao, the paper reframes resilience as both material persistence and narrative continuity. Here, stories of endurance become emotional and strategic resources. Resilience is thus inherently intergenerational, shaped by the ability of younger generations to receive, recognise, and reinterpret inherited memories – transforming survival into an act of remembering, meaning-making, and future-making. This study situates resilience within the longue durée of Mindanao’s colonial and postcolonial histories, combining autoethnography and intergenerational storytelling to foreground memory as both resource and burden.

This article critically examines the effects of punitive drug policies on children and young people in the Philippines. Drawing from ethnography, policy analysis, and a narrative review of the literature, this article argues that drug policies have had a profound and multifaceted impacts on Filipino youth, from actual violence to the structural violence that they reflect and reinforce. In the first place, anti-drug campaigns—most recently and significantly Duterte administration’s “war on drugs” (2016–2022)—have led to direct harms, such as extrajudicial killings, incarceration, and psychological trauma, as well as indirect effects related to family disruption, community fear, and the erosion of trust in institutions. Beyond such violent campaigns, however, young people have been subjected to surveillance through drug testing. Meanwhile, young people who use substances like shabu (methamphetamine) and solvents (rugby) face stigma, discrimination, and ever-increasing threats of further criminalization, including proposals to lower the age of criminal responsibility even as socioeconomic contexts of their use of these substances are not addressed. Ultimately, it calls for a shift from a punitive to health- and rights-based approaches that center the welfare, dignity, and agency of young people.

Inflicting the Structural Violence of the Market: Workfare and Underemployment to Discipline the Reserve Army of Labor

ABSTRACT India’s environmental governance in the post-independence era has been largely performative. Driven by development rhetoric, India’s ecological polices distribute precarity among the marginalized communities. I argue that ecogovernmentality, i.e. governing people through the management of the environment, is shaped by necropolitics. I demonstrate how death, displacement, migration, and forms of slow poison emerge as the central mechanisms of ecogovernmentality. I refer to this as necropolitical ecogovernmentality, which operates through the legitimization of structural violence and systematic un-witnessing. By examining Sanjay Barnela’s eco-documentary, Hunting Down Water (2003) as a visual case study, I demonstrate how necropolitical governmentality functions in India.

This phenomenological study explores the lived experiences of teachers affected by direct and structural violence in the divided community of Lukulu district of the Western Province of Zambia. The objectives of this study were to; explore teachers' experiences of direct and structural violence in some selected schools of Lukulu district, investigate the causes of direct and structural violence against teachers as well as provide recommendations for resolving direct and structural violence against teachers in Lukulu district. The study was guided by the structural violence theory (Galtung, 1969), Peace education theory (Harris, 2003) and the Critical Peace education theory (Wulf,1974). The study employed interpretive phenomenological analysis, thereby interviewing fifteen participants in the categories of five school managers and ten teachers from five purposively sampled schools. Thematic analysis was used to interpret the findings and investigate the ways in which division, direct and structural violence against teachers affected the delivery of education, development and welfare of teachers. The study revealed that structural violence against teachers manifested in verbal abuse of teachers by senior managers, direct political violence on the teachers perceived to belong to other political parties by the ruling party cadres, violence in form of insults from pupils, parents and community members and chronic gossiping and rumour mongering which proved to be detrimental to the wellbeing of the teachers. Additionally, the study highlighted some of the causes of violence against teachers such as political interference in the running of educational institutions, corruption, bribery and favouritism; lack of transparency and accountability in the appointment of teachers to management positions and poor representation and support from respective teacher unions. Besides that, the study revealed several effects of violence against teachers such as physical injuries, loss of human life, suicide, loss of property, closure of schools, loss of teaching and learning time as teachers tend to pursue court cases against perpetrators of the violence. In view of the foregoing, this study recommended implementation of policy reforms that addresses the structural inequalities and peace education such as establishment of the directorate of peace education, development and international education at national, provincial, district and school levels that should have in its structure a national peace education, development and international education director, provincial peace education and development mentors, district peace education and development mentors and school peace education and development mentors. These officers would be critical to advancing the peace education agenda through comparative and international education advocacy. Finally, this study contributes to Galtung (1969)'s concept of positive peace by proposing three forms of positive peace education. These are direct positive peace education, structural positive peace education and cultural positive peace education. These are critical to the resolution of direct, cultural and structural violence against teachers.

In this paper, a feminist refusal is proposed as a critical approach to reading women’s fiction in Indian society and suggests that women’s "no" to care, marriage, obligation, respectability, and narrative confession operates as a positive and productive form of feminist ethics that has been wrongly characterised as a negativity and failure of feminism. Counter to dominant feminist approaches that conceptualise agency through empowerment and resolution as vision and presence, this paper highlights refusal as a form of feminist realism that attends to constraint and structural violence. From the perspectives of feminist ethics of narrative and intersectional feminisms, this paper will explore how refusal through silence and withdrawal in certain narratives of Indian feminisms has been mistakenly interpreted as a lack of activity and a failure of morality. However, this paper will contend that these texts represent an alternate form of feminist language that challenges the patriarchal codes of sacrifice, logic, and redemption. The feminist refusal makes visible how “care” and “duty” function as forced virtues imposed upon women as morality itself, while structural equality is papered over by culturally constructed feminine norms. Through the application of refusal as an optic of interpretation, this paper will enhance the scope of the feminist literary tradition in India from one of celebratory empowerment to one of resistance through the ethics of self-preservation.

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to the body of knowledge on the COVID-19 pandemic by examining perceptions and understandings of COVID-19 among a purposively enlisted set of young adults in the marginalized low-income communities of Ajegunle and Amukoko in Lagos State, Nigeria. Drawing on the theory of structural violence, this qualitative research underscores how participants’ pre-pandemic lived experiences shape their varying levels of disbelief and scepticism about the reality of the viral disease. The paper highlights how these lived experiences are replete with narratives of poor living standards and the prevailing socio-economic realities and challenges within their communities. The paper further demonstrates how these experiences have, over time, fostered mistrust of democratically elected leaders, shaping responses to the pandemic and contributing to disbelief, neglect, and the spread of misinformation, particularly when containment efforts were spearheaded by political leaders deemed untrustworthy.

Despite decades of promoting Sustainable Land Management (SLM) as a solution to soil degradation and climate variability in Sub-Saharan Africa, adoption rates among smallholder farmers remain low and fragmented, especially among women. Using a Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) framework, this study examines the gendered disconnect between agricultural knowledge and practice in Eastern Zambia. The common knowledge gap hypothesis, which claims low adoption of agricultural technologies among women is due to a lack of agricultural information, is challenged. Instead, an alternative hypothesis is proposed: structural inequalities create an asset gap. Drawing on survey data from 761 smallholder households across six districts, Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression analyses are employed to investigate the factors influencing awareness, training levels, and SLM adoption. The findings reveal that female-headed households are just as aware of SLM practices as male-headed households and perceive training as more useful. However, male-headed households adopt significantly more SLM practices, a difference driven not only by gender but also by better access to land and labour. Furthermore, the study uncovers a ‘project island’ effect, where geographic location predicts adoption more strongly than individual household traits. These results indicate that low adoption among women is not due to a lack of understanding but stems from structural violence that disconnects knowledge from the power to act. The study concludes that current technocratic extension methods are insufficient. To bridge the gap between awareness and practice, policies must move beyond simple information dissemination towards structural solutions that provide credit and labour-saving technologies for women farmers.

In the context of the protracted humanitarian crisis, continuing armed conflict and large-scale displacement in Gaza, menstrual health remains one of the most neglected aspects of women’s well-being. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 18 displaced Gazan women, this study explores how structural violence, poverty and displacement intersect to shape menstrual health experiences. Women reported limited access to safe menstrual products, inadequate sanitation facilities and deep-rooted stigma that intensified both physical discomfort and emotional distress. Using the lenses of structural violence and ecological systems theory, the study situates menstrual health insecurity as a critical human rights issue and a core concern of social work practice in humanitarian contexts. By engaging with debates in critical menstruation studies, the analysis highlights how the politicisation of the female body in Gaza transforms menstruation into a site of both vulnerability and resistance. Findings underscore the need for integrated social work responses that combine the provision of menstrual materials, psychosocial support and advocacy for menstrual justice within war-affected settings.

IntroductionGray literature on gender-based violence (GBV) in universities shows that female students are the most vulnerable group. In our context, this study examines the forms of GBV and the profiles of perpetrators at Daniel Ouezzin Coulibaly University.MethodsA mixed-methods approach was adopted. The questionnaire survey involved 300 students, and interview guides were administered to 23 participants (students, lecturers, and administrative staff).ResultsFindings indicate that 92.7% of students are familiar with the concept of GBV. Among female students, 45.86% report physical violence, 44.17% psychological or emotional abuse, and 9.97% cultural violence. Sexual harassment through inappropriate touching is a major concern, affecting 30% of respondents. Perpetrators include students (38.46%), lecturers (27.44%), administrative staff (26.92%), and classmates (7.18%).Discussion/conclusionThese results highlight the high prevalence of GBV in higher education institutions and the urgent need for targeted interventions, including institutional policies, improved infrastructure, and tailored prevention programmes.

ABSTRACT Age comes a wooing for each of us as we contend with mortality before our encounter with the Grim Reaper. The Grim Reaper is an enduring figure in medieval European Catholicism representing death, usually shown as a skeleton with a dark hood and robe holding a scythe. Black, linked to the black death or plague and black garments at funerals is epitomized in the dark garments of the Grim Reaper whose scythe is a symbol of agriculture, representing the harvesting of souls. Beyond the western Christian tradition, Hine‐nui‐te‐po is the Māori goddess of death, Yama is the Hindu god of death, and Mictecacihuatl is the Aztec queen of the dead, emphasizing how mortality is represented across cultures. A familiar image of death for danger is the ubiquitous skull and crossbones image. Death is an undeniable reality, and confronting mortality often stares one in the face as one gets older, with fears of abandonment and vulnerability. As populations age, organizations grapple with an aging workforce. An estimated 727 million persons were 65+ in 2020 and in 2050, based on better nutrition and medical care, this figure will be 1.5+ billion, with women being the majority. One‐in‐five women 60+ live alone, though there are differences among women from diverse faith groups. An aging gendered workforce stares organizations in the face. How can organizations serve as resource enablers to circumvent and recalibrate structural and symbolic violence against those who fall into the chronobiological marker of age generally 65+ or often 50+, to rearrange different registers of identity? Can organizations recognize wisdom keepers beyond images of doddering dears and wrinkled visages whose attractiveness may have faded in the eye of the organizational beholder? Worker related ageism has several facets which may be implicit or explicit with a plurality of aspects involving stereotypes, and age‐based discrimination in recruitment and employability. Adding to this plurality, the facet of faith and ageism in organizations becomes another delicate aspect to contend with. It is important to stress that the multi‐faceted concepts of aging and faith are both socially and culturally constructed and can be linked to those who are faith adherents as well as those who do not have a specific faith such as atheists, agnostics and those without a faith orientation. In this commentary, the aging–faith–gender nexus in organizations is signposted through four crucial dimensions for exploration and analysis: (1) elderly bodies and work; (2) gendered gerontophobia; (3) mortality and death; and (4) organizational cartographies.

Treatment for substance use disorders in Spain has traditionally been abstinence-focused and developed from an androcentric perspective, failing to address the specific needs of women who use drugs. Although abstinence-based models continue to predominate, cities such as Madrid and Barcelona now offer a broader range of services, including harm reduction approaches. The intersection between substance use and gender-based violence remains largely overlooked, especially in research and service provision, thereby reinforcing systemic inequalities and limiting access to appropriate resources. This article explores the intersection between drug use and gender-based violence among women, emphasizing harm reduction as a gender-sensitive approach. A qualitative study was conducted based on seventeen semi-structured interviews with women who have used or are currently using psychoactive substances in two major Spanish cities. The sample included women of diverse ages, nationalities, socio-economic backgrounds, and substance use profiles. Recruitment was carried out through a combination of strategies, including social media, snowball sampling, and engagement with a harm reduction center. Data were analyzed thematically using NVivo 14 to identify the types of gender-based violence experienced and the strategies employed to confront it. All participants experienced gender-based violence, including institutional, familial, intimate partner, and sexual violence. Structural violence and stigma further restrict their access to health, social, and legal resources, thereby increasing their vulnerability. Many women used substances as a coping mechanism in response to gender-based violence. The study highlights the complex intersection between substance use and gender-based violence among women, emphasizing the need for tailored, intersectional harm reduction interventions and strategies to support women in safely and effectively reporting violence.

abstract Through the story of Carmen, a young woman from Wentworth, South Africa, we explore the limits and possibilities of gender-transformation work in contexts shaped by systemic violence. Wentworth is a community marked by apartheid spatial legacies, intergenerational trauma, and the constant threat of gangsterism. In early 2025, Carmen arrived at the transnational TRANSFORM Youth Summit alone—despite having prepared alongside a group of her peers using photovoice methods. The other young people from her community did not come. Fear of kidnapping, territorial violence, and gang surveillance kept them home. Through Carmen’s story, we consider how gender issues can be displaced or silenced in times of crisis, and how absence itself can be understood as a form of visual evidence. Drawing on feminist and affect theory, including Lauren Berlant’s concept of the impasse, Haraway's entreaty to stay with the trouble, and Pumla Gqola’s framing of refusal in the context of pervasive gendered violence, I argue for a more nuanced understanding of gender-transformation that accounts for the limits of participation under structural violence, and honours the subtle, complicated ways that youth continue to resist, witness, and make meaning. Ultimately, I call for an expanded praxis that sees youth not only as change-makers, but also as survivors negotiating the layered violence of their environments.

ABSTRACT Climate change-induced hazards are increasingly shaping the vulnerabilities of refugee populations. However, the interplay between disaster governance and (im)mobility in camp-based settings remains underexplored. Through ethnographic engagement and interviews with refugees and humanitarian workers in the Rohingya refugee camps of Bangladesh, this study reveals how site selection on fragile slopes, restrictions on durable infrastructure, and exclusion from protective infrastructures amplify hazard risks. Exacerbating these are securitization approaches, manifesting through fencing, surveillance, and restrictions on movement, mimicking forms of carceral humanitarianism. These practices immobilize refugees and constrain their ability to respond while failing to mitigate the very risks they are designed to address. Despite these barriers, refugees negotiate limited mobilities through kinship networks and volunteer-led evacuations, which provide temporary relief but also redistribute risks unevenly. Camps, therefore, institutionalize complex risk, where multiple vulnerabilities intersect with structural violence. Challenging the notion of camps as temporary solutions to be policed, the study calls for a more meaningful and equitable inclusion of refugees in host states’ disaster governance frameworks, National Adaptation Plans, and national and international climate finance strategies, and a reimagining of refugee protection in an era of climate crisis, where mobility and immobility are both politicized and precarious.

Abstract Amid the ever-greater encroachment of neoliberal principles in education – including marketisation, ranking and teaching to assessment – this article serves as a reminder that educators possess agency to resist and mount a successful defence of democratic, child-centred education. The case study presented here reports and reflects on an instance of informal adult learning at community level. It occurred between 2011 and 2014 in Sandefjord, a small town in the south of Norway. The municipality is affluent and was governed at the time by the two most right-wing parties in Norway, the liberal-conservative Høyre [The Right], and the populist-libertarian Fremskritts-partiet (FRP [Progress Party]). The local politicians wanted their schools to be the best in the county, preferably in the whole of Norway. For them this meant achieving the top grades in the national exams in Years 5, 8 and 9, so they introduced a strict half-yearly grading scheme in all municipal schools, starting with six-year-old children in Year 1. They ignored the fact that the Norwegian Education Act specifically forbids the grading of children in the first six years of schooling. One teacher refused to comply, arguing that this represented an inhumane ranking of his pupils. He was joined, first by one other teacher, and later, after the municipality hired a law firm to enforce their compliance, by 38 others. Parents wrote to newspapers in support of the protesting teachers. The entire community studied the legal regulations on the grading of young children. The “Sandefjord case” gained nationwide media coverage, the protests were successful, and the scorecards were done away with. On 13 January 2015, the original two protesting teachers were awarded the prestigious Zola Prize for civil courage. Ten years after this victory, the author of this article presented this case study at the 2024 conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), whose thematic focus was “The power of protest”. The Sandefjord case is of universal relevance, demonstrating the power of informal adult education, of protest, and of solidarity among members of a local community.