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Many countries in the global South have rapidly aging populations. The COVID-19 pandemic has been especially hard on older adults in these countries, who mainly depend on kin for care. The pandemic has shown that a recommitment to public investment in their well-being is needed.

Demographic debates in the decades following the 1960s have shaped much of the discourse on population ageing across the world. This paper traces these discourses and research agendas that led to the understanding of demographic transitions in the developed and developing world. The policies were mostly articulated by demographers from the US and ageing was seen more as a challenge for the West. The questions addressed in this paper are that apart from the predictable and unchanging vulnerabilities of ageing voiced earlier by anthropologists and social workers in the 1940–1950s, what were the new risks being articulated by development experts? Once a diffused 'world' agenda was articulated and largely left adrift without resources, what were its afterlives? How did experts in various parts of the world redeploy the global ageing agenda and plan to assert various other alignments? Where did China and India figure in this? The paper locates the debates on India and China in the afterlives of the World Assembly on Ageing held in Vienna in 1982.

With fears of global health epidemics (of reemerging infectious diseases) having escalated over the past few decades, we must ask how we understand the diverse responses to such outbreaks. I explore a single event that merits revisiting—the 1994 outbreak of plague in Surat, the commercial capital of the Indian state of Gujarat—in an attempt to answer this question. I trace responses at various intersecting levels of public health and political authority—global, national, and local—as they interacted with each other and expressed specific political concerns and social anxieties during this outbreak.

People are living longer, not only in wealthy countries but in developing nations. Western experts have long conceived of aging as a universal predicament--one that supposedly provokes the same welfare concerns in every context. In the twenty-first century, we must embrace a new approach that prioritizes local agendas and values. In this history of how gerontologists, doctors, social scientists, and activists came to define the issue of global aging, Sivaramakrishnan shows that the United Nations, private NGOs, and transnational philanthropic foundations embraced programs that reflected prevailing Western ideas about modernization. The dominant paradigm often assumed that, because large-scale growth of an aging population happened first in the West, developing societies will experience the issues of aging in the same ways and on the same terms as their Western counterparts. Focusing on South Asia and Africa, As the World Ages shows how regional voices have begun to question this one-size-fits-all model and have argued instead for an approach that responds to local needs and concerns.--

This analysis lays a framework for greater collaboration between the cancer community and social scientists in both research and policy. We argue that the growing cancer burden that low- and middle-income countries face is raising social, political, and economic challenges of global cancer that require interdisciplinary research beyond the traditional biomedical-clinical nexus. First, we briefly review some of the most important existing social science studies that have addressed cancer in low- and middle-income countries, including the main methods, approaches, and findings of this research. Second, we give an overview of recent interdisciplinary collaborations between social scientists and oncologists and demonstrate how qualitative research can help us to understand the distinct challenges of cancer care in low- and middle-income settings. Finally, we identify key areas for future collaboration and suggest possible paths forward for cancer research and policy that involve social science.

Some years—1789, 1929, 1989—change the world suddenly. Or do they? In 2020, a pandemic converged with an economic collapse, inequalities exploded, and institutions weakened. Yet these crises sprang not from new risks but from known dangers. The world—like many patients—met 2020 with a host of preexisting conditions, which together tilted the odds toward disaster. Perhaps 2020 wasn't the year the world changed; perhaps it was simply the moment the world finally understood its deadly diagnosis.In The Long Year, some of the world's most incisive thinkers excavate 2020's buried crises, revealing how they must be confronted in order to achieve a more equal future. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls for the defunding of police and the refunding of communities; Keisha Blain demonstrates why the battle against racism must be global; and Adam Tooze reveals that COVID-19 hit hardest where inequality was already greatest and welfare states weakest. Yarimar Bonilla, Xiaowei Wang, Simon Balto, Marcia Chatelain, Gautam Bhan, Ananya Roy, and others offer insights from the factory farms of China to the elite resorts of France, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest to the overcrowded hospitals of India.The definitive guide to these ongoing catastrophes, The Long Year shows that only by exposing the roots and ramifications of 2020 can another such breakdown be prevented. It is made possible through institutional partnerships with Public Books and the Social Science Research Council