摘要:
In the introduction to this special issue, the editors introduce the reader to research methodologies and analyses not commonly presented in mainstream health policy literature. Intersectional analysis, for example, is a means of drilling down into how the multiple social categories a person occupies (e.g., gender, class, ethnicity) may influence their experience of inequality. When an intersectional framework was applied to US Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data in 2018 and 2019, for example, gender minority Blacks were identified as having distinctly poor health experiences compared with cisgender Black and other non-Black gender minority populations.1 Consequently, health policies and monitoring programs that purport to advance health equity must account for multiply marginalized populations such as *** at drug policy through an intersectional lens reinforces the importance of macrolevel social determinants as they interact with meso and microlevel factors to influence drug harms and mediate policy and intervention effectiveness2 as well as the role of power in excluding certain perspectives, framings, forms of knowledge, and experience.3 Ethnographic, social-scientific, and community-based research methodologies challenge power imbalances by favoring the embodied knowledge of those with lived experience, knowledge gained by direct observation and study of the particular history and economic and political systems in a given location,2 as opposed to forms of professional expertise favored by public authorities seeking to govern society at a distance.