Ethico-racial positioning in campaigns for COVID-19 research and vaccination featuring public figures.

This article analyses a set of videos which featured public figures encouraging racially minoritised people in the UK to take the COVID-19 vaccine or get involved in related research. As racially targeted health communication has both potentially beneficial and problematic consequences, it is important to examine this uniquely high-profile case. Using a purposive sample of 10 videos, our thematic content analysis aimed to reveal how racially minoritised people were represented and the types of concerns about the vaccine that were expressed. We found representations of racialised difference that centred on 'community' and invoked shared social experiences. The expressed concerns centred on whether ethnic difference was accounted for in the vaccine's design and development, plus the overarching issue of trust. Our analysis adopts and develops the concept of 'racialisation'; we explore how 'mutuality' underpinned normative calls to action ('ethico-racial imperatives') and how the videos 'responsibilised' racially minoritised people. We discuss two points of tension in this case: the limitations for addressing the causes of mistrust and the risks of reductivism that accompanied the ambiguous notion of community. Our analysis develops scholarship on racialisation in health contexts and provides public health practitioners with insights into the socio-political considerations of racially targeted communications.

Complicity: Methodologies of power, politics and the ethics of knowledge production.

In this collection we develop the concept of "complicity" as a means to understand how medical sociologists might be allied in unexpected or uncomfortable ways with dominant structures of power. After giving examples of complicity from our own research, we introduce existing scholarship on complicity, describing it as a concept that comes coupled with a sense of responsibility and that is related to, yet distinct from, a range of other terms including reflexivity, collusion, guilt, and shame. We also discuss how complicity has been described to occur at the level of the institution, within theoretical frameworks, and during mundane moments that we face on a day-to-day basis. Building on this review, we hypothesise that medical sociology - where access to fieldsites is often hard won, where "researching up" in medical and scientific institutions is common, and where our own work frequently concerns matters central to medical institutions themselves - is a discipline wherein mundane complicity is likely. Following this gathering exercise, we introduce the interventions that comprise this collection: interventions from a diversity of sociologists of health and illness who, perhaps for the first time in written form, account for how complicities of various kinds came to shape their work and how, with varying levels of success, they have sought redress. We close by offering some insight into the process of developing this collection, celebrating its successes while also acknowledging that many gaps and complicities remain.

'Improving the odds for everybody': Narrative and media in stem cell donor recruitment patient appeals, and the work to redress racial inequity.

Stem cell registries, which provide cells for transplants in blood malignancy treatment, recruit donors partly through mobilising narrative. This is often via appeals from patients without matching donors who seek to encourage registrations from people who might go on to be their own, or somebody else's, donor. Registries have also historically underserved racially minoritised communities, who are less likely to locate matching donors. As such, appeals often come from racially minoritised patients. Prior research highlights the importance of narrative in health contexts, and donation in particular. However, the impact of stories on those telling them is underexplored. This article fills this gap, providing analysis of a range of interview, media and documentary data. It sketches out the contours of appeal work, showing how patients' private lives become publicly exposed. It highlights how appeals might be understood as collective action on behalf of racially minoritised communities, flagging how those most affected by inequity often become central to the fight to redress it. Through this, the article extends an emergent 'sociology of donation', arguing for acknowledgement of media's importance in contemporary donation contexts.

"It's harder for the likes of us": racially minoritised stem cell donation as ethico-racial imperative.

How best are we to understand appeals to participate in a biomedical project that are based both on invoking shared racial identity, and on framing engagement as the clear moral course of action? Stem cell donor recruitment, which often focuses on engaging racially minoritised communities, provides useful insight into this question. This article proposes that it is not an essential mutual racial identity between the person asking and the person asked at play. Rather, it is the creative 'doing' of relatedness between people at the scale of race as well as family that coalesces into powerful appeals to participate. Through analysis of ethnographic, documentary and social media data, the paper argues that this work relies at least partly on framing donation as a duty of being part of a racialised community, which I describe here as an ethico-racial imperative, in which both race and responsibility become intertwined to compel participation in the biomedical project of donor registration. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41292-021-00241-9.