How does the diffusion of social movement symbols and strategies occur from North to South and from South to North? Using interview data with activists in Argentina, Mexico, and the US, we find that symbols and strategies originating in the U.S. prior to Roe v. Wade spread to Argentina and Mexico, while strategies and symbols from Argentina and Mexico diffused to the U.S. in the months before the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision. We introduce and develop a novel concept — circular diffusion: the process by which innovations move from originator to adopter—where they are adopted whole cloth, transformed, or used as inspiration for new innovations depending on local contexts—and then back to the originator. Originators and adopters exchange roles as they learn from each other over time. We argue that both ongoing contestation and ongoing interactions are necessary to activate and sustain the process of circular diffusion.

Does asset ownership improve women’s lives? If so, how? When women own property, are they better able to make choices about their daily lives? About their own health? How does ownership increase women’s ability to negotiate at the household level? What does this relationship look like across different types of property, held in different ways? Using cross-sectional survey data from Colombia, Guatemala, and Honduras, this manuscript explores the relationship between women’s ownership of housing and land and their ability to participate in decision-making at the household level, examining key differences in how assets are owned (i.e., sole ownership vs. joint ownership) and types of property (i.e., land vs. home). I find that while property ownership has the potential to increase women’s decision-making ability, it is critical to examine both how and what women own to understand this relationship.

In the wake of the 2022 US Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, there has been a palpable shift in the dynamics between organizations, new challenges have emerged in establishing research contacts, and the need to safeguard participants' identity has become heightened. While the ramifications of Dobbs have been felt most keenly in the US, there have been reverberations through the connections between movements across the Americas. We find organizations in the US to be inextricably linked with and informed by networks originating in Latin America. Indeed, much of our present approach to research in the US has been informed by our knowledge and experience researching abortion rights movements outside of the US.

Environmental justice and health research demonstrate unequal exposure to environmental hazards at the neighborhood-level. We use an innovative method—eco-intersectional multilevel (EIM) modeling—to assess intersectional inequalities in industrial air toxics exposure across US census tracts in 2014. Results reveal stark inequalities in exposure across analytic strata, with a 45-fold difference in average exposure between most and least exposed. Low SES, multiply marginalized (high % Black, high % female-headed households) urban communities experienced highest risk. These inequalities were not described by additive effects alone, necessitating the use of interaction terms. We advance a critical intersectional approach to evaluating environmental injustices.

In the early days of the pandemic, public health officials and politicians across the globe relied on Twitter to rapidly communicate COVID-19 information. Although the majority of these authority figures continue to be privileged white men, the number of women and racialized leaders is increasing. We analyze how users responded to public health tweets by Canada’s top public health official Dr. Theresa Tam and New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. Examining responses to these two racialized women through a critical discourse analysis, we uncover a pattern of users mobilizing gendered and racialized discourses to undermine the message, sow public distrust, and challenge the authority of Tam and Lujan Grisham. This paper documents hostility in the digital public square that, we argue, constitutes intersectional harassing backlash which could have implications for the efficacy of public health messaging on and offline.