Arizona’s Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, signed into law in April 2010, is already adversely affecting public health in the state. Our findings from a study on childhood obesity in Flagstaff suggest that the law changed health-seeking behaviors of residents of a predominantly Latino neighborhood by increasing fear, limiting residents’ mobility, and diminishing trust of officials. These changes could exacerbate barriers to healthy living, limit access to care, and affect the overall safety of the neighborhood. Documentation of the on-the-ground impact of Arizona's law and similar state-level immigration policies is urgently needed. To inform effective policymaking, such research must be community engaged and include safety measures beyond the usual protocols.

Community-engaged approaches to research and practice continue to show success in addressing health equity and making long-term change for partnership relationships and structures of power. The usefulness of these approaches is either diminished or bolstered by community trust, which can be challenging for partnerships to achieve. In this research note we present an example process for recruiting, interviewing, and hiring community researchers as a starting place for capacity building and for laying the foundation for data collection and analysis in health-related community projects.

Marginalized communities have a documented distrust of research grounded in negative portrayals in the academic literature. Yet, trusted partnerships, the foundation for Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), require time to build the capacity for joint decision-making, equitable involvement of academically trained and community investigators, and co-learning. Trust can be difficult to develop within the short time between a funding opportunity announcement and application submission. Resources to support community- and academic-based investigators’ time to discuss contexts, concerns, integration of expertise and locally acceptable research designs and data collection are limited. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded Center for American Indian Resilience and the Southwest Health Equity Research Collaborative have implemented an internal funding mechanism to support community and academic-based investigators’ travel cost and time to discuss complementary areas of interest and skills and to decide if moving forward with a partnership and a collaborative grant proposal would be beneficial to the community. The rationale and administration of this Community-Campus Partnership Support (CCPS) Program are described and four examples of supported efforts are provided. Centers and training programs frequently fund pilot grants to support junior investigators and/or exploratory research. This CCPS mechanism should be considered as precursor to pilot work, to stimulate partnership building without the pressure of an approaching grant application deadline.

Millions of people have been victimized by the actions and omissions of states and governments. This collection provides expert analyses of such victimizations across the world, from Europe, the United States, and Africa to New Zealand and South America. Leading scholars in the area of state crime describe the nature, extent, and distribution of state crime victimization, as well as theoretical and practical paths for understanding, explaining, and aiding victims of massive harms by governments. Cases of state crime and state victimization are presented on Brazilian, Native American, and New Zealand children, Somalian Pirates, Columbian, South African, and Bosnian civilians, United States immigrants, and war crime victimization in World War II. Other chapters delve into formal and informal ways to address victimization through the European Court of Human Rights, the International Criminal Court, and provide analyses of justice processes around the world. This anthology bridges the latest thinking, theory and research in the fields of state crime and victimology and provides a general resource concerning basic issues related to victimization - particularly victims of state crime. As such, it fills a major gap in the literature by providing the first text and scholarly book focused solely on a victimology of state crime. This book is essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, socio-legal jurists and academics with an interest in state crime and victimology.

Background: Political ideologies drove public actions and health behaviors in the first year of the global pandemic. Different ideas about contagion, health behaviors, and the actions of governing bodies impacted the spread of the virus and health and life. Researchers used an immediate, mixed methods design to explore sociocultural responses to the virus and identified differences and similarities in anxiety, fear, blame, and perceptions of nation across political divides.Methods: Researchers conducted 60 in-depth, semi-structured interviews and administered over 1,000 questionnaires with people living in the United States. The team analyzed data through an exploratory and confirmatory sequential mixed methods design.Results: In the first months of the pandemic interviewees cited economic inequality, untrustworthy corporations and other entities, and the federal government as threats to life and pandemic control. Participants invoked ideas about others to determine blame. Findings reveal heavy associations between lack of safety during a public health crisis and blame of “culture” and government power across the political spectrum.Conclusion: Data indicate anxiety across political differences related to ideas of contagion and the maleficence of a powerful elite. Findings on how people understand the nation, politics, and pandemic management contribute to understanding dimensions of health behaviors and underlying connections between anxiety and the uptake of conspiracy theories in public health. The article ends with recommendations drawn from project findings for future pandemic response.

Anthropologists have long known how perceptions of contagion play out along the lines of xenophobia and racism. Months after the beginning of the global Cover-19 pandemic, predictions by anthropologists of xenophobic ideologies and actions have come to pass. In the United States people understand the global pandemic not as biology, but as the manifestation of political affiliation, difference, connection, and disconnection. COVID-19 is, according to public perception, dangerous because it maliciously mutates to attack. It is “a guy we don’t know.” Relationships between the mysteriousness of the virus and heightened visibility of longstanding inequality in the United States form new contexts for existing social tensions. These dynamics provide a backdrop against which the ongoing commitment to uprisings connected to the Black Lives Matter movement unfold. Here I draw on analysis of 50 semi-structured interviews we conducted from March to August of 2020 demonstrating how understandings of the biology of a virus are woven into perceptions of politics, inequality, and the fractures of a divided nation. To understand social and political responses to the global pandemic it is essential that we continue to investigate xenophobia, inequality, and racism alongside the biological impact of SARS-CoV-2.