Social Exclusion, Collective Solidarity and Systemic Vulnerability: Reshaping Health Sociology for the 21st Century

At a time of widening health inequalities, intensified by population ageing, the fragmentation of welfare systems, and the rapid evolution of care ecosystems, social exclusion, collective solidarity, and systemic vulnerability have become defining paradigms reshaping the sociology of health in the 21st century. As the boundaries between the medical, the social, and the political continue to blur, the ways in which societies recognize, distribute, and respond to illness are being fundamentally redrawn. Understanding these shifts is essential not only for explaining how health and disadvantage intersect today, but for anticipating the social challenges that lie ahead.These dynamics generate fractures and reconstructions across multiple social spheres: the reframing of stigma, isolation, and identity; profound reconfigurations of family life through the burdens of informal care; intergenerational tensions; disrupted educational and career trajectories; workplace discrimination and the economic insecurity that illness can produce; and shifting patterns of community cohesion and traditional support networks. Examining how individuals, families, communities, and systems respond to these pressures reveals both the depth of contemporary vulnerability and the conditions under which solidarity, resilience, and collective agency emerge, or fail to.This Research Topic applies the sociology of health, in a critical tradition that treats power, inequality, and social structure as central rather than incidental to how health is produced and distributed. Our aim is analytical rather than prescriptive: we seek to understand the mechanisms through which exclusion, solidarity, and vulnerability operate, and to examine, not merely advocate, the policies, institutions, and collective practices that claim to strengthen resilience and equity. We ask how such responses are produced, who they reach, whose interests they serve, and under what conditions they succeed or reproduce the very inequalities they target. We invite empirical, theoretical, and comparative contributions that interrogate how contemporary health pressures test and transform social structures, and that bring critical scrutiny to ideas, policies, and best practices for building more inclusive and adaptive care ecosystems. We particularly encourage work that rethinks past experience to inform future action.To keep the collection focused, we will not consider work that is merely descriptive, that lacks a critical analytical perspective, or that treats power and inequality as incidental rather than central to health.We welcome submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:- Multidimensional mechanisms of social exclusion: including labour-market exclusion, regional disparities, digital divides, and the intersection of illness with class, gender, and age.- Emergent architectures of solidarity: including digital support communities, patient advocacy, mutual-aid networks, and informal caregiving models.- Systemic vulnerabilities in healthcare governance and welfare policy: including welfare system fragmentation, service gaps for under-served conditions, and institutional policy preparedness.- Stigma, identity, and the lived experience of illness: including labelling, social isolation, and the impact of diagnosis on identity.- Family dynamics and the burdens of informal care: including caregiver strain, household economic impacts, and the division of care labour.- Prospective frameworks for equity, resilience, and predictive health: including adaptive social protections, preventive policies, and data-driven equity models.We welcome Original Research, Systematic Reviews, Perspectives, and Brief Research Reports. We particularly encourage submissions using qualitative, mixed-methods, longitudinal, or intersectional approaches. Topic editors: Juan R. Coca, Enrique Fernández-Vilas, Janet Hoskin Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/47959/social-exclusion-collective-solidarity-and-systemic-vulnerability-reshaping-health-sociology-for-the-21st-century