The “untouchable” who touched millions: Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, Navayana Buddhism, and complexity in social work scholarship on religion

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar was a twentieth century socio-political and religious reformer whose activities impacted millions of lives, especially among India’s Dalit community. This article illustrates his lifework and its lessons for social work scholarship on religion. Using the examples of Ambedkar and Navayana Buddhism, I discuss three sources of complexity for social work scholarship on religion: 1) religion may function as both oppressive and emancipatory; 2) religion is malleable, not monolithic; and 3) religion is situated in and interactive with contexts. I conclude with suggestions for how social work scholarship on religion may account for complexity

Incorporating mindfulness: questioning capitalism

This paper engages with Buddhist critiques of capitalism and consumerism; and it challenges the capitalist appropriations of Buddhist techniques. We show how Buddhist modernism and Marxism/socialism can align, and how Engaged Buddhism spawns communalism and socially revolutionary impulses for sustainability and ecological responsibility within the framework of Buddhist thought and mindfulness traditions. Our case study of the Thai Asoke community exemplifies Buddhist communal mindfulness-in-action, explores successes and idiosyncrasies, and shows how communal principles can operate in such work-based communities

What can health inequalities researchers learn from an intersectionality perspective?:Understanding social dynamics with an inter-categorical approach

The concept of intersectionality was developed by social scientists seeking to analyse the multiple interacting influences of social location, identity and historical oppression. Despite broad take-up elsewhere, its application in public health remains underdeveloped. We consider how health inequalities research in the United Kingdom has predominantly taken class and later socioeconomic position as its key axis in a manner that tends to overlook other crucial dimensions. We especially focus on international research on ethnicity, gender and caste to argue that an intersectional perspective is relevant for health inequalities research because it compels researchers to move beyond (but not ignore) class and socioeconomic position in analysing the structural determinants of health. Drawing on these theoretical developments, we argue for an inter-categorical conceptualisation of social location that recognises differentiation without reifying social groupings – thus encouraging researchers to focus on social dynamics rather than social categories, recognising that experiences of advantage and disadvantage reflect the exercise of power across social institutions. Such an understanding may help address the historic tendency of health inequalities research to privilege methodological issues and consider different axes of inequality in isolation from one another, encouraging researchers to move beyond micro-level behaviours to consider the structural drivers of inequalities