While measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 disturbed both global and local markets, some commentators also argued that the pandemic could be seen as the beginning of the end of neoliberalism. Although neoliberal reforms have come under pressure, little is known about the implications of COVID-19 in or across specific sectors. Scaling down the rich theoretical-historical debates about neoliberalism to the regional level, we study the impact of COVID-19 on the marketized public transport system in Stockholm, Sweden. During COVID-19, ridership dropped as did ticket revenues, which put the market under operational and financial distress. Drawing on a discussion of the and of marketization, we probe how the contracted bus operators responded to the pandemic, how they tried to save the market from collapsing, and whether the measures taken suggest an organized move away from neoliberal policies. Adding to recent debates of COVID-19 and neoliberalism's longevity, we conclude that although the underpinning marketization remained unquestioned, the were partly re-evaluated in the midst of the global crisis as a way to protect the established neoliberal policies from falling apart.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed and exacerbated existing inequalities within countries and across geographies. It reminded us how the world and its people are interconnected. Gender-based violence (GBV), which is an expression of gender inequality and toxic masculinity, is another pandemic that exists in all societies at varying degrees of prevalence and severity. It requires the same effort and attention that governments globally have given to COVID-19. With half the world under lockdown as governments' response to COVID-19, GBV increased significantly (UN Women, 2020a). The increase was a reminder of the need to have contingent mitigating mechanism to protect the marginalized, women and girls, against a co-existing pandemic, GBV. The intersection of marginalization and discrimination made certain groups of women more susceptible to GBV and COVID-19 pandemics. These intersecting social identities of vulnerability need equal attention in order to eradicate inequality (Simonovic, 2020).

The practice of community based participatory research (CBPR) has evolved over the past 20 years with the recognition that health equity is best achieved when academic researchers form collaborative partnerships with communities. This article theorizes the possibility that core principles of CBPR cannot be realistically applied unless unequal power relations are identified and addressed. It provides theoretical and empirical perspectives for understanding power, privilege, researcher identity and academic research team composition, and their effects on partnering processes and health disparity outcomes. The team's processes of conducting seven case studies of diverse partnerships in a national cross-site CBPR study are analyzed; the multi-disciplinary research team's self-reflections on identity and positionality are analyzed, privileging its combined racial, ethnic, and gendered life experiences, and integrating feminist and post-colonial theory into these reflections. Findings from the inquiry are shared, and incorporating academic researcher team identity is recommended as a core component of equalizing power distribution within CBPR.

"This article reviews migration issues in Canada, the United States, and Mexico in the context of a general interpretation that NAFTA's [North American Free Trade Agreement] migration provisions are insufficient to deal with the larger continental migration problems."