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The community-based work (HEAT: Health Equity Alliance of Tallahassee) of Gravlee, community organizers, colleagues, and students in Tallahassee, that of Ravenscroft and Schell (2015) on environmental pollutants in partnership with the Mohawk, and Galloway and coworkers’ (Fafard-St. Germain et al. 2019; Galloway et al. 2020) research on food insecurity and on cancer experiences in partnership with Inuit communities, all point to the value and critical need for more community-engaged and participatory biocultural work. Studies such as these might hopefully be the rule rather than the exception in the future.

These examples illustrate trends in critical biocultural studies of health and illness toward expanding engagement with social theory, and expanding the breadth of questions and contexts of biocultural analysis with an eye toward addressing important issues of social justice. We imagine and expect further engagement with other theories and problems within the areas of biosociality, biological citizenship, and biocommunicability (Briggs 2003, 2016; Briggs and Nichter 2009; Franklin and McKinnon eds. 2001; Petryna 2005; Rabinow 1996; Rose and Novas 2005), that have emerged over the past several decades as important within medical anthropology. For example, advocacy around specific diseases based on biological citizenship is increasingly common and is part of the terrain of scientific research. Such acts of biological citizenship would seem to provide particularly rich avenues for critical biocultural research; research that demands a thorough knowledge and integration of biology and culture. Critical biocultural approaches might also draw on biocommunicability – the production, circulation, and reception of (biomedical) knowledge – that has been proposed as central to an anthropology of epidemics (Briggs and Nichter 2009), and to two moving ethnographies by Briggs and Mantini-Briggs (2003, 2016) that forcefully link the biopolitics of the production and flow of information to the emergence and spread of epidemics and unequal exposures, treatments, and human suffering. The stark inequities exposed by the current COVID-19 pandemic, the efforts to control, limit, and otherwise obscure or confuse the information the public receives, and the divided response to public health efforts, makes the biocommunicability around epidemics all the more relevant and urgent; and of obvious import to any future work on this and other pandemics by critical biocultural medical anthropologists.