Advancing health equity: defending science and sustaining hope in precarious times

We write from interdisciplinary vantage points and entangled commitments across public health, bioethics, health communication, health professions education, and community engagement. We also write from deeply personal places: as caregivers, immigrants, descendants, teachers, first-generation students, people with minoritized identities, and advocates who have each witnessed how structural inequities manifest in our families, workplaces, and neighborhoods. Our professional paths have never been separated from our private truths. Although we engaged in constructive disagreement while preparing this editorial, we agree that health equity is not an abstract aim but a daily encounter that calls us to embody a lived ethic shaped by the moral choices people must make in unjust systems and the institutional structures that too often constrain or deny wellbeing. We have all seen how population health is shaped by policies and politics, how institutions shape ethical norms, and how the infrastructures of wellbeing and harm are inequitably distributed. For this purpose, we write to name the harm and carry forward the hope. And we invite you-our readers, fellow scholars, and movement builders-to bring your perspective to the same goal. With our diverse backgrounds and shared commitments as a foundation, we turn to the broader context in which health equity research operates and how it can be sustained.