From the COVID-19 pandemic to uprisings over police brutality, we are living in the greatest social crisis of a generation. But the roots of these latest emergencies stretch back decades. At their core is a brutal neoliberal ideology that combines structural racism with a relentless assault on social welfare. Its results are the failing economic and public health systems we confront today—those that benefit the few and put the most vulnerable in harm’s way.

Contributors to this anthology insist there is another way: a new kind of politics—a politics of care—that centers people’s basic needs and connections to fellow citizens, the global community, and the natural world. Imagining a world that promotes the health and well-being of all, they draw inspiration from public health, philosophy, economics, literature, and the examples of activists, from ACT UP to Black Power. Together they point to a future in which no one is disposable.