BackgroundAlthough population mobility is frequently cited as a barrier to malaria elimination, a comparatively small body of literature has attempted to systematically examine this issue. This article reviews the literature on malaria and mobile populations in order to critically examine the ways that malaria elimination experts perceive the risks surrounding population mobility. The article brings in perspectives from HIV/AIDS and other infectious disease control programmes working in areas of high population mobility. The article aims to move beyond the current tendency to identify mobile populations as a risk group and suggests ways to reconceptualize and respond to population mobility within malaria elimination.MethodsThe review was commissioned by the Asia Pacific Malaria Elimination Network (APMEN). Searches were made using PubMed, ProQuest, Google and Google Scholar. The review includes English language published peer-reviewed literature and grey literature published up to November 2013.ResultsThe review identified three key themes in the literature: mobility, economic development and shifting land use; concerns about accessing mobile populations; and imported and border malaria. The review found that the literature treats mobile populations as a homogenous entity and is yet to develop a more accurate understanding of the true risks surrounding population mobility. Concerns about accessing mobile populations are overstated, and methods are suggested for working collaboratively with mobile populations. Finally, the review found that many concerns about mobile populations and imported malaria would be more productively framed as border health issues.ConclusionThe focus on mobile populations is both excessive and insufficiently examined within the current literature. By its very nature, population mobility requires malaria elimination programmes to look beyond isolated localities and demographic groups to respond to the interconnections that mobility creates between localities and population groups. Malaria programmes will gain greater clarity by refocusing the discussion away from mobile populations as a risk group and toward mobility as a system involving interconnected localities and multiple demographic groups. Rather than focusing on mobile populations as a risk group and a barrier to elimination, malaria elimination programmes ought to develop collaborative community engagement efforts in border areas and regions of high population mobility and where imported malaria is of concern.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1475-2875-13-307) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Although community engagement has been recognized as an important element of public health since the Alma Ata declaration, in practice community engagement has played a marginal role within malaria control programmes. As more countries move toward elimination, malaria elimination programmes will need to reimagine malaria in a number of ways. An important element of this will be to re-conceptualize and better strategize community engagement, which will become increasingly important for programme success as countries near elimination. This commentary intends to begin a conversation on re-imagining community engagement in an elimination setting, by outlining five ways that community engagement should be strengthened and re-strategized in the lead up to malaria elimination.

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This article advances current conceptions of teacher activism through an exploration of the social justice dispositions of teachers in advantaged and disadvantaged contexts of schooling. We interrogate the practices of teachers in a government school with a high proportion of refugee students and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, in a high fees, multi-campus independent school, and in a disadvantaged Systemic Catholic school to illustrate how Bourdieu's notion of dispositions (which are constitutive of the habitus), and Fraser's distinction between affirmative and transformative justice, are together productive of four types of teacher activism. Specifically, we show that activist dispositions can be characterised as either affirmative or transformative in stance and as either internally or externally focused in relation to the education field. We argue that the social, cultural and material conditions of schools are linked to teachers' activist dispositions and conclude with the challenge for redressing educational inequalities by fostering a transformative activism in teachers' practices.