Building upon a series of blog posts and conversations, two feminist scholars explore how political community, trust, responsibility, and solidarity are affected by the COVID‐19 pandemic. We explore the ways in which we can engage in political world‐building during pandemic times through the work of Hannah Arendt. Following Arendt’s notion of the world as the space for human togetherness, we ask: how can we respond to COVID‐19’s interruptions to the familiarity of daily life and our relationship to public space? By extending relational accounts of public health and organizational ethics, we critique a narrow view of solidarity that focuses on individual compliance with public health directives. Instead, we argue that solidarity involves addressing structural inequities, both within public health and our wider community. Finally, we suggest possibilities for political world‐building by considering how new forms of human togetherness might emerge as we forge a collective “new normal.”

We propose the 'patient-worker' as a theoretical construct that responds to moral problems that arise with the globalization of healthcare and medical research. The patient-worker model recognizes that some participants in global medical industries are workers and are owed worker's rights. Further, these participants are patient-like insofar as they are beneficiaries of fiduciary relationships with healthcare professionals. We apply the patient-worker model to human subjects research and commercial gestational surrogacy. In human subjects research, subjects are usually characterized as either patients or as workers. Through questioning this dichotomy, we argue that some subject populations fit into both categories. With respect to commercial surrogacy, we enrich feminist discussions of embodied labor by describing how surrogates are beneficiaries of fiduciary obligations. They are not just workers, but patient-workers. Through these applications, the patient-worker model offers a helpful normative framework for exploring what globalized medical industries owe to the individuals who bear the bodily burdens of medical innovation.

In this paper, we use Hannah Arendt's conception of praxis and her critique of family to diagnose how praxis and diversity initiatives may suffer when family is used as an organizing principle. As an organizing principle, notions of family function to promote hierarchical sameness within organizations, thereby suppressing diversity. In response to hierarchical sameness, Arendtian praxis can destabilize homogenizing tendencies, and effect social change by challenging ‘business as usual’. Further, because praxis is situated within a diverse, plural community of actors, it is able to appreciate diversity within organizations. Hence, we suggest that organizations can ‘do’ diversity better with a structure that enables praxis to emerge. In addition, we point to ways in which family as an organizational principle privileges a narrow conception of family that obscures gender, racial, sexual and class‐based inequities. This project contributes to the feminist scholarship on diversity and organizational inequities.

The 2004 Canadian Assisted Human Reproduction Act bans commercial contract pregnancy and egg provision, but Canadians undertake cross-border reproductive travel to access these services. Feminist bioethicists have argued that the ethical justification for enforcing the ban domestically, namely exploitation, grounds its extraterritorial enforcement. I raise an additional problem when Global Southern or low-income countries are destinations for travel: neocolonialism. Further, I argue that a ban on commercialized reproduction is problematic. Although well-suited to address neocolonial forces of exploitation and commodification, a ban reinforces neocolonialism by paying insufficient attention to the agency of gestational laborers and egg providers.

Feminists have found Arendt helpful in articulating a theory of judgment across cultural differences. Embodiment enters this discussion, usually, through attention to enlarged mentality. In contrast, I approach embodiment and judgment by looking at undertheorized connections with Arendt’s conception of “thinking.” Drawing on a discussion of Boethius and Huckleberry Finn, I suggest that persons are led to thinking (and to judgment) by lived contradictions, that is, by instances in which their experiences cannot be interpreted through dominant norms in their society or culture. I also consider a claim that oppression hinders a person’s ability to be receptive to enlarged mentality, thus making it difficult for oppressed persons in Third World contexts to exercise judgment. In response, I examine how an oppressed person is receptive to meaning-making through negotiating lived contradictions.