Introduction

During 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic took hold globally, claiming countless lives, yet more widely throwing everyday life into disarray for countless more. As the pandemic unfolded, it became more and more obvious that while everyone was susceptible to contracting the virus, there were stark social inequalities being brought to the fore in many areas outside simply direct health consequences. The topic of COVID-19 became central to many research areas in a multitude of different disciplines across the world, leading to an explosion of scholarship. However, while many studies have focused on the medical impact of the virus as a global health crisis (Mosley 2020; Reiss and Bhakti 2020; Schab and Malleret 2020), few have considered the multifaceted, international and multidisciplinary issues around social inequalities connected to the pandemic, its handling and its effects. Thus far, much available research has taken the form of short texts, bringing together scholars from neighbouring fields of expertise or focusing on a particular geographical area. These are mainly reactionary pieces of research published in response to the developments occurring in real time, leaving a gap in the literature for a broader reflection on what has happened since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in early 2020.

Our own contribution to the COVID-19 scholarship was added in October 2020 in this way, through a co-authored journal article that brought together both of our expertise in health law, race and gender issues and migration from a feminist perspective in the context of the pandemic (Germain and Yong, 2020). It was also an initial reaction piece to the emerging research on the disproportionate impact on women possessing certain intersectional characteristics, centring on the barriers to accessing healthcare. However, the increasing amount of COVID-19 scholarship began to demonstrate that experts in the fields of law, policy and other humanities were interested in studying the diverse impact of the pandemic on populations in their specific fields, but had yet to take a multidisciplinary approach to understanding how the phenomenon has deepened existing inequalities outside direct health consequences.