Mo's Field Notes

Issue 2

Equity as Infrastructure

Welcome back to the second issue of Mo's Field Notes.

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Every January, institutions recommit to Dr. King with language about fairness and unity. However, Dr. King’s later work was not sentimental, but rather operational. He spoke about housing, wages, hospitals, and sanitation, as well as the material conditions that determine who lives longer and who does not. Justice, for him, was not an attitude. It was a system.

That framing matters because equity is still treated as an outcome, something we measure after the intervention is over. In public health, it appears in dashboards, disparity reports, and grant language. But rarely does it appear in who controls resources, who sets timelines, or which communities receive durable capacity rather than temporary relief.

I saw this clearly during emergency response work. When crises hit, we mobilize quickly, with surge staffing, data pipelines, and emergency funds. However, the same communities cycle through response after response, having no permanent infrastructure afterwards. Clinics remain understaffed. Data systems remain fragmented. And of course, burnout becomes an expected cost rather than a signal of structural failure. Compassion flows in; control, continuity, and resources do not.

Equity, in this sense, is not about intentions. It is about structural design. Who gets stable funding instead of pilot programs? Who has authority over data instead of being endlessly studied? Who receives infrastructure that lasts beyond the emergency declaration?

Equity as infrastructure asks a different question: not whether we care, but what our systems are actually built to sustain. It shifts the focus from moral language to operational choices, from promises to load-bearing structures.

Our rhetoric is polished, and yet, our systems still leak. That gap is where equity either becomes real or remains decorative.

Below are materials that help translate equity from language into design, policy, and infrastructure.

Foundational Equity Papers

📘 Defining Equity in Health. Read Article

📘 The Concepts and Principles of Equity and Health Read Article

📘 Discrimination and Racial Disparities in Health Read Article

Data Justice Frameworks

📘 What is Data Justice? Read Article

📘 Data Feminism from MIT Read Article

📘 Data Justice Framework Read Article

Funding and Infrastructure Critiques

📘 Integrating Equity in a Public Health Funding Strategy Read Article

📘 Developing a Financing System to Support Public Health Infrastructure Read Article

📘 Data Justice and the Right to the City (book) Read Book

These materials remind me that equity is not something public health delivers at the end of a project, but something it either embeds from the start or quietly fails to produce at all.

Thank you for reading. I hope you found this issue helpful. See you in the next issue!

-Mo

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