This article examines how contending constructions of safe space for migrants reflect the geopoliticization of humanitarianism and its geosocial discontents. It contrasts geopolitical constructions of safe space that have been used by European authorities to justify and administer Hotspots with geosocial efforts to construct safe space through practices of solidaristic accommodation. The article documents the ways in which Hotspots have made migrants unsafe, even as they have been simultaneously justified in humanitarian terms as making both Europe and refugees safer. It further illustrates, by contrast, how counter-constructions of safe space can take divergent geosocial forms. These varied geosocial formations of accommodation emerge out of embodied space-making struggles for physical safety, personal dignity, organizational autonomy, radical democracy, spatial liberty, and social community. They create context-contingent alternatives to Hotspot geopolitics as well as opportunities for migrants and their allies to critique the limits of official humanitarianism. But they also remain overdetermined by the dominant border politics that Hotpots are supposed to secure. For these reasons, the borderlands between the abstract geopolitics of Hotspot humanitarianism and the embodied geosocial constructions of solidarity show safe space to be at once complex, compromised, and constantly contested.

COVID-19 has underlined the critical importance of bringing biosocial and biopsychosocial approaches to pre-health education. Given the striking social inequalities that the pandemic has both exposed and exacerbated, we argue that bridging between the biomedical and social sciences with such approaches is now more appropriate and urgently needed than ever. We therefore call for the re-socialization of pre-health education by teaching to develop socio-structural competencies alongside physical and biological science knowledge. We suggest that community partnerships, which address local inequalities and their global interdependencies, should be encouraged as an essential element in all pre-health education. Educators should also support such partnerships as opportunities for students who come from more minoritized and impoverished social backgrounds to see their own social knowledge-including community-based knowledge of health-injustices revealed by the pandemic-as the basis of biopsychosocial expertise. By prioritizing this reconceptualization of pre-health education, we can empower future health workers to prepare more adequately for future health crises in ways that are socially aware and structurally transformative.