Introduction: Cultural Identity, Stigma, and Health Inequalities in South Asian and Muslim Communities in the UK

This issue of Global Discourse brings together four qualitative research articles that examine how South Asian Muslim (SAM), and Chinese communities in the United Kingdom navigate complex intersections of cultural identity, religious obligation, and social stigma when confronting significant health, care, educational and social participation challenges. The contributions illuminate how dominant institutional biomedical frameworks, neoliberal policy architecture and secular normative assumptions about public provision pose challenges for those with distinct values, family structures, definitional frameworks and linguistic needs. As all four articles indicate, this contributes to a pattern of hidden need, delayed help-seeking, structural exclusion, everyday dietary compromise and persistent loneliness that compounds existing health inequalities and leaves some of the UK's most marginalised families and older people without adequate, culturally sensitive support. Taken together, the articles span the life course, from the school lunchroom to dementia care pathways and ageing in community settings, demonstrating that the structural invisibility of Muslim, South Asian, and Chinese community needs is not confined to acute health settings, but permeates the ordinary institutions of public life and extends into the everyday fabric of ageing and social connection.