The social determinants of health and human rights describe where and how we live and thrive. They express our actual and optimal conditions of housing and nutrition; our social, cultural, and spiritual connections; our access to education, health, and social services; and our ability to be fully involved in our societies through expression, mobility, association, work, and engagement with the formal political process. Ultimately, they are different yet overlapping measures and languages of human well-being and self-actualization. The connection between these deeply related but, until recently, rarely linked conceptual frameworks was made explicit in the 2008 report of the WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health (CSDH). This seminal report comprehensively outlined the imperative to scale up the global focus on the social determinants as a matter of social justice, the absence of which was “killing people on a grand scale.” 1 The CSDH report prompted a special issue in Health and Human Rights in 2010 exploring the relationship between human rights and the social determinants of health. 2 Since then, there have been several critical global policy initiatives, including the Rio Declaration on the Social Determinants of Health (2011) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)(2015), which affirmed the links made by the CSDH locating the social determinants of health in relation to human rights and the right to health. 3 These complimentary frames are at last connected in rhetoric and policy, but what does this linkage mean in practice, and what progress has been made since 2009? 4

As three human rights and right to health scholars, we are deeply engaged with the theoretical and practical implications of these concepts and their linkages. Yet none of us exists outside concepts or theory when it comes to human rights and the social determinants of health. This was made clear when one of us experienced a health crisis in the lead up to this special issue. A long night in the emergency room highlights how power is mediated through variables like place, race, age, class, gender, ethnicity, and disability to determine health care, and indeed health: watching nurses brush off valid questions from an older male patient of color; hearing a white male patient interrupt his female doctor repeatedly. While