Understanding and Transforming the Medical Industrial Complex:
Part One
Fall Political Ed Series 2023
Please note that this offering has passed
Our 2024 Spring Political Ed Series will begin March 14! The information on this page can offer a sense of how our Spring Series will be structured.
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Series Overview
The pandemic is not over. Our healthcare system is not merely broken; it is functioning as intended, to control, punish, and profit, not to heal. Rising ableism, the normalization of eugenics, and mounting attacks on bodily autonomy and reproductive rights define our times. All these are carried out by the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC). The Health Justice Commons believes we need to build a movement to disrupt and transform the Medical Industrial Complex and create alternatives to the current healthcare system for our futures to be possible. To do these we need to unite disabled, sick, neurodivergent, and chronically ill people, with healthcare workers, healers, and artists and activists from all movements and backgrounds.
Now more than ever, we need just healthcare that truly cares for our bodies, communities, and the planet. This can only come to be by understanding the Medical Industrial Complex’s white supremacist, anti-Black, carceral and ableist roots, its ongoing, oppressive workings, and building our communities’ capacity to create alternatives. HJC’s Fall Political Ed Series offers the learning and the community space to incubate this understanding and capacity while nurturing new connections to build our power. Are you ready to learn, be in community, and take action together? Please join other disabled people, healers, healthcare workers, med and nursing students, climate justice warriors and others working for justice.
Access info: All sessions will provide ASL and English <> Spanish interpretation as well as live closed captioning. All sessions will be recorded (with participant permission) for the use of participants.
Image description: a dark pink graphic of a fist raised in the air with a sense of strength and power.
Series Details
WHEN: 28th September, 2023 - 2nd November, 2023. Six consecutive Thursdays, 5p - 7p PT // 7p - 9p CT // 8p - 10p ET.
WHERE: Online via Zoom. Attend from anywhere!
COST: $185 - $285. Work Exchanges and scholarships are available! No one turned away for lack of funds. If you are able, please consider using the 'cover fees option' for your enrollment contribution, as FlipCause detracts credit card fees (like all online payment platforms). We are a small, disabled/crip, and member-run organization, so whatever you can give supports the participation of others with less access to funds. Thank you!!
WORK EXCHANGE/ SCHOLARSHIP: Full and partial scholarships are available! To request a full scholarship or a partial scholarship with a work exchange, please email us at HJCommonsContactUs@gmail.com. Please put: ‘Course Work Exchange or Scholarship’ in the subject line. Our work exchanges are flexible and tailored to your access needs. No one will be turned away for lack of funds!
ACCESS INFO: All sessions will provide ASL and English <> Spanish interpretation as well as live closed captioning. All sessions will be recorded (with participant permission) for the use of participants.
A dark pink graphic of a wheelchair user with their left fist raised in the air and a loudspeaker in their right hand.
What you’ll learn
An in-depth understanding of why we refer to the US and global healthcare system as the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC).
How we got here– a deep dive into the MIC’s hidden history in times of pandemic & climate chaos.
Medical Apartheid, the white supremacist roots and the formation of the MIC.
How the MIC is entangled with corporate polluters, big pharma, the military industrial complex and big agro like your worst bad hair day!
How the MIC is inherently carceral and overlaps and is complicit with the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), and how the MIC criminalizes asylum-seeking communities and immigrants, people seeking and providing reproductive healthcare, and youth and adults seeking and/or providing gender-affirming transgender healthcare.
How leading resistance movements such as Disability Justice, Intersex + Trans/Gender Justice challenge and disrupt the MIC and are essential for our collective work to transform the MIC and create alternatives led by those most impacted.
The 10 principles of Disability Justice as defined by our partner, Sins Invalid, and how to put them into practice in your life and work.
Experiential exercises to 'unlearn' and heal from the deceptive and ableist ways the MIC defines health and worth.
Ways forward to decolonize healthcare. Tools for disrupting and transforming the MIC that you can practice in your own life, work, and communities.
New & updated content for those who participated in prior sessions!
“Understanding and Transforming the MIC Part 1 provided me an opportunity to learn in community, expanded my understanding of health and disability justice and has empowered me to plant seeds of transformation in my local communities.”
- Sarah
Meet the series co-facilitators
Rise (they/them) is a queer, Black, disabled writer, poet, and artist living on Potowatomi Land (Chicago). They are a Trauma and Disability Justice facilitator. They are also a meditation facilitator and Birth / Abortion / Grief & Loss Care Worker. Rise is deeply invested in disability justice, access, centering wellness for Black queer folk, trauma education, and rest. When they are not doing the most, they are daydreaming and hanging with their support pup, Jelly Ferocious.
Image Description: Jimena Lucero, a queer brown Latinx woman with her hair parted down the middle; she is wearing large dangly earrings, a black off the shoulder top, and has her face slightly turned away from the camera.
Jimena Lucero (she / her) is a writer, actor, & cultural worker living on Lenape / Canarsie land in New York City. She has several years of experience in publishing, arts, and non-profit organizations. Jimena was a 2019-2020 Emerge-Surface-Be fellow at the Poetry Project. Her work engages with decolonial feminism, trans liberation, and disability justice. She spends her free time reading, making music, and taking photographs of flowers she sees on her walks.
Dustin Gibson (he/him) joined PeoplesHub in May of 2020 to support disabled movement workers and implement a framework of disability justice. He most recently served as the Director of Access, Disability and Language Justice. He comes from an organizing tradition of Independent Living with commitments to deinstitutionalization and youth self-determination. He’s a peer support trainer and member of several abolitionist organizations.
Image Description: A sweet-faced white Jewish nonbinary trans person with short hair, sitting in a wooden chair in a luscious garden space with California poppies in the foreground. They are wearing a gray argyle sweater, gray pants and silvery sneakers, with a furry little light brown dog on their lap.
Mordecai Cohen Ettinger (they / them) has nearly 30 years experience as a multi-sector social justice activist and organizer, holistic healer, radical scholar, and educator. Mordecai co-founded the TGI Justice Project, served as an Interim Co-Director at Justice Now, and as Interim Executive Director at Caduceus Outreach Services, a radical mental health organization. They are adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Lean more about their background here.
Meet the Guest Presenter
Patty is smiling into the camera against a shiny, sequined pink background.
Patty Berne is the Co-Founder, Executive and Artistic Director of Sins Invalid. They are also widely recognized and celebrated as a primary architect of the framework of Disability Justice, a framework which was developed by Disabled BIPOC in response to the exclusionary, racist, and single-issue approach of the U.S. disability rights movement that failed to center the experiences of multiply-oppressed disabled people and the root causes of ableism and disability oppression. Patty will be joining us for session 6, the final and culminating session of the series.
Image description: a dark pink graphic of a wheelchair user holding a loud speaker in one hand with their other hand raised in the air and clenched into a fist.
What you’ll receive
An extensive syllabus containing up to date and historical, intersectional and multi-media resources collected over 10 years to equip you with an expansive understanding of the MIC.
Video and audio recordings of each session with embedded live captions in English and ASL.
Live community discussion space for participants to process and reflect together on what they’ve learned, and to share further resources.
Curated readings on topics presented to further your understanding of the MIC.
An English transcript for each session. Spanish transcripts are available upon request.
“Although it is absolutely necessary, deepening an understanding of the harms our medical system routinely carries out can bring up feelings of overwhelm / helplessness as well as the shame of realizing you’re part of the Medical Industrial Complex.
The space provided by this series has been invaluable. The HJC has done the beautiful work of creating community that fosters a fight for change while allowing folks to feel both safe and heard. I look forward to future trainings!”
- Rae, Nurse Practitioner
FAQ
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This series is designed to deliver extensive information and resources on the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) for anyone interested in developing an in-depth understanding of its history, how it functions, its entanglements with other industries, such as Big Pharma, corporate polluters, and the prison system, and paths forward for transformation and creating alternatives.
This includes, but is not limited to, all of us impacted by the MIC – disabled, sick, neurodivergent and chronically ill people – and those of us who work within the MIC, adjacent to it, or are healers and healthcare workers such as anyone that is an Activist / Organizer, Therapist, Social Worker, Psychologist, Psychiatrist, Mental Health Worker/ Practitioner, Healer, Curandera/x, Energy Worker, Acupuncturist, Herbalist, Midwife, Ayurvedic Doctor, Nurse, Nurse Practitioner, Physician, Physician's Assistant, Medical Student.
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All the sessions are recorded, so attending live is not necessary!
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Full and partial scholarships are available! To request a full scholarship or a partial scholarship with a work exchange, please email us at HJCommonsContactUs@gmail.com. Please put: ‘Course Work Exchange or Scholarship’ in the subject line. Our work exchanges are flexible and tailored to your access needs. No one will be turned away for lack of funds!
Health Justice Commons’ work centers three main approaches:
An intersectional social justice lens with a deep grounding in and commitment to Disability and Climate Justice
An abolitionist mindset to healthcare and healing
A peoples’ science lens. Learn more about people’s science here.