Understanding and Transforming the Medical Industrial Complex
Fall Political Ed Series 2025
Series Overview
This Fall marks both an unprecedentedly challenging political moment and a time of continued mourning for Disability Justice communities in the wake of the transition of beloved leader and visionary, Patty Berne.
To support our communities to make sense of this moment and to envision, and take collective action to resist authoritarianism, Health Justice Commons is offering a special Political Education Series, Patty Taught Us: Dreaming Disability Justice Futures.
This series features an in-depth workshop and panel. You can attend both events or just one.
Workshop: Patty Lives Through Us: The Medical Industrial Complex, Ableism and Eugenics.
Overview: This workshop breaks down the basics of the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) and offers timely analysis of how the MIC is being used to further authoritarian agendas while amplifying and normalizing ableism, eugenics, and genocide. Patty Berne’s invaluable teachings on ableism, eugenics and the MIC will be uplifted.
Co-facilitators: Jimena Lucero and Mordecai Cohen Ettinger.
Panel: Patty Taught Us: Lessons For Our Times.
Overview: This panel features Disability Justice leaders and dreamers: Maria Palacios, Lateef McLeod, Talila A. Lewis, and Alice Wong reflecting on the relevance of Patty’s teachings amid our conditions and how to best move forward together.
Our healthcare system is not merely broken; it is functioning as intended, to control, punish, and profit, not to heal. In fact, the denial and criminalization of reproductive and trans healthcare is an increasingly successful means of far-right mobilization and power-building.
Rising ableism and global ecocide, the normalization of eugenics, mounting attacks on bodily autonomy and reproductive rights define our current political reality. 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 this we need to unite people like you who are determined to work for collective liberation: disabled, sick, neurodivergent, and chronically ill people, with healthcare workers, healers, and artists and activists from all movements and backgrounds. The work and legacy of Patty Berne can serve as a powerful compass on this path for collective liberation that was the heart of their life’s labor.
HJC’s Fall Political Ed Series, Patty Taught Us Edition 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.
Image description: a dark pink graphic of a fist raised in the air with a sense of strength and power.
Series Details
WHEN: October 23rd and October 30th 2024. Three consecutive Thursdays at 5p - 7p PT // 7p - 9p CT // 8p - 10p ET.
WHERE: Online via Zoom. Attend from anywhere!
COST: $0 - $200. Pay As You Can! 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 BIPOC-led organization. Whatever you can give supports the participation of others with less access to funds and sustains our crucial work. Thank you!!
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– an overview of 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 in ways which conceal and perpetuate climate crisis, ecocide and rising disablement.
How the MIC is being used by national and global authoritarian regimes to entrench their stronghold of society.
How our work and the work of our cross-sector movements have been guided and influenced by the Disability Justice visionary, Patty Berne.
New & updated content for those who participated in prior sessions!
“Disability Justice is a vision and practice of a yet-to-be, a map that we create with our ancestors and our great grandchildren onward, in the width and depth of our multiplicities and histories, a movement towards a world in which every body and mind is known as beautiful.”
- Disability Justice - a working draft by Patty Berne — Sins Invalid
Image description: a dark pink graphic of a fist raised in the air with a sense of strength and power.
What you’ll receive
An extensive syllabus & study guide 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.
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 was horrible to think of, it was really important for me to understand that for some of us our bodies are the site of oppression. Our bodies are contested territory. Understanding that allowed me to develop this framework of disability justice”
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.
to understand and critique the MIC historically and currently.