Fall 2020

In Whose Hands? Reclaiming Care Work

This semester, our theme is “In Whose Hands?: Reclaiming Care Work.” We plan on discussing recent calls to abolish and radically reimagine the healthcare industrial complex for its role in white supremacy and oppression. We want to trace the history of recent efforts to reclaim care work for liberation through street medicine, mutual aid groups, radical birth work, and disability justice. Please see the calendar attached for dates and times.

Session 1

What Does Abolition Mean for Medicine?

September 22, 7 - 8 PM EST

Readings at the links below, or as PDFs in our Drive
A. Ruha Benjamin, “Race to the Future” (watch or read)https://www.ncwit.org/video/race-future-reimagining-default-settings-technology-and-society-ruha-benjamin-video-playback
B. Yoskiko Iwai, “Abolition Medicine” Lancethttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7365639/
C. Leslie Falk, “Black Abolitionist Doctors and Healers, 1810-1885”https://www.jstor.org/stable/44442951?seq=10#metadata_info_tab_contents
Recommended: Noor Chadha et al, “Toward the Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine” (Introduction)https://issuu.com/instituteforhealingandjustice/docs/toward_the_abolition_of_biological_race_in_medicin Optional: Braun et. al. "Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?" 2007https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1989738/
Vyas et. al. "Hidden in Plain Sight — Reconsidering the Use of Race Correction in Clinical Algorithms," 2020https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMms2004740

Session 2

Histories of Mutual Aid

October 6, 7 - 8 PM EST

Continuing our conversation on abolitionist physicians and healers, we'll begin by reading a chapter from Gretchen Long's Doctoring Freedom, "We Have Come to A Conclusion to Bind Ourselves Together: African American Associations and Medical Care,” about the efforts of Black fraternal orders and benevolent societies, and their imbrication with the state, in the decades leading up to Reconstruction.
We will also read two short contemporary articles, both of which grapple with the emergence of new mutual aid organizations in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Maya Aderath's "The United States Has a Long History of Mutual Aid Organizing," situates these recent developments within the context of unions and labor organizing, while Myriam Gurba's "Be About It: A History of Mutual Aid Has Prepared POC for This Moment," draws on the long history of "alternative care work" in minoritized communities, whether or not such projects were referred to as "mutual aid."
Lastly, we encourage you to take a look at "Get Well Soon," an art piece by Sam Lavigne, Tega Brain, with an introduction by Johanna Hedva. This archival piece creates pattern and repetition out of GoFundMe, a platform built upon a fully individualized, monetized approach to care--demonstrating both the staggering failures of our for-profit health care system, and the different scales at which we might start imagining new forms of aid and reciprocity.
Optional: For those who are interested, we've also linked some optional readings, including an article from this past spring about mutual aid work in New Haven, and selections from Russian anarchist scholar Peter Kropotkin's 1902 text, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which offers its own definition of the term.

Session 3

Street Healthcare

October 13, 7 - 8 PM EST

This week, we'll consider street medicine as a practice that provides care to those engaged in direct action, and in response to various forms of state violence and neglect.
To ground our conversation, we'll read:
A. Matthew Weinstein's "Street Medicine, Anarchy, and Sciencia Popular"
B. Katherine Koh's "Psychiatry on the Streets--Caring for Homeless Patients"
C. Sarah Brothers' "A good 'doctor' is hard to find: Assessing uncredentialed expertise in assisted injection"
Taken together, we hope these texts will help us to understand the different kinds of care that have been labeled "street medicine," and conversely, what kinds of practices have been excluded from that label. What does medicine look like when it leaves the hospital (or even the clinic), and what is the role of formally-trained medical practitioners in defining the practice of street medicine? Does street medicine help us to envision different relations of care more broadly?
We're also interested in the way that street medicine is circulating more broadly in this moment (especially in relation to the ideas of abolition medicine and mutual aid that we've discussed so far!). We've posted a street medic training by the Do No Harm Coalition geared toward health professionals that has garnered mainstream attention (skip around as you'd like), and if you're on Instagram, we encourage you to take a look at @frontlinemedics and @donoharmcoalition, or any other medic-adjacent accounts you may know of or follow.

Session 4

Birth Work

October 27, 7 - 8 PM EST

We'll read two short pieces by Loretta Ross, cofounder of the Reproductive Justice movement, and feminist scholar and activist Silvia Federici. Both texts were written to introduce anthologies for and about birth workers, and they examine the underpinnings of that work, as well as the pitfalls of romanticizing it or approaching it as exceptional. We've also included a recent article about the impact of COVID on Black women and birthing people's experiences of pregnancy, especially as media coverage has focused on an increased interest in home birth and midwifery among white women, while ignoring the ongoing crisis in Black maternal health.
As we've discussed throughout the fall, we hope to draw out the ways that broad ideologies and political commitments are enacted in daily practices and specific skills, and the ways in which these care providers envision the future of their own work.

Session 5

Disability Justice and Care

November 10, 7 - 8 PM EST

Thinking of you all during this long, difficult week and hoping that you're staying safe. Please join us this Tuesday, November 10th, from 7-8pm, for our final session of the semester, on Disability Justice and Collective Care. We opened our conversation at the start of the semester with the recent calls to abolish and reimagine the healthcare industrial complex, and throughout the fall we have grappled with different kinds of practices and politics (ranging from mutual aid networks to full-spectrum doula work) that offer their own definitions and visions of care. For this final session, we will turn our attention to disability justice, a framework developed in the early 2000s by disabled queer activists of color. Disability justice posits that ableism cannot be dismantled until it is understood within the context of co-existent systems of domination and exploitation, like capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy.
For our discussion, we'll be reading selections from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. This book intertwines the personal and the theoretical, and centers the embodied experience of chronic illness and disability. Piepzna-Samarasinha's work acknowledges not only the systems (including medicine) that neglect and harm disabled people, but also the structures and relationships that sustain marginalized people and communities. In so doing, these selections reframe what healing might look like, and who is best positioned to offer care--for all people and all bodies. Without sugarcoating the mundane, the painful, or the unjust, how do we build caring interactions into meaningful forms of collective healing? We hope that this conversation will help illuminate what makes care meaningful, and what visions of the future might emerge from these intimate and daily commitments.

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