Understanding and Transforming the Medical Industrial Complex:
Part One
Fall Political Ed Series 2024
Series Overview
Genocidal violence is raging across the planet. The pandemic is not over. The elections and possible implementation of Project 2025 fastly approach. 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 the target of redoubled efforts for fascist mobilization and power-building.
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 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.
We must not allow current and rising fascism to dampen the magic and power of our imaginations. 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.
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.
Image description: a dark pink graphic of a fist raised in the air with a sense of strength and power.
Series Details
WHEN: September 26th - October 30th 2024. Five consecutive Thursdays and the last session will be on a Wednesday. 5p - 7p PT // 7p - 9p CT // 8p - 10p ET.
WHERE: Online via Zoom. Attend from anywhere!
COST: $195 - $295. 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!
“I have been working on Health accessibility for over 20 years and I live for days when I take classes that shake my mind as this class did.
To this day, I am still reading and exploring the list of resources they provided. The historical context and the different frameworks were key to wrapping my head around the topic.
I appreciate HJC so much, the fact that spaces like these exist for us to find each other and center us while centering others. Gracias por la traduccion y los captions, thanks for the captions and translations. It made me realize how many times while I navigate this system as an immigrant, I accommodate myself to others, and what a difference it is when I don't have to think about it nor transform myself.”
- Jacoba, Fall Political Ed Series 2023 Participant
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: 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 Panelists
Understanding and Transforming the Medical Industrial Complex culminates in a closing panel and collective dreamstorming session with these amazing panelists:
Walela is smiling into the camera, holding up a copy of their book. Bless the Blood.
Walela Nehanda is a nonbinary queer neurospicy Pisces and author of Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir released via Penguin Teen. Their work has appeared in TIME, The Cut, SELF, The Atlantic, Poetry Foundation, Nylon Mag, and more. Walela has been listed in Out Magazine’s Class of 2020 alongside 100 other “ripple-inducing and culture-shifting individuals” including Janelle Monae and Andre Leon Talley. They have also been awarded the 2020 Netflix and Adobe Crip Camp Fellowship, as well as Ford Foundation and Mellon’s 2024 Disability Futures Fellowship. Walela spends most of their time chronically watching rom coms, giving hot takes, curating hyper specific playlists, and being a longtime supporter of anti capitalist killer whales.
A Black trans person in a green, gold, and teal collarless button up short sleeve shirt looks directly at the camera. He wears a dangly earring in his right ear. He is not smiling. He has a curly afro and a fade. Behind him there is a microwave on a white countertop, and some framed pink postcards.
Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is a poet and writer from Piscataway, New Jersey. SLINGSHOT, his debut poetry collection, was published by Nightboat Books in 2019 and won the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. He is a Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow with Poetry Foundation and the inaugural Poet in Residence at Brooklyn Public Library. Cyrée is also the Social Media and Community Engagement Specialist at Sins Invalid.
A photo of a dark-skinned Black woman with long curly locs smiles and looks into the distance. She is wearing a green top, and is surrounded by red and white hanging flowers.
Amanda Hill is the co-director / mage of operations at Healing by Choice. Amanda is a conjurer of freedom by way of community organizing and energy work. She is a practicing abolitionist working to co-create just - and therefore safe - communities through individual and communal transformative processes. Amanda is a Reiki practitioner who incorporates emotional support and accessible tools such as plant medicines, sound healing, and breath into whole-person wellness.
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.
“The Spring Pol Ed Series was held with such loving care and provided a space to develop a much more comprehensive understanding of the medical industrial complex and the links between ecocide, genocide and eugenics. It has transformed the way I am thinking about my work and my personal life too. Sending my deepest gratitude, thanks and solidarity.”
- Stephanie, Spring Political Ed Series 2024 Participant
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!