Understanding and Transforming the Medical Industrial Complex: Rooting in Collective Care
Fall Political Education Series 2026
October 8th - 29th, Weekly on Thursdays
With Community Action Labs on Tuesdays!
4-6pm PT | 6-8 pm CT | 7-9pm ET
Sliding Scale: $150 - $350 (scholarships available). Payment information is below!
No one 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. Haitian Creole and other language interpretation available upon request.
The series will be accessible on THINKIFIC! After you complete the enrollment form, you will receive an invite to join our THINKIFIC space and submit payment.
Series Overview
As we approach the mid-term elections, what has been true continues to be true: our healthcare system is not merely broken — it is functioning as intended, to control, punish, and profit, not to heal.
The pace of people losing access to and the criminalization of healthcare has escalated profoundly and in life-threatening ways for many targeted communities in this period.
These harmful conditions have been amplified by HR 1, which has enacted $1 trillion cuts to Medicaid. At least 15 million people are projected to lose access to healthcare. States like Nevada get 25% of their budget from Medicaid. Telehealth services and other access to essential care has already been catastrophically cut for too many.
In March 2026, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security issued its 3rd red flag warning for US trans communities.
A survey of healthcare workers by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the Migrant Clinicians Network found that 84% of healthcare workers reported significant or moderate decreases in patient visits following immigration enforcement actions.
Most recently, the Department of Justice is aiming to rescind the Olmstead decision, which could result in the forced institutionalization or confinement of disabled people.
We must not allow current conditions to dampen the transformative power of our imaginations. Now more than ever, we need just healthcare that truly cares for our bodies, communities, and the planet. We deserve nothing less than freedom and collective liberation.
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 education series offers the learning and community space to incubate this understanding and capacity while nurturing new connections to build the healthcare system we truly deserve, rooted in collective care.
Are you ready to learn, be in community, and take action together? Please join other disabled people, healers, healthcare workers, medical and nursing students, climate justice warriors and others working for justice.
Health Justice Commons’ work centers three main approaches to understand and critique the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) historically and currently:
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.
Image Description: A red graphic of a wheelchair user with their left fist raised in the air and a loudspeaker in their right hand.
Series Details
Image Description: Artwork by haley brown. Black screenprinting and black-and-white photographs on a white background. The central text says, “The future is disabled.” Above this text is a grid of photographs and illustrations. The first photograph in the upper left corner is zoomed in on a handmade poster held by a protester that says, “Hands off our CDB.” Below this photograph is an illustration of a snail. What follows to the right of these images are illustrations of a black circle in the center of a grey gradient, an 8-point star or splat, and a flowering plant. Below the central text is another grid of photographs and illustrations. In the first column on the left are illustrations of an eyeball with a diagonal white line struck through the center of the iris, a flowering plant, and a 7-point star or splat. The next column contains an illustration of the earth as seen from space and a photograph with Brad Lomax and Judy Heumann – two disability rights activists – on a stage before a crowd at a 1970s rally. Both are wheelchair users. The third column has a 1988 photograph from the Deaf President Now! movement in which Gallaudet students led efforts to advocate for appointing the university’s first Deaf president. In the black-and-white photograph, protesters wave colorful flags while doing a banner drop from the balcony of the US Capitol. The banner says, “Deaf President Now!” Below this photograph are illustrations of half of a wheelchair wheel and a snail.
WHEN: Starts Thursday, October 8th and runs through October 29th (four consecutive Thursdays). The time is the same for each Thursday session: 4-6pm PT | 6-8pm CT | 7-9pm ET.
Community Action Labs are on Tuesdays: October 13th, 20th, and 27th. The sessions on October 13th and 20th will be from at 4-5:30pm PT | 6-7:30pm CT | 7-8:30pm ET. The session on the 27th will be from 4-6pm PT | 6-8pm CT | 7-9pm ET.
WHERE: Online via Zoom. Attend from anywhere!
COST: $150 - $350 (partial and full scholarships are available). No one turned away for lack of funds. For a list of payment options, please see below. After you complete the enrollment form, you will receive an invite to join our THINKIFIC learning platform and submit payment.
SCHOLARSHIP: Full and partial scholarships are available based on participant needs. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. You can request a scholarship on the enrollment form here!
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. Haitian Creole and other language interpretation available upon request.
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“I loved the safe and supportive space created for health care practitioners, health justice advocates, activists, community leaders and like-minded folks from all over the world. The workshops were meaningful because it allowed folks to come together to learn, share and be in community with one another, especially during these heavy times we are experiencing — in the US with the kidnappings of our Black and Brown communities, the ongoing genocide in Palestine and violent wars in other parts of the world.
I appreciated how the team ensured that the language and access needs of participants were addressed during the beginning of each workshop to allow for total engagement and participation. I also enjoyed the conversations, lessons learned and ways to take collective action to stand up for our communities and center the intersectionality of disability and climate justice in our day to day work.”
— Patty, 2026 Spring Political Education Series participant
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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 with analysis of our current conditions.
Medical Apartheid and eugenics, 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 chemical corporations.
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 movements such as Disability Justice, Intersex + Trans/Gender Justice and are essential for our collective work to transform the MIC and create community-led alternatives.
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.
Defining collective care and healthcare that truly heals on our own terms and learning 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!
Image Description: A red graphic of three fists raised in the air with a sense of strength and power.
Facilitators
Image Description: Rise, a Black disabled femme, is pictured from the chest up in a black hoodie and a leopard print headwrap. Jelly, a black cockapoo, is sitting on their forearm in a teal hoodie. They are both looking forward into the camera.
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.
Image Description: The Health Justice Commons logo.
Mordecai Cohen Ettinger (they/them) has over 30 years experience as a multi-sector social justice organizer, healer, and educator. They are the Founding Director of Health Justice Commons. Mordecai also serves as Senior Adjunct Lecturer at the California Institute of Integral Studies where they have taught in the Department of Undergraduate Studies since 2014.
Along with their over three decades of movement work, Mordecai is a somatic practitioner with a background in Generative Somatics, Somatic Experiencing, and Cranial Sacral Therapy. As a survivor of radiation poisoning and medical torture, Mordecai’s commitment to healing and disability justice is soul work as well as life’s work for our collective liberation.
Image Description: A Latina woman with fair skin, brown hair, and brown eyes smiles at the camera. She is wearing pink headphones and a dark pink sweater.
María R. Palacios (she/her) is a poet, author, spoken word performer, motivational speaker, social change advocate, disability rights activist, mentor, and workshop facilitator whose work has appeared on numerous multi-media publications, conferences, and live events over the last thirty-five years. María's work centers around illustrating the power and beauty of disabled people without negating the truths surrounding the ableism and oppression faced by disabled communities around the world.
María’s work includes various genres of art ranging from written collections of rebellious poetic story telling, to passionate spoken word pieces and sarcastic illustrations of disability themed cartoons aimed at calling out ableism.
María R. Palacios is one of the Capitol Crawlers from the iconic march of 1990 that passed the ADA. Her advocacy, since then, has taken many forms eventually morphing into her current voice – a voice unafraid of sharing the survival stories of the disabled people the world wants to forget. María has been a performer with Sins Invalid since 2007 and is currently their Spanish Language Community Organizer.
In the artistic world, María R. Palacios is known as the Goddess on Wheels.
Image Description: Ly Xīnzhèn, an East Asian person in their thirties with short black hair and glasses, is smiling from an armchair. They have a tuxedo cat on their lap with his tongue sticking out and are resting a hand with a turquoise ring on the cat's side. They are wearing a red top with a design of leaping and stretching cats, a handmade ceramic watermelon pin made by Katayoun Amjadi, and a necklace with a mezuzah in the design of a little home made by Sarah Day Arts. They are sitting in front of shelves with books, framed pictures, baskets, and a pothos plant. Photo by Linus Berggren.
Ly Xīnzhèn M. Zhǎngsūn Brown (they/them) is an internationally recognized advocate, organizer, attorney, strategist, policy expert, and writer focused on interpersonal and state violence against disabled people at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, language, and nation. They are founding executive director of The Autistic People of Color Fund, a project of collective care, redistributive justice, and mutual aid, and they have been creating Disability Justice Wisdom Tarot since 2020.
Ly Xīnzhèn has taught classes on feminist disability studies, disability critical race theory, disability law and policy, and neurodiversity for multiple universities over the past ten years. Ly Xīnzhèn is also the Disability Justice Committee representative to the national executive committee at the National Lawyers Guild. They find joy and home in making and sharing food with their many beloveds, kin, and comrades.
Image Description: Justice, a Black blind woman with her hair styled in 2-strand twists, smiles joyfully for the camera wearing black sunglasses and a cream hooded sweater.
Justice Shorter (she/her) is a skilled organizer / facilitator, Disability Justice amplifier and senior advisor on issues at the intersection of race, disability, gender, health, climate, and crises. She is a national expert on disability inclusive disaster protections, emergency management and humanitarian crises/conflicts.
As a curator and composer, she has orchestrated immersive training experiences for thousands of participants worldwide. As a strategist and dreamscaper, she has worked with countless organizations to meaningfully and measurably enhance their equity efforts.
Justice is the author of the renowned Disaster Justice Guidebook for People of Color with Disabilities. In 2023, Justice officially launched her own consulting firm, SeededGround. In community with disabled creatives/contributors from around the world, SeededGround has produced several powerful projects across movement spaces such as EMprints as well as Portraits & Portals.
Guest Panelists
Image Description: Image of Germán, a Puerto Rican man with long curly hair sitting in his wheelchair on a city sidewalk, wearing a denim button-down shirt with The Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies logo on it.
Germán Parodi (he/él) is an activist, advocate, and first responder whose journey as a disabled Puertorican embodies the spirit of "Nothing About Us Without Us." As Co-Executive Director of The Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies — the nation's Disability and Disaster Hub — he fights for the rights and inclusion of disabled people before, during, and after disasters in Turtle Island and worldwide.
Image Description: Image of Gabriel, a Mexican person with short curly dark hair sitting against a white background, wearing a pearl earring, light pink button-down shirt, and a black jacket.
Gabriel San Emeterio, LMSW (they/elle), is a queer, immigrant, and disabled educator, researcher, community organizer, and activist dedicated to furthering disability justice and intersectional public health. Their work integrates critical, participatory, and liberatory frameworks to address health inequities, especially affecting LGBTQIA+ communities, immigrants, people living with HIV, and those affected by ME/CFS, Long COVID, and other complex chronic conditions. Gabriel co-founded Strategies for High Impact and Long COVID Justice, and leads the HIV Complexities Project.
Ly Xīnzhèn M. Zhǎngsūn Brown, one of our brilliant facilitators, will also be a guest panelist!
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“Thank you so much for making the sessions accessible for those who weren't able to attend! Sadly, a lot of stuff happened to me during May that I couldn't attend the remaining sessions. I really loved how you really practiced compassion with one another here — even when one of us chatted on Signal that they're unsure if they can continue attending because they were homeless. I learned a lot more than just the lectures from y'all. :) For free too! I can never be thankful enough.”
— Reich, 2026 Spring Political Education Series participant
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What You’ll Receive
An extensive syllabus containing up to date and historical, intersectional and multimedia resources collected over 10 years to equip you with an expansive understanding of the MIC.
Video and audio recordings in English and Spanish 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.
Participate in 3 Community Action Labs that provide a more interactive and intimate space to connect, reflect, ask questions, discuss, and dreamstorm with the community which has come together to participate in the series!
Payment Information
Image Description: A white, red, and pink graphic illustrating suggested payment tiers for the HJC Fall Political Education Series. The first column is labeled ‘Scholarships,’ with tiers of $0, $10, $25, $50, and $100. The second column is labeled “Sliding Scale,’ with tiers of $150, $200, $250, $300, $350. And the third column is labeled ‘Full / Solidarity,’ with tiers of $395, $450, $500.
Our payment options are offered in three categories: Scholarships (Partial or Full), Sliding Scale, and Full / Solidarity. Payment options are provided in the image above. No one will be turned away for lack of funds!
You can request a full or partial scholarship via the enrollment form and a member of the HJC Team will reach out to you. After you submit the enrollment form, we'll follow-up with you via email with a link to submit payment and join our THINKIFIC learning space. Thank you!
Frequently Asked Questions
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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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No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Please indicate on the enrollment form that you need a partial or full scholarship. We will work with you to ensure your needs are met and you can participate!
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“I am really grateful for the experience! I have told other members of my community about it, and hope to come back for the fall session!”
— 2026 Spring Political Education Series participant