Understanding and Transforming the Medical Industrial Complex Part 2: Climate and Disability Justice Edition
Spring Political Ed Series 2025
Series Overview
Join us for the Health Justice Commons' Spring Series starting March 13th, 2025!
This series focuses on the intersections of ableism, medical racism, and environmental racism and their entanglements with the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC). It explores the historic and ongoing connections of big pharma with corporate polluters and legacies of eugenics and genocide around the globe. The series also examines how the MIC itself underpins, perpetuates, and profits from the climate crisis and profound, ongoing violence and harm. You do not have to have taken Part 1 to enroll in and benefit from Part 2, we’ll provide resources to catch you up!
The Medical Industrial Complex has historically been wrought from and has ongoingly been used to deploy far right agendas. With the Trump campaign having spent $215 million on trans hate ads alone, and Project 2025 calling for the Center of Disease Control to enact extensive surveillance and detailed reporting on anyone who received an abortion, and to rename the Department of Health and Human Services to the “Department of Life,” our communities are facing an unprecedented advance of authoritarianism and gendered medical ableism that further weaponizes so-called healthcare.
Therefore, now, as never before, is a time to dream boldly, build our communities’ capacity, summon new coalitions, and create the alternatives we need.
HJC’s Spring Pol Ed Series brings together disabled communities and leaders with healthcare workers, healers, birth workers, med and nursing students, climate justice organizers, artists, academics, and compassionate dreamers to learn together, build power and resistance, get new concepts and tools, and be better prepared for action. If this resonates for you, please join us. Our doors and hearts are open and you are essential to our communities in these times!
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: Starts Thursday March 13th and runs through April 17th (Six Consecutive Thursdays). The time is the same for each Thursday session: 5p - 7p PST | 7p - 9p CST | 8p - 10p EST.
WHERE: Online via Zoom. Attend from anywhere!
COST: $195 - $295, work exchanges and scholarships 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!!!
INFO ON FACILITATORS: This series will be co-facilitated by a team of amazing co-facilitators including Rise, Jimena Lucero and Mordecai Cohen Ettinger of the Health Justice Commons.
WORK EXCHANGE/ SCHOLARSHIP: Work exchanges and partial to full scholarships are available based on participant needs. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. You can request a work exchange or scholarship on the enrollment form here!
ACCESS INFO: All sessions will provide ASL, interpretation between English and Spanish, and live closed captioning. All sessions will be recorded (with participant permission) for the use of participants.
OPTIONAL ACTION LABS: You can participate in up to three Action Labs! Tuesday evenings, 5 - 6p PT / 7 - 8p CT / 8 - 9 ET. Dates: 3/18, 4/1 and 4/15. These optional sessions will be times for solidarity, sharing, reflecting on series learning and exploring potential strategies - no actions or extra work are required or expected!
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
The settler-colonialist roots of the MIC and its ongoing complicity with genocide, eugenics, intersectional oppression and racialized/ gendered medical ableism, all of which continue to be entangled with and reinforce settler-colonialist violence.
The role of medical ableism, racialized ableism, environmental racism and classism in intensifying COVID-19 pandemic denialism.
The toxicity, medical ableism, and violence of prisons and other institutions of confinement connected to the MIC.
Environmental Racism: From Gaza, Palestine to Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, to Indigenous Tribal Land, Bhopal, India, and Flint, MI.
Exploring settler-colonialist ecocide, environmental toxicology and the neurobiology of intergenerational harm.
Contested Bodies/ Contested Illnesses: What they reveal about the MIC’s complicity with corporate polluters, climate crisis and disease causation.
Contested toxins: the hidden history of big pharma and its entanglement with big agro, the global war machine, imperialism, eugenics and genocide.
Ways forward to decolonize healthcare. Tools for disrupting and transforming the MIC, and incubating alternatives that you can practice in your own life, work, and communities including the Disability Justice framework and 10 principles.
"I am so grateful for the opportunity to take this series. I learned so much from the series - both through the content of the curriculum and by participating in real time in a space that centered accessibility.
Being in a space like that reminds me how inaccessible most activist spaces are and the big difference in the felt sense of being in a disability justice-centered space. It affirmed me as a person to be in a disabled-centric space.
This in-depth unpacking of the harm of the medical-industrial complex is critical work for anyone who wants a more just and equitable society. Thank you for offering this to the community.”
- Betsy, former Spring Series participant.
Meet the series co-facilitators
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: 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: Climate and Disability Justice Edition culminates in a closing panel and collective reflection session with these amazing panelists:
Photo of Jen staring at the camera and holding her beading medallion (not in frame). Jen is wearing a black tee, black glasses, hir hair is parted to the side, and large earrings.
Jen Deerinwater is a bisexual, Two-Spirit, multiply-disabled, citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and an award-winning journalist and organizer who covers the myriad of issues hir communities face with an intersectional lens. Jen is the founding executive director of Crushing Colonialism and a 2019 New Economies Reporting Project and a 2020 Disability Futures fellow.
Jen is a contributor to Truthout and hir work has been featured in a wide range of publications, including Bitch, Rewire.News, and New Now Next. Jen’s writing is included in the anthologies Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty First Century, We Organize to Change Everything: Fighting for Abortion Access and Reproductive Justice, Property Will Cost Us the Earth: Direct Action and the Future of the Global Climate Movement, and Crip Authorship: Disability as Method. Jen is also hard at work on two books, including Sacred and Subversive (Jessica Kingsley Publishers), a 2SLGTBTQIA+ anthology on faith and spirituality.
A petite Black woman smiles up at the camera. She is wearing black and her dark wavy hair is pulled back from her face.
Yomi Sachiko Young is a mama, beloved daughter, disability justice dreamer and social justice evangelist/organizer driven by the promise of liberation for all bodyminds. Originally from the Bronx, NY, Yomi makes physical home on unceded Ohlone land aka Oakland, CA and political home at Shelterwood Collective, a 900-acre Queer, Black, Indigenous and Disabled-led forest and cultural space based on unceded Southern Pomo and Kashia territory, above what is now called the Russian River. Yomi is a former print journalist who once served as Executive Director of the landmark Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, CA, the nation's founding advocacy organization run by and for people with disabilities. She now works in healthcare leading a civil rights compliance efforts for a large, integrated health system.
Photo of Tré standing against a blank red backdrop, looking into the camera, with his hands in the pockets of his jackets. Tré is wearing a green jacket with a black hood and a black cap.
Tré Velasquez is a Xicano organizer, artist, poet and comedian. He was raised by working class parents in Ajo, Arizona- a copper mining town heavily impacted by environmental racism and militarization of the colonial US/Mexico border. He comes from a background of 20 years in community organizing including transformative justice, youth organizing, climate justice and healing justice. He is currently a co-director and collective member of Movement Generation. Tré loves his family, making people laugh, cooking, growing food/medicines and being outside.
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 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.
The opportunity to participate in up to three Action Labs. These optional sessions will be times for solidarity, sharing, reflecting on series learning and exploring potential strategies - no actions or extra work are required or expected!
"HJC's course on understanding the Medical Industrial Complex not only opened my eyes to how many parts of our lives are truly intertwined within it, but also helped me see how much of it is rooted in historical oppression and the legacies of hateful systems we still live under.
It's given me a look into the basics of what Disability Justice is all about and how we can use the principles as a lens to see through in which to combat against the MIC.
This course has fueled my drive to learn more of the ways racism, eugenics, intersexism, colonialism, and misogyny (just to name a few) are currently manifesting in our healthcare today.
I intend to use this new knowledge to honor the many people who have died and suffered because of it."
- Jayden, former Spring Series 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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Work exchanges and partial to full scholarships are available based on participant needs. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. You can request a work exchange or scholarship on the enrollment form linked below!