Medical Humanities and Arts Program About Us Curriculum Required Curriculum Elective Curriculum Research & Creative Projects Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Plexus Journals Funding Opportunities & Awards Publications Support and Partners Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Home Education Department Programs Medical Humanities and Arts Program Medical Humanities and Arts Program > Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Bridging the Health Equity Gap A collaborative initiative between UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz and UC San Francisco, the Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice: Mapping Inequity and Renewing the Social project addresses health disparities in institutions and policy. With the support of a three-year, $1.3 million UC research grant, the multicampus research team aims to advance health equity and structural transformation through research, curriculum development and training that is grounded in health humanities methodologies and theories. Project Objectives Mapping Inequity Conduct a social and institutional mapping of key issues in health equity and care support, with a focus on abolition medicine and disability for each participating campus across California. Collective Training Implement public and UC student collective training in multi-disciplinary data collection and analysis. Curriculum Development Develop eight-course modules in Health Humanities for undergraduate, graduate and medical students. Course modules will be based on each campus's social mappings and workshop training. Infrastructure & Pipeline Develop an infrastructure and pipeline for collaborative training of undergraduates, graduates, medical students and postdocs in the Health Humanities. Accessibility Disseminate project materials, training and findings through public engagement, online and in-person courses, journal and book publications, workshops and performance. Definitions, Methods & Conversations Learn more about our definitions, teaching methods in health humanities and generative interdisciplinary conversations. What is Abolition Medicine? The original Lancet article “Abolition Medicine” by Iwai, Khan, and DasGupta (2020) inspired our initial thinking about the concept. The authors draw on W.E.B. Dubois’ concept of “abolition democracy” which works to dismantle systems of oppression while focusing on building new systems that foster health and a more just society. From examining the social structures that support juridical and extrajuridical violence to integrating longitudinal anti-racist training and abolishing race-based medicine in medical schools and practice, the article calls for specific actions that abolition medicine can engage. Join us for conversations about reimagining a healthier and more just society. What is Disability Justice? Sins Invalid–a collective of queer, disabled women of color led by Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, and Stacey Milbern–developed the framework of disability justice that grounds our thinking for this project. Expanding on existing concepts of disability rights and disability studies, the disability justice framework seeks to secure equity and obtain rights for disabled people, taking special consideration of intersectionality and marginalization within an oppressive system. We also draw upon Dolmage and Lewiecki-Wilson (2010), who affirm that disability is a complex political and cultural effect of one’s interaction with an environment, not simply a medical condition to be eliminated. What is Social Mapping? Broadly defined, social mapping can be a visual mapping of social networks, living conditions, a mapping of connections that a community deems relevant to the places they work, live, and play. Our project is inspired by Cizek and Uricchio thinking about social mapping as creating “collective wisdom” about any research topic, from a place to an object to a question to a concept. As a collaborative process the work is an event, an ongoing relationship, and a set of artifacts that encourages the kind of multivocal metacommentary that is essential for understanding health equity. Stay tuned for methods, course content and videos. What is Health Equity? Since the mid 2010s, a broad interest in understanding and activism around health equity has expanded exponentially. Health People 2030 defines health equity as “the attainment of the highest level of health for all people. Achieving health equity requires valuing everyone equally with focused and ongoing societal efforts to address avoidable inequalities, historical and contemporary injustices, and the elimination of health and health care disparities.” Each campus’s social mapping will provide insight into the diverse and nuanced approaches to enacting and advocating for health equity. Multicampus Initiative Projects Learn more about each participating campus’s project and how it explores themes in Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice. UCI UC Irvine’s project engages abolition medicine and disability justice through innovative social mapping methods. UCI’s collective, Juliet McMullin, PhD, James Lee, PhD, and Candice Taylor Lucas, MD, MPH, reimagine care through examining clinicians' and community members' questions and practices that support new formations of disability, health, and illness outside the clinical gaze and in the context of larger social structures and environments. They also examine how attention to anti-Black, racist and gendered practices of exclusion are integrated into medical education. Stay tuned for training on anti-oppressive research methods and course content for undergraduate and medical education. Collaborating graduate and postdoctoral scholars include Nicholas Freeman, Deena Ayesh, Micayla Wilson and Roy Cherian. UCR UC Riverside’s collective, Fuson Wang, PhD, Carla Mazzio, PhD and Matthew King, PhD, draw on their expertise in English and religious studies. Their research engages a creatively anachronistic lens to recover longer histories of practices and cultural artifacts important to disability studies and abolition medicine. Through their Health Humanities and Disability Justice Lab, UCR is building an active scholarly community to collectively engage in interdisciplinary and intersectional conversations that address the gaps between the aims of the health humanities and disability studies and more conventional medical and institutional formations. View Professor Wang's public lecture videos on introductory topics in the health humanities. UCSC Megan Moodie, PhD, students and colleagues at UC Santa Cruz are developing “guides for survivance” and “stories for good medicine” that foster a consideration of the kinds of alter-notions of care that are emerging from disability communities. These notions are not overly invested in cure but in harm reduction and sustainable living. Part of UCSC’s social mapping includes an annotated bibliography on abolition medicine, focusing on disability in the prison system. Professor Moodie centers Cizek and Uricchio’s sense of mapping as “collective wisdom,” as they deepen our understanding of harm reduction and sustainable living. She is leading the development of two arts-based social mapping training videos that will be released in the winter of 2024. Collaborating graduate and postdoctoral scholars include Caitlin Flaws and Alisa Keesey. UCLA Helen Deutsch, PhD, and Rachel Lee, PhD, lead the UCLA collective. Building on their ongoing Oral Histories of Environmental Illness Project, their focus is on mapping and codifying humanistic research and teaching that approaches health and disability through a care-work lens ‘beyond the clinic,’ and that both explores and builds archives that witness struggles over care and its opposite — abandonment, neglect and slow (or rapid) extermination. The project focuses on creating transhistorical conversations between humanities scholars, historians, social scientists and contemporary theorists of health, sickness, cure, and care that draw upon archives as a rich resource for rethinking the present. In doing so, the collective can respond to questions regarding how projects that center care for ecosystemic and human health “beyond the clinic” revise what counts as medicine. And, how a social justice orientation offers points of convergence to effect material changes in clinical training. Professors Deutsch and Lee are faculty who were deeply involved in UCLA’s Education Initiative in Disability Studies, which fostered the development of a disability studies major. Collaborating graduate and postdoctoral scholars include Lesley Thulin and Natalia Duong. UCSF Brian Dolan, PhD, and students are collaborating on a mapping project that examines the professional alignments between law enforcement and medicine in addition to expanding our understanding of anti-Black, racist and gendered practices of exclusion that are integrated into education and medical education. Focusing specifically on medical experiments performed on incarcerated individuals by UCSF faculty in the 1960s and 1970s, the research examines whether the research was ethical (meeting informed consent standards) and/or resulted in any medical harm. The project builds on UCSF’s innovative REParations and Anti-Institutional Racism (REPAIR Project). The REPAIR Project is a three-year initiative designed to address anti-Black racism in science and medicine. Collaborating graduate and postdoctoral scholars include Reelaviolette “Ree” Botts-Ward. Community Advisory Board (CAB) Members The AMDJ Community Advisory Board provides guidance to the campus principal investigators on all aspects of the project. Genoa Brown – interdisciplinary, multifaceted artist, musician, teacher, business owner and resident in the well-known Tannery Artists’ community in Santa Cruz Lisa Fu – executive director, California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative Allison Hedge Coke – professor of creative writing at UCR Mimi Khúc – writer, scholar and teacher of things unwell. 2023 scholar/artist/activist in residence for FLOURISH: Community-Engaged Arts and Social Wellness at the University of Toronto Scarborough Aizita Magaña – director of planning and policy, as well as public partnerships, for the Immunization Program at Los Angeles County Department of Public Health Dylan Rodriguez – professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies and co-director of the Center for Ideas and Society at UCR Teaching Resources and More The resources section is a space of continual creativity, generosity and collective wisdom. As AMDJ projects and networks thrive, we will share social mappings, course materials, events and resources. Receive bi-annual newsletters and event notifications. Sign Up Now Course Supplements and Public Lectures Course Supplements Introduction to Medical and Health Humanities Humanities by Professor Fuson Wang. Professor Wang covers topics that range from documenting trauma and mediating addiction to ethics of disability. Upper-Division Literature and Disability by Professor Fuson Wang. There are 20 public lecture videos now available as resources for students and faculty interested in disability studies. Public Lectures Canary Knowledge: Chronic Fatigue, Chemical Sensitivities, and the Limits of Medicine. On November 17-18th, 2023, at Hershey Hall in UCLA, this two-day conference for the Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice initiative took place. You can view the live streams in the links below, and stay tuned for further resources! Day 1 | Day 2 Additional Resources In development Other UC projects aligned with Disability Justice and Abolition Medicine UC Davis “Enduring Conditions: A Disability, Illness, and Care Collaboratory” is led by Associate Professor Ryan Lee Cartwright in conjunction with Yale Professor Kalindi Vora. The project aims to develop a national network of scholars, culture workers and organizers who will bring disability justice approaches to the study of chronic illness. UC Berkeley Othering and Belonging Institute. The Disability Studies Cluster within the Othering and Belonging Insitute supports theoretical and applied research, policy analysis, teaching and community partnership on disability issues at local, national and global levels.