Announcing the 2025 Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Research Fellows

The Humanities Institute (THI) is thrilled to announce the 2025 Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Research fellows. This graduate fellowship supports ongoing research on health inequality in the state of California and beyond. 

A total of eight graduate fellows from a range of fields – including Sociology, Literature, History and Philosophy – will receive $5,000 for their research projects and join the ongoing work of the Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice (AMDJ) Multi-Campus Research Project Initiative, which also includes faculty and grad students from UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Riverside, and UC San Francisco. AMDJ aims to map key nodes – as well as gaps – within our communities where the provision of health services intersects with carcerality, disability, and other forms of social inequality. Through the development of research projects, training materials, and mentoring relationships across the five campuses, AMDJ also seeks to address pipeline issues within medicine and medical humanities itself.

This year’s projects demonstrate many different intellectual commitments and interests, from investigating the care labor of mental health practitioners serving youth in Los Angeles to conducting oral histories of trans residents in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, once an epicenter for trans community care. Other projects examine the intersection of abolition and the philosophy of psychiatry, “care webs” as expressions of abolitionist care, the ideology of “health” in medicine and medical writing, harm reduction perspectives among Latine college students, abortion care clinics across the U.S.-Mexico border, and healing cuisine as a form of alternative care in Santa Cruz.

UCSC-PI Megan Moodie (Anthropology) and GSR Mario Gomez-Zamora (LALS) will be convening the fellows, along with any other interested faculty and grad students, in late April. Contact Professor Moodie if you are interested (mmoodie@ucsc.edu).

See all THI fellows on our website and make sure to check back for student profiles in the months ahead. Congratulations to the new fellows!

(From top left to right: Betania Santos, Katherine Johnson-Rogers, Jenny Ham, Ines Pedrosa e Melo; from bottom left to right: Nathaniel Burke, Elliot Richardson, Betsy Centeno, Nicole Sarmiento)

Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Research Fellows

Maria Betania Santos (Sociology) – “Youth Mental Health Crisis and the Politics of Care.”

Nathaniel Burke (Philosophy) – “Philosophical Approaches to Institutional Abolition: Psychiatry”

Katherine Johnson-Rogers (Literature) – “Life Writing and the Conjuncture of US Medical Practice”

Elliot Richardson (History) – “Trans Medicine and Carceral Power in San Francisco’s Tenderloin”

Jenny Ham (History of Consciousness) – “California Cohousing Care Webs”

Betsy Centeno (Social Psychology) – “Harm Reduction Perspectives on Substance Use and Sexual Health Education Among Latine/x Students”

Ines Pedrosa e Melo (Film & Digital Media) – “Tracing Multisensory Histories of Informal Reproductive Care Networks in California”

Nicole Sarmiento (Film & Digital Media) – “Counter-mapping towards care, fugitivity and abundance”

This fellowship is made possible by The Humanities Institute & The UCOP Multicampus Research Initiative Program