Projects

Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice

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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.

To learn more visit: https://medschool.uci.edu/research/clinical-departments/family-medicine/education-training/medical-humanities-and-arts/research-creative-projects/abolition-medicine-disability-justice

 

Abolition Medicine

While abolition medicine is a new term, it is grounded in a rich history of abolitionist movements against slavery, incarceration, and racist policing. Health Humanities have tied their questions to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1932 “abolition democracy” as a call for deepening the examination of the role of anti-Blackness and racism in medicine to break down the systems that support inequity, and to have a vision that builds up systems that support a healthier and more just society (Iwai, Khan, DasGupta 2020). As Obasogie and Zaret (2021) state, the process of identifying anti-Black racism in systems of law enforcement, policing and prisons, necessitates examining these systems’ alignment with other professions such as medicine (Washington 2008), and education. In working through abolition and abolition geography, Gilmore (2022) argues that “racism is produced through the legal, social and philosophical organization” of a place. Thus, place-making is central to abolition, is also “how we make freedom” (Gilmore 2022). The place-making of American Medical institutions has begun to shift with calls from the American Medical Association and the American Pediatrics Association to eliminate racebased medicine.

 

Disability Studies and Disability Justice

Disability studies emerged from the work of disabled activists who envisioned the field as being both critical as well as rooted in processes of reflexive revision and extension, the development of the “social model of disability”, and more refined focus on embodied ontologies. Disability is a complex political and cultural effect of one’s interaction with an environment, not simply a medical condition to be eliminated. Focusing on a social model and embodied ontologies requires a shift away from able-bodiedness and neurotypicality as normative standards that should be aspired to. It is a move toward expanding our understanding of bodyminds that can be allowed to flourish rather than be policed, a deeply intersectional approach to human difference, and resistance to all eugenic logics. This shift expands the need to elaborate the interactions among institutions, economies, and experiences that constrain or facilitate a reclaiming and reimagining of life.

 

Social Mapping

By “social mapping,” we refer to a participatory research process in which visual and embodied media – such as drawing, dance, or sound recording – are used, along with written accounts, to collectively express and elaborate local knowledge. Social mapping is a practice that develops collaboratively between participants as it happens, usually with gentle framing and guidance from a mapping project team or individual. It can be used to unfold what Katerina Cizek and William Uricchio et al call “collective wisdom” about any research topic, from a place to an object to a question to a concept. Key to this approach is the understanding of all participants as collaborators – not only in the process of information-generation, but also in its theorization. Social mapping as an event, an ongoing relationship, and a set of artifacts encourages the kind of multivocal metacommentary that is essential for real community-based research processes.

For resources on social mapping, see:

 

UCSC’s Role

Each campus focuses on a particular methodological approach to social mapping. Because of our particular campus strengths in these areas, UCSC is the site for the elaboration of and training in arts-based research methods.

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.

Events

 

Image taken in SF October 25, 2024.

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