About the Curation for All: Education Tools for Health and Equity Project

Focus: Abolition Medicine & Disability Justice

Overview:

  • The Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Project conducts social and institutional mapping on key health equity issues through the lenses of disability justice and abolition medicine. We develop curricula and collective trainings, build health humanities pipelines for undergraduate, medical, and graduate students, and engage public audiences by sharing our findings and educational modules.

  • The University of California Multi-Campus Project: A three-year project funded by UC’s Office of the President as a Multi-Campus Research Award. Collaborators on the larger “Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice” award include UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz, and UCSF.

  • The project aims to initiate structural transformation across the UC system through community-engaged research, curriculum development, and training in the fields of health humanities and disability studies among undergraduate, graduate, and medical school students.

Why This Project Is Necessary:

About 1 in 4 incarcerated individuals report cognitive disabilities such as autism, Down syndrome, or learning disorders. (Prison Policy Initiative, n.d.)

People with disabilities are disproportionately represented throughout the criminal legal system, including in jails, prisons, probation, and parole.

People with disabilities are disproportionately represented throughout the criminal legal system, including in jails, prisons, probation, and parole.

While approximately 15% of the U.S. population has a disability (1), research estimates that between 40% and 66% of incarcerated people report at least one disability (2,3).

This over-representation reflects a long history of criminalizing, segregating, and institutionalizing disabled people.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so-called “Ugly Laws” criminalized the public presence of people with visible disabilities, framing disability as a public nuisance requiring removal (4). Institutionalization soon became the dominant response, and by 1955, state psychiatric hospitals housed over 550,000 people nationwide (5).

The expansion of institutionalization was closely tied to the American eugenics movement. In Buck v Bell (1927), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld compulsory sterilization of institutionalized people, legitimizing state control over disabled bodies (6). Between 1907 and the 1970s, more than 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized in the United States, with California responsible for roughly one-third of these procedures (7,8). These policies disproportionately targeted disabled people, immigrants, women, and communities of color.

Although mid-twentieth-century de-institutionalization reduced reliance on large psychiatric hospitals, it was not matched with sustained investment in community-based care. Psychiatric bed capacity declined from more than 550 beds per 100,000 people in 1955 to fewer than 50 per 100,000 by 2000 (5).

Simultaneously, federal mental health funding retrenchment in the early 1980s weakened community mental health systems (9). Scholars describe this shift as trans-institutionalization, the movement of disabled individuals from psychiatric hospitals into jails and prisons rather than adequately resourced community settings (10).

Addressing disability overrepresentation in the carceral system, therefore, requires structural transformation beyond the reform of isolated practices; it requires reimagining how institutions define health, safety, and care.

The Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Project brings together disability studies, health humanities, and abolitionist frameworks to reframe health equity research and pedagogy. We examine both the frictions and alignments between locally identified health equity challenges and community reimaginings of care.

Our work includes:

  • Social and institutional mapping of health equity issues across participating UC campuses and surrounding communities

  • Community-engaged research that centers lived experience and local knowledge

  • Collective trainings in multidisciplinary data collection and analysis

  • Development of eight Health Humanities course modules for undergraduate, graduate, and medical students

  • Pipeline-building for collaborative training across educational levels

  • Public dissemination through workshops, performances, publications, and community partnerships

Community participation is foundational to the project. We support advisory boards that include community members, offer paid internships for students, create research opportunities beyond the university, and amplify creative and scholarly work that reimagines care.

Together, we aim to initiate structural transformation across the UC system through community-engaged research, curriculum development, and interdisciplinary training in health humanities and disability studies.

The Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Project exists because health inequities are structural, not accidental. Disability has long been managed through exclusion and confinement rather than through collective care and access.

By centering disability justice and abolition medicine, we work to reimagine institutions, education, and healthcare systems that dismantle systemic racism and ableism, and build new infrastructures of care.

Our goal is not simply to study inequity, but to address the conditions that produce it and educate trainees to view disability from a non-ableist and non-carceral perspective.

Our Approach:

The Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice Project conducts social and institutional mapping of key health equity issues through the lenses of disability justice and abolition medicine. We develop curricula and collective trainings, build health humanities pipelines for undergraduate, medical, and graduate students, and engage public audiences by sharing our findings and educational modules.

This work responds to urgent and overlapping crises that reveal how deeply health inequities are embedded in institutional structures: racialized health disparities exposed by COVID-19, climate-related disasters, attacks on bodily autonomy, and punitive immigration and policing regimes.

Across these contexts, disability is not merely a medical category but a social construct where racism, ableism, gendered violence, and economic dispossession converge.

The University of California Multi-Campus Project

This three-year initiative is funded by the University of California Office of the President as a Multi-Campus Research Award ("Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice" Grant ID: M23PR5992).

Collaborating campuses include:

  • University of California, Irvine (UCI)

  • University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

  • University of California, Riverside (UCR)

  • University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC)

  • University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)