Introductory Modules

This lesson introduces the core principles of abolition medicine and disability justice while inviting critical reflection on how medical education and clinical practice can reproduce anti-Black, racist, gendered, and ableist exclusions. Participants will explore community- and clinician-led approaches that reimagine care beyond the limits of the clinical gaze.

This lesson engages disability justice and abolition medicine theory to support critical analysis of the medical field and its institutional practices. Participants will use zine-making as a creative method for reflection, storytelling, and social critique.

This lesson introduces the concept of the disability archive as both an institutional record and a personal, embodied repository of knowledge. Drawing on Robin Katz’s “Ableism, Archives, and the Work Ahead,” students will critically examine the limits of traditional archives and collaboratively imagine alternative, justice-centered approaches to documenting disability history and experience.

This session explores medical gaslighting and the varied forms it takes, both direct and indirect, while examining how ableism intersects with racism, sexism, and other structural inequalities in clinical care. Grounded in disability justice, participants will reflect on their own experiences and imagine alternative approaches to providing care that move beyond dismissal and harm.

Drawing on case studies and the work of scholars, artists, and activists, the module examines the structures and mechanisms that position Black life within distinct conditions of violation. Participants develop a vocabulary to identify how antiblackness operates across interpersonal, institutional, material, and intergenerational contexts, while distinguishing it from racism to sharpen analysis of harm and intervention.

This lesson will teach students how health equity is defined and practiced across institutional and community contexts. Using social mapping data, participants will compare institutional frameworks with community narratives, identify key conceptual and implementation differences, and analyze the power dynamics that shape health equity in practice.

This session introduces eugenics as a coordinated framework that operated across multiple institutions. Students will examine how legal, medical, scientific, and cultural systems collectively produced and reinforced ideas about “fitness,” “unfitness,” and social value.

This lesson explores incarceration as a structural factor that shapes health outcomes and functional capacity. Students will examine how the conditions of confinement influence healthcare delivery, medical decision-making, and the practice of informed consent within carceral environments.

This session explores how disability is represented, interpreted, and theorized through early modern literary and archival texts. Through close reading and discussion of works, such as Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and William Hay’s “Deformity: An Essay, “ participants will examine how concepts of beauty, deformity, embodiment, and disability have evolved, while considering how archival materials both shape and challenge contemporary disability theory and identity.

This session explores illness narratives, disability, and communities of care through a close reading of Audre Lorde’s “The Cancer Journals” and Frances Burney’s account of her mastectomy. Participants will examine how illness intersects with gender, bodily autonomy, institutional medicine, and systemic violence, while reflecting on empathy, storytelling, and collective care across historical and contemporary contexts.