AMDJ 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 diaphragmatic breathing as a practical tool for understanding the relationship between breath, pain, and pain relief. Participants will also explore the physiological and emotional health benefits of singing as a collective, embodied practice of care.

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.

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 interrogates the relationship between enslavement and the development of gynecological science, examining how anti-Blackness shaped medical knowledge and practice. Through engagement with archival fragments and cultural texts such as Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums, participants will analyze the medical exploitation of Black communities and explore ways to reckon with and address this enduring legacy.

This session critically examines the history of gynecological science, focusing on the speculum, the legacy of J. Marion Sims, and the racialized dynamics of visibility and the medical gaze. Participants will analyze the anti-Black foundations of medical tools and imagine alternative designs and practices grounded in justice and care.

This session examines care in the afterlife of slavery by presenting Black feminist health initiatives, community birthing justice work and Black creative resistance. Participants will analyze how Black communities have built alternative infrastructures of care, such as through wellness pods, salons and barbershops, artistic production, and grassroots maternal health organizing, while confronting the legacy of medical exploitation.

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.