Retrospective of Programme #1
Healthcare Workers for Health Justice
A selection of reflections in the forms of quotes from the programme organisers and participants.
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Araceli Camargo is a neuroscientist and health justice advocate working at Centric Lab. Araceli is a descendant of the original Peoples of Turtle Island.
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There were two main moments that stayed with me. The first was the Palestinian doctors who asked the question “what happens when the doctors die?” This created further questions
What happens when key and life sustaining infrastructure is destroyed? How do we reorganise ourselves to meet this phenomena? What do we need to fully be able to understand this phenomenon? What are the knowledges and tools we need to develop to help us move through this era? What are the Ancestral Knowledges that we need to sustain and evolve to meet the health demands of this era to ensure the future of generations to come.
The other contemplation was in the lecture from Zapotec womxn in Chiapas, who have organised themselves to create a health clinic. It provided the opportunity to understand that healthcare can happen in multiple ways and in fact it needs multiple imaginations. This clinic offers an example of what can be done from the bottom up, an opportunity to create pathways of health justice here in the UK.
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Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne (she/her) is a junior doctor, organiser and researcher focussed on environmental justice, abolition, anti-colonialism and reimagining health systems. She loves doing grassroots mutual aid work and trying to develop liberatory healing skills. Rhiannon is of Welsh and Armenian-Palestinian heritage and finds lots of joy in connecting through food and music.
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As a facilitator, this programme opened up new avenues of political consciousness and healing for myself. Rather than trying to deliver knowledge, the purpose of the facilitators was to design activities, connections and speakers that supported the growth and nourishment of the participants. This flexibility, openness and relationality allowed me to also learn from them and feel the beauty of seeing frameworks resonate with the participants. I felt seen, loved and supported myself.
The knowledge came alive through relationships, through spaces where people felt solidarity and love and connection, and were able to bring in their own knowledge and connect to it themselves too. Knowledge is only useful in constant dialogue, movement and relationship with people - the knowledge has to be alive by people holding it, and this programme showed me how knowledge can be a form of community power building. What gave people the ability to absorb the knowledge was time and community, as well as the space to apply and feel the concepts and frameworks.
I had almost forgotten how healing it feels, to find people who care as deeply as you do, and to explore the things you care about together, bringing your authentic self to that space. I felt so grateful to be able to collectively create that space together.
It feels so great to be part of building something that feels deep, sustainable and radical. It feels good to build a space that is our own, not campaigning against something or trying to fight within other spaces, but nourishing our own space and power.
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Amiteshwar Singh (he/him) is an organiser and student doctor in the UK, with roots within Amritsar, Panjab. To implement his vision for health justice that is rooted within decolonial praxis, he centres his work around the intersections of ecological justice, racial justice and a just economic transition. Through re-imagining health, Amit finds great joy in committing himself to a community-led radical, joyful future.
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A really valuable learning this programme gave me was the experience of being part of a community, albeit small, as it was in the process of being collectively built and nurtured. Together, we explored questions and themes around kinship, dignity, trust and vulnerability through our shared practice.
Another moment that deeply resonated with me was a quote from Abdirahim Hassan, founder of Coffee Afrik, who said, ‘Justice is what love looks like in public’. Coffee Afrik embodies the philosophy of hood futurism to envision the concept of ‘poor and thriving’ through acts of reclamation, such as projects that reclaim ownership of and repaint land in ‘the hood’ as a form of resistance. This led me to question how we can reclaim the right to nourish, and be nourished, by the land upon which we exist.
How can, and is, this concept be applied to other communities, including those beyond the borders of the UK? How can the reclamation of physical land lead us towards reclaiming cultural narratives and histories as well as forming new ones in response to those that have been erased?
