Contribution long abstract:

Building on the interconnected mappings of disability justice, mutual aid, decolonial methodologies, abolitionist organizing, we taught an ethnic studies course on the intersections of state-sanctioned violence, medical ableism, and scientific racism to develop actionable commitments towards dismantling the medical industrial complex and reimagining practices through crip of color formations of collective liberation and community-based care beyond institutions.

We employed pedagogical strategies for practicing non-linear, reflexive, dialectical (un)learning of biomedicine as a colonial epistemology by organizing student-led discourse based on asynchronous lectures, reimagination workshops, and praxis-based collaborations. Content involved the study of biomedicine as a colonial project; medical gaze and biopower; healthcare as policing/care as violence; abolition as co-creation for building alternative health infrastructure. Methodologically, we prioritized patchwork ethnography, desire vs damage, low theory, unknowing, decolonial embodiment, disability as verb/mode of analysis, and the creation of abolition geographies through rupture/abolition as presence.

The course culminated in a final symposium- Caring Futurities: An Abolitionist Desire Patchwork which integrated embodied ways of disabled theorizing, praxis and temporalities; prioritizing desire, rest and uncertainty; and recognizing absences and contradictions as sources of knowledge within our collective experiences. This practice acknowledges the inherent complexities of crip subjectivities- offering a poetics of survival where our relationalities become the creative grounds for building alternative health models. It questions whether decolonizing biomedicine remains possible with colonized methodologies and how our embodied knowledge collectively exists in fragments and ruptures provides insights into colonial wounds and strategies to dismantle them towards abolition and building harm reductionist care infrastructures.