Repair in Times of Reaction: Reparative Humanities Practices for Antiracist Medical Education

Carlos Martinez
Latin American & Latino Studies
UC Santa Cruz

Aimee Medeiros
Humanities and Social Sciences
UC San Francisco

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Participants

In recent years, the heightened visibility of police violence and the disparate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have brought increased attention to the inequalities and organized economies of violence impacting racialized communities in the United States. The emergence of mass movements seeking to address racialized oppression has led to an examination of the historical and enduring harms within the “caring” fields of medicine, public health, and social work, among others. Our working group seeks to build upon this momentum by gathering scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplines across the UC system to cultivate and amplify what we describe as “reparative humanities practices” in response to histories of racialized violence in health and medicine. Inspired by the concept of reparative justice, reparative humanities practices aim to place humanistic methodologies in the service of efforts seeking to repair past harms and end the perpetuation of injustice by centering the knowledge of historically impacted communities. This working group lays the foundation for establishing a UC-wide network of scholars and educators dedicated to drawing upon humanistic and social science methods to bolster the ongoing yet contested movement for addressing legacies of racism in health and medicine.

Image credit: UC Berkeley Bancroft Library.