Health Equity and Disability Justice

Description

This course offers theoretical frameworks and practical tools that patients, care-givers, and healthcare workers can mobilize to advocate for health equity, culturally-safe care, and disability justice. Using case studies from Canadian healthcare settings and centering de-colonial and intersectional knowledge and practices of Black, Indigenous and racialized writers, the course explores: - medical racism, ableism and heteropatriarchy as the foundations of settler-colonial healthcare systems - the limits and dangers of cultural competency as a model of care - the politics of dependency care and health equity in our homes - ecological violence and environmental racism as health risks - the politics of complaint (who gets to complain and what happens to a complaint in an institution) Using the frameworks of disability justice and intersectionality, the course offers moral vocabularies, practices and methods that can be used to affirm the right of Black, Indigenous and racialized people to culturally-safe, compassionate, accessible and dignifying care not just in hospitals, but also, within their homes and communities. We will experiment with: ​ - Writing, reading, and interpreting letters to patient relations - Creating meaningful scripts and dialogues for expressing and affirming a patient's right to consent - Using qualitative methods to interpret and represent personal and collective experiences of medical violence and trauma - Applying various provincial and federal human rights legislation to demand accessible and safe care - Mapping institutional hierarchies and negotiation strategies within healthcare settings - Using cross-cultural and "non-western" models of care to create more holistic representations of a patient's care and access needs. **Enrollment ends SEP 20th or when class is full.** About the Instructor: Sarah Munawar (She/Her) is a visiting professor at the Elizabeth Rockwell Center on Ethics and Leadership (EDR) at the University of Houston. Having earned a PhD in political science at the University of British Columbia, as a researcher and educator, she advocates for health equity, culturally-safe care and disability justice for disabled and chronically ill Muslims, as well as, Muslim families situated within relations of dependency care.