About

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PURPOSE

Healing Histories Project’s work for political change and transformation as abolitionist healers and health practitioners is rooted in our practices of collective knowledge and memory. We use memory as a political and cultural tool to reclaim and redirect the purpose of “history,” which is often used as a weapon to control and disappear our memories of resistance. Our practice of collectively writing history seeks instead to understand the cellular memory of generational trauma – from historical moments of war, colonization, slavery, and genocide – as well as uplift legacies of resistance. We created a timeline to remember stories of care and experiences of the Medical Industrial Complex not as “data” but as what we call “memory points.” Memory points are moments in time that map a blueprint of the wider patterns and changes in our lives. We honor that everything on the timeline is about real people living in real time, shaped by the care of our lands, bodies, and spirits. We recognize that every life named or referred to on this timeline was lived with far more complexity than a single memory point can allow. We’ve wrestled with how to write histories that treat moments in the past not as objects or “information” but as memories that deserve dignity and respect.

When the co-founders of Healing Histories Project began to study with other movement organizers to share each other’s work on collective care and dismantling the Medical Industrial Complex, we found ourselves uncovering stories that helped us to understand the links between the original wound of colonization, the current conditions of healthcare, and its future within the United States. This gave us guardrails to explore larger themes such as eugenics, white supremacy, population control, transphobia, the intersection of carceral and medical systems, the ownership of biological life, and the separation of care from community, land, and spirituality. With the same deliberation as a study group, we began to make decisions for how to build out the political educational tool of a timeline as a practice of gathering stories and memory. We are rooted in using multiple lenses and frameworks, including Indigenous sovereignty, Black radical tradition, Healing Justice, global feminist inquiry, and abolition, and exploring how these stories impact each other. We honor many ways of knowing and being as integral to how we value systems of care and knowledge. We have struggled with how we can be principled in gathering history by having intention with:

• how we ask permission from community and share information with community; 
• how we research as a political and cultural practice;
• gathering history as a site of cultural memory and liberatory practice from our own respective experiences and strategies;
• a commitment to finding places of convergence and political alignment around values of healing justice, disability justice, racial justice, Indigenous sovereignty, environmental justice, economic justice, and collective care.

VALUES

The process of creating the timeline was rooted in a Healing Justice framework and shaped by collectively-held values around care, slowness, and willingness to struggle with difficult questions. We valued the time it takes to hold heavy histories and memories, slowing down and extending deadlines whenever it was necessary to stay in integrity with the process. We encouraged each other to bring awareness to the somatic, emotional, and cultural responses that arose from bringing our presence and attention to these stories. The immense scope of the project required care in pacing ourselves with the amount of content we took in. Whenever possible, we tried to move only as quickly as would allow us to honor and feel the impacts of the real lived experiences we were reading and writing about.

We strove to practice accountability by engaging honestly with each other around the content and pushing back on each other as needed. One example of this commitment to principled struggle was that we spent many months wrestling with the process of categorization in order to create our timeline “filters.” This process brought up many challenging political questions around the colonial and eugenic legacies of sorting and categorization, as well as how research is often presented as “data” in a way that can be extractive and objectify or victimize the very people we are trying to lift up as survivors and resistors. We struggled with how to filter the material without flattening real stories or trying to separate them into restrictive and colonial categories. Our list of filters continues to expand and evolve alongside these political conversations.

This project was also rooted in radical acts of trust - trust in each other and our collective process, and trust that we ourselves can be “the ones we have been waiting for” (June Jordan, 1978). Academia often constrains our imaginations about who can produce and share legitimate knowledge – through this project, we practiced the courage to claim and gather content and put it out into the world from our own voices as independent scholars, organizers, archivists, cultural workers, practitioners, and healers. This kind of collaborative writing and research is deeply radical in that it challenges the framework of individual “ownership” and intellectual “property.” Everything that we wrote for the timeline was a blending of many voices - by the time we launched the timeline, we had completely lost track of who had originally written which content. We believe that this process of rigor and combing through the same material over and over again to integrate different voices and perspectives makes it much richer and stronger. The timeline is a beautiful weaving of our collective experiences, studies, and embodied practices of research.

LEADERSHIP ROLES

This timeline represents over ten years plus of study, research, practice, and thought that organically evolved out of a study group with community historians, archivists and researchers, health and healing practitioners, community organizers, and designers rooted in abolition. The initial concept and research for the timeline was initiated by Cara Page, Susan Raffo, and Anjali Taneja, after working together at the US Social Forum in Detroit in 2010 at the Healing Justice practice space and the Healing Justice Liberation Peoples' Movement Assembly (PMA). The PMA was a strategic gathering of healers, health care workers, organizers and cultural workers who came together to look at the conditions of our people and the opportunities for transformation. The vision for the timeline began at the People’s Movement Assembly. After the Forum, Cara, Raffo, and Anjali decided to keep studying with other thought partners to learn together and to continue building the timeline as the focus of their learning.

 In 2019, the analog timeline on the MIC became too big to tote around to trainings and community meetings, so they decided to digitize the timeline to reach more people and be a tool for building political strategy and an ecosystem of liberatory care. This decision was immediately followed by the onset of COVID-19, when many more people began wrestling with health inequity in the United States. Some of these inequities included: lack of PPE access, prioritization of able-bodied people for hospital equipment such as ventilators, and the way that Big Pharma, and other healthcare companies used a moment of crisis to capitalize on profit. Witnessing these atrocities and so many others revealed the depth of health inequities across the system, from prisons to community clinics. This led the team to pivot towards gathering memory points for a separate COVID-19 timeline in real time to track the layers of state contradictions and community organizing, while simultaneously continuing to work towards a larger timeline of the Medical Industrial Complex (which would ultimately combine).

TIMELINE AS A POLITICAL EDUCATIONAL TOOL

Our MIC timeline was shaped by two timelines we had previously created. The first was a timeline designed by Susan Raffo in partnership with local practitioners in the Twin Cities on the racist histories of birthwork, called “Birthing Racial Justice.” The second was the Eugenics & Social Movements” timeline co-curated by Cara Page (when she was repping Committee on Women, Population & the Environment) and Patty Berne (who was repping the Center for Genetics & Society) with Emery Wright and Stephanie Guilloud of Project South. The first versions of the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) timeline we created were analog, with large sheets of paper that were rolled out whenever we were presenting on Healing Justice, collective care, and safety. This is what we used as a visual way to show the political context and cultural stories of care, healing, and health in the U.S.

In the early part of our research, we met with Barnard College librarians and archivists Martha Tenney and Alicia Peaker. They understood library science as a feminist and political tool for organizing, in particular, using historical “facts” as a strategy for building shared knowledge and power. They encouraged us to think carefully about the design of our platform and how it could engage people to use the timeline as a political educational tool, emphasizing that our platform should align with our values of accessible language, honoring memory and not objectifying stories. Through their guidance, we became clear that we wanted the timeline to be a curated experience of shared learning and knowledge, not an academic repository or top-down platform. We didn’t want people to have to use complex technology to engage with the timeline in such a way that it became inaccessible.

We realized we wanted to complicate the history of healthcare and the industry of medicine by showing the stories of colonization and slavery that led to understandings of disease in a colonialist and white supremacist, eugenic context. We also wanted to honor the role of traditional healers and birth workers as integral to care for survivors of slavery and colonization outside of institutions built on Western-based models of care that seek to erase memories of other healing traditions. This led to our name for the timeline, ‘Stories of Care & Control’. Over time, we became an intergenerational, multiracial team of memory keepers and archivists: students, community health practitioners and healers, organizers, and grassroots researchers across regions and medical fields.

BUILDING THE PROJECT TEAM

We wanted to expand our reach and begin to understand our communications strategy for the timeline. In November 2021, the team hired Luce Lincoln to design and implement  communication strategies for HHP, including the timeline. Luce has played a key role in curating the public face of the project - orchestrating the newsletter, social media, and project website and coordinating the timeline launch and outreach. Since the timeline launch, Luce has been instrumental in producing the webinars and workbook that accompany the timeline.

In early 2022, the team put out a call for someone with “experience visualizing content or an online cultural, educational, and/or social justice digital project.” We recognized our research needed grounding in our political frameworks and theory of change in a more coordinated way in order to convey our research lens more clearly. The team hired RC Cotterman as Digital Project Manager to coordinate the final stages of the digital timeline production and provide “connective tissue” between the different components of the project. RC’s work included hiring and supervising multiple research interns and contractors, liaising with the web design/production team, BlueShift, who built the timeline website, and overseeing the content review and editing process. This role proved essential in holding and moving the larger vision forward, as well as in facilitating communication between the many collaborators working on the project. RC worked closely with the project co-leads as they steered the project priorities,  conducted much of the research, and wrote the Curated Stories. Using political events and cultural themes, these stories provide deeper political analysis and context.

RESEARCH TEAM

Our research team began with undergraduate student interns hired in partnership with the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), who worked with us to research particular topics and themes. We reached out to people working both inside and outside of medical/clinical fields and academia. We also worked with community advocates and organizers interested in telling the story of health and healing practitioners in the U.S. as a map of resistance to the dominant system of care. All of these researchers had various kinds of healing, medical, and/or organizing praxis beyond the project. We worked to cultivate greater political alignment among our research team by speaking openly about our political frameworks in interviews with prospective candidates, ensuring that the people we hired were in alignment, and then orienting them to the values and vision of the project after they came on board. We also developed and shared an extensive style guide with our full team to make our language choices more explicit and connect the terminology we used to our shared values. The Digital Project Manager developed the style guide and other guidelines around research, laying out clear steps to the research process so that new researchers could enter the fold over time.

Additional contractors and researchers who worked on the timeline included Ocean Suh, who stewarded the process of developing the filters that allow timeline users to narrow and focus the scope of the memory points. Ocean also conducted research and meticulously archived our source links. Our undergraduate and graduate student interns (Nicola Douglas, Brianna Suslovic, Sangeetha Ravichandran, Defne Demirer, Alise Mackey, Sophie Kreitzberg) supported the timeline by adding missing data or sources to incomplete areas of research, identifying images to accompany the memory points, cleaning and formatting data, and researching new areas of content. Many of these interns had been trained in academic models of research and were entering into a community-led research process for the first time. In their evaluations of their experience, many of our researchers commented on how much they appreciated being part of a process that embodied an ethic of care, collaboration, and political rigor.

RESEARCH PROCESS

• Stories from BIPOC, immigrant, queer and trans, disabled, and poor and working-class communities; especially Black and Indigenous stories in acknowledgment of the original wounds of enslavement and colonization on this continent. 
• Stories from an abolitionist perspective, which respond to harm inside of carceral institutions (prisons, psychiatric hospitals, detention centers, etc.) while also showing how reforms have failed to lessen the violence within these institutions.
• Intersectionality - stories that show how different forms of oppression and liberation are connected; forms of resistance led by communities living at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression.
• Stories that have been overlooked in mainstream narratives about the MIC, which have tended to focus on the pharmaceutical industry and corporate profit-seeking etc. We instead center histories of eugenics, scientific racism, ableism, and intersections between the MIC, surveillance, and the carceral state.
• Resistance - ways in which people are working both inside and outside of the MIC to create radical care alternatives rooted in dignity, individual and collective autonomy, and consent. Movements and frameworks we highlight include Healing Justice, Disability Justice, Transformative Justice, Environmental Justice, Reproductive Justice, and Liberatory Harm Reduction, among others.
  Stories that show how cultural traditions have held onto their healing practices despite targeting and attack.

The majority of research material came from digitally available secondary sources, but we also drew upon some primary sources, print books, and our own lived experiences and expertise. Throughout the process, we wrestled with whether to include oral narratives and stories, but determined that this was beyond our capacity. In vetting secondary sources, we developed guidelines for our research team on what sources to avoid (such as explicitly anti-science sources or others that didn’t align with our ethics or priorities).

As we were honing in on the collective voice that we wanted to come through the timeline, we identified a balance between providing clear political analysis and allowing timeline content to speak for itself in an unbiased way. We determined that we wanted our analysis to primarily be shared in our decisions for which material to include, the filters we chose, and the accompanying interpretive material in the curated stories and informational pages on the website. For the memory points themselves, we attempted to minimize our “editorial voice” as much as possible, describing events plainly and allowing our audience to draw their own conclusions about their significance. We wanted the timeline to feel usable in multiple contexts. While we didn’t attempt to conceal our political values and priorities, we wanted folks to be able to tell their own stories using our material as a foundation, so that it could be used as a political education and/or organizing tool. We also strove to steer away from overly-instructive language as much as possible in the memory points, delivering information and encouraging people to engage with and interpret it through active conversation with their own colleagues, collaborators, and communities. This is where we coined the term “memory points” that grounded us in not seeing the data as objects but as collective memories of many communities impacted by a system of healthcare rooted in larger systems of capitalism, colonization, and eugenics.

EDITING & REVIEW PROCESS

During the later stages of the process, we underwent a review process to bring in external expertise and widen the perspectives represented in our timeline. The first part of this process was an extensive medical review. Because our team did not include people working within the biomedical system at that point, we hired multiple contractors with clinical experience to review all of the medical content (Tanvi Avasthi, Sharon Lehil, Aarti Bhatt, and Lillann Paine). They flagged and corrected areas where we had inaccurately portrayed clinical procedures or research, and helped us ensure our citations were from respected sources within the medical field. We also sought out medical reviewers who shared an aligned political analysis and understood the Healing Justice framework.

Our research methodology and review process were also deeply influenced by relationships with leaders and organizations within our wider movement ecosystem. This included consultation, review, and leadership from folks working in the Disability Justice movement, Indigenous healers and organizers, Reproductive Justice organizers, queer and trans health leaders, and more. We hired external reviewers to look over and provide feedback on selected content where they have expertise from professional and lived experience, including Rita Valenti, an abolitionist and retired nurse and organizer in Atlanta, GA, and Ericka Dixon and Sebastian Maragaret, co-Directors from the Disability Project at the Transgender Law Center. These community consultations focused especially on areas where we felt like this expertise wasn’t sufficiently represented on our internal team.

During our process of editing and review, we developed an extensive style guide that helped our full team come into alignment around language choices and made the political values beneath those choices explicit. We sometimes chose to use multiple terms interchangeably (such as Latine and Latinx) in an effort to acknowledge the diversity of perspectives within communities and the ever-evolving political struggles over language. We developed this style guide in conversation with our collaborators, who supported us in finding language that uplifted the dignity of the people whose stories were shared on the timeline and reflected how these different communities understand and represent themselves.

WEBSITE CURATION & DESIGN

In exploring different possibilities for collaboration with digital designers for the timeline, we sought out a team that had both the technical capacities to build what we were looking for and a sense of political and values alignment with HHP. We hired the web development company BlueShift and one of the design contractors they work with, Cassie Tangney, to help us visualize the data in a digital format. In designing the website, we were committed to accessibility, and we appreciated BlueShift’s high standards for ensuring compatibility with assistive technologies, keyboard navigation, accessible color contrast levels, etc. We wanted the website to be visually appealing, easy to use, and evocative of our theory of change and understanding of the connections between land, bodies, spirits, and economies. We chose natural colors and visual designs that could flow between rivers and blood vessels, galaxies and cells, topography and fingerprints. We had hoped to find a way to display that material that was non-linear in alignment with pre-/de-colonial frameworks of time, but we ultimately decided to go with a linear timeline format due to limitations in budget and technical capacity. Throughout the process, we worked to maintain our vision and values while also ensuring that the material made it out into the world, rather than being blocked by purism or perfectionism.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

What we are calling “history” is made up of moments and memories that deeply impact our lives. At HHP, as we look to understand the woven threads that created the moment we live in, we also understand that our actions today will shape the world that our descendants know. This methodology document is one of the ways that we show our process; it is where we share our intentions and commitment. The timeline will continue to expand and deepen, and we are grateful to those who made the timeline possible, as well as those who will join us for its next iteration.