Health, Movements, and Power-building

Feb. 1, 2022
4:00PM - 5:30PM
Online
Open to the Public

Please join us on Tuesday, February 1, 2022, 4pm-5:30pm ET for our third event in a year-long co-sponsored series between the LPE Project and the Global Health Justice Partnership on health, social reproduction, and the crisis of care: “Reimagining the Political Economy of Care.” Register for the event here.

Healthcare is an extraordinary complex bureaucracy, and in the US enormous authority is given to healthcare providers and professionals. What does that mean for community mobilization around health? Can health serve as a site of organizing and social justice work ? Are there particular ways of organizing around health that do – and don’t – build community power? The Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the Grey Panthers all campaigned around health issues, and in different ways explored how health organizing might be a vehicle to build power. Arguing that capitalism directly equates one’s ability to produce labor to one’s value in society, these organizations grappled with the question of organizing the non-working poor and the non-working elderly such that they would come to be valued and would gain access to political power. The scholars on this panel will discuss the different power-building and organizing strategies of the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the Grey Panthers, and how they worked both inside and outside the systems of traditional medicine to make health central to their political activism. 

Panelists:

Maya Sandler

Johanna Fernandez

Lucie White

moderated by Gregg Gonsalves

Sponsoring Organization(s)

Global Health Justice Partnership 
Law and Political Economy Project