Medical education as liberatory praxis: Experiences from the UCLA "structural racism and health equity" curriculum

Abstract

This paper describes the origins and initial experiences of an innovative student-led, faculty-supported, and community-accountable ongoing experiment in structurally competent anti-racist medical training: the UCLA Structural Racism and Health Equity (SRHE) Curricular Thread. As critical locations of social reproduction for the medical profession and the broader medical-industrial complex, medical schools present opportunities for disrupting professional identities that further settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, and extractive abandonment, and for instead constructing a liberatory health praxis. Scholars have proposed integrating structural analysis into medical training to examine harmful aspects of clinical medicine and medical epistemology that become naturalized and inscribed through professionalization. Coalitions of trainees, faculty, health workers, and community organizers have also long participated in productive disruptions of medical education as usual through creative intra- and extra-institutional pedagogical efforts that reimagine the profession and call attention to medical institutions’ responsibility towards racial and social justice. Drawing on these genealogies, SRHE provides medical education that (1) deconstructs hidden structures that produce and sustain health inequities and (2) imagines liberatory futures for the medical profession that challenge community/clinical binaries and notions of “medical expertise” itself.