Public Health Pulse Podcast, Season 2 Episode 1
Channel: The League of Revolutionaries for a New America
Date: 14/11/2023

Public Health Pulse Podcast Season 2 Episode 1: Cara Page and Edgar Rivera Colón, Hosted By Rita Valenti 

Welcome to the Public Health Pulse podcast series!  This is an exciting exploration of Health & Healing Justice conducted through seven 30-minute interviews with leaders from science, student, medical, public health, and healing justice communities across the country. Initiated and produced by the Crescent City Media Group out of New Orleans, interviewees dynamically analyze the failed response to the pandemic and mechanisms of the Medical Industrial Complex. Leaning on the intersections of abolition, reproductive justice, bodily autonomy, and scientific integrity, the mandate and responsibility for politicization of healthcare and healing workers is revealed:  Not as allies but as a part of our big class tasked with revolutionary transformation. Interviewees are brutally honest in critiquing the response to the pandemic. Yet all are loving and passionate about building a vision for healing the public’s health: A vision that’s free from capitalism and its crushing pillars of white supremacy, patriarchy, and ableism.

Note: The podcast was filmed in the summer of 2023 and does not address the genocide in Gaza and/or the unending U.S. funding for war, destruction and an extension of the border wall.

Interview #1, Cara Page
The inequitable response to the COVID-19 pandemic has heaped more trauma on working class communities especially Black, Indigenous, Latinex, Immigrant and disability & elderly communities.  Today’s interview with Cara Page will discuss the definitions, origins, and timeliness of a Healing Justice framework toward the creation of an abolitionist, equitable and transformative system of health and healing justice for our society. 

Cara Page is a Black Queer Feminist cultural memory worker and organizer.  For 30 years, she has organized with LGBTQI+/Black, Indigenous & People of Color Liberation movements in the U.S. & Global South at the intersections of racial, gender & economic justice, healing justice and transformative justice. She is co-founder of the Healing Histories Project, a network of abolitionist healers/health practitioners and more who are engaged in building solidarity to interrupt harmful systems of care in the Medical Industrial Complex. Cara is co-author with Erica Woodland of Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care and Safety, now available!

Book Link:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/710523/healing-justice-lineages-by-cara-page/

Interview #2, Edgar Rivera Colón, PhD
The pandemic laid bare the structural inequities that exist in our society. Settler colonialism, genocide and slavery have shaped the health outcomes and the existing dearth of quality and universal public health infrastructures especially in Puerto Rico and the U.S. South.  Edgar will discuss this landscape from his working-class roots and intellectual work and illuminate a vision for another way forward.  

Edgar Rivera Colón, PhD is a medical anthropologist at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine and a Course Director at Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine Certificate of Professional Achievement program.  He teaches courses on health justice and the history of racism in medicine.  He co-authored the textbook, The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine.  He recently published with Patrick Hebert, “Slow Burn, Humid Pitch: Cultivating Care While Livin’ La COVIDa Loca” and hosts the ‘Karl Marx Ate My Field Notes’ podcast, on politics and spirituality.  

Link:
https://nacla.org/news/2020/08/07/slow-burn-humid-pitch

Host: Rita Valenti is a Registered Nurse, retired from Grady Health Systems.  She is deeply engaged with health and healing justice strategies as a focus of her political work.  She holds membership in many diverse healthcare organizations and healing justice collectives including, the People’s CDC, Healthcare-NOW, Georgia Physicians for a National Health Program, Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective and the Healthcare Committee of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America.  She is a co-founder of Project South, a former Georgia State Legislator and frequent speaker on the embedded harms in corporate private healthcare, while promoting the necessity for free, universal, equitable, comprehensive and trusted healthcare for all.          

Links: 
https://peoplescdc.org
https://leagueofrevolutionaries.org

Produced by:
Rita Valenti

Executive Produced by:
Crescent City Media Group
https://www.the-mediagroup.us

Supported by: 
Project South 
https://projectsouth.org