Health Justice Summit;
building hope
LIVE IN LONDON
17th November
VIRTUAL
18th November
What do we mean by Health Justice?
Our bodies are not a static state, they are elastic, evolving and ever adapting to the environments we inhabit and the experience we have. This means that our health is also not a fixed state and shaped by the world around us, so what does this mean for a person that is exposed to air pollution, lives in a home with mould, or has to do shift work? It means a body that is never rested or given the resources it needs to recover. This can manifest in chronic fatigue, metabolic changes, endocrine disruptions, and so on. The next question is who are the people who experience this? Why them? What are the structural systems at play?
Health justice provides us with a framework that addresses the aforementioned questions and provides tools and infrastructure to abolish the deliberate and orchestrated marginalisations, discriminations, and injustices. To achieve health justice, we must understand it as ecological, meaning we have to change our relation to Land, heal our habitats from contamination, have access to life sustaining infrastructure such as homes that can address our changing planetary systems, create new food systems, access nourishing Air, Soil, and Water, and heal our social relations. This is not just for us, this is for beings on Earth. There is no justice without the liberation of our Lands and more-than-human Kin.
This work requires various tools; imaginations anchored in Kinship, culture that teaches us about Kinship, emancipatory scholarship that provides us with a justice lens, lore that entwines us with the Land, adequate civic infrastructure, and communal healing practices. The health justice movement is composed of those working and building on healing from the very many angles that determine health, creating multiple ways of knowing, being, and healing.
This gathering is a showcase and celebration of the multiple ways people are seeking health justice and enacting healing practices for and with their communities.
Why are we gathering?
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Liberation and justice work is mentally demanding and can be a source of psychological injury as confronting violent top-down governing systems that seek to marginalise creates moments of violence. When this is paired with working in silos it can contribute to burnout. Burnout is a mental and physiological experience that can create long term poor health outcomes. In the UK it is formally recognised as an occupational phenomena. This gathering provides an opportunity to co-create infrastructures and strategies that allow us to move forward whilst healing rather than creating further harm.
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We will gather to build wide interconnected networks of Kinship, so when further action is needed, we know how to show up for each other. The on-the-ground organising against “ICE” have highlighted that neighbourhoods who have a history of community building had a sense of readiness, making the response faster. It has also highlighted that working in “leaderless” but interconnected networks is very effective. This is for three reasons; interconnected networks are harder to spot and destroy, leadership structures creates multiple vulnerabilities, and networks lessen the burden allowing for response to continue over long periods of time.
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Over the last couple of years we have all felt dread and perhaps even hopelessness, because of the constant onslaught of violences. There are ways of working that are rooted in sharing, Kinship and solidarity which allow for respite and mental and physical restoration when needed. We cannot build movements with tired hearts. This gathering is meant to nourish our minds and replenish our imaginations.
Who will be gathering?
VIRTUAL / IN PERSON
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She is a Quechua Amazonian evolutionary biologist, who studies the diversity, evolution, and origins of plants in the Andes and Amazonia. Her main interest is to explore Indigenous and local plants and support their use within their custodians. Through her work she is addressing challenges like food insecurity, biodiversity conservation, and the preservation of traditional knowledges.
WHY THEY ARE INVITED
Anthony has a mastery of language, being able to express complex social problems with accurate emotiveness and precision. This allows us, as an audience, to understand our experience at a deeper level and perhaps with more empathy. This art is crucial and life saving in eras like ours. He will be teaching us the agency language gives us and guiding us through an essay writing process.
LINK TO THEIR WORK
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Poet, essayist and publisher.
His third collection, Heritage Aesthetics published with Granta Poetry in 2022, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award. His second collection, After the Formalities published with Penned in the Margins was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize, along with the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. His other published titles include How To Write It with Merky Books and The Blink That Killed the Eye, a collection of short stories published with Jacaranda in 2013. Anthony is the founder and artistic director of Out-Spoken Live, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press.
His forthcoming collection Speech Acts will be published with Fitzcarraldo Editions in Spring 2027.WHY THEY ARE INVITED
Anthony has a mastery of language, being able to express complex social problems with accurate emotiveness and precision. This allows us, as an audience, to understand our experience at a deeper level and perhaps with more empathy. This art is crucial and life saving in eras like ours. He will be teaching us the agency language gives us and guiding us through an essay writing process.
LINK TO THEIR WORK
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Turtle Island Land Scholar, Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at Tulsa University, Tribal Law
Specializing in tribal law and federal Indian law. Her research explores the ways in which federal Indian law impacts tribes’ ability to govern, and conversely, the ways in which the United States and its legal systems can look to tribal law as a source of legal innovation. Before joining The University of Tulsa, Carson was a Skadden Fellow for the Tribal Law and Policy Institute and later worked as a tribal law and policy consultant. In those roles, she focused on tribal justice and nation building, including the development of innovative justice systems such as Tribal Healing and Wellness Courts, Peacemaking programs, restorative justice processes for tribal youth and other Indigenous justice initiatives.
WHY THEY ARE INVITED
We cannot have Land justice without understanding the systems of law that prevent Land liberation. She will be addressing the link between the right to pollute laws and colonialism in the context of air pollution. She has been working with us to understand lore behind the laws that end up polluting our Air, Water, and Land. Grace is building hope through building the legal infrastructure that provides Indigenous Peoples with a future without settler colonialism practices.
LINKS TO WORK
https://utulsa.edu/people/grace-carson/ https://www.thecentriclab.com/air-is-kin/colonization-us-property-law-and-the-right-to-pollute
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GP, Health Justice Advocate, Medact
Dr Dobbin is an NIHR In-Practice Fellow in the Primary Care and Public Health Department at UCL. She is also active in professional development and collaboration, serving as the UK representative for the European Young Family Doctor Movement on behalf of the RCGP.
Her interests extend to health equity and social justice. She is a member of the Migrant Solidarity Group and Medact, and volunteers with Doctors of the World. Her research focuses on health inequalities driven by NHS charging regulations.
WHY THEY ARE INVITED
Dr Dobbin navigates the complex landscape of healthcare, social determinants of health, and health justice with great empathy and scholarship. Her work gives us hope through the co-creation of systems of healthcare that acknowledge the reasons why we are getting sick. We have been working with her across various programmes, where we are co-creating tools that provide communities facing health injustice with agency.
LINKS TO WORK
https://www.ampthillregentsparkpractice.nhs.uk/team/dr-joanna-dobbin
https://www.thecentriclab.com/obesity-health-justice-work/obesity-health-justice-pamphlet
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Community organiser, human rights
She is the vice chair of Residents of Edmonton Angel Community Together (REACT), which represents over 3000 homes. They work with communities with different religions and cultures. Our aim is to give a voice to our residents by continuing to work with Enfield Council for better living standards for all our residents, bridge differences thereby creating good neighbourly relationships in Upper Edmonton.
Cellina has a background in local government and human rights, which remain part of what drives her in community activism.
WHY THEY ARE INVITED
Cellina represents that community is still the most effective pathway to justice, dignity, and liberation. We cannot build hope in isolation, it needs communality, social cohesion, and the energy of the people. We started to work with her around clean air advocacy, where she is helping her community keep a health diary to begin to address the health injustice driven by air pollution and various other systemic violences.
LINKS TO WORK
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Architect, activist.
She co-founded Home Energy Action Lab (HEAL) a framework test bed for community based domestic retrofit services. She is a director of Studio seARCH, a consultancy that advocates for systemic change around low carbon domestic retrofit.
Previously she spent 3 years as head of Citizen Engagement at Built Environment – Smarter Transformation, the innovation centre for the built environment in Scotland, 3 years as a coordinator at the Architects Climate Action Network, and a year as social housing associate at the Passivhaus Trust.
Working in the face of a climate emergency, the focus of Sara’s work is to drive essential change in the built environment and wider communities through connecting bottom-up, grassroots projects and top-down strategies and initiatives. Collaboration is a fundamental part of this work.
WHY THEY ARE INVITED
Hope is a practice, created through tools, resources, and knowledge, through her work Sara is providing us with the physical infrastructure to help create homes that sustain our life as we face the incoming changes in our weather systems. The home is crucial infrastructure of all living beings, it is where we heal, dream, and create Kin. We have been working with her for a year on the link between retrofit and health justice.
LINKS TO WORK
https://nationalretrofithub.org.uk/about/meet-the-team/
https://www.thecentriclab.com/chia/the-role-of-community-health-impact-assessments-in-retrofit
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Social Anthropologist, community organiser, Turtle Island Scholar
She currently collaborates with the CENTER FOR SUPERIOR STUDIES OF MEXICO AND CENTRAL AMERICA (CESMECA-UNICACH) I am a member of the collective Feminist Critical Views of Territory and co-coordinator of the CLACSO working group "Bodies, Territories and Feminisms". Her main lines of work are: Feminist Epistemologies of Abya Yala, Body-Territory, Territorial Community Feminisms, Precarization of Women's Lives in Extractivist Space.
WHY THEY ARE INVITED
Creating pathways of survival and liberation for Indigenous Peoples on the frontlines of violence takes strategy, deep sense of love and hope. We have been working with her for the last three years, where we learned about rebellion, survival, and how to imagine a world of dignity.
LINKS TO WORK
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/bodies-territories-and-feminisms/9783838217093/ https://www.thecentriclab.com/research-archive/healing-justice-grant-health-clinic-mexico
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Associate Professor in Science, Technology and Society at University College London
Stephen's research explores relationships between science, technology, and society through an affective psychosocial lens. He is fascinated by the role that emotions play in science communication and public engagement, particularly in contexts of difficulty, discomfort, and controversy.
WHY ARE THEY INVITED
He is able to break down how emotionality and emotional states play a role in the effectiveness of scientific work and its communication. This is especially important when co-creating emancipatory scholarship with
LINKS TO WORK
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Doctor, Working on a PhD in Ecological Health Justice, Health Justice Advocate
His PhD research looks at the potential of urban agroecology for health justice, where he is working with the human microbiota, who can teach us how we're becoming the places we inhabit. With attention to the roots of health inequities, in particular access to land, we hope to support the movement towards an ecological and decentralised public health.
WHY THEY ARE INVITED
Healing with the Land is a significant pathway towards health justice. Understanding the physiological mechanics of how our bodies directly entwine with the Land is not only important for understanding health, it is important for changing long established supremacy Lore. We are not separate from the Land, we are the Land. When we all understand this, we will no longer tolerate the laws, narratives, and imaginations that seek to separate us from the Land or seek to harm the Land. Providing us with frameworks that open up our imaginations is crucial to world building, this is where hope lives.
LINK TO WORK
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Trans and Migrant Justice Advocate, community organiser, Migrant from the Philippines
Nina is an experienced community organiser around Trans health justice, migrant rights, refugee rights, and domestic worker rights.
WHY THEY ARE INVITED
We invited Nina to speak about the role joy plays in her work, specifically joy as a practice. This is part of her continual work with us, where we are exploring emotional states, such as joy in readying the body for healing.
Link To Work
https://tinig-uk.com/2023-filipinos-have-a-stronger-voice-in-the-uk
https://www.thecentriclab.com/trans-gnb-health-care/hjgrants-joy-precarity-rematriation