Stories of Care & Control: a timeline of the medical industrial complex

Someone recently asked me, so, aren’t you writing anymore? We haven’t seen a post from you since before your book came out. It stopped me and, fascinatingly, I felt a wave of guilt as though I had oopsed on something and then, seconds later, I started to giggle. I HAVE been writing, I said. Just not the kind of writing that is going up on a blog post. Instead, I’ve been working on thousands of stories, some that take place in a few sentences and some that are longer, and I’ve been doing it in deep partnership with others. This post, today, is a sharing of that work has been.

For over ten years, I’ve been working as part of a team surfing waves of community research and liberation work to build a tool. We wanted this tool to be a constantly evolving space that could tell stories about how our inherent commitment to care has been tight-shaped into processes of control, diagnosis, isolation and categorization. We wanted to make something that would be useful to those of you working within large scale health or therapeutic institutions, those doing care work in community or interpersonally, and those organizing to shift how systems hold power at the expense of the complex connectedness of life. We wanted to make something that could be used by real people in real time who just want to know: what the fuck happened? Why is this…