Healing Histories Project
Reviewed by: Zelda Montes
Review start: February 11, 2024
Review last updated: February 21, 2024
Site Links:
Archive Link: https://archive.ph/5o8u2
Data Sources
- Blog posts
- Podcasts
- Pedagogical questions
- Curated stories
- Timelines
- Images
- Articles
Processes
- Blog posts reflect a dated history of work on the HHP
- Pedagogical questions, framed as “Curriculum and Tools,” ask users to reflect critically on the research collected
- Podcasts are embedded under “Fortification COVID-19 Edition” as a potential entry point for users to engage with; the embeds link to Apple Podcasts which subsequently link to Libsyn
- A main timeline contains all the research collected regarding the Medical Industrial Complex, which is tagged in order to filter the timeline by topic
- Articles are linked as sources within the timelines
- Select curated stories of the Medical Industrial Complex accompany their respective curated timelines
- Images supplement the curated stories
Presentation
The landing page of the Healing Histories Project is a searchable Wordpress site featuring multiple pages, with the bulk of content on the Blog and Curriculum & Tools pages. Overall, the site serves as a contextual entry point for the Timeline, which exists at a separate site altogether. After being directed to the timeline from the navigation bar, users are welcomed by a pop-up window soliciting contact information to “stay in touch.” The Stories of Care and Control: A Timeline of the Medical Industrial Complex website situates curated narrative stories alongside their respective timelines, as well as a main all-encompassing timeline. Upon entering the site, users are encouraged to explore the timeline, with a page linked containing information about how to use the timeline. The timeline is interactive, filterable, and keyword searchable. User engagement with the timeline surfaces a yearly date, overview, description, filters, and sources, as well as an ability to share the timeline event via email, X/Twitter, or Facebook. Interacting with the curated stories yields another pop-up window for the user to decide whether they want to read the narrative essay written, or interact with the curated timeline. A navigation bar links to pages both within the website where the timeline lives, as well as back to the Healing Histories Project website.
Digital Tools Used
- WordPress
- Svelte
- Timeline and database technologies are unknown
Languages
- English
Review
The Healing Histories Project (HHP) is a pedagogical framework website (healinghistoriesproject.com) founded by Anjali Taneja, Cara Page, and Susan Raffo, organizers and medical practitioners committed to the principles of Health Justice and Abolition working to “generate change through research, action and building collaborative strategies & stories with BIPOC-led communities, institutions and movements organizing for dignified collective care” (What is HHP?). The Stories of Care and Control: A Timeline of the Medical Industrial Complex sub-site (mictimeline.com) serves as a culmination of over a decade of research on the changing evolution of the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) that resulted from the 2010 US Social Forum, further shaped in partnership with the Kindred Healing Justice Collective, the People’s Movement Assembly, and interdisciplinary contributors “rooted in abolition” (About | Our Team). As a digital remembrance project rooted in a “theory of change,” the timeline focuses on the following themes for contextualizing the impact of the Medical Industrial Complex on land, economies, bodies, and cultures:
- The Before
- Separation of Care from Community
- Colonization, Eugenics, and the Evolution of Disease and Medicine
- The Carceral State
- Strategies of Movements and Resistance
- The Story of the Colonizer Wound (pre-1700)
- The Story of Sugar (1500 BCE to 2014)
- The Story of Tuberculosis (late 1800’s to 1940’s)
- The Story of Marine Health (1798 to 1944)
- The Story of Disability Justice (1600s to 2021)
- The Story of COVID-19 (2021 to 2023; monthly dated)
As a user, I found myself easily able to navigate the site, though confused as to why the MIC timeline exists on a separate site as the HHP site. While I understood that these projects were connected, integrating these user journeys would certainly help users in exploration of both of these sites. Beyond user experience, it was difficult to determine where the research came from and how it could be accessed – easier access to the research data could be transformative in facilitating contribution to and extensions of the project. However, questions regarding research are on the minds of the HHP contributors, as they hinted at future work to include a new page for sharing information about their “collaborative methodology and process” (About | Our Team). Besides research access, I observed cited sources were only present in the timeline itself and not in the curated narrative stories.