Epidemics of Injustice

This annual course, with lectures free and open to the public, prepares public health leaders and community members with the tools to bring about social change and address structural determinants of health.  All course meetings will take place virtually, convening each Monday during the spring semester (excluding spring break) from 6:00-8:00 p.m. CST, beginning January 13, 2025.

Epidemics of Injustice is led by the Radical Public Health student group and sponsored by the Division of Community Health Sciences at the UIC School of Public Health. Please visit the course site HERE for the latest updates and announcements.

How to participate

  • UIC students

    UIC students can enroll through the course catalogue in IPHS 430: Epidemics of Injustice.

  • Community members

    Register HERE by self-selecting which class sessions you want to attend.

  • Video archive

    If you miss a class, we’ll upload the full videos from 2025 to the Radical Public Health YouTube channel. View 2024 recent course archives. View 2023, 2022 and 2021 older course archives.

2025 Course Schedule

  • January 13

    Introduction to Health equity and Fugitivity with Dr. Linda Rae Murray.

  • January 20

    No class – MLK Jr. Day.

  • January 27

    Fugitivity under Racial Capitalism with Dr. David Stovall.

  • February 3

    Reflection & discussion for UIC registered students only.

  • February 10

    Freedom Fighting as a Fugitive Activity with Dr. Richard David.

  • February 17

    Immigration as a Fugitive Activity with Drs. Naomi Paik and Nadine Naber.

  • February 24

    Shared Liberation as a Fugitive Activity with panelists: Leone Jose Bicchieri from Working Family Solidarity and Chris Rudd from ChiByDesign.

  • March 3

    Reflection & discussion for UIC registered students only.

  • March 10

    Power Mapping action lab with Sari Bilick from Public Health Awakened.

  • March 17

    Root Cause Analysis action lab with Radical Public Health.

  • March 24

    No class – UIC spring break.

  • March 31

    Reflection & discussion for UIC registered students only.

  • April 7

    Education as a Fugitive Activity – speaker TBD.

  • April 14

    Reproductive Justice as a Fugitive Activity – speaker TBD.

  • April 21

    Healthcare as a Fugitive Activity – speaker TBD.

  • April 28

    Reflection & discussion for UIC registered students only.

Class speakers

headshot portrait of Tiffany, shoulders and up, wearing a blue shirt, against a backdrop of green leaves

Tiffany N. Ford (she/her), instructor of the Epidemics of Injustice course, is an Assistant Professor in the Community Health Sciences division at the UIC School of Public Health. Her research explores how anti-Black structural racism operates via policy, governance, and social norms to unequally distribute the resources that contribute to subjective well-being. Specifically, Dr. Ford is interested in place-based policy and practice interventions to support health status, financial security, and social support and relationships, three core determinants of subjective well-being, for people racialized as Black. She is the director of the Black Feminist Policy Lab at UIC, an abolitionist, queer Black feminist learning community that centers love, equity, and truth in the development of a policy agenda to support people racialized as Black in the U.S..

Dr. Linda Rae Murray photo.
Dr. Linda Rae Murray has spent her career serving the medically underserved. She has worked in a variety of settings including Medical Director of the federally funded health center, Winfield Moody, which served Cabrini Green Public Housing Project in Chicago, Residency Director for Occupational Medicine at Meharry Medical College and Bureau Chief for the Chicago Department of Health under Mayor Harold Washington. Dr. Murray is the recently retired Chief Medical Officer for the Cook County Department of Public Health. She also practiced as a general internist at Woodlawn Health Center, was an attending physician in the Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Cook County Hospital and is an adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) School of Public Health (Occupational & Environmental Health and the Health Policy & Administration departments).  Dr. Murray plays a leadership role in many organizations including the National Association of City and County Health Officers Health Equity and Social Justice Team, the national executive board of American Public Health Association and serves on the board of the Chicago based Health and Medicine Policy Research Group. In 2011, Dr. Murray served as President of the American Public Health Association. She is the Co-Chair for the Urban Health Program Community Advisory Committee at UIC.  Dr. Murray has been a voice for social justice and health care as a basic human right for over forty years. She remains passionate about increasing the number of Black and Latino health professionals.
David Stovall photo.

David Stovall, PhD, is a professor in the departments of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).  His scholarship investigates three areas 1) Critical Race Theory, 2) the relationship between housing and education, and 3) the intersection of race, place and school. In the attempt to bring theory to action, he works with community organizations and schools to address issues of equity, justice and abolishing the school/prison nexus.  His work led him to become a member of the design team for the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice (SOJO), which opened in the Fall of 2005. Furthering his work with communities, students, and teachers, his work manifests itself in his involvement with the Peoples Education Movement, a collection of classroom teachers, community members, students and university professors in Chicago, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area who engage in collaborative community projects centered in creating relevant curriculum.  In addition to his duties and responsibilities as a professor at UIC, he also served as a volunteer social studies teacher at the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice from 2005-2018.

headshot of Naomi Paik at an angle, wearing blue shirt

A. Naomi Paik is the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press) and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (2016, UNC Press; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017), as well as articles, opinion pieces, and interviews in a range of academic and public-facing venues. Her next book-length project, “Sanctuary for All,” calls for the most capacious conception of sanctuary that brings together migrant and environmental justice. A member of the Radical History Review editorial collective, she has coedited four special issues of the journal—“Militarism and Capitalism (Winter 2019), “Radical Histories of Sanctuary” (Fall 2019), “Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination” (Spring 2020), and “Alternatives to the Anthropocene” (Winter 2023). She coedits the “Borderlands” section of Public Books alongside Cat Ramirez, as well as “The Politics of Sanctuary” blog of the Smithsonian Institution with Sam Vong. She is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, and a member of the Sanctuary Campus Network, Sanctuary for All UIC, the Migration Scholars Collaborative, and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, UIC. Her research and teaching interests include critical ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; abolition; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration.

Sari Bilick's photo

Sari Bilick (she/her) is the Organizing Program Director at Human Impact Partners (HIP), based in the Bay Area in California on unceded Lisjan Ohlone land. Sari leads HIP’s organizing work, including co-coordinating Public Health Awakened, a national network of public health professionals organizing for health, equity, and justice. She has over 15 years of experience in organizing and before joining HIP worked in labor, community, and political organizing and brings extensive experience in leadership development, training, and coalition building. Sari has engaged public health practitioners, healthcare and service workers, immigrants, tenants, domestic workers, and faith communities to take action around a wide range of economic and social justice issues. She is passionate about organizing and mobilizing communities around the issues most important to them and bringing a social justice and equity lens into all spaces.

Radical Public Health logo.

Radical Public Health (RPH) is an association of UIC students, alumni, faculty, staff, and community members that seeks to address the systemic, underlying causes of public health challenges and to consider more radical solutions.

headshot portrait of Leone from shoulders up, smiling, in black and white

The proud son of Mexican and Italian immigrants, Leone Jose Bicchieri is the Founder and Director of Working Family Solidarity, and has worked for 30 years organizing workers and working families of all backgrounds for economic and racial justice, including farmworkers in the Northwest, poultry processing workers and chicken farmers in the Southeast, meatpacking workers in the Midwest & Plains states, janitors in Midwestern cities, & temp staffing workers in the greater Chicago area. He was national staff with the Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride, and also worked as a long-term volunteer in Nicaragua during the Contra War. Leone was recently Executive Director of the Chicago Workers Collaborative, a Chicago-based worker center, where he founded the “Bringing Down Barriers” program to unite African American and Latino temp staffing workers to win more rights at work. Leone was also a Founding Board Member of Raise The Floor, the alliance of eight worker centers in Illinois.

Course Contacts

Veronica Howell (TA), vhowel2@uic.edu

Learn more about the Community-Engaged Teaching & Learning Initiative at UIC SPH

Video archive