Epidemics of Injustice

Green background with mushroom/fungi and dotted lines with two logos above

(This site will continuously be updated as the 2026 course develops)

Epidemics of Injustice (EofI) is an annual, interdisciplinary public health course that is available to all University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) students for 2 credits and open to the public as a non-credit experience, free of charge. The course 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, unless otherwise noted, convening each Monday during the spring semester (excluding spring break) from 6:00-8:00 p.m. CST, beginning January 12, 2026.

Epidemics of Injustice is led by the Radical Public Health (RPH) student group and sponsored by the Division of Community Health Sciences at the UIC School of Public Health.

2026 Course Theme

The 2026 theme is inspired by biomimicry, or leaning on nature as a model and mentor. Mycelium networks associated with mushrooms show us that much of the sustained work and relationships of an ecosystem are the underground connectors. At a time when public health systems are in systematic decay, how can we build stronger networks of healing, resistance, and regeneration?

 

Emergent Strategy Community Coloring Book: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YhZ0Am9Mh3ND67KOFcLDBk7C6UNJrPGk/view?pli=1

See Latest EofI Updates Here

How to Participate

  • UIC STUDENTS

    UIC students can register for 2 credit hours at my.uic.edu via the XE Registration System, by searching for CRN: 44551 or IPHS 430.

  • COMMUNITY MEMBERS

    Visit Radical Public Health’s Beehiiv page HERE to subscribe to EofI updates, including the Zoom registration information to be shared closer to the course start date.

  • VIDEO ARCHIVE

    If you miss a class, we’ll upload the full videos to the Radical Public Health YouTube channel. Older course archives are found here: 2023 | 2022 and 2021.

2026 Course Schedule

  • January 12

    Introduction to Health equity with Dr. Linda Rae Murray.

  • January 19

    No class – MLK Jr. Day.

  • January 26

    TBD – check back soon

  • February 2

    TBD – check back soon

  • February 9

    TBD – check back soon

  • February 16

    TBD – check back soon

  • February 23

    TBD – check back soon

  • March 2

    TBD – check back soon

  • March 9

    TBD – check back soon

  • March 16

    TBD – check back soon

  • March 23

    No class – UIC spring break.

  • March 30

    TBD – check back soon

  • April 6

    TBD – check back soon

  • April 13

    TBD – check back soon

  • April 20

    TBD – check back soon

  • April 27

    TBD – check back soon

Class speakers

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

Tiffany N. Ford (she/her) 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..

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

rph.uic@gmail.com

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

Video archive