Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician, an activist, a mother and a composer. She is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she practices and teaches internal medicine. She is a cofounder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change. At the invitation of Lakhóta health leaders, she advises the Mni Wichoni Health Circle, an Indigenous-led health sovereignty project at Standing Rock decolonizing food and wellness. She is the cofounder of the Deep Medicine Circle, a women of color-led, worker directed organization healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story, restoration and learning. Through the Deep Medicine Circle, she leads the Farming is Medicine program, an innovative reparative food system example, which starts with moving land back to Indigenous hands and farming under their sovereignty, centering values of reciprocity, mutual benefit and reintegration into right relationship with one another and the web of life. She has toured twenty-nine countries with her band, Rupa & the April Fishes, whose music was described by the legend Gil Scott-Heron as “Liberation Music.”

Raj Patel is an award-winning author, film-maker and academic. He is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He worked at the World Bank and WTO, and has been teargassed on four continents protesting against them. A James Beard Foundation Leadership Award winner, he has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US, UK and EU governments, and is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved, the New York Times bestselling The Value of Nothing, and the coauthor of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, all of which have been translated and taught across the world, as have his scholarly publications in economics, philosophy, politics, and public health journals. His first documentary, filmed over the course of a decade in Malawi and the United States, is The Ants & The Grasshopper. He is a board member of the Deep Medicine Circle.