What is the Summer of Unlearning?
This series was born from conversations with artist-researchers and survivor-patients—those creating radical wisdom from the margins of medicine.
Each week, we engage a book that reveals the gaps in Western medical thought—and lifts up new paths of care rooted in community, creativity, and interdependence. By doing so, we are taking a thousand steps forward from expert-centric, science-driven sick care to patient-centric, human-centered healthcare.

Why This Book?
“Care Work” is not a how-to manual. It is a love letter to crip wisdom, a futurist map drawn by sick and disabled queer femmes of the global majority, and a collective refusal to let care be defined only by institutions.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha invites us into a world where care is created by us, for us—especially when the system fails, gaslights, or forgets us entirely.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, and we have already saved each other’s lives—without insurance, degrees, or permission.”

What does this Book Uncover?

Medicalized Care ≠ Real Care
Leah reveals how healthcare systems often strip care of love, access, consent, and context—especially for people living in poverty, with disability, queer, trans, or racialized patients.

Access is Love
Access isn’t a checklist. It’s a practice. A culture. A way of saying “I want you to be here with me, and I’ll adapt to make that possible.”

Crip Emotional Labor
Folks living with Western science-labeled disabilities don’t just survive illness—they manage networks, emotions, logistics, healing, collapse, and rebirth every day. That invisible labor deserves recognition, not extraction.

Decolonial Healing
Care isn’t neutral. Leah roots care in the politics of decolonization, racialized Black and Brown interdependence, migrant survival, and transformative justice.

Why Artist-Researchers Champion This Text

• Performance artists stage care rituals in public to reclaim the presence of science-labeled disability as powerful, not pitiable.
• Visual artists reimagine blueprints of accessible futures not rooted in tech, but in community-based design.
• Writers & poets use Leah’s work to dream outside of state care, institutional trauma, and White savior narratives.

This book doesn’t imagine art as healing. It enacts healing through art.

Why This Book Is Revolutionary for Patients
Because it dares to say:

“No one is coming to save us—but we have always been saving each other.”

It invites us to stop asking: “How can I fit into the system that rejects us?”
And start asking: “What can we build together outside of it?”

It centers the realities that patients know but professionals often overlook:

• that care is uneven, messy, mutual, and
• that access needs fluctuate—and that’s not failure, it’s life.

🔍 Questions for Our Community

Clinicians

What would it mean to center access intimacy—not just medical access—in your practice?

How can care become a relational act, not a service transaction?

What are you doing to make space for chronically ill and disabled patients to set the terms of their own care?

Pharma Leaders

How are disabled and chronically ill BIPOC represented in your clinical trials beyond inclusion quotas?

What are you doing to center community-defined healing in R&D, not just institutional endpoints?

Policy-Makers

How can public health invest in community-based access networks, not just emergency infrastructure? How are you assessing the long-term cost savings of sustainable public health in a human-centred manner?

What are you doing so that your policies honor interdependence? How much are you still punishing it through systems of surveillance and scarcity?

Patient Advocates

Where can we challenge the narrative that rest = laziness, and instead, resource collective access to rest?

How do we support caregivers who are also patients themselves?

Community Builders

What would it look like to dream of access without the state?

How are you practicing “access as love” in your own organizing?

Care is not a performance. It is a world-building practice.
Join Leah and all of us in learning how to create access that heals—without apology.

Missed the first three weeks? Catch up:

• Week 1: Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic
• Week 2: Ed Cohen’s A Body Worth Defending
• Week 3: Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals
• Week 4: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice