Designs for land-based learning, research and healing in a Tanzanian teaching hospital
This research and design initiative invites a collective re-imagining of what constitutes healing amid the 21st century’s health and environmental crises. Globally, medical schools respond to climate change through curricula to train climate-aware physicians, research to track alterations in the distribution and longevity of disease, and plans for responding to emergencies caused by climate events.
These initiatives — while important steps — stop short of fully reckoning with medicine’s entanglements with histories of colonial dispossession and the logics of ongoing extractions that drive climate change. Inspired by Leanne Simpson’s insistence that decolonization requires approaching “land as pedagogy,” this collaborative international project conceives a decolonial teaching, research and healing garden to join the clinic, classroom and laboratory as a central site of medical training.
Designs for land-based learning, research and healing in a Tanzanian teaching hospital
This research and design initiative invites a collective re-imagining of what constitutes healing amid the 21st century’s health and environmental crises. Globally, medical schools respond to climate change through curricula to train climate-aware physicians, research to track alterations in the distribution and longevity of disease, and plans for responding to emergencies caused by climate events.
These initiatives — while important steps — stop short of fully reckoning with medicine’s entanglements with histories of colonial dispossession and the logics of ongoing extractions that drive climate change. Inspired by Leanne Simpson’s insistence that decolonization requires approaching “land as pedagogy,” this collaborative international project conceives a decolonial teaching, research and healing garden to join the clinic, classroom and laboratory as a central site of medical training.
- Stacey Langwick, Department of Anthropology, College of Arts & Sciences
- Rhoda Mauer, Cornell Agricultural Experiment Station, College of Agriculture & Life Sciences
- Community partner: Mtuy Permaculture Center for Climate Action
- Community partner: Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center
Funding to increase and sustain undergraduate involvement in community-engaged research