2024 Visiting Professor Equality Diversity and Inclusion Series

Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician at the University of California, San Francisco, where she practices and teaches internal medicine. Her work sits at the nexus of climate, health and racial justice. Dr Marya founded the Deep Medicine Circle, a women of color-led organization committed to healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story, restoration and learning. She is also a co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change.

Dr Marya was recognized in 2021 with the Women Leaders in Medicine Award by the American Medical Student Association. She was a reviewer of the American Medical Association's Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity. Because of her work advancing health equity, Dr. Marya was appointed by Governor Newsom to the Healthy California for All Commission, to advance a model for universal healthcare in California. She has toured twenty-nine countries with her band, Rupa and the April Fishes, whose music was described by the legend Gil Scott-Heron as “Liberation Music.” Together with Raj Patel, she co-authored the bestselling book examining the health impacts of colonialism on bodies, societies and the planet called Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.

Websites:

• Rupa & the April Fishes
• Inflamed: Deep Medicine & the Anatomy of Injustice
• Do No Harm Coalition
• Deep Medicine Circle

Public Lecture

Farming is Medicine: Advancing Whole Systems Health

Friday 18th October, 15.00-16.30

Robert Emmet Theatre

Arts Block, Trinity College Dublin

Physician, composer, writer and activist Rupa Marya will offer a framework to understanding how what ails the planet, our fracturing societies and our bodies wracked by inflammatory disease are interrelated. Marya introduces a higher order of diagnosis from the groundbreaking book written with political ecologist Raj Patel—Inflamed: Deep Medicine & the Anatomy of Injustice. In this work, they weave a rich fabric that brings together ways of knowing from health sciences, history, Tribal Environmental Knowledge, ecology, microbiology and storytelling that can help illuminate how to rebuild a culture of care through repairing fractured relationships between groups of people and between people and the web of life, starting with land relationship. In her home in the San Francisco Peninsula, California, Marya puts these concepts into daily practice through the Deep Medicine Circle, a collective of farmers, lawyers, scholars, economists, artists, Indigenous elders, youth, healthcare workers, botanists, health students, ecologists who work to repair relationships through the Farming is Medicine program (opens PDF), an innovative agroecological food systems model that is having transformative impacts. Working in the urban center of Oakland on a 1-acre rooftop farm and on the rural coast of the peninsula with Indigenous Ohlone community on a 38-acre Landback farm, the Deep Medicine Circle is building a local food system based in the practices of care. Marya will share the framework, the practices and data of the ongoing work with the community at Trinity in hopes of seeding what may be useful to support the Irish struggle for health and healing.