Justice is the Real Medicine: The Tensions & In(tensions) of Radical Thinking in Liberal Institutions Across the Medical Industrial Complex

Abstract

This dissertation navigates the tensions that arise when radical, political, approaches intersect with the liberal frameworks of health institutions and organizations. Grounded in the interdisciplinary methodology of research-creation, this study interrogates how systems of care, equity, and justice are negotiated, disrupted, and re-imagined within institutional boundaries. Drawing from critical social theories and concepts, the research utilizes pragmatic methods including the plugging-in technique, critical friend collaborations, radical workshops, emergence, affirmative refusal, and skill-sharing, to mobilize knowledge and foster collective insights. The study reveals how liberal, health spaces such as hospitals and long-term care homes often constrain radical political praxis, requiring actors to navigate a delicate balance between complicity and resistance. Through research-creation, it emphasizes the transformative potential of collaborative, creative, and reflexive practices in making visible the affective and structural forces that sustain complicity to white institutionalization. By employing affirmative refusal and emergence as methodological strategies, this research highlights the generative possibilities of refusing predetermined pathways while remaining attuned to the unforeseen. Moreover, radical workshops served as spaces of collective learning and experimentation, fostering community-based knowledge production and challenging state-sanctioned, institutional norms. This work contributes to scholarship on radical politics, health justice, and research-creation by offering practical and theoretical tools to disrupt and reimagine the boundaries of care and well-being within liberal organizations. Ultimately, it argues for the necessity of holding tension as a productive site for transformation, where institutional critique and creative praxis coalesce to envision more just futures.