'Feed the Need, Starve the Empire' - Building Solidarity and Local Food Systems with Dr. Rupa Marya

'Feed the Need, Starve the Empire' with Dr. Rupa Marya

Thursday August 6th, 6.30pm - 8.00pm 

What we will learn...

In this talk for Queer Sheds, Dr. Rupa will describe the central theme of her book Inflamed, discussing how systems designed through colonial capitalism trigger damage signals through the human body, the web of life, our social structures and the planet at large. She will share reflections on how building solidarity and shifting local food systems through novel partnerships can provide the antiinflammatory balm for what ails us.

About Dr. Rupa Marya 

Dr. Rupa Marya  is a physician, activist, writer, mother, soil lover and composer. She was Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, practicing and teaching hospital medicine for 23 years until she was fired in May 2025 for her advocacy of Palestinian life and liberation. A scholar of the health impacts of colonialism on human and planetary health, she founded the Deep Medicine Circle to advance the concept of Whole System Health, where healed relationships between people and with the web of life confer health. She is currently at Trinity College Dublin as Adjunct Professor of Land, Food and Medicine and Senior Research Fellow at the School of Medicine, where she is bringing the Farming is Medicine program to Ireland to help build local food sovereignty and supporting the articulation of a Liberation Medicine. Her work sits at the nexus of climate, health and racial justice. Together with co-author with Raj Patel, she wrote the book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. 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.”