Abstract

The Medicine Race Democracy Lab was established by faculty from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine and operated from 2021 to 2023. Its core mission aimed to examine healthcare provision beyond traditional hospital settings, focusing on community clinics as sites of social innovation. The lab engaged with acupuncture colleges, community centers, religious institutions, and charitable organizations that offer healthcare services beyond the Texas Medical Center. While critiques of large medical systems have highlighted their role in perpetuating medical racism and exacerbating access barriers, the MRD Lab found that community-based clinics often address these issues directly. Our research revealed that these grassroots healthcare providers tend to be racially inclusive, financially accessible, and therapeutically innovative.

The lab took on a multidisciplinary approach to engage with issues related to immigration and religion, and yielded a range of research outputs, including videos, exhibitions, poetry, essays, maps, and podcasts. Each research cluster was guided by external advisors and implemented a staggered peer-to-peer mentoring system. The lab received funding from the Chao Center for Asian Studies, the Humanities Research Center, and the Building Research on Inequality and Diversity to Grow Equity (BRIDGE) initiative at Rice University.

Currently, while the lab’s intensive research phase has concluded, it continues its work through ongoing academic training, publishing, and sustained relationships with community clinics.

Keywords: medical humanities lab, community clinic, medical education, immigrant populations, refugees, medical racism, acupuncture colleges, Buddhist medicine, postcolonial studies, interdisciplinary methods, digital humanities

[VIDEO 1]

Caption: MRD Lab Tour, Welcome with Lan A. Li

Introduction

The Medicine Race Democracy (MRD) Lab began as an accident. In 2020, I (Lan Li) was a new assistant professor at Rice University and reached out to a student who had lost their internship due to COVID. The plan was to offer them a summer job. I thought that I could use my research funds to support students, collaborators, and colleagues. And what started as a simple gesture evolved into a thirty-person lab with over a dozen external advisors.

[VIDEO 2]

Caption: MRD Lab Origins with Eddie Jackson

Eddie, who had taken a class with me during my first-semester seminar at Rice, was familiar with my approach to pedagogy and research. Our initial project seemed modest: collect and analyze research articles in molecular biology, chemistry, and cellular physiology related to Chinese medicine and cancer. Eddie collaborated with a high school intern on this task. However, as we met regularly in June 2020, it became clear that our ambitions exceeded our initial timeline, which prompted a pivot.

Drawing on my decade-long experience as a filmmaker, I began training Eddie in crafting a story about their family history and cancer. This shift from academic research to narrative work allowed Eddie to engage with a wider audience. Together, we brainstormed, scripted, and edited drafts while also consulting story editors to help Eddie reflect on memories of their late Uncle Robert. The project resulted in an 11-minute episode based on a four-hour recording session of Eddie’s first script that included an interview with Uncle Robert’s partner, Sissy.

With our first episode complete, we needed a name for the podcast. Eddie suggested “meta-stasis”—not metastasis, as in malignant cancer cells, but meta-stasis, to signal a place where ideas incubate, transform, and take on new life. This name perfectly encapsulated the spirit of our evolving project and the lab it would become.

[VIDEO 3]

Caption: MRD Lab Tour, Meta-stasis with Bilal Rehman and Katherine Wu

The lab evolved organically. What began as a podcast kept growing, expanding beyond our initial expectations. I started recruiting more students to create a medical digital humanities exhibition—a project that would take a year to design, conceptualize, and build. Led by graduate student Yesmar Oyarzun, this exhibition focused on skin of color in dermatology research and was aptly named “Undertones.”

The turning point came with funding. In 2021, Ricardo Nuila, Fady Joudah, and I secured two seed grants from Rice University, along with support from the TMC Collaborator Fund and the Building Research on Inequality and Diversity to Grow Equity (BRIDGE) fund. This financial backing officially launched the Medicine Race Democracy Lab—a name as ambitious as it was modest. Our initiative had transformed into an interdisciplinary medical humanities space designed to foster self-discovery.

As the lab grew, so did the challenges posed by COVID. Waves of crises swelled and receded, making the first year of funding feel extraordinarily long and intense. Our team expanded rapidly: three students became five, then twenty, and soon I lost count. This growth mirrored the urgency and complexity of the larger social issues we had hoped to address.

A Medical Humanities Laboratory

The purpose of the MRD Lab focused on community clinics as sites of social innovation. We collaborated with acupuncture colleges, community centers, and religious institutions that provided services to patients seeking care outside the Texas Medical Center.

Across the eight research clusters in the lab, we found that community-built clinics were often racially inclusive, financially accommodating, and therapeutically radical. These grassroots centers offered free resources for new immigrants and refugees, helping with housing, unemployment benefits, food banks, dental services, and legal advice—in addition to basic primary care. Many of these centers were racially diverse, interfaith, and safe spaces for gender and sexual inclusivity. Rather than operating as comprehensive nodes, they functioned as distributed, networked centers of shared resources.

Our research clusters took on various methods characteristic of medical humanities, including literature review, oral history, cartography, and ethnography. We produced a range of outputs such as videos, exhibitions, poems, essays, maps, and podcasts (Klugman and Lamb 2019; DasGupta 2022). Drawing on postcolonial and subaltern studies, we framed social medicine in its connections to immigration, religion, education, and power (Mbembe 1992; Chakrabarty 2002; Chibber 2013; Murphy 2016; Salguero 2022a).

Our aim was not to reify the work of medical and social support, but to critically engage with our collaborators. This approach allowed our students—many of whom came from economically diverse and immigrant backgrounds—to make sense of their own lives and relationships to medicine (hooks 1994, Peña 2022).

The MRD Lab Tour

The following videos offer a tour of the lab’s individual clusters and special projects. They introduce the goals of the respective clusters (many of which had overlapping teams), their intellectual significance, and what each student individually learned in the process.

Point Break Podcast

Caption: This podcast was a training ground for students to learn about acupuncture in Houston. Sophia and Eddie, who began with limited exposure to or understanding of acupuncture, shadowed interns at the American College of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine before developing insights related to acute diseases, emergency medicine, fertility treatment, institutional diversity, medical activism, community acupuncture, and more.

[VIDEO 4]

Caption: MRD Lab Tour, Point Break with Sophia Peng and Eddie Jackson

Research Cluster 1: Clinic Locator

This research cluster featured community clinics in neighborhoods across the greater Houston area. The first part of the cluster developed a series of essays that featured clinics offering low-cost and free services to immigrant and refugee communities. The second part of the cluster created a series of original hand-drawn maps that mimicked didactic images (without using ArcGIS) to model technological modesty through low-tech modes of critical engagement (Bijker 2017).

[VIDEO 5]

Caption: MRD Lab Tour, The Clinic Locator Essays with Taylor Philips and Linda Wu

[VIDEO 6]

Caption: MRD Lab Tour, The Shifa Clinic with Sabariah Mohamed Hussin and Bilal Rehman

[VIDEO 7]

Caption: MRD Lab Tour, The Clinic Locator Cartography with Katherine Wu and Emily Ma

Research Cluster 2: The Buddha’s Doctor

This research cluster was advised in collaboration with Pierce Salguero, who trained students to produce short academic essays on Buddhist medical practices around the world. One student, Brandon Ba, developed many short articles on Jivitadana Sangha Hospital (in Yangon, Myanmar), Sitagu Buddha Vihara (in Austin, Texas), Seongmyeong Sa (in Namhae, South Korea), and Land of Medicine Buddha (in Santa Cruz, California). Brandon also had a long-term personal connection with the Sitagu Buddha Vihara, one of the few Burmese Mahayana Buddhist temples in the United States.

[VIDEO 8]

Caption: MRD Lab Tour, The Buddha’s Doctor with Jason Lee

Research Cluster 3: The People’s Doctor

This cluster was an ongoing archive based on interviews with Dr. Tolbert Small, who had served the community at his office and through house calls for 36 years. He continued his practice at the Native American Health Center, working 50 hours per week at the age of 77. This cluster was led by Eana Meng, an MD-PhD student at Harvard Medical School (Meng 2021).

[VIDEO 9]

Caption: MRD Lab Tour, The People’s Doctor with Eana Meng and Katherine Wu

Research Cluster 4: Keyword Search

This reading group conducted a literature review to critique discourses related to “social determinants of health” including policy, gender, infrastructure, and race, among other keywords that framed critical inquiry in the medical humanities (Altschuler, Metzl, Wald 2023). Each reflection critiqued deterministic assumptions that undergirded the team’s selected keywords and speculated on ways to complicate, deepen, or expand on them.

[VIDEO 10]

Caption: MRD Lab Tour, The Keyword Search with Bilal Rehman

Research Cluster 5: Decolonizing Ayurveda

This research cluster focused on contemporary research approaches to Ayurveda and evaluated the ways in which practitioners conformed to biomedical standards, resisted biomedical standards, and disrupted biomedical standards of research in the context of state-building and modernity (Mukharji 2011, Mukharji 2016). We encouraged our students to ask: what did it mean to “decolonize” Ayurveda? What were the processes and the possibilities of decolonizing medicine in a biomedical context?

[VIDEO 11]

Caption: MRD Lab Tour, Decolonizing Ayurveda with Adarsh Suresh, Saagar Dhanjani, Sriya Kakarla

Research Cluster 6: Decolonizing Acupuncture

This research cluster surveyed a range of experimental papers published on acupuncture to interrogate biomedical standards of inquiry such as randomized control trials. Running alongside our Decolonizing Ayurveda cluster and in parallel to the Point Break podcast, the members of this cluster interrogated questions of tradition and modernity and how they related and stood in contrast to anti-colonial efforts (Hinrichs and Barnes 2013; Lei 2014).

[VIDEO 12]

Caption: MRD Lab Tour, Decolonizing Acupuncture with Esther Lee

Research Cluster 7: Personal Reflections

This poetry lab was advised by Samuel Lê and invited students to interrogate personal narratives related to immigration, race, and medical professionalization. We structured it based on peer-to-peer mentoring with a total of three cohorts writing and workshopping original poems.

[VIDEO 13]

Caption: MRD Lab Tour, Personal Reflections with Summer Nguyen, Sophia Peng, Madison Zhao, Kaylah Patel

Reading Interludes

[VIDEO 14]

Caption: Summer Nguyen Reading from “The Orange Tree: A Military Doctor’s Choice”  

[VIDEO 15]

Caption: Sophia Peng Reading from “Horizonless Mythologies”

[VIDEO 16]

Caption: Alyssa Cahoy Reading from “Balikbayan: Conversations with Pinay Nurses”

The Tagalog term “balikbayan” directly translates to “to return” (balik) and “home country” (bayan) and was used to refer to a Filipino living abroad who returns to the homeland. This project centered the migratory and medical narratives of Filipina nurses, who made up a significant portion of the foreign-born nurse population in the US (Choy 2003; Lorenzo et al. 2007; Brush 2010; Muir 2020; Cachero 2021). Using a combination of recorded oral histories, digital photography, and poetry to share these stories, Alyssa wanted to pay tribute to the lifemaking that happened within diasporic Philippine communities that built on research on the politics of nursing during COVID (Almendral 2020; Nazareno et al. 2021).

Alyssa collaborated with the Philippine Nurses Association—Metro Houston (PNAMH) to find interview participants for her Personal Reflections project. As a result, she spoke with the former PNAMH president and Filipino Cancer Network founder Cherry Sloan. What was meant to be a 30-minute interview with Sloan turned into a laughter-filled, two-hour conversation, which Alyssa said was part of Filipino culture, to not keep track of time when spending time with fellow countrymen. Alyssa viewed these oral histories as the heart of her project, stating: “I have immense gratitude for the Filipina women who came before me and paved the way. Crafting a project about the deep comradeship between pinay overseas healthcare workers has allowed me to bear witness to the ways in which our kapabayans breathe life back into one another on foreign land. I emerged from this project with a sense of radical hope, a revitalized drive to persevere, through tracing these submerged histories, or her-stories, rather.”

[VIDEO 17]

Caption: Brandon Ba Reading from “Double Vision”

For the Personal Reflections cluster, Brandon developed “Double Vision,” a series of poems about his parents. Brandon aimed to uncover how the social and political turmoil shaped their medical training, and, later, their expectations of their son. At the heart of his research was the recent history of colonialism and medicine in Burma (Butwell 1972; Thwe 2013).

Brandon added: “For ‘Double Vision,’ one of the major components of the project was interviewing my parents. I was worried and nervous because I never really had the opportunity to connect with my parents deeply, as our relationship felt transactional: they provided to meet all my needs, and I listened to and helped them. As a result, I felt that there was a barrier between my parents and me, even though we shared the same living space.

“During the interview, though I was still anxious, I learned more about them and their experiences. After all, they had a whole life to themselves before I was born. Transcribing and reviewing the interviews helped deconstruct my perception of them as only being ‘parents.’ I learned especially about the differences between my childhood and their childhood, and how those differences in experience impacted my perspective of their parenting relative to their true intentions.

Before entering this lab, I doubted that I would have ever been able to connect with my parents this deeply. It is still a work in progress, as we still have our disagreements and moments of disconnect, but this represents the first big step for me that I was surprised to have accomplished.”

Research Cluster 8: Memory Bank

This oral history vault provided transcripts of interviews with practitioners, activists, and scholars on topics related to the lab, such as the founding of the Jivaka Project on Buddhist medicine, the accreditation of acupuncturists in the United States, the formation of community clinics to support LGBTQ+ individuals in Houston, and the founding and ongoing work of community clinics associated with the Islamic Society of Greater Houston.

[VIDEO 18]

Caption: MRD Lab Tour, Memory Bank with Katherine Wu

Laboratory as Transgression

Humanities labs are not new. Like the natural sciences laboratory, they connect to the legacies of colonial voyages, expeditions, and extraction. Scholars do not deny the ways in which contemporary, capitalistic forms of knowledge production and meaning making build on cultures of violence (Murphy 2018).

Yet humanities labs can embed critique as part of their modes of inquiry. We can, for instance, engage with scholars like bell hooks and Lorgia García Peña, who demand that pedagogical spaces (especially those in “higher” education) serve as spaces for self-realization, self-transformation, and self-transgression (Peña 2022). Academic life cannot be passive. It must welcome self-examination. It must welcome rebellion (hooks 1994).

[VIDEO 19]

Caption: MRD Lab as Self Transformation with Eddie Jackson

Conclusion

The stakes of these forms of inquiry were high. They were intense, and they were immediate. They mimicked classrooms outside of the classroom. They resembled seminars outside the seminary. They were bound by practices of care, generosity, and shared power. These labs were not new, but they were socially innovative. For instance, the Environmental Data Justice Lab at the University of Toronto is an Indigenous-led lab. It appropriates colonial research methods to data, pollution, and colonialism. The Humanities Lab at American University takes on different modes of critical engagement to facilitate lively, ongoing, experimental, and open-ended projects. The Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University models ways of scaling historical reconstruction projects with over 500 contributors, experts, students, and makers.

Likewise, our MRD Lab now remains open-ended. It began with a focused exploration of community healthcare in Houston, and its focus shifted as we evolved. After two years of roasting in the COVID furnace, the lab took on a new life. It continued to incubate and serve as a model for communal modes of self-realization and self-transgression.

As we look to the future, the MRD Lab is undergoing significant transitions. Many of our founding student members have graduated, taking with them the valuable skills and insights they gained during their time with the lab. Their departures have signaled new opportunities. Additionally, changes in institutions among our core faculty advisors have prompted us to reassess and adapt our overall approach.

Despite these changes, or perhaps because of them, we remain committed to our foundational principles of critical inquiry and community engagement. We are shifting our emphasis toward academic training and publishing, while maintaining our relationships with community clinics. This evolution allows us to continue our mission as we adapt to our new circumstances. Individual student projects have taken on increased importance, often converging into longer-term collaborations.

The MRD Lab may look different in the coming years, but its spirit of inquiry, innovation, and inclusivity will continue to drive the work of those who passed through it.

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