SPIRIT OF 1848: A CALL FOR ABSTRACTS – APHA 2025 (Nov 2-5, Washington, DC)
SPIRIT OF 1848 THEME:
Making Health Justice: Everything Everywhere All at Once
The official theme for APHA 2025 is: “Making the Public’s Health a National Priority.” We in the Spirit of 1848 take the next step and call for: Making Health Justice: Everything Everywhere All at Once – a task core to the mission of the Spirit of 1848 Caucus.
Motivating our theme is: (a) deep recognition of the need for international solidarity and questioning of reactionary nationalist politics, including anti-immigrant politics and politics that undermine Indigenous sovereignty, that harm people’s health and drive health inequities within and between countries, combined with (b) deep appreciation for the creativity and joy that lies at the heart of the work for health justice in all of us, doing everything, everywhere, all at once, in solidarity & coalition with so many others!
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Spirit of 1848 sessions (APHA 2025) – by day, name, and LIKELY time, and whether an OPEN CALL for abstracts or INVITED ONLY |
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Monday, Nov 3, 2025 |
Activist session |
8:30 am to 10:00 am |
OPEN CALL + invited |
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Social history of public health |
10:30 am to 12 noon |
INVITED ONLY |
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Politics of public health data |
2:30 pm to 4:00 pm |
OPEN CALL + invited |
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Tuesday, Nov 4, 2025 |
Integrative session |
10:30 am to 12 noon |
INVITED ONLY |
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Student poster session |
12:30 pm to 1:30 pm |
OPEN CALL + invited |
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Progressive pedagogy |
2:30 pm to 4:00 pm |
OPEN CALL + invited |
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Labor/business meeting |
6:30 pm to 8:00 pm |
N/A |
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Below we provide: (1) the specific instructions for each session, and (2) the APHA instructions about preparing abstracts, with regard to word limits, membership & registration requirements, and information required to enable the session in which a presentation is included to qualify for continuing education credits.
Instructions for what we are seeking for each session (listed in chronological order) are as follows:
TITLE: Local, national, and international organizing for health justice, everything everywhere all at once CALL: The Activist Session welcomes abstracts that describe organizing around the overall Spirit of 1848 theme of “Making Health Justice: Everything Everywhere All At Once” through an open call and invited abstracts. We encourage submissions about activism in a diverse range of spaces, from neighborhoods to worksites to college campuses and beyond. We especially aim to showcase local, national, and international organizing focused on building cross-national solidarity and countering imperialist threats to health justice, although we welcome submissions highlighting organizing around other issues. Given that the conference will take place in Washington D.C., we especially welcome abstracts from D.C.-based activists. |
TITLE: Transnational and Indigenous Critical Historical Perspectives for Solidarity, Sovereignty, and Health Justice Everywhere CALL: The Social History of Public Health Committee of the Spirit of 1848 Caucus will SOLICIT abstracts from speakers who can present historical and still ongoing examples of transnational, global, or transnationally resonant health solidarity struggles, as well as those within politically polarized nations. We are particularly interested in presentations that focus on international human rights including struggles for gender equality, racial justice, labor rights, queer justice, Indigenous struggles for collective survivance and health, as well as struggles that occur at the intersections of health, legal rights, resource equity, and access to political power. Invited presenters will provide case studies that speak to these themes and provide instructive and useful examples that can inspire ongoing collective struggles to realize health justice across many contexts. |
TITLE: Making Data for Health Justice: Everything Everywhere All At Once CALL: This session and its speakers will focus on conceptual and empirical investigations into the ways national, tribal, and local priorities influence how we collect public health data for health justice. Presentations could include a focus on answering any one (or multiple) key question(s):
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TITLE: Prioritizing Health Justice: Politics, Peoples, and our Planet – Everyone & Everything Everywhere All at Once CALL: This session and its invited speakers will focus on prioritizing health justice in relation to global & national politics and institutions, Indigenous health, and planetary health (especially environmental & climate justice). A common thread will be the need for solidarity in all its forms, within and across specific issues, struggles, nations, and people – that is, solidarity with and for everyone & everything everywhere all at once. |
Spirit of 1848 Social Justice & Public Health Student Poster Session Call for Abstracts For the APHA Annual Meeting 2025, the Spirit of 1848 Social Justice & Public Health Student Poster Session is issuing an OPEN CALL FOR ABSTRACTS for posters that highlight the intersections between social justice and public health from a historical, theoretical, epidemiological, ethnographic, and/or methodological perspective. This session will have an OPEN CALL for submissions by students (undergraduate or graduate) who are focused on work linking issues of social justice and public health. This can include, but is not limited to, work concerned with the Spirit of 1848’s focus for APHA 2025 on “Making Health Justice: Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Per our Spirit of 1848 policy, we encourage submissions that bring a critical Indigenous lens, drawing on Indigenous theories, knowledge, and methods, to the specific topic that is the focus of this session, i.e., student posters on links between social justice & public health. The submitted work can address one or more of many interlocking types of justice (e.g., racial, Indigenous, political and/or economic, gender and/or sexuality-related, environmental, restorative, etc.) We are interested in submissions not only from students in schools of public health and other health professions (e.g., nursing, medicine) but also from students in schools & programs focused on law, political science, public policy, social work, government, economics, sociology, urban planning, etc. For examples of abstracts selected in prior years, see our annual reportbacks. Abstracts will be evaluated on the following criteria: (1) Relevant to the Spirit of 1848’s broader mission and APHA 2025 theme ( “Making Health Justice: Everything Everywhere All at Once”); (2) The rigor of the research methods and theoretical foundation; (3) Originality; and (4) Scholarly or practical importance NOTE: to address the on-going problem of student uncertainty about funding, which has led to students with accepted posters withdrawing their submissions, we will continue with the successful approach we implemented in 2016, whereby we will: (1) accept the top 10 abstracts (the limit for any poster session); (2) set up a waitlist of all runner-up potentially acceptable posters (ranked in order of preference); and (3) reject abstracts that either are not focused on issues of social justice and public health or are not of acceptable quality. If any accepted poster is withdrawn, we will replace it with a poster from the waitlist (in rank order). For any questions about this session, please contact Spirit of 1848 Student Poster Coordinating Committee member Charlene Kuo. |
TITLE: Teaching and Learning Health Justice: Everything Everywhere All At Once CALL: Overall, we seek submissions for practical presentations on pedagogy that enhances capacity for teaching and organizing with a focus on making health justice. This includes the pedagogies that are being (re)developed through decolonizing epistemologies and other ways of re-framing knowledge and voice, Indigenous methodologies outside of Western frameworks, and learning that happens outside of traditional academic settings. We call for work that shows how such pedagogy can be carried out, in both: (1) training programs for community and workplace activists, organizations, and members and (2) diverse academic settings, e.g., universities and colleges (including community colleges), health professional schools (public health, nursing, medical, dental, social work, veterinary, etc.), high schools, and elementary schools. We also welcome student-led presentations focused on how to bring such pedagogy into their educational programs and communities. We also encourage pedagogies that link local and global solidarity and movement building. Per our Spirit of 1848 policy, we encourage submissions that bring a critical Indigenous lens, drawing on Indigenous theories, knowledge, and methods, to the specific topic that is the focus of each session If you have any questions, please contact the session organizers, who are Spirit of 1848 Coordinating Committee members Vanessa Simonds (email: vanessa.simonds@montana.edu), Lisa Moore (email: lisadee@sfsu.edu), Rebekka Lee (email: rlee@hsph.harvard.edu), and Nylca Muñoz (email: nylca.munoz@upr.edu) |
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NOTE: APHA repeats below the "calls" for the sessions with open calls for abstracts (& does not list the 2 sessions that are invited only) |
Per our Spirit of 1848 policy, we encourage submissions that bring a critical Indigenous lens, drawing on Indigenous theories, knowledge, and methods, to the specific topic that is the focus of each session
If you have any questions, please contact the session organizers, who are Spirit of 1848 Coordinating Committee members Vanessa Simonds (email: vanessa.simonds@montana.edu), Lisa Moore (email: lisadee@sfsu.edu), Rebekka Lee (email: rlee@hsph.harvard.edu), and Nylca Muñoz (email: nylca.munoz@upr.edu)
Presentations could include a focus on answering any one (or multiple) key question(s):
This session will have an OPEN CALL for submissions by students (undergraduate or graduate) who are focused on work linking issues of social justice and public health. This can include, but is not limited to, work concerned with the Spirit of 1848’s focus for APHA 2025 on “Making Health Justice: Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
APHA ABSTRACT REQUIREMENTS & CONTINUING EDUCATION CREDITS:
NOTE: it is important that our Spirit of 1848 sessions be approved for CE credits, so that public health & clinical professionals can get CE credits in sessions focused on the links between social justice & public health! – so please be sure to read these instructions carefully!!!
1) APHA ABSTRACT REQUIREMENTS
2) CONTINUING EDUCATION CREDITS
APHA values the ability to provide continuing education credit to physicians, nurses, health educators, veterinarians, and those certified in public health at its annual meeting. Please complete all required information when submitting an abstract so members can claim credit for attending your session. These credits are necessary for members to keep their licenses and credentials.
For a session to be eligible for Continuing Education Credit, each presenter must provide:
o Examples of Acceptable Measurable Action Words: Explain, Demonstrate, Analyze, Formulate, Discuss, Compare, Differentiate, Describe, Name, Assess, Evaluate, Identify, Design, Define or List.
-- Examples of Acceptable Biographical Qualification Statement:
“I have been the principal or co-principal of multiple federally funded grants focusing on the epidemiology of drug abuse, HIV prevention and co-occurring mental and drug use disorders. Among my scientific interests has been the development of strategies for preventing HIV and STDs in out-of-treatment drug users.”
“I am qualified because I have conducted research in the area of maternal and child health for the past 20 years and have given multiple presentations on this subject.”
Please note that I am the principal investigator of this study is NOT an acceptable qualification statement. Nor it is acceptable to state: “I am qualified because I am a professor at XYZ University.”
Contact Mighty Fine at mighty.fine@apha.org if you have any questions concerning continuing education credit. Please contact the program planner for all other questions.
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MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE SPIRIT OF 1848
& HOW TO BECOME A MEMBER AND SUBSCRIBE TO OUR LISTSERVE:
For additional information about the Spirit of 1848, including our mission statement and why our name is “Spirit of 1848,” please see below--and also please visit our website, where you can learn more about our Caucus and see past sessions that we have organized at APHA: http://www.spiritof1848.org/
And, if you are a dues-paying APHA member:
(& for more explanation about why we need this information, see: http://spiritof1848.org/listserv.htm)
1) login in at: http://apha.org/
2) click on the bottom part of where your name shows up, which will reveal the “menu” for options
3) click on “update profile”
4) click on the tab for “communities”
5) scroll down to “caucuses,” go to “Spirit of 1848,” and choose the option for “current participant”!
(note: selecting a Caucus affiliation does NOT count against the choice of 2 Section affiliations)
Lastly, if you are interested in subscribing to our email bulletin board, we welcome posting on social justice & public health that provide:
If your posting is only about social justice/political issues, or only about public health issues, and does not explicitly connect issues of social justice & public health, please do not post it on this listserv.
Please note that the listserv does not accept attachments. For petitions, please post only the text, accompanied by the explicit instruction not to reply to the listserv but to reply to you directly with signatures.
Community email addresses:
Post message: spiritof1848@googlegroups.com
Subscribe: https://bit.ly/spiritof1848-form
Unsubscribe: spiritof1848+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
List owner: 1848.spirit@gmail.com
Web page: www.spiritof1848.org
To subscribe or unsubscribe send an e-mail to the address specified above with the word "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" in the subject line. For more information, please see the Spiritof1848 Listserv Semi-Regular Reminder or e-mail the list owner.
SPIRIT OF 1848 MISSION STATEMENT
November 2002
The Spirit of 1848: A Network linking Politics, Passion, and Public Health
Purpose and Structure
The Spirit of 1848 is a network of people concerned about social inequalities in health. Our purpose is to spur new connections among the many of us involved in different areas of public health, who are working on diverse public health issues (whether as researchers, practitioners, teachers, activists, or all of the above), and live scattered across diverse regions of the United States and other countries. In doing so, we hope to help counter the fragmentation that many of us face: within and between disciplines, within and between work on particular diseases or health problems, and within and between different organizations geared to specific issues or social groups. By making connections, we can overcome some of the isolation that we feel and find others with whom we can develop our thoughts, strategize, and enhance efforts to eliminate social inequalities in health.
Our common focus is that we are all working, in one way or another, to understand and change how social divisions based on social class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, and age affect the public's health. As an activist and scholarly network, we have established four committees to conduct our work:
1) Public Health Data: this committee will focus on how and why we measure and study social inequalities in health, and develop projects to influence the collection of data in US vital statistics, health surveys, and disease registries.
2) Curriculum: this committee will focus on how public health and other health professionals and students are trained, and will gather and share information about (and possibly develop) courses and materials to spur critical thinking about social inequalities in health, in their present and historical context.
3) E-Networking: this committee will focus on networking and communication within the Spirit of 1848, using e-mail, web page, newsletters, and occasional mailings; it also coordinates the newly established student poster session.
4) History: this committee is in liaison with the Sigerist Circle, an already established organization of public health and medical historians who use critical theory (Marxian, feminist, post-colonial, and otherwise) to illuminate the history of public health and how we have arrived where we are today; its presence in the Spirit of 1848 will help to ensure that our network's projects are grounded in this sense of history, complexity, and context.
Work among these committees will be coordinated by our Coordinating Committee, which consists of the chair/co-chairs and the chairs/co-chairs of each of the four sub-committees. To ensure accountability, all public activities sponsored by the Spirit of 1848 (e.g., public statements, mailings, sessions at conferences, other public actions) will be organized by these committees and approved by the Coordinating Committee (which will communicate on at least a monthly basis). Annual meetings of the network (so that we can actually see each other and talk together) will take place at the yearly American Public Health Association meetings. Finally, please note that we are NOT a dues-paying membership organization. Instead, we are an activist, volunteer network: you become part of the Spirit of 1848 by working on one of our projects, through one of our committees--and we invite you to join in!
NB: for additional information about the Spirit of 1848 and our choice of name, see:
--Coordinating Committee of Spirit of 1848 (Krieger N, Zapata C, Murrain M, Barnett E, Parsons PE, Birn AE). Spirit of 1848: a network linking politics, passion, and public health. Critical Public Health 1998; 8:97-103.
--Krieger N, Birn AE. A vision of social justice as the foundation of public health: commemorating 150 years of the spirit of 1848. Am J Public Health 1998; 88:1603-6.
Community email addresses:
Post message: spiritof1848@googlegroups.com
Subscribe: https://bit.ly/spiritof1848-form
Unsubscribe: spiritof1848+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
List owner: 1848.spirit@gmail.com
Web page: www.spiritof1848.org
First issued: Fall 1994; revised: November 2001; November 2001; November 2002
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WHY "SPIRIT OF 1848"?
Selected notable events in and around 1848
1840-1847:
Louis René Villermé publishes the first major study of workers' health in France, A Description of the Physical and Moral State of Workers Employed in Cotton, Wool, and Silk Mills (1840) and Flora Tristan, based in France, publishes her London Journal: A Survey of London Life in the 1830s (1840), a pathbreaking account of the extreme poverty and poor health of its working classes, including sex workers*; in England, Edwin Chadwick publishes General Report on Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population in Great Britain (1842); first child labor laws in the Britain and the United States (1842); end of the Second Seminole War (1842); prison reform movement in the United States initiated by Dorothea Dix (1843); Friedrich Engels publishes The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845); John Griscom publishes The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York with Suggestions for Its Improvement (1845); Irish famine (1845-1848) despite high agricultural output and protests against British agricultural and trade policies; start of US-Mexican war (in Mexico, known as “La invasión de Estados Unidos a México,” i.e., “The United States Invasion of Mexico”) (1846); Frederick Douglass founds The North Star, an anti-slavery newspaper in the United States (1847); Southwood Smith publishes An Address to the Working Classes of the United Kingdom on their Duty in the Present State of the Sanitary Question (1847)
1848:
World-wide cholera epidemic
Uprisings in Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Sicily, Milan, Naples, Parma, Rome, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, and Dakar; start of Second Sikh war against British in India
In the midst of the 1848 revolution in Germany, Rudolf Virchow founds the medical journal Medical Reform (Medizinische Reform), and writes his classic "Report on the Typhus Epidemic in Upper Silesia," in which he concludes that preserving health and preventing disease requires "full and unlimited democracy" and radical measures rather than "mere palliatives"
Revolution in France, abdication of Louis Philippe, worker uprising in Paris, and founding of The Second Republic, which creates a public health advisory committee attached to the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce and establishes network of local public health councils
First Public Health Act in Britain, which creates a General Board of Health, empowered to establish local boards of health to deal with the water supply, sewerage, and control of "offensive trades," and also to conduct surveys of sanitary conditions
The newly formed American Medical Association sets up a Public Hygiene Committee to address public health issues
First Women's Rights Convention in the United States, at Seneca Falls, New York
Henry Thoreau publishes Civil Disobedience, to protest paying taxes to support the United States’ war against Mexico
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto
77 enslaved persons in the District of Columbia attempt to escape to freedom aboard The Pearl schooner. While the attempt is unsuccessful and many participants are sold to Southern plantations, the Pearl Incident provokes renewed activism for abolition of slavery in the U.S. Frederick Douglass highlights the hypocrisy of enslavers in Washington who stopped the Pearl while “feasting and rejoicing over” the 1848 democratic revolution in France.*
The Seneca Nation of Indians is founded as a modern democracy with a constitution and elected representative government, building on a democratic self-governing tradition begun in 1200 C.E. by the Hodinöhsö:ni’or Six Nations Confederacy.*
First Chinese immigrants arrive in California: Chinese immigrants comprise 90% of workers who build the Central Pacific Railroad and complete the transcontinental rail system. Paid 30% less than white workers, suffering high injury rates from this hazardous work, and excluded from citizenship, they persist and form the foundation of vibrant Chinese American communities (with parallel migration and exploitative labor experiences across the Americas).*
European and US-settler prospectors, mostly White, flock to California during the 1849 Gold Rush, bringing disease, ecological destruction, and waves of genocidal violence against Indigenous communities. These events, followed by wars against Indigenous peoples throughout the West and Southwest U.S. (1849-1892), seed Indigenous resistance movements that continue into the 21st century.*
Elizabeth Blackwell (1st woman to get a medical degree in the United States, in 1849*) sets up the New York Dispensary for Poor Women and Children (1849); John Snow publishes On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (1849); Lemuel Shattuck publishes Report of the Sanitary Commission of Massachusetts (1850); founding of the London Epidemiological Society (1850); Compromise of 1850 retains slavery in the United States and Fugitive Slave Act passed; Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852); Sojourner Truth delivers her "Ain't I a Woman" speech at the Fourth Seneca Fall convention (1853); John Snow removes the handle of the Broad Street Pump to stop the cholera epidemic in London (1854); James McCune Smith (1st African American to get a medical degree, awarded in 1837 by University of Glasgow) co-founds the interracial Radical Abolitionist Party (1855)*
* denotes entries added since the original list created in 1994 (version: 6/21/22)
Nancy Krieger, PhD
nkrieger@hsph.harvard.edu