In part 1, medical students Chanelle Simmons and Isabella Giunta explore the impact of mass incarceration on the health of individuals and communities. Through collected anecdotes, they illustrate the failures of prisons to provide their inmates with adequate health care, even in life-threatening situations. They also describe the history of racist policies and practices that allow for this inhumane treatment. They are joined by Jarrell E. Daniels, a prison reform activist, mentor to youth emerging from juvenile detention, and research assistant at the Center for Justice at Columbia University. Jarrell shares the obstacles he faced while trying to access health care in prison and discusses the necessary changes to be made to ensure people in prison receive the care they need.

More than two generations after the end of colonization in north Africa, France still suffers from the undigested legacy and aftereffects of a brutal empire that spanned over two centuries and whose perverse reverberations are still felt today. Khalil Bendib speaks with French Algerian Nacira Guenif Souilamas, Professor of sociology and anthropology at University Paris 8 of Vincennes in Saint-Denis about French president Emmanuel Macron’s policies to combat home-grown terrorism while simultaneously acknowledging some of his country’s legacy of racism and genocide and how the French state is responding to a new wave of terrorism on its soil by increasing repression and surveillance of French Muslims.

Malihe Razazan spoke with Kali Rubaii, an assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University, about the toxic legacy of the war in Iraq and the underlying reasons for the high rates of birth defects in the city of Fallujah

Hossam el-Hamalawy, journalist, photographer and member of the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists, reflects on the term 'Arab Spring' and the ten years that have passed since what he refers to as the regional revolutions and regional uprisings that took place in the Middle East and North Africa.

Interviewed by Khalil Bendib | English

Courtesy of Voices of the Middle East and North Africa (VOMENA).