What is harm reduction, really? Is it voting? Is it seat belts? Is it naloxone? While public health often treats harm reduction as a list of tools or strategies, this session invites us to dig deeper, into the philosophy, politics, and contradictions of harm itself. We’ll ask: Is harm inherent, or is it produced? What are the social, structural, and emotional conditions that create or intensify harm? Who decides what harm is, and who is forced to experience it?

This conversation centers harm reduction not as a checklist, but as a justice-rooted framework, a commitment to dignity, autonomy, and survival in a world that often withholds those things. We’ll explore how harm is exacerbated by systems of criminalization, medical neglect, stigma, and control, especially for people who use drugs, sell sex, live with chronic illness, or navigate poverty, racism, and ableism. We’ll interrogate how harm reduction gets watered down, co-opted, or professionalized into meaninglessness, and what it means to reclaim it as a radical, liberatory practice.

Through discussion, storytelling, and collective inquiry, we’ll challenge dominant narratives and get to the root: not just how to reduce harm, but how to understand where it comes from, who it impacts, and what it would take to truly transform the conditions that produce it.

This session is for public health workers, care providers, organizers, and community members who want to get real about harm, and get it right.