"Here You Can Have the Spaces That We Dream About"
Catalina Alzate on community acupuncture as a positive future
This is a post I’ve had in the queue for a couple of weeks and now that I finally have my laptop back, I’m so excited to share it! (I’ve learned that it’s technically possible to edit and publish a Substack using only an iPhone, but I wouldn’t recommend it, especially when there’s video involved.) So without further ado:
A number of really good things have happened for POCA Tech this year; one of them was connecting with Catalina Alzate, professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. (See also The Power of Healing Together, and big thanks to James Lorr of Urbana Acupuncture for the introduction!)
Catalina studies community acupuncture as “a living design system”. Here’s an excerpt from her website, the Critical Anatomies Lab:
In the midst of our healthcare crisis (a design crisis), community acupuncture is a life project: It is invested in the relational dimension of life.
But what does that mean?!!
Let’s first look at how Community Acupuncture stands for tackling long-standing sources of our healthcare crisis:
“Liberation Acupuncture is a conceptual framework for acupuncture that affirms that individual health and disease do not exist, and cannot be understood or addressed, apart from social conditions – particularly injustice, inequality, and the pervasive influence of traumatic stress” (Lisa Rohleder).
Community Acupuncture is therefore a life project because it is rooted in the task of reconnection: restoring relationships between people, their bodies, and their environments. In all forms of design, this means foregrounding community, intimacy, and place, to repair the damage wrought by an ontology of disconnection and oppression.
Below are four statements of design in its ontological dimension. We can replace “design” with “community acupuncture” in each, and understand how Community Acupuncture is one of the best-case scenarios for rethinking design from the vantage point of relationality and vice versa1:
Design is a practice of world-making, a way of life
Design takes place in systems of distributed agency, power, and expertise
Design is practice-oriented: engaged, experimental, open-ended
Design is a conversation about possibilities
As part of an ongoing collaboration with POCA Tech, Catalina shared this beautiful lecture describing her own embodied understanding of community acupuncture, why we need it in society, and how it supports a positive future (double click to play):
I so appreciate this affirmation that community acupuncture points toward the world we want to live in.
Also, Catalina is inviting us to join a reading group she’s leading on healing, technology and indigenous knowledge. The group will meet on October 17 and November 21, and will be reading texts that discuss different ‘healing logics’, with some mentions of acupuncture in the larger healthcare ecosystem, and in connection to indigenous knowledge.
If you’re interested, please register here: https://www.criticalanatomies.com/care-tech
For more about 5NP and relationality, see On Making Relatives, an interview with Dolores Jimerson, 5NP trainer and also the Behavioral Health Education Director for the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board.