We Rage for the Ancestors! Centric Lab Symposium, 2024
“Knowledge cannot be found in just one Institution, everything carries knowledge, bodies, emotions, Peoples, Land”
- Nina Rivera
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Focusing on healing as tied to autonomy, being part of the Land, and healing as a political act of resistance. This makes healing multidimensional and beyond “cure” or simply being absent of disease. In fact it goes beyond the body and into spirituality, connection, reciprocity, and a part of a person’s beingness.
The programme was not an asymmetrical exchange of knowledges, where there is a clear divide and imbalance relationship between learner and teacher. It was an ecosystem for knowledge exchange and cultivation anchored in the shared desire for liberation and health justice.
Future iterations could benefit from a wider diversity of medical professional roles and more tangible points around medical action work. The result will be a programme that is more representative of the wide range of responsibilities, methods, and experiences that frame formal and informal healing without unintentional supremacy bias towards doctors and those in academic positions.
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Providing justice grants that provide an advocate to directly and autonomously enact health justice is key to social justice movements.
“The issue of displacement has been found to directly affect the dysregulation of trans migrant bodies, exposing them to alien environments and experiences that they now have to address and manage, often causing unique stressors.”
Great care was taken in the methodology of bringing healing circle attendees together with dignity, from the size of the group to the accompanying practitioners to the itinerary to remuneration. This methodology is transferable to other gatherings.
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Healing happens in an ecosystem and it is beyond the medicalised boundaries. It can be having space for a garden, or being able to have the time to heal, spending time with friends and family, living in a neighbourhood that feels secure and supportive, or having the opportunity to self-advocate for your health.
This work has evidenced a tangible way practitioners and lived experience can c-ocreate resources with equitable power dynamics in the method, healing outcomes, and the potential to impact people in a diverse range of communities not just affected by obesity.
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We have created a programme that is focused on “abolishing the right to pollute” policies. We are being polluted due to a systemic and robust support for industrial growth regardless of the harms this causes.
It is a programme that brings forward the opportunity for epistemic justice
The programme has two main components: the Air is Kin Signs and Symptoms Survey and Air is Kin Academy.
The AiK Signs and Symptoms Survey is a tool being co-designed and co-developed with doctors, community advocates, and specialists in health, science, and law to help communities evidence their own health conditions in relation to air pollution. The survey is being designed so that people can self-represent, document their condition based on the feedback of those around them, or be the ones capturing the health conditions of those less able to (such as children).
AiK Academy is a self-directed programme to support people who are considering or enacting health justice advocacy. The programme doesn’t just cover knowledge, but also provides support and examples of what safeguarding looks like when someone enters this domain.
Accompanying these two main sides of the project is the Air is Kin Drop–in Session that will happen once a season where community advocates can be heard and directed to specialists who can address concerns and needs around their health justice advocacy.
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Successful support of community advocacy needs three factors
Monetary infrastructure that provides them with the autonomy, time and space to enact their health justice strategies.
Epistemic infrastructure that provides them with the opportunity to think outside the imagination boundaries of white supremacy to enact worlds rooted in justice.
Co-creation of tools and strategies that can be easily contextualised to their community’s needs for self-advocacy.
For the advocates involved, how they felt through the process/methodology of creating their own HIAs was an important factor in how it impacted them. Advocacy is long and nuanced investment and involves key tenets such as trust, accessibility, and sustainability in any methodology introduced.
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“[ … ] there is “responsibility” in that the word “responsibility” in itself, holds the words ability to respond and we must take the ability to respond when and wherever we have it.” We all have a responsibility to each other, as a principle, to act with dignity, reciprocity, and without harm. This of course extends to more-than-human Kin.
This theme really envelopes all of the other work at Centric as we cannot have health justice without ecological justice. Our mind/bodies are intricately and historically tied to the Lands we inhibit in a complete and seamless manner. There is no duality, we are the Land, this is not a metaphor, the Soil is in our guts, the Air in our lungs, and the Water in our tissues.
“ [ … ]understanding the origins of Land relationships and then using this understanding of Land, helps to develop a framework which underpins policy analysis”
How do we inherit the tradition of observation? This is so deeply healing for those of us who have experienced the genocide of our Peoples and Knowledges. They can take so much from us, but the tradition and practice of observation has and will stay with us. And this will guide the next generation of Knowledge making and by default our futures.
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There is no such thing as “wild”, if we are the Land, then we are always in direct relation with the world around us. Meaning that Nature does need us to “go away” they need us to be reciprocity and Kinship with them. This is what the history of the Bitter Potato of the Andes teaches us, we are because of they are.
The Bitter Potato has been in the diets of those Indigenous to Andean territories for millenia, co-creating an intricate and nuanced relation that has guaranteed each others’ existence. We are bringing this to our work as our collective futures are tied in the understanding of reciprocity and Kinship with all Beings. This is not to say that we will all create the Bitter Potato but we should take with this the learning of coexistence.
WHAT DID WE LEARN?
It was clear that we have created an ecosystem that has various mutually beneficial work streams, all working together as a movement to support the advancements for health justice. Advancements is pluralised to reflect that we are not the movement. There are many movements and we honour the Zapatismo principle of the pluriverse. Centric Lab aims to do this by not being leaders. Instead, by creating an infrastructural resource to allow for many to create journeys towards health justice. Centric Lab is an entity stewarded by “the people”. We are not removed from the violence or injustices that we seek to abolish. This is where you contextualise Centric Lab not as a company but as an infrastructure builder for a movement.
Health justice and ecological justice are intricately intertwined and therefore it is difficult to solely work under one umbrella and ignore the other. We’re aiming to undo the capitalist mentality of severing relationality to create commodity. Indigenous Peoples, for example, are being displaced due to planetary dysregulation, contamination, and Land grabs which in turn creates very specific poor health outcomes and disease aetiology that needs to be addressed as whole phenomena rather than as happenstance or in isolation from social, ecological, political determinants of health.
Creating opportunities for grants will be the future of Centric Lab as the movement needs more momentum due to the advancement of multiple crises that not only multiply quickly but also they amply each other. We cannot be hoarders of funding and must distribute across areas that otherwise can’t access funds and resources - that’s part of our role in being an infrastructure organisation.
To advance the many movements for health justice it is important to recognise that ours, and many others, sits outside the imagination of the west. It can be difficult for people to fully understand the need to work in an allocentric manner. To do this involves supporting an ecosystem of activity that explores work in a shared manner:
We start with the dismantling of supremacy epistemologies that incarcerate our thinking. This requires research across science, linguistics, and sociology to (re)surface knowledge and create new ways of thinking and systems that don’t repeat the harms of what came before - if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory (source).
Then we move to create a programme, which concentrates on a specific abolitionist goal. Whether it is to abolish “right to pollute policies” or the stigma behind obesity.
Then we move into a product that the community can interact with that reflects their lived and felt realities. This is co-created with communities. Here is where our campaigning starts.
Then we move into autonomy, where we give people grants so they can lead their own movements, become the lead investigators of their experiences, and create their own healing pathways. Centric Lab work in equitable dialogue with investigators, we act not as experts but as people on the journey with them, contributing what we have.
Our next step is for that autonomy to grow into healing clinics.
We can see this in how:
The Ecological Justice programme is developing into a way of understanding the polycrises and lens to investigate, critique, and rebuild policy(-like) systems that centre a more equitable relationship between humans and the world, that thinks about time more, removing the urgency from all decision making that capitalism has drilled us into doing.
The Healing Justice Programme is a political education movement to awaken the agency of healthcare professionals as “sites of liberation” and not cogs in a destructive machine.
The CHIAT & AiK programmes as ways to become students of environments and outcomes and direct towards action.
The Obesity Justice, Trans & MIgrant Justice, and Indigenous Health Justice work as ways to make sense of reality and to build an understanding and belonging whilst navigating damaging systems of oppression.
Where we’re going
One of the strengths of the way Centric Lab intends to grow is the value and focus on ecosystems, much in the way Nature itself is constructed. Historically, it has been very easy for work to grow in isolation based on the specialised topic that is being investigated, facilitated, or reported. The symposium set a precedent for the walls of these silos to disappear and enable the potential of nourishing across communities and programmes as injustices don’t exist in isolation and we can all learn and support each other in some way. It is also a great vehicle for spotlighting the great work and intentions in this group.
The dream building from events like the symposium is that people who stop by Centric Lab’s ecosystem, even just through a small grant, can feel empowered to reach out to people working on other projects, ask questions, and maybe collaborate without any direct intention or guidance from the Centric Lab core team. In other spaces, someone might feel like this would be poaching from their pool, but we do not look at our ecosystem from an ownership perspective and encourage people to gravitate to the themes, investigations, and communities that they find.
As we stabilise the amount of projects and the depth of projects, this could be a more routine exercise (even if it’s once a season) and we can discover what people attending or contributing to these symposium-like events means from the Centric Lab community, project health, and most importantly the people stewarding the projects. It also develops a culture that decentres from the core team and gives content that someone looking to expand a project, like a grant, outside of the ecosystem can use to evidence the prototype and feedback from a trusted community.
In summary, there is promise in this symposium model positively influencing the Centric Lab culture based on how people interacted in the first showing and the discussions, opportunities, and new points of references that have developed since. Having more equal or lower investment opportunities like this will help to enable interproject and intracommunity nourishment.
If you would like to speak with us about supporting this journey, please drop us a line at:
hello @ thecentriclab . com