Sites of Health Activism: Reading Grassroots Design & Spatial Strategies

Sites of Health Activism: Reading Grassroots Design & Spatial Strategies – Student-facilitated primary source workshops Weeks 10–12 (Thursdays); Written Deliverable Due Monday, December 7 at 5pm; Final Presentations Week 14

Grassroots health activists have developed models of care that challenge, resist, or reimagine institutional approaches to health. In doing so, they have also developed alternative ways of creating, organizing, and using space—from the Black Panther Party’s mobile clinics and the Young Lords’ occupation of Lincoln Hospital to feminist health centers organized around domestic spaces and cooperative housing models pioneered by disabled activists in the Independent Living Movement.

For this assignment, students will create a dossier analyzing the spatial strategies of a grassroots health activist organization, collective, or group of individuals. Because activist initiatives often work by retrofitting, occupying, or repurposing existing spaces rather than designing new buildings (an expensive enterprise), their architectural strategies may not be documented through conventional drawings. Instead, students will learn to read photographs, films, posters, zines, newspaper articles, and other alternative primary sources as evidence of spatial practice.

Each dossier should include at least five primary sources: three visual and two written. Students will annotate each visual source, using the methods developed in previous assignments to identify and analyze spatial strategies and place them in conversation with the written primary sources and relevant historical scholarship. The annotations will form the basis of a five-page analytical essay that argues how the group used space to enact an alternative model of health, care, or bodily autonomy.

The dossier will conclude with a two-page speculative writing piece that draws on the case study to imagine a contemporary health space or spatial strategy for the TriCo campus. Rather than simply reproducing the historical example, students should consider how its spatial strategies might be adapted to address a health-related need, inequity, or form of collective care today. Speculative drawings and images can append the writing, but are not required. 

During the “RECLAIMING HEALTH” module, students will each facilitate a primary source workshop, bringing key materials related to their case study for group interpretation. Students should familiarize themselves closely with their sources and help guide the group’s analysis, while also using their classmates’ insights and questions to deepen their own interpretations. The final dossier is due Monday, December 7 at 5pm. In the last week of class, each student will give a brief, 10-minute presentation reflecting on their completed dossier and speculative writing piece.