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Centric Lab

@thecentriclab.com

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Prototyping ways to use health-based scientific evidence to support justice movements, surface and socialise non-western epistemologies & create language to articulate the health injustices felt by many racialised and marginalised folx. thecentriclab.com

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Centric Lab @thecentriclab.com · Mar 25

No Time for Leaders

We have created this zine as a framing that helps guide our work moving forward.

www.thecentriclab.com/stories-prov...

This zine is a provocation, a set of contemplations and principles to frame our response to loss. A time of deep listening and questioning.

Setting our Intention.
The intention of this document is to declare how we at Centric Lab are going to respond to the loss we are facing.
In particular, how are we going to heal when the loss and trauma is on-going and when resources become increasingly unavailable.

Introduction.
Over the summer of 2024, Centric Lab curated a programme involving doctors and other healthcare professionals. The programme was shaped by Dr. Rhiannon Miharian Osborne and medical student Amit Singh.

In one of the lessons, we heard from two Palestinian doctors, who asked us “What happens when the doctors die”? How do you heal your Peoples, how do you survive, how do you live? The group fell silent, none of us quite knew how to answer this question. Palestine is not only facing the loss of their healthcare infrastructure, they have also lost biodiversity, soil biome, water all of which will make it very difficult to cultivate food. Even before this revamping of violence, they were already living the effects of planetary dysregulation; soil is heavily degraded in Gaza, which has deeply affected biodiversity, they also are having much hotter summers and colder winters. To have faced this state violence whilst already living in such precariousness goes far beyond cruelty. We should also contemplate that genocide creates a loss of elders, communities, cultures, epistemologies, knowledges, which leave Peoples without many of their intellectual tools for rebuilding and healing. This of course is deliberate.

Reposted by Centric Lab

Josh Artus @joshartus.bsky.social · Jul 15

New thinking from the Lab 👇

Centric Lab @thecentriclab.com · Jul 15

A Case for Health Reparations For Communities Affected by Air Pollution.

This work lays out pathways and theories to nurture our communities, create infrastructure for autonomous healing processes, and live through this epoch with dignity.

www.thecentriclab.com/stories-prov...

What are health Reparations?
The creation of infrastructure for Peoples who have directly experienced structural violence to autonomously create pathways to repair and fortify community health.

We are presenting pathways, philosophies, and strategies for community-led healing to safeguard against air pollution through Health Reparations.

The full reporting can be found on our website, under Health Reparations and Air is Kin work.

Centric Lab @thecentriclab.com · Jul 15

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Centric Lab @thecentriclab.com · Mar 25

No Time for Leaders

We have created this zine as a framing that helps guide our work moving forward.

www.thecentriclab.com/stories-prov...

Centric Lab @thecentriclab.com · Mar 17

Consideration 6: Health Justice
Part of the abolition strategy is that we are seeking health justice. This can include the following: (more integrated to other types of knowledge)
Community health centres that highlight and support air pollution prevention.
Community health centres that focus on air pollution recovery
Community centres where people can learn about advocacy and create their own library of knowledge. This is to build community resilience, create mental support pathways, and build up knowledges.
Research centres dedicated to understanding the healing pathways for air pollution poor health outcomes.
An integrated approach.

More about Air is Kin.
The mission of the project is to move towards the abolition of “Right to Pollute” policies and to facilitate healing pathways for communities impacted by air pollution.

This project and study are meant to create a starting point for the abolition of the right to pollute policies, which are having a continual devastating effect on both planetary and human health.

To date those affected by air pollution have had to use data and evidence to prove their humanity to the polluter. Every time we have to evidence our humanity and health we are haggling with the polluter.

We haggle on a lower level of pollution, yet, according to the World Health Organisation, there are no safe levels of air pollution.

How to Get Involved?
If you are a community living near a site of acute air pollution and want to join a research programme to help your advocacy work, please message aik@thecentriclab.com

We are looking to partner with more GPs in urban areas to help their abilities to track and make not of illnesses and symptoms related to air pollution.

Centric Lab @thecentriclab.com · Mar 17

Consideration 5: Air should be Air
We understand that, in order to re-establish “Air”, we need to ask for more than clean air, we need to consider that “Air” has had its beingness taken away. Meaning that they cannot act autonomously, they have been depleted of their original nourishment, and of course Air is sick due to contamination. In order for us to have “Air”, it will also include the abolition of war, prisons, capitalism, imperialism, supremacy over Land and Peoples. As all of these factors directly contribute to the pollution and dehumanisation of Air.

Additionally, we recognise that our advocacy for “Air” is a Liberatory pathway, leading us to a Kinship with Land - a Rematriation. A final component of this consideration is that asking for “Air” means that all of us on this planet are included in the pursuit of justice, as none of us are breathing Air.

Centric Lab @thecentriclab.com · Mar 17

Consideration 4: A Change in Governance
In order to abolish Right to Pollute policies we need to consider how we want to be governed. The Zapatistas, who are a movement of Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas, have a way of governing called “leading through obedience”. In other words, their governance structures are there to obey the will of all living beings. This requires humility, deep listening, and autonomy. We should ponder what type of governance both support Right to Pollute policies and what structures would support Right to Life policies.
This orientation to governance also demands us to ask - is the state a sufficient container to support Right to Life policies that enable such ‘leading through obedience’? If the state is, in Dean Spade’s words, a “technology for extraction”, an abolitionist approach questions the ultimate liberatory potential of the state, certainly in its current form.
Whilst we may not have the answers straight away, we should consider further questions
What “Right to Life” policies really means within the violence of the state?
How are we redistributing the resources currently upholding the corporate Right to Pollute towards policies and practices that uphold the Right to Life?
Who decides how this happens, through what mechanism? If the state - whether national or local government - continues to steward this process?
What processes, mental frameworks, and methods are needed to hold the imaginations and needs of various communities as they transition to a governance structure that can uphold “Right to Life” policies?

Centric Lab @thecentriclab.com · Mar 17

Consideration 3: We are Kin
Framing it in an abolitionist framework, we have to centre different epistemologies, which can seed worlds outside supremacy. Many people are led to believe that we need to have contamination in order to survive as a human species. It is the collateral damage for “progress” which includes roads, science, medicine, ect. This of course is not true, as how can poison be a route to survival. This myth serves to conserve and grow oppressive capitalist systems.

There are many societies across the world and human history that have not abided by supremacy and in fact centre Kinship. This requires seeing all beings as having life, autonomy, and imagination. In practice this means that there is no human centred hierarchy, instead there is reciprocity and symbiosis between all beings. In this context, worlds are created where Water, Air, and Land are not there for human consumption or survival, instead they are our creators, to be conserved and be in service of. For example, what if we could drink water from any stream and in turn all contributed to the health of every water source in our neighbourhood? Or what if we all had access to food and medicine gardens that also contributed to the regulation of neighbouring ecological systems?

Centric Lab @thecentriclab.com · Mar 17

Consideration 2: In Real Time
One of the main challenges for communities confronting industrial polluters is finding data that tells the story of their day to day lived experience. Air pollution through its impact on health, immediately (first contact symptoms) and chronically (development of mental and physical sickness), the right to pollute enables the theft of lifetime - both in quantity and quality - from communities. This is why time-sensitive interventions are necessary now. Traditional legal approaches seek to gather ‘evidence’ - where what counts as valid evidence is severely limited - to work towards a hypothetical ruling in the future that may or may not happen. These alone are insufficient, as the cessation of the right to pollute must be now - every day that it does not, is time stolen, and lives shortened.
Therefore through this project we need to include the following questions;
What does it feel like to experience air pollution on a day to day basis?
What if feels like to lose the ability to interact with their neighbourhood due to stench or fear of contamination?
What if feels to lose Ancestral habitats due to contamination, what does that do to the body and mind?
What air pollution feels like at first contact; itchy eyes, sore throat, nausea, chest tightness and so on.

There are three points of importance to further consider
Industrial polluters and even agencies set up to protect people (DEFRA, Environmental agency, Public Health England, councils) claim that “first contact” symptomology does not constitute poor health and often people are ignored. This allows for the polluter to continue unchallenged. Therefore a clear definition of “poor health” should be established through this project to cover this part of the lived experience.
Due to the variance in lived experience each person in the community will experience the physical and mental effects of air pollution differently. For example, a person living in the neighbourhood who is also a truck driver could be exposed to other stressors that are amplified through air pollution. Oftentimes individuals are told that a polluter is under the “legal permissible limit”, therefore they cannot be stopped and worse their symptoms cannot be related to the air pollution as it is under a limit. Therefore, this project should include an updated definition of “susceptibility” and the need for agencies to hold polluters accountable regardless of “permissible exposure” as those are just guidelines not policies.
Finally, we should bring forward how the mental stress being experienced daily amplifies the physical symptoms.

Centric Lab @thecentriclab.com · Mar 17

Consideration 1: A Change of Mind
It is now a widespread philosophy that Nature and its resources exist for human consumption and “progress”. It is seen as culturally acceptable that we must tolerate certain levels of harm as the reward is human progress and economic success. However, we know that harms like air pollution are putting everyone’s health at risk. We are living with higher rates of asthma, obesity, hypertension, dementia, and cancers all which have a link to air pollution and other contaminants.
To create an abolitionist strategy we must change our cognitive framing, where we see ourselves as separate and superior to Nature. We must also see beyond the creation of extractive economies and centre human health and dignity over profits.

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Centric Lab @thecentriclab.com · Mar 17

According to the World Health Organisation there are no safe levels of air pollution. Given this fact, we as citizens and scientists can no longer show a permissiveness or a tolerance to air pollution. Therefore, in the context of this project abolition means the end of “Right to Pollute Policies”. We would also like to introduce one more factor to the abolition conversation, which is the spiritual. For many of us on this project, we belong to Peoples and communities that have been historically marginalised by systems of supremacy that lead to experiencing air pollution at a disproportionate rate. Therefore many of us carry a deeply rooted and even Ancestral need to abolish what has harmed us for generations.

Many would think that science has to be politically neutral and therefore has no utility within a political space. However, science is a human cognitive output and like all other outputs it is intrinsically rooted in culture. For example, in western European culture, humans are put at the top of the cognition scale, therefore it has taken western science until quite recently to recognise that other beings such as trees and plants have complex intelligence. In contrast, many cultures of Turtle Island do not centre the human and long recognised not only the intelligence of more than human Kin, but also their wisdom and intelligence. We cannot separate science from culture. Additionally, science is a tool, one that allows us to systematically observe the world, so we can turn this into information for complex problem solving.

Therefore, for this project we are going to use abolition as our strategy to create a scientific design that contributes to the abolition work being conducted by communities all over the world. Abolition is a strategy that requires big mental shifts starting from knowledge roots, narratives, and moving towards cultural shifts that end with changes in the law. This requires time and certain considerations.

Centric Lab @thecentriclab.com · Mar 17

Another World is Possible
Abolishing at its core is the official ending of an event, law, policy, or even state of mind. There is also a political element to the word, that has its roots in the Black and Indigenous Abolition movements which ended chattel slavery in what is illegitimately known as the Americas. The contemporary abolitionist movement refers to the dismantling of the ‘prison-industrial complex’ (PIC) - comprising “overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems” (Critical Resistance, 2023). PIC abolition is centrally concerned with breaking cycles of violence, making legible where carcerality acts and is reproduced in proposed solutions to violence. Crucially, though, PIC abolition commits to being in perpetual practice of “rehears[ing] the social order coming into being” (Wilson Gilmore & Gilroy, 2020).

Centric Lab @thecentriclab.com · Mar 17

We will not Haggle.

To date those affected by air pollution have had to use data and evidence to prove their humanity to the polluter. This arises in three pathways.

We have to prove to be human enough to be affected by the pollution. Usually, communities are told it is their genes or race that puts them at risk rather than the pollution itself.

We have to prove that our communities are worthy of the same dignity as others. Not everyone in society is forced to live in sacrifice zones. More importantly, no one should live in a sacrifice zone.

We have to prove our health to the polluters as we are not given the dignity of zero contamination. We are often told that “x” quantities of particulate matter are not a threat to our health, yet we are living with the effects. This leaves us having to accept living with headaches, coughs, and other ailments caused by contamination.

Every time we have to evidence our humanity and health we are haggling with the polluter. We haggle on a lower level of pollution, yet, according to the World Health Organisation, there are no safe levels of air pollution.

Centric Lab @thecentriclab.com · Mar 17

Air Pollution and Abolition.

How might we approach this?

Follow this thread to see some of our thinking...