ABOUT

In Summer 2026, we are organizing a series of dialogues with UIUC Students and Faculty, as well as Program Coordinators and Community Health Practitioners at the Champaign Urbana Public Health District (CUPHD) to develop a framework for action-research in AI & Community Health.

Click here to learn more and express your interest in participating

The Critical Anatomies Lab conducts design research on health equity, community well-being, and emerging technologies. We ask about the methods, tools and community-building strategies we need to design healing experiences, services and systems that advance goals of social and transformative justice.

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We work across three areas:

Anatomical ontology: We study how visual representations of the body, and their technological mediations, shape our understanding, valuation, and imagination of bodies, and how they influence medical knowledge and healing practices. As action-research, we experiment with the affordances of body images and body mapping to make visible the nuances and contradictions in performing care work, and reimagine our connections to land, human and non-human life.

Community-based healthcare models: Care and caring are central to the work in the lab, especially when practices of care enter institutions, financial structures and regulations. We document, analyze and actively engage with healthcare models rooted in community care. We collaborate with public health organizations, grassroots organizers, feminist collectives, community-based doulas and community acupuncture clinics to devise spaces for critical analysis and creative expression.

Emerging technologies in healthcare: As an interdisciplinary contribution between design and the social studies of science, we explore how emerging technologies shape labor relations around care. We disseminate the analysis of technologies to broader audiences through design-based means, such as digital and printed publications, visualizations of how we are rethinking infrastructures, and crafting new narratives about the ways that technologies solidify and transform the design of our societies, and the visions we build for our just transitions.