Healing Otherwise
Embodied Care, Counter-Knowledge, and Assemblage in Black Panther Health Activism
Welcome to Healing Otherwise
This website project explores how the Black Panther Party reimagined health not as a service—but as a shared, embodied practice of care, resistance, and community. Through images, archives, and anthropological analysis, this site traces how healing became a political act.
Start exploring through the sections below
1-Historical Context:
Who were the Black Panthers, and what made health a site of political resistance?
This section explores the founding of the Party, the racialized neglect of Black health, and how the Panthers turned clinics and care into a radical infrastructure for collective survival.
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2-Care as Practice:
How did care happen on the ground? This section enters the clinics - not as sterile, clean places, but as messy, improvised infrastructures where volunteers, ideology and necessity met. From medical training to acupuncture, Panther health care practices detached themselves from medical orthodoxy.
3-Counter-Knowledge:
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Who gets to define knowledge—and who is left out? This section explores how the Panthers challenged the authority of institutional medicine by producing and circulating knowledge from below. Through flyers, medical pamphlets, and hands-on training, they redistributed expertise and opened access to healing. Assemblage here becomes a method for reclaiming knowledge—disrupting medical hierarchy and reimagining care beyond clinical walls.