About Catalina Alzate
Biography
Catalina bridges design with health equity, centering community-based processes for knowledge production, and a justice-oriented study of emerging technologies. She directs the Critical Anatomies Lab.
Catalina’s educational background spans Design, Feminist Science and Technology Studies, and Somatics.
Her passion and dedication to community-engaged work started early in her career as a designer. Her award-winning undergraduate capstone project was pivotal for her career in service thinking and social justice. The project bridged participatory design and microeconomics. Since then, Catalina has worked in design studios, start-up incubators, research hubs, and has been a Faculty at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art Design and Technology in Bangalore, India, and in the School of Design and Creative Technologies at UT Austin. In india, Catalina was involved in Participatory Design + Community Healthcare projects with rural communities, in collaboration with Digital Rights and Community Health organizations. At UT Austin, she taught courses that incorporate critical theory in design, and a special topics course on Design and Policing.
During her time living in India, Catalina built networks of research, activism and friendship in Southeast Asia, by attending training programs in technology-facilitated gender-based violence, evaluating and allocating research funds for projects on gender and digital technologies based in South Asia, Africa and South America, and serving as a subject matter expert and graphic designer in various projects by The Association for Progressive Communications and the International Development Research Centre in Canada (IDRC). Catalina participates in advisory groups that directly inform international bodies such as UN Women and the United Nations Population Fund on the conceptualization and analysis of the material impacts of online or technology-mediated violence in the lives of women and gender non-conforming people.
Research and publications
Ongoing and upcoming research
Research
Catalina uses feminist and critical theory, the lens of participatory design, and the dynamic structures of service and systems design to conduct and evaluate interventions related to community well-being and emerging technologies from a justice lens. These interventions, manifested in a spectrum of creative possibilities, from expressive introspective works to workshops and long-term community design processes, emphasize the collective and interdependent aspects of health.
On the expressive side, Catalina engages with collage, scan-art, illustration and texturing as part of meaning-making in graphic design.
The ontology of the body is central to Catalina’s design practice, and a key factor in shaping different forms of scholarship. Her own engagement with ‘Integral Theatre’ (an interplay of Jungian psychology and physical theater), and with Female Pleasure and Sexuality as part of her additional training background, influence the methods and forms of Catalina’s work.
Recent creative work includes a co-authored visual essay that examines the ways that emerging technologies and corporate narratives create a prototypical way of living motherhood in contemporary US. Catalina has developed participatory body mapping pieces that express realities of performing care work, as well as a diagnostic study of the use of AI in community health delivery models.
Selected publications
Book Chapters:
- Alzate, Catalina. “Learning from FemTech to Inform the Design of Healthcare Technologies” Digital Transformation in Design: Processes and Practices. Transcript Publishing, 2024. Official Book Launch in May 2024 (Open Access)
- Ortiz, Alfredo; Giles, Juan Carlos; Alzate, Catalina; Retolaza, Iñigo. "De Quien es el Conocimiento? Cuarto Cartas Reflexivas hacia la Democratización del Conocimiento en Procesos Participativos” [Whose Knowledge? Four Reflective Letters Towards Democratizing Knowledge in Participatory Processes] ¿De quién es el conocimiento? Emancipación, Cruce de Saberes y lucha contra la pobreza ("Whose Knowledge? Emancipation, Crossings of Knowledge and the Fight against Poverty"), ATD Quart Monde, 2023
- Alzate, Catalina. “The method of Enactment and the framework of Design: Interdisciplinary contributions to Participatory Research”. The SAGE Handbook of Participatory Research and Enquiry, 2021 London: SAGE Publications Ltd.