The Demand to Participate

My book projects critically trace the emergence of concepts and logics central to contemporary design and innovation. My first book dissects the notion of “participation.” The Demand to Participate: Governing Through Collaboration in Indigenous Taiwan (under advanced contract with Stanford University Press) looks at the Taiwanese government’s recent response to longstanding Indigenous inequalities through policies of participatory and community-centered design in health and agriculture. It argues that participation, despite its benevolent veneer, constitutes a novel mode of governing Indigenous communities that measures and tabulates community cooperation, while nonetheless producing new spaces for resistance and dissent.

An Atlas of Self-Sufficiency

My second book project, An Atlas of Self-Sufficiency, asks why, in a post-global moment, inward self-reliance has become an organizing metaphor of contemporary technological solutions. It looks at new “circular bioeconomy” residences and neighborhoods throughout Asia—as well as the technologies within them—which promise self-sufficient enclosure from political, environmental, and pandemic crises by producing energy and food from waste. I argue that promises of self-sustaining life often promise to escape worldly inequality rather than remedy it, and I probe the manifold roots of the self-sufficiency concept, from geopolitical conflicts and corporate environmental remediation projects to fantasies of lunar colonization.