The Demand to Participate

Pushing against geopolitical boundaries, I conduct ethnographic fieldwork across Taiwan, China, and the U.S., and my book projects critically examine the emergence of two concepts central to contemporary design and innovation. My first book dissects the notion of “participation.” The Demand to Participate: Governing Through Collaboration in Indigenous Taiwan (manuscript in preparation) 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, self-reliance has become an organizing metaphor of contemporary technological solutions. It looks at new “circular bioeconomy” residences and neighborhoods throughout Taiwan, China, and the U.S.—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. Simultaneously, I examine how ethnic minority and Indigenous communities in China and Taiwan produce their own understandings of “self-reliance” that emphasize de-growth and gesture toward alternative futures.

Aspiration and Automation in Two Cities

A third project in development returns to my longstanding interest in the entanglements of health, environment, and technology by foregrounding the dual meaning of aspiration as both breath and political-economic desire. Drawing on ethnographic research with breathwork communities in two heavily polluted cities in Taiwan and China, the project asks how practices of intentional breath discourse with or against technological imperatives of automation. It advances aspiration as a framework for understanding survival in degraded, polluted, and automated environments across geopolitical boundaries.