Dissertation Research

My dissertation looks at the explosive rise of "participatory design" (參與式設計) movements in Taiwan. In fields ranging from healthcare to environmental remediation and public housing, the government has been investing heavily in projects to recruit the participation of elderly, Indigenous, rural, or otherwise minoritized communities in the production of new technologies. Ultimately, these projects of liberal multicultural inclusion are tasked with the end goal of making historically marginalized communities "self-sufficient" (自給自足) —no longer in need of aid—through locally-suited technological innovation.

In dialogue with critical Indigenous studies and feminist science studies, my research asks why this strategy of inclusion has come to be the case. I interrogate how this seemingly virtuous "design thinking" ignores questions of historical and structural dispossession, shifting responsibility and blame to Indigenous groups for their own cooperation in these new initiatives. Through 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how Amis Indigenous communities insist that systemic issues like economic inequalities, lack of health resources, and severed land relations well exceed the scope of design practices. In so doing, my interlocutors refuse, rework, and transform the assumptions behind design thinking, tactically seizing the resources and civic spaces opened up by participatory policies to steward new institutions that accord with their needs.

Peripherally, I ask why "self-sufficiency" (itself a gendered concept), and why the inclusion of marginalized communities in technological production, are gaining traction in the context of geopolitical dramas surrounding today's Taiwan and China. I turn to historiographical research as well as short-term ethnographic fieldwork done on Chinese participatory design projects to make this comparative case.

Follow-up Project

In my second project, I turn to "circular bioeconomy" (循環生物經濟) guided neighborhoods and residential complexes in Taiwan and China. I do so in order to continue asking questions on the concept of "self-sufficiency" as well as to investigate why particular human-nonhuman living arrangements in both countries are taking on newfound political urgency.