Research
Automating Discovery
Can there be a feminist science of Mars?
At the intersections of Feminist Science and Technology Studies, Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, my current book project Automating Discovery: Learning to See the Transpacific Ghosts in the Machine builds from my dissertation work to craft situated knowledge of Mars, or a version of feminist objectivity of Mars, through an extended practice of learning to become accountable for “what we learn how to see.” Dwelling in the absences and limits of official transpacific histories and archives, Automating Discovery brings together technical and speculative analyses of the digital and cultural infrastructures that make US scientific visions of Mars possible, reading across an archive of technical documents, engineering and design imaginaries, Asian American feminist life writing, and Filipino speculative fiction. In so doing, Automating Discovery engages the possibilities for crafting an anti-colonial feminist science of Mars while asking why we must think about US technoscientific research and development on Mars as an urgent feminist issue in our current planetary moment.
Other Projects
Feminist Pedagogy
I have a deep commitment to Feminist STS pedagogy, and maintain an active research agenda in this area. I have written an article, “Feminist Iterations of ‘The Implosion’: New Techniques for Teaching About Science, Technology, and Society through The “Implosion Project”” that outlines a new and explicitly feminist iteration of Professor Joseph Dumit’s (2014) “Implosion Project.” “Feminist Iterations of ‘The Implosion’” is forthcoming in Feminist Pedagogy.
How can we center social justice praxis in scientific research?
As an educator in the field of feminist science and technology studies, a crucial part of my job is to develop and apply interdisciplinary pedagogical tools and approaches that can help students make meaningful connections across the theories, knowledge, and practices of Ethnic Studies and women of color feminisms and those of the STEM disciplines, and I have co-written about one such approach, the “Feminist Science Shop Model,” which you can read more about here.
I am also a frequent collaborator with The Feminist Research Institute at UC Davis in “Asking Different Questions: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Science,” an NSF-funded project that brings researchers and practitioners from the humanities and social sciences and STEM fields together to apply insights from feminist science studies, women of color feminisms, and ethnic studies to STEM research agendas and cultures, in an effort to build interdisciplinary research cultures that center social justice.