As a teacher and scholar, I study how pathology dismantles rigid ways of conceptualizing community and points to more adaptive forms of belonging that can better navigate rapidly shifting social, economic, and political networks. In this endeavor I am inspired by critical race, ethnic, and Indigenous studies; democratic theory and political thought; critical pedagogy; science and technology studies; complexity and systems theory; and disability studies. I use these critical and theoretical tools to understand how minority agency and forms of belonging have become more elastic and nuanced in response to the unprecedented challenges presented by the rise of neoliberal economic policies.

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A dedicated educator and researcher, I graduated from Brown University in 2018 and am currently revising my manuscript titled Pluralism and Pathology in African American and Indigenous Fiction for the University of Michigan Press. My project examines the prevalence of illness in Indigenous and African American fiction written since 1980, and the ways in which such sickly identities offer alternatives to conventional models of communal affiliation and organizing. A portion of this work was published in the journal LIT, and other chapters have been presented at the annual meetings of the ACLA, NeMLA, MELUS, and ASA.

 

The archival work that will form the foundation of my next project, titled Self-Determination, Imposter Syndrome, and Other Ailments in American Literatures, will commence at the Newberry and Tamiment Libraries summer 2021, thanks to a generous Kenyon Faculty Research Grant. This new endeavor will analyze how self-determination—the doctrine of self-governance and the ethics of care that enabled minority communities to combat divestment—has been transformed since 1975. Specifically, I seek to understand how self-determination, which emerged as a powerful democratizing tool in the 1950s, has been adulterated to bolster anti-democratic neoliberal discourses like personal liberty, privatization, and personal responsibility. This project will trace the evolution of the concept of self-determination through three phases. First, I will examine self-determination’s dual evolution in the postwar writings of Indigenous and African American political figures who sought sovereignty and self-governance to replace paternalistic federal policies. Next, I will examine the cross-fertilization of self-determination and an ethics of care within more radical cultural nationalist movements of the 1960s and 70s. Finally, I will pivot to consider the current, fraught relationship between self-determination and neoliberalism. Specifically, I will analyze how the transmutation of self-determination into a neoliberal identity politics is reflected and resisted in the preponderance of imposters, sellouts, and traitors in the fiction of African American, Latinx, and Indigenous authors like Stephen Graham Jones, Brando Skyhorse, Percival Everett, and Paul Beatty.

 

The outreach component of this new project, called Anatomy of a Movement, draws its impetus from the findings of political scientists like Deva Woodly, who argue that social justice organizing is most powerful when it affects profound identitarian shifts in stakeholders, but that little is known about such positional alchemy because organizers frequently leave no detailed blueprint of their tactics behind. Anatomy of a Movement would create that blueprint by collaborating with community organizers and activists addressing the racial health disparities exacerbated by Covid-19. Specifically, I will survey, interview, and work alongside social justice organizers to gather data for a meta-analysis of the field: categorizing and cataloguing the techniques and tactics of community engagement and education health equity organizations deploy. I would also aspire to collaborate with The Humanities Action Lab on this project, to connect with its impressive network of universities, issue organizations, and community partners in over 40 cities, and to emulate its translocal model of resource sharing and reciprocal learning. Anatomy of a Movement will invite students, faculty, and community members across distances and the disciplines to explore, analyze, and share how forms of belonging and community are forged—both cognitively and corporeally—through the tension between our political ideals and our everyday practices, habits, and feelings.