My research lies between political theory, feminist and queer theory, and American studies. It primarily concerns relationships between affect and politics in the United States, shaped by entangled histories of slavery, dispossession, heteronormativity, and global war. My research strives to loosen the hold of power by amplifying minor forms of being and relating.
Research Areas
Political theory, Asian American studies, queer theory, Black studies, settler colonial and Indigenous studies
Research Interests
Affect, race, biopolitics, new materialisms, settler colonialism, ecology
Current Research
I am presently conducting two major research projects: A Life Otherwise and The Yellow Commons.
A Life Otherwise examines how the good life, in addition to establishing how life ought to be lived, advances a particular, exclusionary notion of what life is. It retrieves minor figurations of life that do not comport with property relations, individuation, order, optimized bodily capacity and longevity, reproductive intimacy, survival, and providential time. Part of this project has been published as “Vital Impasse.”
The Yellow Commons envisions Asian America as an ecology of humans and nonhumans in the wake of anti-Asian racism. It strives to develop a minor ontology of Asian America through notions of the human, life, affect, and futurity. It reimagines ethical and political activity through new materialisms and vitalisms, process philosophy, posthumanisms, and Asian American and Indigenous studies.