Project: Stories of Climate, Justice, and Sustainability in Philadelphia (2009-2024)

Project Description
Philadelphia consistently struggles to equitably mitigate and adapt to climate and sustainability challenges. Telling the story of current and past policy initiatives in Philadelphia (highlighting both successes and failures), my research examines how “compound urban crises” shape environmental policy and urban sustainability planning in the nation’s poorest large city. Westman, et al. argue that cities are “sites where multiple crises manifest” and we need more “extended case studies” that capture the interplay among crises (p. 1402, 1410). During the CHAT Fellowship, I will be working on completing a book manuscript that serves as an “extended case study” of Philadelphia’s urban environmental politics from 2009-2024 (including the creation of the Land Bank, the Green Infrastructure plan, climate justice planning, the urban agriculture plan, conflicts around housing affordability, and redevelopment efforts around the former Philadelphia Refinery). Put together in a book form, these stories illustrate the process of equitably sustainability planning for “compound urban crises” in the context of “planning with complexity” (Innes and Booher, 2010).

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Project: Paranormal Rhetorics: Disability Magic and Crip Glamour

Project Description
Paranormal Rhetorics: Disability Magic and Crip Glamour argues for reconceptualizing the norm—the dominant cultural model for bodies and minds based on ability—by investigating a neglected history and current practice of rhetoric steeped in the paranormal. I investigate historical and contemporary discourses of phantoms, astrology, hauntings, mysticism and goddesses, arguing that they are valuable to study from the perspective of disabled people because they uncover critical interventions in high-stakes situations, often of life or death. In the struggle for disability justice—efforts to secure healthcare, access education, resist re-institutionalization, protest autistic erasure and end violence against disabled people of color—a focus on paranormal rhetorics reveals crucial strategies for resistance. I explore the paranormal discourses and phenomena described by significant figures in the global humanities, including Greek philosophers Gorgias, Plato and Aristotle, Italian Renaissance humanists Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, nineteenth-century philosopher William James and his trans-Atlantic Society for Psychical Research, twentieth-century rhetoricians Kenneth Burke and Susanne Langer, and transnational critical race feminists Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa. I pair new readings of paranormal phenomena described by these figures with contemporary writing by disabled people who conjure ghosts, materialize phantoms, cast spells, read tarot and practice astrology and mystic ritual to resist ableism and strengthen disability culture.

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Project: Shifting World’s Factory Floor: Industrial Relocation, Labor, and Local Development in A Changing China

Project Description
China’s role as the “world’s factory” for manufacturing cheap products has been changing in recent years. In response to rising labor and other manufacturing costs and growing labor shortages in coastal regions, many labor-intensive manufacturers have moved to inland China and other countries where labor is cheaper. China’s state-led industrial restructuring and upgrading, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the US-China trade wars have spurred another wave of industrial relocation. Companies seeking new pastures find that China’s interior, with large rural areas, still holds significant advantages. This book project explores this new space and examines how industrial relocation has affected workers and local development in China’s vast interior. Based on interviews and ethnographic research, this study offers grounded accounts and analysis of work organization and labor control in the new factories, workers’ responses and subjectivities, the role of local governments, and the consequences for people’s livelihood strategies and local development. Situated in the context of China’s industrial restructuring and rural revitalization, this study tells the stories of people from diverse gender and age backgrounds across rural and urban settings, providing a multifaceted and ground-level view of the Chinese socioeconomic transformations amid its shift in growth model, rural-urban integration, and changing geopolitical currents. 

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Project: What Are We Doing in Morocco? Women's History, European History, and Spanish Colonialism 1898-1939

Project Description
Histories of modern Spanish imperialism take shape without women, while histories of Spanish women almost ritualistically disavow questions of race and empire. Building off a distinguished education in imperial and women’s history, my research unites the “question of Morocco” with its contemporary “woman question” in Spain, arguing for the importance to Spanish feminists of defining themselves as Europeans. While the working women who led the great Spanish strikes of 1909 and 1917 opposed the war in Morocco and practiced “unwomanly” behavior, the first generation of Spanish feminists doubled down on the binaries separating man and woman, European and non-European. At the same time, Moroccans faced Spanish colonialism with widely differing perspectives on its evils and opportunities. Although they tried every approach from total collaboration to total rebellion, no Moroccan surpassed the Europe/non-Europe binary. I use the case of Spanish colonialism to prove the centrality of colonialism to European history notwithstanding the smallness of the one remaining colony in northern Morocco. As I follow the Red Cross delegations of the 1910s, to the hygiene discourse of the 1920s, through the colonial travel of the 1930s, I show how profoundly colonialism, even in a small, unprofitable, half-legitimate “Spanish zone,” warps culture.

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Project: Reciprocal Relations Between Women and the Environment in American Regionalist Writing

Project Description
Authors Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Austin, and Zitkala-Ša produced texts in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century that feature relationships between person and place unique to the American Regionalist genre. My research examines this relationship and the ways Regionalist authors utilize it as a means of conceptualizing novel frameworks of environmental-human connection. Within these relationships female characters forge connections with non-human life that exhibit reciprocal influence, mutual benefit, and the refutation of hierarchies that privilege the human party over the non-human. The landscape and its non-human inhabitants are as active of characters in these narratives as the women. These texts, though written nearly 100 years earlier, effectively illustrate Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘becoming-with.’ I use Haraway’s, as well as Annette Kolodny’s, Lawrence Buell’s, and other ecocritical researchers’, scholarship to analyze these relationships, both in terms of the rhetorical strategies used to deploy these representations and in regards to the effect these narratives may have had in shifting readers’ perspectives away from dominant patriarchal narratives of the time.

Project: Rewriting the Global-Local Nexus: Transnational Television and South-South Media Flows

Project Description
My project looks beyond West-driven media globalization to explore South-South media flows on the transnational television platform StarTimes, a major pay-TV provider from China in sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from global media studies and media industry studies and insights from ethnographic fieldwork, the project investigates the global-local nexus in transregional media flows, linguistic and cultural politics, negotiation of commercial interests and state power, and inequalities in global television markets. More specifically, this project generates insights into how media buying centralizes and promotes content from traditionally peripheral media hubs in the Global South to Africa. The production culture in translation, dubbing, and program directing makes indigenous African language channels culturally resonant among audiences in East and West Africa. The project also theorizes the private corporation’s boundary-spanning role in promoting the Chinese media industry and cultural diplomacy in Africa and its negotiation with political economy conditions in navigating the Chinese media “going global” dilemma observed in the expansion of Chinese state media. The project is a timely investigation of the intensified media and culture interactions between Africa and China amid rapid geopolitical changes, documenting a critical moment in global media history from Global South perspectives.

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