Project Description

The project is particularly interested in tracing the material and affective life of catastrophe itself — the ledgers, models, and marketing through which insurers transform environmental devastation into tradable assets. These financial technologies, though abstract in design, are profoundly material: they are structured by the physical vulnerabilities of coastlines, the infrastructures of flood and fire, and the ecological volatility of the Earth system. I approach the insurance archive as a dense ecology of material forms — paper, data, infrastructure, photography, risk models, maps, and bodies — each shaping how climate catastrophe is sensed, valued, projected, and lived. Alongside these material inquiries is an enduring interest in scrutinizing property insurance as singular window into the affective dimensions of climate collapse. Because insurers convert fear into a monetizable asset, they lay bare a particular emotional logic of the Anthropocene.

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Project: The Political Economy of Black Men: A Critical Policy Analysis

Project Description

If sexism does not explain variation in Black men’s political behavior, what might? I argue that negative experiences with policies, particularly within the criminal legal system and social welfare programs, have the potential to generate distrust, alienation, disengagement, even withdrawal from political systems. Guided by poverty governance as a conceptual tool, I offer a critical policy analysis of the burdens faced by Black men in relation to the social safety net, child support, and marijuana legalization. In so doing, I seek to raise the quality of examples, evidence, and caution available to analysts to grapple with the policy feedback effects born of Black men’s political economy. The best way to try to make sense of it in the United States is by examining concrete examples of the policy-scape faced by Black men. For example, it is widely accepted that welfare in the US is a gendered experience (Kang et al. 2017). That is partly because “[t]he distribution of welfare in the US is a gendered process in which women, especially mothers, are much more likely to receive assistance than men” (Kang et al. 2017). For example, “[m]en generally do not qualify for cash welfare, childcare, or Medicaid.” Plus, because African American men are disproportionate in felony drug convictions, many are ineligible for certain public benefits. Thus, “[m]ost research and debate have concentrated on the use of welfare by families headed by single women” (Kost 1997).

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Project: When Monuments Breathe: On Preservation and Decay

Project Description

I focus on the scale of a stone monument, which can still be thought of, almost literally, as a living, breathing object – photosynthesizing cyanobacteria living on stone breathing in carbon dioxide and water to produce food, and exhale oxygen as a byproduct. To an individual cyanobacterium living on an air-exposed stone surface, however, environment is destiny in the sense that, at least in relatively slowly changing conditions, survival is coupled to local chemical and physical conditions. How is it even possible to live on a stone surface without, seemingly, nutrient sources and most importantly without a steady supply of water? It is worth appreciating that microbes generally are capable mechanics, that can, and will, remodel their environment to the extent that physical constraints allow, in order to make it more favorable. They still dominate the earth’s chemical cycles, e.g., carbon, nitrogen, sulfur cycles, and will continue to do so no matter anthropomorphic interventions. There are many questions about how environmental conditions effect microbes, with the most fundamental perhaps being given a characterization of these conditions, can we predict which microbes will be present and what will they be doing?

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Project: Afghan Refugees and Media Makers in Exile Reflect on Imperial Remainders and the Afterlives of War

Project Description

My work-in-progress film project explores the trials and tribulations of these creators, weaving together stories of diaspora, creativity, and resilience to reveal the rich complexity of life and identity in new cultural landscapes. However, with the opportunities provided by the fellowship, I want to expand the scope of the film to meditate on refugee and immigrant experiences in the present political climate, especially for refugees of war who the U.S. was at war with/in our countries. Afghan, Iraqi, Vietnamese, and other war refugees have a unique relationship to the U.S. because of these wars. Post evacuation in August of 2021, Philadelphia took in one of the largest numbers of Afghan refugees. Forced to recalibrate following the 2024 U.S. presidential elections and onset of immigration and refugee restrictions, many in the community, and those awaiting entry, are experiencing deep uncertainty. The resettlement of refugees has been politicized in many countries, including the U.S., which suspended support for resettlement of Afghan refugees in January 2025 (Bustillo). In addition to the tangible and the visible wounds of war for Afghan refugees, I want to explore the material and psychic toll of US empire. What we carry in our bodies and minds—the scars, chemicals, cognitive dissonance, and traumas—haunt refugee communities for generations as they are passed on.

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Project: Jurisprudence of the Mountains: Ontologies, Ethics, and Jurisdictional Imaginaries of Indigenous Hunting on Formosa

Project Description

My current project examines how Bunun communities in Taiwan engage with law, matter, and sovereignty through practices of wildlife hunting. Related to Jane Bennett’s (2010) concept of “vital materiality,” it explores how Bunun hunters understand mountain territories, animals, and hunting instruments not as inert resources but as living participants in a moral and political ecology guided by a local system of ancestral rules and taboos known as samu. This project traces how Bunun community members enact an Indigenous “jurisdiction” (Richland 2021) in the mountains of Taiwan by affirming samu while selectively integrating other legal and moral orders in the manner of their own choosing. Through samu, the mountainous landscape, animals, and hunting instruments are imbued with ethical vitality as these rules and taboos direct behavior, distribute responsibility, and animate the natural and spiritual world. By analyzing these everyday enactments of samu alongside the integration of other external orders in contemporary hunting practices, the project reveals how the vitality of matter and the politics of Indigenous sovereignty are mutually constituting.

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Project: Groundwork: Alternative Pathways, Networks, and Sites of Resistance in Conceptualist Art from the Brazilian, Argentine, and Chilean Dictatorships, 1964-1990

Project Description

My dissertation focuses on the alternative networks and sites of resistance forged by politically committed artists living under the repressive Brazilian, Argentine, and Chilean dictatorships from 1964-1990. I take a regional and comparative approach to this art historical period previously only narrated as national histories, examining the relationship between human rights abuses and environmental devastation that unfolds irrespective of state borders and as constitutive of dictatorial regimes. I utilize the methodology of political ecology developed by theorists Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and Jane Bennett, which recognizes politics as a collaborative project that develops through the interdependence of humans, materials, and the environment. The chapters are organized by medium and comparative artworks from the three countries to demonstrate how artists confronted authoritarianism while intervening in public space and activating materiality to realize their works. Chapter Three, which I will present as a CHAT Fellow, builds on the previous discussions of material networks and site-specific interventions to examine revolutionary theater as a popular tool to reclaim neoliberal public space, rehearse new ways of living, and disseminate subversive ideas through gesture, action, word, and sound.

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Project: Toward a Metamorphosing Ontology: the Wax Worms Across Visual, Material, and Digital Articulations

Project Description

"Toward a Metamorphosing Ontology” is an interdisciplinary and multimodal dissertation exploring how science and art approach organisms through visualization, extraction, and transposition. This project traces multiple emergences of the larvae of a metamorphosing insect, wax worms (Galleria mellonella), across socio-material worlds and engages, theoretically and practically, with their multiple unstable ontologies that lie beyond scientific frameworks. Long being notorious as web-weaving parasites of beehives, wax worms emerge today as bio- and techno-agents amidst the environmental crisis. They have recently been re-evaluated as protein sources, immunological model organisms, and agents for plastic degradation. This project takes the multiple potentialities as the extension of the worm’s parasitic webs across disciplines. While each thread documents human control and extraction, the messy crisscrosses cocooning around the organism render the worms’ ontology as uncertain and metamorphosing. Taking the interdisciplinary web as my guide, the project delineates how the worms are articulated visually, materially, and digitally, how each field settles or unsettles the worms’ ontology, and how their convergence opens opportunities for the parasites’ proliferation.