Biography
I am broadly interested in how (infra)structures like language and digital platforms condition and organize social life. How do “grand” ideas like nationalism and revolution become meaningful in everyday lives? How do seemingly ephemeral feelings pick up political momentum through digital mediation? What aspects of “mundane” acts of reading, speaking, and writing shape our relationship with the world around us? Working at the intersection of linguistic anthropology, cultural studies, and disability studies, I use ethnographic methods to explore the relationship between technology and what I call the everyday politics of affect.
My dissertation, tentatively titled “Platforming Feelings: Amateur Voice Acting and the Everyday Politics of Affect in China,” is an ethnographic exploration of the affective experiences of amateur voice actors on the Chinese internet. Treating affect as the very texture of semiosis—the meaning-making processes—of everyday social interactions via digital mediation, I aim to develop an empirically grounded method to understand how affect comes to condition the political and cultural dimensions of digital lives in China and beyond.
In my own mundane life, I find joy in the changing seasons and the company of Miyu, the feline founder of the famous Cat Awesome Theory (CAT).