Current Faculty Fellows

Musicology & Ethnomusicology | Mapping Soundscapes of Caregiving: Listening to Filipino Migrants 
Through sonic ethnography and interactive digital mapping, this research project chronicles the daily experiences of migrant Filipino caregivers across multiple cities including New Jersey, Milan, London, Saudi Arabia, and Hong Kong. Listening to the caregivers’ everyday sounds and analyzing their musical consumption and production, the multimedia project structures its inquiry into four themes: narratives of daily caregiving, cultural transits, musical identities and communities, and infrastructures of inequalities. What role does sound play in the maintenance of transnational identities and the forging of social, racial, class, and gender relations in the diaspora?

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Dept. of Radio-Television-Film | Aspirational Digital Ecosystems in a Post-postcolonial World 
 I am currently working on a book project that evaluates how the cultural resonance inherent in the concept of “openness” is being mobilized in government agencies, corporate entities and allied civic organizations to harmonize the growing investments in public-private partnerships as the inevitable bedrock of digital ecosystems in India. However, I submit that the “open” digital ecosystems being promoted as public-private partnerships at the state-corporate nexus are in fact restricted ecosystems because they are primarily invested – both emotionally and financially -- in representational practices of classification, organization and visualization to capture and control data for efficient exchange and profit accumulation. Instead, I posit a more general notion of aspirational digital ecosystems in relation to the many idealizations of openness invoked by various stakeholders in their desires to enhance individual, familial, social and environmental wellbeing. These stakeholders include not only the political-economic elites at the state-corporate nexus and the upwardly mobile communities of middle-class consumers but also the unrepresented and often unrepresentable subaltern communities across traditional demographics – such as gender, class, caste, race, language, region and religion. I describe the collective aspirations of diverse communities in non-representational terms of multisensory affect – such as passions, desires, dreams and visions – that always exceed and overflow restricted notions of governmental rationality and platform efficiency. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship on affect in postcolonial studies, cultural ecology, environmental studies and digital media studies, I define the general shift away from representational models of postcolonial power toward non-representational modes in which the sensory infrastructure of affect takes command as a characteristic feature of the new post-postcolonial order. In each of the six chapters of the book, I critically analyze affective invocations of openness in policy proposals, design documents, promotional videos, glossy brochures, industry reports and public commentary by policymakers, designers, social activists, media pundits, consumers and citizens at large who aspire, in different ways, to harness the power and potential of open digital ecosystems in a post-postcolonial world.

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Dept. of Curriculum & Instruction and Centers for Asian American and East Asian Studies | K-beauty discourses and intercultural learning in a digital age

My project focuses on the digital future of intercultural learning. I explore how youth recruit multiple semiotic resources in transnational online communication to engage with globally diverse peoples and cultures. During the fellowship, I will specifically examine how Korean beauty (K-beauty) gets imagined by youth who live outside of Korea through internet-mediated engagements with Korean popular media texts. The central question of this work is: How do youth who live outside of Korea construct dialogic and self-reflexive representations of Korean beauty within an online discussion forum, and what social, cultural, and political ideologies animate their discourse?

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Dept. of Art & Art History | Stories All Over Networks 
This creative research project investigates externalities of planetary computational networks and artificial intelligence, while engaging with neural networks and machine learning techniques to generate stories and spark ideas for interventions. The project’s form will be determined by an experimental process involving university resources and data gathering. In the face of AI’s expansion, the purpose behind this project is to pose philosophical and ethical questions about what is at stake, who we are becoming and who we can be.

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Dept. of English | Radio Publics 
As a Humanities Institute Fellow, I will be working on my book, Radio Publics. Radio Publics investigates the history of radio in Germany and the United States between 1920-45 in order to better understand both the promises and perils of new media. Throughout its history, radio has been a medium fraught with contradictions: it is private and public, local and global, a tool for the powerful and a tool for the weak. At the center of this book is a paradox about democracy and technology: the same technology that enabled mass participation in political discourse also became a tool for totalitarian propaganda. The controversies and debates that we encounter in the 1920s to 40s about access, representation, identity, misinformation, and censorship all resonate today. Studying the history of radio can help us better understand and plan for our digital futures.

Dept. of African and African Diaspora Studies | Reef

This project expands on a dream incubation text that I authored in 2021 for Perfect Sleep. Developed by artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, Perfect Sleep is an installation and smartphone app that investigates the potential of sleep, dreaming and restoration as climate engineering technology. As the artists put it, “by inviting participants to experiment with their own sleep cycles, the work explores how lack of sleep and climate change are both products of the same extractivist capitalist system where regeneration, rest and natural limits go unvalued.” “Reef”, the dream incubation that I wrote for the smartphone app, invites sleepers to dream of the endangered coastal ecosystem of the island of Tobago. Tobago’s coral reefs, like many others, have degraded overtime. Made vulnerable by pollution and waste mismanagement, algae overgrowth, and threatened by anchors, deforestation, changing climate conditions and reef-walking tourists. 

Building on my initial observations, snorkeling and conversations on labor and the precarity of seafloor life with glass-bottom boat captains in Tobago in the summer of 2022, Reef investigates coral reef mimicry, wave soundscapes, and what - Scarus coeruleus, the blue parrotfish that make their home in Tobago’s Buccoo Reef - and other ocean life can teach us about resistance, resilience and how to make a reef.

Dept. of American Studies | Border Circuits: Latina/o/e Digital Labor since 1965
Border Circuits is a project that examines the history and politics of electronics manufacturing in the US-México borderlands since 1965. The urban fabric of northern Mexican cities was transformed as government-enacted initiatives redrew territories and brought new industries to produce innovative technology. Mexican and Indigenous women who worked in electronics were at the forefront of living with and against the digital economy--its opportunities, its injustices, and its toxicities. Through an intersectional lens, inquiries of human-machine configurations, archival research, and discourse analysis, the project shows the integral role of Latina/o/es and of the borderlands as invisible infrastructures of the contemporary world.

Dept. of Classics | Linguistic Fairness and the Study of Literature

The study of literature is a core activity within the humanities. Key aspects of the academic ecosystem – publication venues, technical resources, and courses – have been developed within “legacy” institutions, especially departments and fields focused on Euro-American, imperial, and modern cultural production, often represented by a narrow set of languages. The result is that while research universities can on the one hand aspire to global audiences, on the other hand their humanities outputs often exhibit a bias against many languages, including those with which large populations identify. To date there has been no systematic attempt to evaluate how well the academic field of literary study in the US represents linguistic and cultural diversity. To that end this project seeks to answer a single overarching question: in the study and teaching of literature, especially in the US, how well do curricula, publications, and other metrics reflect different cultures and periods?

Dept. of Government | Imagining Constitutional Reform 
Elkins and collaborators -- Jill Lepore (Harvard) and Tom Ginsburg (Chicago) -- will hold a series of public consultations across the country to assess current American constitutional priorities.  These consultations will focus on the perspectives of communities that have been underrepresented in policy and constitutional debates. Each consultation would assemble a distinct group of people, allow them to explore other national constitutions and prior U.S. constitutional amendment proposals, collect ideas, propose them, discuss them, and come to a collective decision about them. These consultations are designed to construct a constitutional moment—that rare moment when citizens grapple with higher law—and to observe what consensus and new ideas emerge that could be applied to pressing sociopolitical challenges.

Dept. of Government | AI versus Human Responsibility in Political Community 
My project addresses digital technologies in the form of artificial intelligence (AI) and, from the perspective of social theory, analyzes the specifically political dangers that AI poses to liberal democratic communities. The chapter, which includes a focus on racial, ethnic, and other forms of discrimination, defends four theses: (1) the social need for complexity reduction makes political community vulnerable to AI; (2) human intelligence is a social phenomenon, that is, consciousness is possible only in constant exchange with its environments; (3) human intelligence includes a distinctly political capacity for the mutual attribution of responsibility among citizens; and (4) algorithms cannot meet the political challenges of liberal democracy.

Dept. of Anthropology | Language at the Racialized and Technological Limits of the Human
Within debates about human exceptionalism, language has long been held up as the mental capacity that separates humans and other animals. Yet recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are making some re-think this position. Like humans, AI chatbots today can write poetry, essays, news reports, Twitter rants, and 4chan posts. Like humans, these forms of language can be by turns beautiful, competent, dull, cliched, or racist. While discussions of human exceptionalism often take place just within the domain of scholarly discourse, the prevalence of AI-based "personal assistants" and other labor-saving helpers is bringing debates about the boundaries of the human into popular media. Following posthumanist scholars who critique the racialized and gendered forms of human exceptionalism, I am exploring the ways that contemporary discussions about the humanity of AI chatbots can be seen in terms of the ways that they reflect longstanding racialized, colonial ambivalences about the humanity and linguistic capacities of laborers. In other words, in order to analyze the ways that people are marking out the space of human exceptionalism when it comes to AI, it is necessary to look back at the history of how Euro-Americans have discussed and imagined the communicative capacities of unfree laborers in the past.

Latin American Cultural Studies & African and African American Studies | Archiving Black America
Archiving Black América is a LLILAS Benson digital humanities initiative that focuses on both acknowledging and redressing the objectification and violence of documentation practices. It will engage in archiving (broadly conceived) the production of knowledge and systems of meaning that both illuminate the violence of this historicity and provide a counter to epistemicide. The project poses the following overarching question: How does our past, present, and future vision of the Americas change when it is imagined by Black writers, artists, activists, and theorists? The project addresses this question by centering Black concepts of time-space (such as ancestrality, or Afro-futurism) as it makes hemispheric connections between the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. It contemplates the relationships of power that structure Black diaspora societies and how they might be challenged. The period of time encompassed by the project begins with colonialism and the slave trade and continues to the present, in the context of global capitalism and its production of anti-blackness. Given these enduring arrangements of racialized power, Archiving Black América seeks to highlight visions for living more justly and the possibilities for Black political thought and activism.  One of the goals of the project is to create a website for sharing resources and building a multi-disciplinary community of racial justice researchers. The website will expand the digital presence of our Black Diaspora Archive, established in 2015 to document the Black experience in the Americas and the Caribbean. It will facilitate access to existing material in our collection and additionally and importantly, it will also involve our community of researchers in contributing new acquisitions.

Dept. of American Studies | Technologies of Dispossession, Techniques of Resistance 
As part of my engagement with the Digital Futures and Social Justice Faculty Fellows Seminar, I am excited to continue three lines of research pertaining to intersections of technological, digital, and housing justice. For one, I am currently working on a book project entitled Unbecoming Silicon Valley: Techno Imaginaries and Materialities in Postsocialist Times, which explores socialist-era computing, infrastructural, and housing practices in Romania, many of which have been subsumed by the powers of Silicon Valley. While focusing on Siliconized urban landscapes, I also look to anti-capitalist cyber practices, housing justice organizing, and anti-imperial speculative media work that collectively materialize the unbecoming of Silicon Valley. Relatedly, I will further explore the methods and practices of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP)—a critical cartography, digital humanities, and multimedia collective dedicated to mobilizing digitality for housing justice that I cofounded in 2013. As of late, I launched a new project here at UT interconnected to the AEMP called Landlord Tech Watch. As a public facing project linked to an array of community partners, Landlord Tech Watch produces scholarship on the various scopic, algorithmic, and platform mediated systems that landlords and property managers use automate contexts of gentrification. By thinking through all three of these projects together, I aim to conceptualize technologies of dispossession alongside techniques of resistance, refusal, and rebellion.

I am required.

Dept. of Germanic Studies | Born-digital Archives, Digital Forensics and the Future of Philology 

My present research project is about digital forensics and li­te­ra­ry born-digital archives, born-digital preservation, born-digital history and archives, as well as forensic perspectives on disinformation archives, hacking his­tories, and tracking of information campaigning. On a more general level, my research investigates how digital methods change our views on humanities perspectives, e.g. on identiy, diversity, intersectionality, and methodological aspects such as reproducibility and XAI.

Dept. of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies | Intimate Acquisitions: A Relational History of U.S. Bounty Lands

“Intimate Acquisitions” seeks to create front-facing resources on the massive, diffuse, and widely dispersed archive of “bounty land” in the United States from the 18th century forward. Between sixty and seventy million acres of acres of land have been issued to more than 550,000 veterans of conflict, their widows, and their minor heirs. The scope and scale of bounty lands is scattered and vast and tracing them is a fascinating challenge. Land grants given in exchange for military service were listed as allotments, bounties, bounty lands, deeds, grants, pensions, scrip, tracts, and warrants. Further, bounty lands originate from diverse powers and transverse much of the United States and its territories, thus we cannot constrain the study of bounty lands to a single war or military engagement, legislative act, region, or period. As historians expand public understanding of enslavement, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism, my project on bounty lands proposes a publicly available, digital consolidation of a dizzyingly vast archive—an archive that makes visible the mechanics of U.S. settler colonialism. The ultimate goal of “Intimate Acquisitions” is to invite rich and diverse analysis, which will then be manifested in curriculum, digital and online exhibits, publications, public programming, and user tools. 

Dept. of Anthropology | The Analogue Life of Digital Information: Anti-vaccine Messaging in Papua New Guinea
At 3.4%, the COVID-19 vaccination rate in the Pacific-island nation of Papua New Guinea is among the lowest in the world. This is partly the result of widespread vaccine hesitancy, which has been blamed on anti-vaccine messages circulating on social media. Yet, as in many parts of the global south, internet penetration in Papua New Guinea is limited, with only about 10% of Papua New Guineans having access to social media. How does digital health (mis)information—much of it coming from overseas—spread in this context? My project looks at the ways digital messages about vaccines, medicine, and health circulating online are relayed in “analogue” form—in sermons, school lessons, the speeches of political leaders, and informal conversations with family and friends. While access to the internet is quite limited in Papua New Guinea, this project shines a light on the intermediaries—known and trusted sources of health information like pastors, teachers, relatives, journalists, and herbal healers—who help to bridge the digital divide and at the same time help to spread digital (mis)information.

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Dept. of Health Social Work | Building Texas' Profile on Intimate and Interpersonal Violence with Hope to Offer Innovative Strategies that Ameliorate these Social Problems 
Over the past 22 years, Institute on Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault (IDVSA) has served as the state's research leader in building Texas' understanding of intimate and interpersonal violences (human trafficking, sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence). Still, our cumulative knowledge and impact of these violences in the lives of Texans are lacking. IDVSA's research is not generic—it is Texas-specific. Texans perpetrate these violences against other Texans, most of whom they know or are related to. During this Fellowship, I propose applying digital technologies and computational methods across dozens of datasets to more comprehensively build Texas' profile on intimate and interpersonal violence and offer innovative strategies to ameliorate the impact and occurrence. 

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Dept. of History & LBJ School of Public Affairs | The Fire This Time: 1963 and America’s Civil Rights Revolution
The Fire This Time: 1963 and America’s Civil Rights Revolution offers a new interpretation of what was arguably the most pivotal year in post-war America. The project reimagines the scope and breadth of the political, cultural, social, and economic systems and forces that shaped 1963’s national and global civil rights landscape including James Baldwin, Medgar Evers, Lorraine Hansberry, Gloria Richardson, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Bobby Kennedy. In so doing it offers an eye opening window into contemporary movements for racial justice, democracy, citizenship, and dignity that have fundamentally altered the nation’s democratic landscape.

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School of Information | Data Archives from Activist and Informal Collectives
My research focuses on platforms, data management, and digital cultural memory--particularly how these issues impact archives of the near future.  With this work, I aim to explain the realities of data access across different communities. Recently, I have been focusing on data activism where communities collect and archive data to address social justice issues. In examining the realities of opportunities and barriers to data access, research on data archives has broad reach in our society, impacting both our experiences of technology and our capacities for creativity. I am particularly interested in approaching the topic of informal collective and activist data archives from a humanistic orientation and learning from other cohort members about how they apply critical methods to digital technologies and data practices.

Communication Studies | Makers, Maintainers and Unseen Innovators 
My research is focused on how cultures of technology design shape the process of innovation. I’m especially interested in what I call “unseen innovators:” the people who materially make, modify and maintain technologies. Unseen innovators are typically overlooked in public discourses about innovation, which tend to focus on the celebrated realm of programming and coding. As a Faculty Fellow, I'll be developing two projects: (1) an ethnographic project focused on how essential workers are reconfiguring AI technologies implemented during the Covid-19 crisis and (2) a digital humanities project focused on the women who manufactured computer memory for the Apollo moon missions. Both of these projects aim to challenge dominant discourses that depict those with already immense social power and privilege as the singular source of new technology. I'll do this by writing new, scholarly narratives that center the contributions of women to technological accomplishments, both presently and in the past.

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