Social Epistemology
I’m interested in epistemic environments and structural ignorance. I’m currently working on two papers on Asian Americans and social epistemology. The first (which will appear in a forthcoming book in the SUNY Philosophy and Race Series) attempts to develop a decolonial Asian American epistemology from the resources available in an Asian American “borderlands.” The second considers the Black/white binary to be an epistemology of ignorance, and will appear in my co-edited volume, the Oxford Handbook of Asian American Philosophy.
Race, Gender, Ability
I write and think about social groupings—especially race, gender, and (dis)ability—often. I consider these categories to be structuring taxonomies of the world that construct both “self” and “other.” At the moment, I’m most interested in how these social categories relate to the social binary of human/animal or human/nonhuman.
I am an Editorial Assistant and Visual Arts Editor at Women’s Studies Quarterly.
Animals
Humans are animals. My dissertation concerns how human animality has been denied and how the analytic of animality has been used to oppress women, POC, and, of course, animals. Contra the (understandable) urge for oppressed groups to resist animalization, I argue that accepting animality can be a route to liberation. I encourage everyone to look into the MOVE Organization in Philadelphia for a biting example of how fiercely authorities resist challenges to the human-animal paradigm.
De-/Post-Coloniality
I’m inspired by efforts of de- and post-colonial philosophy to decolonize knowledge, both in content and methodology. I hope that my work in ideology critique and social epistemology (see above) and in Asian/American Philosophy (see right) both help further this decolonial project. At the moment, I am especially inspired by decolonial critiques of the human and human kinds.
Asian/American Philosophy
Asian/American philosophy is not new, but its inclusion in the academy is. For some badass Asian American philosophizing I recommend Gidra, a leading publication of the radical Asian American Movement of the 1960s-70s. In addition to the two papers described above under “Social Epistemology,” I have two other As/Am papers in the works: one on coerced emotionality in Asian Americans and a popular piece on the “oriental octopus.”