Research

Research Interests

20^th and 21^st century American studies
Media Studies
Multimodal Composition, Digital Humanities
Intersections of U.S. Science Fiction with Disability Studies, and Women and Gender Studies and Critical Theory, Cultural Studies

Theoretical Background

The Posthuman
Biopolitics
Ecocriticism
Modern Marxism
New Materialism (Object-oriented ontology)
Critical Theory

Current Research Project

My current research project asks: in an era of increasing reliance on artificial intelligence, how can fictional androids help redefine disability, race, and gender in the context of American labor? My project considers how the figure of the android reveals alternative labor practices for the Algoricene (the age of algorithms). My dissertation “Re-thinking Human-Machine Collaboration: Addressing In/Equalities and (Post)Human Affective Laborers in the Blade Runner Franchise,” under the direction of Professors Brannon Costello (chair), Carl Freedman, Katherine Henninger, and Chris Barrett, investigates how narratives of android labor posit new ways of imagining the intersection of identity and work in the twenty-first century. By discussing Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)and its adaptations Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2016), I demonstrate how the android posits opportunities for human-machine collaborations in our futures. The last several years have pointed to the complicated roles artificial intelligence plays in economic and political landscapes, and this project explores how a particular fictional franchise might offer a framework for making A.I. and human labor compatible and sustainable. A literary analysis of the timeless Blade Runner franchise matters to re-think dimensions of human experience in terms of race, class, gender and disability in an increasingly digital world.

Engaging with the figure of the android specifically is highly valuable. Foremost, I argue that androids represent class issues and call for a recognition of the current conditions of exploited laborers while highlighting the similarities between disenfranchised humans and enslaved androids. Androids provide an occasion to critique capitalist trends that intensify human inequality and labor exploitation. The phenomenology of the android in these narratives redefines affect and labor while reimagining social inequalities.

My research sits at the theoretical intersection of posthumanism and critiques of capitalism. Building on the posthumanist work of Rosi Braidotti, N. Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway, I explore the agency of the android. The posthuman invites an approach to androids as beings with agency, which in turn leads to their capacities to resist capitalist systems of labor practices. I unpack the ways androids resist the biopolitics of exploitation by working with capitalist critiques from Frederic Jameson, Carl Freedman, and Rebekah Sheldon. These theoretical insights contribute to my research which attends to social inequalities. To attend to these inequalities, we need to reconsider the practice of close reading as means of recognizing the socio-political circumstances of a primary text.