I earned my Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Washington with department support from the Geography, History, and Disability Studies programs. I received my M.A. in Cultural Studies and my BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Washington, Bothell. I am interested in the cultural politics of representation and difference and in the classroom and my research projects, I explore how culturally produced images, videos, marketing campaigns, news stories, and government documents come together to create social understandings about multiple and intersecting frames of difference across time and place. As a digital humanities and cultural practitioner, I work with digital tools such as digital maps and the Scalar II publishing platform to create interactive visualizations of my research projects. 
 

In my teaching and curriculum, I encourage students to think differently about the politics of power and representation at the intersections of disability, gender, race, ethnicity, and multiple axes of difference and I take great care to integrate creative participatory and collaborative frameworks to help them navigate this challenging process.  Remaining aware of student perspectives, open to changing the course of instruction based on classroom interactions and experiences, and maintaining the flexibility to respond to the wholly unexpected is fundamental to this process. As an instructor, it is my job to discuss my own experiential limitations and to demonstrate for students how to meaningfully interact with the diversity of knowledge and lived experience in the classroom. Providing a welcome and safe space for individuals to ask tough and at times uncomfortable questions where they feel encouraged to respectfully question my particular interpretation of the course content remains a paramount concern in my teaching approach.

Through hands-on activities, critical scholarship and collaborative research projects students work with multiple media platforms, archive materials, pop-culture, and critical scholarship to gain an appreciation for the multiple ways cultural representations can both reinforce damaging stereotypes that support structural inequalities and provoke new social justice spaces and movements that directly challenge negative views, assumptions, and inequalities. I draw from interdisciplinary theories and methods to help individuals in the classroom locate and critically analyze the connections between their own life experiences and core theories in cultural representation, feminist and postcolonial disability studies, and relational and cultural geography. 

In my teaching and scholarship, I address questions of power, representation, and the cultural production of identities of difference with an emphasis on postcolonial approaches to the geopolitics of disability, and intellectual and developmental disabilities in particular. My work responds to an absence of developmental and intellectual disability histories and topics in global development studies, cultural geography, feminist and additional critical scholarship, and in political and public discourse. Institutions in the United States have largely ignored the efforts of disability scholars and activist to document the wide-spread abuse, neglect, and marginalization of those categorized as intellectually and developmentally disabled. In my response to these critical absences and erasures, I take an interdisciplinary approach that draws productive connections between theories of cultural representation, feminist and postcolonial disability studies, relational and cultural geographies, and histories of U.S. nationalism.

“The Myth of Intellectuality and Development: Exploiting the Feebleminded Subject in Discourses of American Philanthropy.”

This project looks at the global and cultural politics of developmental and intellectual disabilities through transnational disability studies, comparative history, and cultural studies frameworks. This project engages digital and cultural tools of exploration to understand the multiple ways that socially and culturally constructed notions about developmental and intellectual disabilities are adapted in discourses that marginalize race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion. As a political and intellectual project, the digital dissertation seeks to explain the material ways in which the cultural discourses that conjured the ‘exemplary feebleminded subject’ influence current-day legislative policies and cultural practices. Anticipated Defense August 2021