Research
Dissertation:
Care-full & Careful Crafting: Trans Asian American Care & Information Infrastructure
My current research examines how trans Asian Americans employ information infrastructures and practices to build and sustain care practices as a means into theorizing further trans of color care and its relations to information infrastructure. Specifically, I ask: What information infrastructures and practices do trans and gender expansive Asian Americans employ to build and sustain care practices? To answer this question, I am working with Lavender Phoenix, a San Francisco Bay Area based community-based organization committed to building trans and queer Asian American and Pacific Islander power, to look at the information infrastructures they’ve built and the care they practice.
Crafted and maintained in a world intent on erasing transgender (trans) livelihoods, trans Asian American community information practices combat the pervasive dangerous narratives that seek to further entrench trans antagonism in society, as well as discourses flattening Asians as homogeneously upwardly mobile, apolitical, and passive. An example of this can be seen through how Lavender Phoenix’s information practices and infrastructure are mobilized. Lavender Phoenix’s information practices are forms of collective care that deepen and nuance Hil Malatino’s concept of trans care, which departs from family and the home as the central starting place of care but rather, theorizes from different spaces that trans and queer labor occur since home can be a fraught site. In this dissertation, I trace how Lavender Phoenix’s information practices offer insight into not only how these practices are sustained and against the violent terms of living for trans Asian Americans, but also how they are vital and productive facets of trans Asian American care. Lavender Phoenix’s information practices and attendant infrastructure, including the Dragon Fruit Project, an intergenerational oral history project, and the Up Us needs assessment, a research project that assessed community needs and issues, extend care in two major ways. First, they intervene in dominant narratives that trans Asian American histories and knowledge are non-existent and sparse by uplifting intergenerational experiences and providing a political lineage to connect to across generations and diasporas. Second, they reconfigure care to be explicitly and characteristically defined by a political vision and wisdom that seeks to actively imagine and build genuine power of the people to transform their conditions. As such, information infrastructure and infrastructure of care are deeply embedded with one another. Lavender Phoenix's information infrastructure is sustained through the relationships cultivated by members, staff, and volunteers. Simultaneously, the infrastructure deepens and grows the community's commitment to and capacity of their information activism and other facets of organizing.
Significantly, this research contributes to scholarship focused on contemporary information practices and infrastructure to deeper understand how they are both active products of political values and producers of political context. Moreover, it demonstrates how community information practices and infrastructure can be developed to meet the needs of minoritized communities and troubles the concept of the “average user.”