Research
Dissertation:
Care-full & Careful Crafting: Trans Asian American Care Webs & Information Infrastructure
My current research examines how trans Asian Americans employ information infrastructures and practices to build and sustain care webs as a means into theorizing further trans of color care and its relations to information infrastructure through . Specifically, I ask: What information infrastructures and practices do trans and gender expansive Asian Americans employ to build and sustain care webs? 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 webs they’ve crafted.
The information infrastructures that help enable trans Asian American, and more broadly, trans of color care webs are built and sustained through the everyday practices by community members and like the care networks they help facilitate, require careful and intentional crafting and upkeep. From conducting and archiving oral histories with community members to facilitating mutual aid efforts via social media platforms, these varying extensions of care via information practices reach across time and space with different levels of access and resonance. Information infrastructures, as well as the care webs they help enable, are sustained within and against violent terms of living but are not solely defined by them; rather, I am interested in how information infrastructures are vital and productive facets of these care webs.