cyborg / internet explorer / student

My research broadly asks: How have historically-excluded communities approached the creation of their own credible knowledge-narratives in the absence of institutionally-produced knowledge which meets their information needs? What can be learned about knowledge production when we embrace subjectivity?

I draw on theorizations of epistemic (in)justice and self-representative knowledge practices from queer and transgender studies, American Indigenous studies, archival studies, and critical health/medical rhetoric in my work on medicalization and queer/trans knowledge production. In examining the meaningful convergences and divergences in histories of medicalization and of self-deterministic knowledge production within queer and transgender communities and within Indigenous communities, I look at knowledge production in terms of possibility, asking what kinds of knowledges and worlds are made possible when we reconsider the ways in which knowledge can be produced in non-hierarchical, equitable, respectful, collaborative relationships.

As a queer, transgender person, I live through the effects of Western institutionalized knowledge production's shortcomings. These effects include limited access to healthcare, including strained relations with medical professionals who never seem to know anything about my body other than its Otherness. I want us to no longer need to beg for what everyone else has been given.

When I’m not working on something related to research, I can usually be found hanging out with my partner, Cai, and our cats in Portland, OR.