My research connects media studies with studies of migration to explore the auto-archival practices of people moving across transnational spaces, bringing together the fields of Latinx and diaspora studies, global media studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Operating at the intersection of philosophy, art, and activism, my work calls for a closer look as to how technology legitimizes claims to security, mobility, and community, while demonstrating how migrants have reclaimed agency and subjectivity by questioning the representational regimes of culture and politics.
This contribution uses a phenomenological and psychoanalytic framework to rethink the porous boun... more This contribution uses a phenomenological and psychoanalytic framework to rethink the porous boundaries between being and likeness. I move from a Surrealist advertising pamphlet produced in 1919 to the facial surgery techniques of 2018, contextualizing theories of the dyadic relationship between text and reader (Iser) with practices of image-solicitation and digital intimacy on the Internet. In unpacking self-surveillance techniques and state-run biometric technologies, this paper examines how our use of faces informs the ways our faces are used against us. Through analyzing how the performance of fantasy and the realization of authorship are imbricated through images of humankind, I research new developments in Augmented Reality avatars, linking the language of the face (Lévinas) as a staging ground for potential empathy and conversely, systematic exclusion. In tracing the data double while looking at the biopolitical function of social media, this paper considers how our images of...
Through a celebrity studies framework informed by political science, sociology, and postcoloniali... more Through a celebrity studies framework informed by political science, sociology, and postcolonialism, I demonstrate how refugees and celebrities implicate each other by tracing both figures' deployment as brands contingent upon the organization of capital in humanitarian organizations and the film and television industries. After providing an analysis of cinematic depictions of refugees to show the reversibility of stateless and star, I discuss structural and symbolic processes of colonization and migration codified through reality television tropes and the performance of celebrity charity. This contribution ultimately turns toward the self-representations of refugees, locating resistance in their refusal to participate in the economy of images.
Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies, 2021
Can we move fan participation and the co-creation of storylines outside the sphere of the culture... more Can we move fan participation and the co-creation of storylines outside the sphere of the culture industry to better understand their potential functions for constructing individual subjectivity and empowering social change? With an attention to experiences of migration, exile and detainment, and through close readings of documentary The Wolfpack (2015), HBO's bilingual horror comedy series Los Espookys (2019) and Manuel Puig's novel, El beso de la mujer araña (1976), I argue that it is necessary to move beyond a speakeraudience dialectic, as in traditional storytelling, and towards transmediated activity, where static or linear temporal and spatial orders are both reproduced and subverted. By converging performance studies with border studies and phenomenology, this contribution counters assumptions about submissive viewership while unpacking the political utility of entertainment. Ultimately, 'Doubling the fantasy, adapting the reel' challenges what it means to be a 'storyteller' and what constitutes a useful 'story' in the context of political advocacy and activism.
No longer can we read the anomaly without considering the larger global crisis of COVID-19. Where... more No longer can we read the anomaly without considering the larger global crisis of COVID-19. Where were we if not out of time during the temporal disjunction – time out of joint, after Shakespeare – of worldwide lockdowns, which coincided with the time of proposal and submission, the time of reading and editing this issue? Where were we, as scholars in North America, if not out of place when we set out to curate a collection of essays in a journal which “originated” down under? A related question: what happens when the anomaly becomes standardised as the norm?
Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2019
Moving from Walter Benjamin's seven-year exile to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's and Myung Mi Kim's auto... more Moving from Walter Benjamin's seven-year exile to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's and Myung Mi Kim's autoethnographic accounts of colonization, acculturation, and translational violence amid nation-building, I analyze the social and political agency of personal texts produced in transit, ultimately asking: How can the writing of migratory texts provide agency for immigrants? How can a literary act of resistance materialize in a literal act of resistance? This contribution moves from the personal lyric to the theoretical critique, an endeavor to poetize and ideologize, and to show that process of migration on the page, while considering the ways in which performance and non-narrative storytelling can foster an alternative to the archive.
How can the production of migratory texts provide social and
political agency for migrants? My st... more How can the production of migratory texts provide social and political agency for migrants? My starting point for investigating connections between literary acts of resistance and literal acts of resistance is in fact multiple: the discontinuous pathways of exile. In re-drafting Walter Benjamin’s seven-year exile from Paris to Lourdes, Lourdes to Marseilles, Marseilles to Port-Vendres, Port- Vendres to Portbou, ‘In Parallel With My Actual Diary’ also reevaluates the xenophobic culture of the European cities that we each traverse, bridging gaps between 1940 and today to shed light on the often undocumented microhistories of migration and the dead end of diaspora: the largest human displacement since the Second World War. In my endeavour to converge past and present, I collage letters written by Benjamin during his exile; scenes of departure culled from interviews, photographic evidence, and testimonies; reportage of political and social upheaval in Europe in the summer of 2017; and finally, my own letters, written to Walter as I read him back. The goal of re-writing Benjamin’s exile as epistolary essay is to engender empathy, while forming parallels between his piecemeal, processual, itinerant (and unfinished) Arcades Project and the migratory – collaborative, anonymous, transmedial – texts produced by displaced persons today.
As the ball dropped on 1999, is it any wonder that No Doubt played, “It’s the End of the World as... more As the ball dropped on 1999, is it any wonder that No Doubt played, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M. live on MTV? Any discussion of the Nineties—and its pinnacle moment, Y2K—requires a discussion of both the cover and the glitch, two performative and technological enactments that fomented the collapse between author-reader and user-machine that has, twenty years later, become normalised in today’s Post Internet culture. By staging failure and inviting the audience to participate, the glitch and the cover call into question the original and the origin story. This breakdown of normative borders has prompted the convergence of previously demarcated media, genres, and cultures, a constellation from which to recognise a stochastic hybrid form. This contribution utilizes frameworks of art theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, dream theory, and close readings of Twin Peaks to force readers into encountering the exigency of the error and the creative potential of the “bizarre” in our everyday life, staging a re-orientation of the viewer/dreamer within a decade-long retrospective of the impending new millennium, which brought with it the actual disasters of September 11, Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, global economic collapse, and two international wars all within ten years.
IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación, 2018
A partir de ejercicios de oralidad con el padre exiliado del autor, y en dirección hacia el análi... more A partir de ejercicios de oralidad con el padre exiliado del autor, y en dirección hacia el análisis de narrativas oníricas y literarias, este trabajo es un epistolario compuesto por correspondencias y la indagación de archivo hacia el futuro; en donde se pregunta cómo podríamos escapar de la reproducción del silencio individual y del trauma, aplicando a la cultura pop la interpretación de los sueños y los estudios sobre la memoria, con el propósito de superar el binomio circular y reductivo silencio-testimonio. Desde la re-contextualización Euro-Americana de los marcos de trabajo psicoanalíticos, mediante modelos basados en la performance y en las experiencias corpoeizadas, este ensayo proporciona un análisis íntimo del papel que desempeña la memoria frente al borrado cultural.
In a culture that has systematically abolished privacy, the pleasure we still most desire is the ... more In a culture that has systematically abolished privacy, the pleasure we still most desire is the private experience. What is more private than connecting our bodies to the VR apparatus, individualizing our imagination so as to stay inside on the outside? This contribution uses logic and language theory (Wittgenstein), visual studies (Berger), and psychoanalysis (Freud) to frame an auto-theoretical inquiry into the many different ways art--and our experience of art--has changed as virtual reality becomes increasingly mainstreamed and normalized. "How Do I Look?" traces the history of VR as its starting point before exploring today's questions of digital intimacy, data accumulation, AI chatbots, and our culture's general fascination with and re-appropriation of death. Internet's exploitation of our inability to deal with death, by removing it from life, is re-contextualized through a reading of two of the most popular episodes of the television show Black Mirror.
This contribution uses a phenomenological and psychoanalytic framework to rethink the porous boun... more This contribution uses a phenomenological and psychoanalytic framework to rethink the porous boundaries between being and likeness. I move from a Surrealist advertising pamphlet produced in 1919 to the facial surgery techniques of 2018, contextualizing theories of the dyadic relationship between text and reader (Iser) with practices of image-solicitation and digital intimacy on the Internet. In unpacking self-surveillance techniques and state-run biometric technologies, this paper examines how our use of faces informs the ways our faces are used against us. Through analyzing how the performance of fantasy and the realization of authorship are imbricated through images of humankind, I research new developments in Augmented Reality avatars, linking the language of the face (Lévinas) as a staging ground for potential empathy and conversely, systematic exclusion. In tracing the data double while looking at the biopolitical function of social media, this paper considers how our images of humankind fix our embodied nature while fixing others in place.
Interações: Sociedade e as Novas Modernidades, 2018
Any discussion of the social invisibilities engendered by the Internet necessarily demands furthe... more Any discussion of the social invisibilities engendered by the Internet necessarily demands further questioning as to how visibility, as an increasing cultural norm, has produced new inequalities in real life. This contribution combines autoethnographic research, social media analysis, and data analytics with theoretical frameworks such as phenomenology and psychology to globally investigate our current culture of AI-catfishing, social media metrics, and metrics manipulation.
My paper raises questions about re-materializing digital divides and inequalities in the “offline world” through citing self-surveillance techniques and algorithmic biases to show how we are both at the whim of these AI-inflected prejudices but also complicit in reproducing them, whether through government coercion or our own cultural norms and rules. I trace our relationship with music technology to outline a trajectory of sensory disconnect and co-produced community—a framework for understanding current cultural phenomena and the ethics of distributed data, privacy, and the rendering of our bodies as a new kind of transaction, and currency. The rise of fake news is re-contextualized within the widespread rise of fake users: the various impersonations of self even and especially through AI.
IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación, 2018
Moving from storytelling exercises with the author’s exiled father to analysis of literary dream-... more Moving from storytelling exercises with the author’s exiled father to analysis of literary dream-narratives, this contribution is an epistolary correspondence with the past and archival inquiry into a future which asks how we might be able to escape the reproduction of self-silencing and trauma by applying pop culture with dream theory and memory studies in an endeavor to sidestep the reductive and circular silence-testimony binary. In re-contextualizing Euro-American psychoanalytical frameworks with models grounded in performance and embodied experiences, this work provides an intimate analysis of the agency of memory in the face of cultural erasure.
This contribution uses a phenomenological and psychoanalytic framework to rethink the porous boun... more This contribution uses a phenomenological and psychoanalytic framework to rethink the porous boundaries between being and likeness. I move from a Surrealist advertising pamphlet produced in 1919 to the facial surgery techniques of 2018, contextualizing theories of the dyadic relationship between text and reader (Iser) with practices of image-solicitation and digital intimacy on the Internet. In unpacking self-surveillance techniques and state-run biometric technologies, this paper examines how our use of faces informs the ways our faces are used against us. Through analyzing how the performance of fantasy and the realization of authorship are imbricated through images of humankind, I research new developments in Augmented Reality avatars, linking the language of the face (Lévinas) as a staging ground for potential empathy and conversely, systematic exclusion. In tracing the data double while looking at the biopolitical function of social media, this paper considers how our images of...
Through a celebrity studies framework informed by political science, sociology, and postcoloniali... more Through a celebrity studies framework informed by political science, sociology, and postcolonialism, I demonstrate how refugees and celebrities implicate each other by tracing both figures' deployment as brands contingent upon the organization of capital in humanitarian organizations and the film and television industries. After providing an analysis of cinematic depictions of refugees to show the reversibility of stateless and star, I discuss structural and symbolic processes of colonization and migration codified through reality television tropes and the performance of celebrity charity. This contribution ultimately turns toward the self-representations of refugees, locating resistance in their refusal to participate in the economy of images.
Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies, 2021
Can we move fan participation and the co-creation of storylines outside the sphere of the culture... more Can we move fan participation and the co-creation of storylines outside the sphere of the culture industry to better understand their potential functions for constructing individual subjectivity and empowering social change? With an attention to experiences of migration, exile and detainment, and through close readings of documentary The Wolfpack (2015), HBO's bilingual horror comedy series Los Espookys (2019) and Manuel Puig's novel, El beso de la mujer araña (1976), I argue that it is necessary to move beyond a speakeraudience dialectic, as in traditional storytelling, and towards transmediated activity, where static or linear temporal and spatial orders are both reproduced and subverted. By converging performance studies with border studies and phenomenology, this contribution counters assumptions about submissive viewership while unpacking the political utility of entertainment. Ultimately, 'Doubling the fantasy, adapting the reel' challenges what it means to be a 'storyteller' and what constitutes a useful 'story' in the context of political advocacy and activism.
No longer can we read the anomaly without considering the larger global crisis of COVID-19. Where... more No longer can we read the anomaly without considering the larger global crisis of COVID-19. Where were we if not out of time during the temporal disjunction – time out of joint, after Shakespeare – of worldwide lockdowns, which coincided with the time of proposal and submission, the time of reading and editing this issue? Where were we, as scholars in North America, if not out of place when we set out to curate a collection of essays in a journal which “originated” down under? A related question: what happens when the anomaly becomes standardised as the norm?
Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2019
Moving from Walter Benjamin's seven-year exile to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's and Myung Mi Kim's auto... more Moving from Walter Benjamin's seven-year exile to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's and Myung Mi Kim's autoethnographic accounts of colonization, acculturation, and translational violence amid nation-building, I analyze the social and political agency of personal texts produced in transit, ultimately asking: How can the writing of migratory texts provide agency for immigrants? How can a literary act of resistance materialize in a literal act of resistance? This contribution moves from the personal lyric to the theoretical critique, an endeavor to poetize and ideologize, and to show that process of migration on the page, while considering the ways in which performance and non-narrative storytelling can foster an alternative to the archive.
How can the production of migratory texts provide social and
political agency for migrants? My st... more How can the production of migratory texts provide social and political agency for migrants? My starting point for investigating connections between literary acts of resistance and literal acts of resistance is in fact multiple: the discontinuous pathways of exile. In re-drafting Walter Benjamin’s seven-year exile from Paris to Lourdes, Lourdes to Marseilles, Marseilles to Port-Vendres, Port- Vendres to Portbou, ‘In Parallel With My Actual Diary’ also reevaluates the xenophobic culture of the European cities that we each traverse, bridging gaps between 1940 and today to shed light on the often undocumented microhistories of migration and the dead end of diaspora: the largest human displacement since the Second World War. In my endeavour to converge past and present, I collage letters written by Benjamin during his exile; scenes of departure culled from interviews, photographic evidence, and testimonies; reportage of political and social upheaval in Europe in the summer of 2017; and finally, my own letters, written to Walter as I read him back. The goal of re-writing Benjamin’s exile as epistolary essay is to engender empathy, while forming parallels between his piecemeal, processual, itinerant (and unfinished) Arcades Project and the migratory – collaborative, anonymous, transmedial – texts produced by displaced persons today.
As the ball dropped on 1999, is it any wonder that No Doubt played, “It’s the End of the World as... more As the ball dropped on 1999, is it any wonder that No Doubt played, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M. live on MTV? Any discussion of the Nineties—and its pinnacle moment, Y2K—requires a discussion of both the cover and the glitch, two performative and technological enactments that fomented the collapse between author-reader and user-machine that has, twenty years later, become normalised in today’s Post Internet culture. By staging failure and inviting the audience to participate, the glitch and the cover call into question the original and the origin story. This breakdown of normative borders has prompted the convergence of previously demarcated media, genres, and cultures, a constellation from which to recognise a stochastic hybrid form. This contribution utilizes frameworks of art theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, dream theory, and close readings of Twin Peaks to force readers into encountering the exigency of the error and the creative potential of the “bizarre” in our everyday life, staging a re-orientation of the viewer/dreamer within a decade-long retrospective of the impending new millennium, which brought with it the actual disasters of September 11, Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, global economic collapse, and two international wars all within ten years.
IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación, 2018
A partir de ejercicios de oralidad con el padre exiliado del autor, y en dirección hacia el análi... more A partir de ejercicios de oralidad con el padre exiliado del autor, y en dirección hacia el análisis de narrativas oníricas y literarias, este trabajo es un epistolario compuesto por correspondencias y la indagación de archivo hacia el futuro; en donde se pregunta cómo podríamos escapar de la reproducción del silencio individual y del trauma, aplicando a la cultura pop la interpretación de los sueños y los estudios sobre la memoria, con el propósito de superar el binomio circular y reductivo silencio-testimonio. Desde la re-contextualización Euro-Americana de los marcos de trabajo psicoanalíticos, mediante modelos basados en la performance y en las experiencias corpoeizadas, este ensayo proporciona un análisis íntimo del papel que desempeña la memoria frente al borrado cultural.
In a culture that has systematically abolished privacy, the pleasure we still most desire is the ... more In a culture that has systematically abolished privacy, the pleasure we still most desire is the private experience. What is more private than connecting our bodies to the VR apparatus, individualizing our imagination so as to stay inside on the outside? This contribution uses logic and language theory (Wittgenstein), visual studies (Berger), and psychoanalysis (Freud) to frame an auto-theoretical inquiry into the many different ways art--and our experience of art--has changed as virtual reality becomes increasingly mainstreamed and normalized. "How Do I Look?" traces the history of VR as its starting point before exploring today's questions of digital intimacy, data accumulation, AI chatbots, and our culture's general fascination with and re-appropriation of death. Internet's exploitation of our inability to deal with death, by removing it from life, is re-contextualized through a reading of two of the most popular episodes of the television show Black Mirror.
This contribution uses a phenomenological and psychoanalytic framework to rethink the porous boun... more This contribution uses a phenomenological and psychoanalytic framework to rethink the porous boundaries between being and likeness. I move from a Surrealist advertising pamphlet produced in 1919 to the facial surgery techniques of 2018, contextualizing theories of the dyadic relationship between text and reader (Iser) with practices of image-solicitation and digital intimacy on the Internet. In unpacking self-surveillance techniques and state-run biometric technologies, this paper examines how our use of faces informs the ways our faces are used against us. Through analyzing how the performance of fantasy and the realization of authorship are imbricated through images of humankind, I research new developments in Augmented Reality avatars, linking the language of the face (Lévinas) as a staging ground for potential empathy and conversely, systematic exclusion. In tracing the data double while looking at the biopolitical function of social media, this paper considers how our images of humankind fix our embodied nature while fixing others in place.
Interações: Sociedade e as Novas Modernidades, 2018
Any discussion of the social invisibilities engendered by the Internet necessarily demands furthe... more Any discussion of the social invisibilities engendered by the Internet necessarily demands further questioning as to how visibility, as an increasing cultural norm, has produced new inequalities in real life. This contribution combines autoethnographic research, social media analysis, and data analytics with theoretical frameworks such as phenomenology and psychology to globally investigate our current culture of AI-catfishing, social media metrics, and metrics manipulation.
My paper raises questions about re-materializing digital divides and inequalities in the “offline world” through citing self-surveillance techniques and algorithmic biases to show how we are both at the whim of these AI-inflected prejudices but also complicit in reproducing them, whether through government coercion or our own cultural norms and rules. I trace our relationship with music technology to outline a trajectory of sensory disconnect and co-produced community—a framework for understanding current cultural phenomena and the ethics of distributed data, privacy, and the rendering of our bodies as a new kind of transaction, and currency. The rise of fake news is re-contextualized within the widespread rise of fake users: the various impersonations of self even and especially through AI.
IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación, 2018
Moving from storytelling exercises with the author’s exiled father to analysis of literary dream-... more Moving from storytelling exercises with the author’s exiled father to analysis of literary dream-narratives, this contribution is an epistolary correspondence with the past and archival inquiry into a future which asks how we might be able to escape the reproduction of self-silencing and trauma by applying pop culture with dream theory and memory studies in an endeavor to sidestep the reductive and circular silence-testimony binary. In re-contextualizing Euro-American psychoanalytical frameworks with models grounded in performance and embodied experiences, this work provides an intimate analysis of the agency of memory in the face of cultural erasure.
Uploads
political agency for migrants? My starting point for investigating
connections between literary acts of resistance and literal acts of
resistance is in fact multiple: the discontinuous pathways of exile.
In re-drafting Walter Benjamin’s seven-year exile from Paris to
Lourdes, Lourdes to Marseilles, Marseilles to Port-Vendres, Port-
Vendres to Portbou, ‘In Parallel With My Actual Diary’ also reevaluates
the xenophobic culture of the European cities that we
each traverse, bridging gaps between 1940 and today to shed
light on the often undocumented microhistories of migration and
the dead end of diaspora: the largest human displacement since
the Second World War. In my endeavour to converge past and
present, I collage letters written by Benjamin during his exile;
scenes of departure culled from interviews, photographic
evidence, and testimonies; reportage of political and social
upheaval in Europe in the summer of 2017; and finally, my own
letters, written to Walter as I read him back. The goal of re-writing
Benjamin’s exile as epistolary essay is to engender empathy, while
forming parallels between his piecemeal, processual, itinerant
(and unfinished) Arcades Project and the migratory – collaborative,
anonymous, transmedial – texts produced by displaced persons
today.
My paper raises questions about re-materializing digital divides and inequalities in the “offline world” through citing self-surveillance techniques and algorithmic biases to show how we are both at the whim of these AI-inflected prejudices but also complicit in reproducing them, whether through government coercion or our own cultural norms and rules. I trace our relationship with music technology to outline a trajectory of sensory disconnect and co-produced community—a framework for understanding current cultural phenomena and the ethics of distributed data, privacy, and the rendering of our bodies as a new kind of transaction, and currency. The rise of fake news is re-contextualized within the widespread rise of fake users: the various impersonations of self even and especially through AI.
political agency for migrants? My starting point for investigating
connections between literary acts of resistance and literal acts of
resistance is in fact multiple: the discontinuous pathways of exile.
In re-drafting Walter Benjamin’s seven-year exile from Paris to
Lourdes, Lourdes to Marseilles, Marseilles to Port-Vendres, Port-
Vendres to Portbou, ‘In Parallel With My Actual Diary’ also reevaluates
the xenophobic culture of the European cities that we
each traverse, bridging gaps between 1940 and today to shed
light on the often undocumented microhistories of migration and
the dead end of diaspora: the largest human displacement since
the Second World War. In my endeavour to converge past and
present, I collage letters written by Benjamin during his exile;
scenes of departure culled from interviews, photographic
evidence, and testimonies; reportage of political and social
upheaval in Europe in the summer of 2017; and finally, my own
letters, written to Walter as I read him back. The goal of re-writing
Benjamin’s exile as epistolary essay is to engender empathy, while
forming parallels between his piecemeal, processual, itinerant
(and unfinished) Arcades Project and the migratory – collaborative,
anonymous, transmedial – texts produced by displaced persons
today.
My paper raises questions about re-materializing digital divides and inequalities in the “offline world” through citing self-surveillance techniques and algorithmic biases to show how we are both at the whim of these AI-inflected prejudices but also complicit in reproducing them, whether through government coercion or our own cultural norms and rules. I trace our relationship with music technology to outline a trajectory of sensory disconnect and co-produced community—a framework for understanding current cultural phenomena and the ethics of distributed data, privacy, and the rendering of our bodies as a new kind of transaction, and currency. The rise of fake news is re-contextualized within the widespread rise of fake users: the various impersonations of self even and especially through AI.