Public Scholarship & Community Building
"Marked by Covid: The Art of Grieving" Pandemic Art Exhibition
In the fall of 2024, I co-organized a Mellon Foundation funded art exhibition called “Marked by Covid: The Art of Grieving” at Harvard’s Countway Library, in collaboration with Dr. Natalie Philips (Michigan State University) and her “Creativity in the Time of Covid-19” team. The exhibition consisted of over 40 pieces of pandemic art from across the world. For our opening weekend, we curated a series of talks and workshops that centered on public health, grieving, loneliness, and memorialization. I am now working with the “Creativity in the Time of Covid-19” team to apply for an NEH grant that will fund a new project called “Art as Medicine,” which will bring more exhibitions and programming to hospitals and medical libraries across the United States.
Click here for more info.
Rhetoric of Health and Medicine Reading Group of Harvard
The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) examines the role of language and persuasion in health communication, medical encounters, and scientific writing. Some of the guiding questions in this field are based on what rhetorician of medicine Judy Segal identifies as the central questions of rhetorical criticism: “Who is persuading whom of what?” and “what are the means of persuasion?” In this monthly reading group, we survey the foundations of this burgeoning disciplinary field to work through some of the following questions: What is RHM? Who works in RHM? What are some of the key texts in RHM? And what kinds of questions and methodologies might we encounter in this field?
We examine the persuasive interactions between pharmaceutical companies and patient consumers, as well as some of the power dynamics between medical professionals and patients. As a group, we consider how experts communicate to the wider public, and how non-experts interact with science and medicine with their own motivations and vocabularies. We read articles, book chapters, and public news sources written by rhetoricians, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, literary scholars, STS scholars, and disability theorists, among others, to explore topics ranging from manufactured scientific controversies, to rhetorics of addiction, to rhetorics of aging.
​
Film Screening and Panel Discussion of "Plan 75"
Who decides how we live and when we die? In “Plan 75,” a dystopian film that feels disturbingly plausible, director Chie Hayakawa explores a not-too-distant future in which the Japanese government incentivizes adults over 75 to opt into voluntary euthanasia to ease the state’s burden of caring for an aging population. While speculative, Hayakawa’s film addresses very real issues of social welfare, the economics of an aging population, loneliness, and agism, to name a few. On January 29th, 2024, I organized a film screening of “Plan 75” at Harvard’s Countway Library, followed by a panel discussion with Dr. Jeremy Nobel, Dr. Karen Thornber, Dr. Susan Nathan, and Maud Jansen, where we discussed some of the ethical dilemmas the film brings to light.
Click here for more info.
Student Podcasts for ENGL 309
For the Winter Semesters of 2021 and 2022, I was instructor of record for ENGL 309: Rhetoric of Science and Medicine. For their final projects, I gave students the option to create a podcast comparing the rhetoric of COVID-19 in relation to a past epidemic. With the permission of consenting students, I was able to showcase some of their podcasts on UBC’s Public Humanities Hub “Podcast Toolkit” webpage.
Podcasts can be found under the “Course Projects” tab.
Concordia Write Nights
In the winter of 2015, I co-founded Concordia Write Nights with Igpy Kin, a fellow graduate student at Concordia University in Montreal, Québec. This weekly writing group, which was open to all students and writers in Montreal, ran place-based write-ins around the city, ranging from a city greenhouse, to the subway at rush hour, to Mordecai Richler’s personal study. We also hosted free workshops led by creative writing faculty, students, and guest writers, and published chapbooks featuring members of our writing group and other local writers. This program, which continues to this day, encourages collaboration and networking between students from across the university’s faculties, and between Concordia students and the greater Montreal community.
Linguistic Topographies Project, Montreal, QC
This website, which developed out of an academic graduate course in 2015, was the application of my research on Guy Debord’s French Situationists and Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins’ Architectural Bodies. Drawing on Arakawa and Gins’ conviction that architecture shapes consciousness, and Debord’s manifesto against civilian apathy, I took to the streets of Montreal to engage volunteers to help me answer questions about language, identity, and architecture. Through a process of random selection, I approached two strangers at opposite ends of the city and gave them each a disposable camera and 24 hours to document their movements. This experience allowed me to collaborate with strangers in a meaningful and creative way. Alex, one of the participants, brought the camera to his work in an auto shop, and later reflected on the expansiveness he felt: “Planting a disposable camera with experimental purposes in an otherwise banal work environment is an interactive and productive way to spice things up and combine research with fun.” I document the theory, methodology, photos, and participant reflections of this project on my website.
Click here for more info.