I’m an associate professor of Critical Media Studies and Emerging Media Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas. My research emerges out of intersections among crip and feminist technoscience, critical studies of data culture, surveillance studies, and critical health humanities. Through an interdisciplinary lens, I pursue questions about how power becomes embedded in health-related technologies and media and about their integration within existing systems of power and oppression, both within the US and globally.

Image of a material copy of the book Communicative Biocapitalism: The Voice of the Patient in Digital Health and the Health Humanities, held up by a hand with black fingernail polish

My first book, Communicative Biocapitalism: The Voice of the Patient in Digital Health and the Health Humanities (University of Michigan Press, 2017), uses intersectional feminist and disability/crip theoretical approaches to argue that digital health’s commodification of the patient voice reproduces medicine’s historically extractivist racializing, heteropatriarchal, and ableist projects. The book analyzes cultural texts whose aesthetics intervene in hegemonic data discourses and interrogates how the dominant interpretive and pedagogical practices of medical humanities and narrative medicine, developed to “honor the patient voice,” advance, rather than undermine, technocapitalist health care and its reproduction of health inequities.

My second book, Screening Madness, 1933–2020 (advance contract, Duke University Press), excavates the media and technological histories that have led to digital psychiatry (e.g., teletherapy) and recovers lost works in Black, radical, and feminist cinema and television to argue that psychiatry’s media and technologies have always been challenged by those the discipline sought to pathologize. Putting histories of computing and of media innovation into conversation with Black, Mad, feminist, and crip studies, the book reveals how central psychiatry’s media and technological innovations have been to efforts to subdue radical efforts to collectivize health and mental health care. In its analysis of cultural productions that have been overlooked, buried, or archivally misplaced, the book joins in a long tradition of feminist, Black, and disability theorizing that seeks out what has been silenced, to “think with” the alternative modalities of care that their aesthetics proposed.

I’ve also co-edited, with Nathan Carlin and Thomas Cole of the McGovern Center for the Humanities and Ethics at Texas Medical Center, a book on pedagogy, Teaching Health Humanities (Oxford University Press, 2019). With contributions from leading figures and emerging voices in the humanities and health fields, the book introduces newer pedagogical approaches drawn from queer, disability, and postcolonial studies and includes contributions about teaching how to engage critically with medical media and technologies.

I mentor graduate students in our MA, MFA, and PhD programs on topics in feminist, ecohumanistic, disability/crip, Global South, and surveillance studies approaches to studying data cultures and their histories. I teach graduate courses on methods used in media studies (archival, digital, interpretive); surveillance studies; and interdisciplinary feminist, disability, and race media studies. I have previously served as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies for the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication, and am also Affiliate Faculty of UTD’s Gender Studies Program.

Although during the pandemic we’ve been, and continue to be, on hiatus, I co-organize Social Practice and Community Engagement Media (SP&CE) at UTD. I’m also a co-organizer of the Feminist Research Collective.

You can view my full CV here.