In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, we have witnessed a surge of public interest in and discussion around racial reckoning. Universities in the United States and across the globe are grappling with their historical associations with transatlantic and chattel slavery. This dissertation takes up the question of...
This dissertation explores how dominant U.S. constructions of race, class, and gender are embedded into and inscribed onto artificially intelligent virtual assistants and the labors they perform. I examine virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana, interrogating their complex relationship to humanness, the tasks they are programmed...
This dissertation considers how women’s spectatorship—how women are imagined as viewing subjects, and what are defined as feminine ways of watching—is transformed by digital technologies, and what it reveals about the shifting nature of privacy and visibility. It maps the contours of our current configuration of gendered looking relations by...
This dissertation purposely prioritizes Tibetan and Himalayan tsunmas’ perspectives on the topic of restoring a full ordination lineage for ordained women. To do so, it examines the gendered landscapes of Buddhist women’s ordination, which has been a contentious issue throughout Buddhism’s twenty-six-hundred-year history, beginning with the Buddha’s eventual acceptance of...
This dissertation explores the role and relation of capitalism in contemporary political life, with the aim to reveal the inherent oppression of what I refer to as capitalist culture. To this end, the project follows three main objectives: (1) to identify the widespread and pervasive nature of capitalist culture (2)...