Alumni

Meryem Kamil

Meryem Kamil is Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is a member of Precarity Lab and co-author of Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths Press, 2020). Learn more about Meryem’s work on her website.

Cassius Adair

Cassius Adair is an independent audio producer, writer, and researcher from Virginia, currently serving as a Visiting Assistant Professor at NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. He is also a research fellow at the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory at the University of Toronto and an outside member of the Precarity Lab at the University of Michigan. For the 2021-2022 academic year, he will be a Fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) with an affiliation at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota. Learn more about Cassius’ work on his website.

Joo Young Lee

Joo Young Lee (American Culture, Ph.D., 2018) is a cultural theorist of race and mixed race. She is currently a Research Professor of the Research Institute of Korean Studies at Korea University in Seoul, South Korea. Her broader scholarly interest includes critical race theory, mixed-race studies, diaspora studies, the relationship between aesthetics and faith, digital culture and race, and intellectual history in the United States. She is currently writing her book, entitled Mixed Names: Representations of Mixed-Race Black Koreans. This book examines representations of mixed-race Black Koreans in literature, films, and media since the U.S. militarization of South Korea in 1945. In addition to this book project, her recent articles focus on the portrayals of interracial relationships, Black-Korean conflict and solidarity, mixed-race identities, the relationship between faith and the Korean diaspora (Korean Americans and zainichi) in American literature and films within the contexts of U.S.-Korea relations.

Iván Chaar-Lopez

Iván Chaar López is an assistant professor of Digital Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research and teaching examine the politics and aesthetics of digital technologies. Chaar López is especially interested in the place of Latina/o/xs as targets, users, and developers of digital lifeworlds. He is currently working on a book, under contract with Duke University Press, about the intersecting histories of electronic technology, unmanned aerial systems, and boundary making along the U.S.-Mexico border. At UT, Chaar López is the principal investigator of the Border Tech Lab where he works closely with undergraduate and graduate students in interdisciplinary research that asks how knowledge communities and technologies push the boundaries of imagination even as they work to delineate the boundaries of the possible. The BTL is working on two projects. One is devoted to researching labor, race, technoprecarity, and disposability in the gig economy. The other centers on the history of electronics manufacturing along the US-Mexico borderlands since the 1960s as a way to interrogate the technopolitics of special economic zones, non-essential knowledge, and disposability.

Iván’s latest article published on the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal talks about the racial technopolitics of immigrant identifications and automation in the U.S. You can read the article here. He will also be giving a talk during  the African Technoscapes Cluster at Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research titled “Notes on Border Technopolitical Regimes.” Visit Iván website to learn more about his work.