Book Project

My book project, “Settler Democracy: Indigenous Self-Sufficiency and the Limits of Participation in Taiwan,” investigates the rise of participatory design as a government strategy to innovate new medical and agricultural technologies in hopes of rectifying health inequalities and improving crop yields in Taiwan's Indigenous communities. I contrast these demographic goals with the grounded experiences of Eastern Taiwan's Amis communities, who insist that systemic issues like economic inequalities, lack of health resources, and severed land relations well exceed the scope of technological design. Through 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I theorize that participation and its virtuous image of state-Indigenous cooperation masks crucial differences between statistically-driven nation-building and Indigenous self-determination—two different quests for “self-sufficiency” (自給自足)—in a politically precarious contemporary Taiwan, where questions of autonomy loom large.

In my Coda, I meditate on why national “self-sufficiency” is gaining traction in the context of geopolitical dramas surrounding today's Taiwan and China. I also examine why the inclusion of Indigenous communities in projects of technological innovation has become politically salient on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. I turn to historiographical research as well as short-term ethnographic fieldwork done on Chinese participatory design projects to make this comparative case.

Second Project

In my second project, I turn to another instance of seemingly progressive design: “circular bioeconomy” (生物循環經濟) guided neighborhoods and residential complexes in Taiwan and China. These projects likewise insist on a notion of “self-sufficiency”—secured through urban and technical infrastructures—as a comprehensive solution to pandemic, environmental, and political crises. Returning to Amis Indigenous Taiwan and comparatively analyzing an urban project in Shenzhen, China, I interrogate how these infrastructures that use waste for energy, thus promising self-sustaining life in the case of pandemic lockdown or environmental crisis, insert utopian fantasies that actually disrupt the lifeworlds of local, often Indigenous communities.