Follow the Bodies : (Re)Materializing Difference in the Era of Neoliberal Multiculturalism

This dissertation examines a transnational literary archive in addition to analyzing shifting U.S. American cultural and political landscapes, and shows how critically attending to the various terms, figures, and valences of corporeality opens generative avenues for addressing the contemporary historical conjuncture, often referred to as the neoliberal capitalist era. Neoliberal capitalism, understood here to be a complex, diffuse ideology that manifests in part as a number of broadsweeping economic changes—including widespread deregulation and privatization, the increasing influence of international financial organizations, governmental cuts in social spending, and structural adjustment programs for the formerly colonized nations of the global south—operates in part through processes of abstraction. We can see this abstractive quality pronouncedly in the evacuation of meaning from terms like “equality” and “diversity” in the multicultural politics that correlate with neoliberal capitalism. This project takes as its point of departure the observation that rampant material inequalities that may be indexed along the axes of race and gender are sustained alongside (or perhaps through) dominant rhetorics of equality, freedom (of the market), “colorblindness,” meritocracy, and a “post-racial” society. As its title suggests, this dissertation traces the bodies (and at times the body parts) of individuals and characters, the bodies (or canons) of literature, the institutional bodies, and the bodies politic that populate and contextualize a group of contemporary texts marked and marketed as “global.” By doing so, I argue that a return to the figure of the body affords critical address of abstraction by focusing attention concertedly on materiality, and that embodiment may be mobilized as a critical analysis that re-centers not only the lived experience of women and people of color in the neoliberal era, but also illuminates the material dimensions implicit in a range of debates, from judicial politics over affirmative action to institutionalized disciplinary disputes over the territory of “world literature.” Analyzing works by Karen Tei Yamashita, Arundhati Roy, and Zadie Smith, I create an archive of the neoliberal present that indexes a matrix of material conditions and reflects on the very rubrics of transnationality and the global that circumscribe such texts

Interface Fantasies and Futures: Designing Human-Computer Relations in the Shadow of Memex

This dissertation is about how designers, experimental writers, and innovative thinkers have imagined both computer interfaces and the human/machine relations that might emerge through engagement with different kinds of interfaces. Although futuristic thinking about digital media and their interfaces has changed over time, we can isolate some constants that have persisted through almost all mainstream practices of interface design, particularly in American culture. Drawing from a historical trajectory that I associate with Vannevar Bush and his speculative invention, which he called “memex” in a 1945 essay, I name these constants sterilization and compartmentalization. They are two tendencies or values that I identify in mid-20th-century dreams of mastering information spaces by mastering their interfaces. My project shows how individuals and groups have reinforced or resisted these values in the engineering and design of computer interfaces, both speculative and real. The urge to sterilize and compartmentalize computers has directly and indirectly shaped what we expect and demand from our computers (and the things we make with them) today, and these values trace the horizon of what human-computer relations could be possible in the future

Transformative interventions. An ecological-enactive approach to art practices

Starting from an ecological-enactive approach to human cognition (Rietveld, Kiverstein 2014) I have articulated a series of transformative interventions whose purpose is to explore how art practices can reorganize our form of life (Noë, 2015; Rietveld, 2019). To do this, I discuss how a plethora of heterogeneous tools traceable in the performing arts, such as masks, puppets, and hybrid costumes, can help us, through what I call monstrous practices, to explore imaginative dimensions that our own bodies "cannot afford." This is the core of the transformative chain that I will define monster-monstrous-Monster: we feed imaginative “monsters” to become “monstrous”– that is, to pool and cross-fertilize our abilities – to confront the "Monsters" in our lives. My main interest is in analyzing how it is possible to create or collect new affordances so as to transfigure one's repertoire of possibilities and transform a shared practice. Each transformative intervention is not only defined through written words but is also developed through unorthodox sociomaterial invitations, usually not used in philosophical practice: storyboards, visual ethnographies, performance projects, and installations, which I will define more properly through an enriched notion of real-life thinking model (Rietveld; RAAAF)

Occupying Time: Design, technology, and the form of interaction

As technology pervades our everyday life and material culture, new possibilities and problematics are raised for design. Attention in contemporary design discourse is shifting ‘beyond the object’, to the qualities of processes and experiences. The boxes and screens typically the ‘object’ of interaction and interface design are m­iniaturizing, even disappearing, as computation is integrated into familiar materials and o­rdinary o­bjects. This opens possibilities – for example, as computer and materials s­cience converge with fashion and architecture in smart textiles and intelligent environ­ments – even as it turns us back, in new ways, to traditional design disciplines and practices. In this context, design is not only about the spatial or physical form of objects, but the form of interactions that take place – and occupy time – in people’s relations with and through computational and interactive objects. As argued in this thesis, a central, and particular, concern of interaction design must therefore be the ‘temporal form’ of such objects and the ‘form of interaction’ as they are used over time. Furthermore, increasingly pervasive technology means that the temporality of form and interaction is implicated in more widespread changes to the material conditions of design and of society. Challenging conventions – of ‘formalism’ and ‘functionalism’, ‘good’ and ‘total’ design­ – temporal concerns and implications require new ways of thinking about and working with the materiality, users, and effects of design. Located at an intersection between emerging technologies and design traditions, interaction design is approached in ‘Occupying Time’ through diverse disciplinary frames and scales of consideration. If focus in interaction design is typically on proximate ‘Use’, here a discussion of ‘Materials’ scales down to reconsider the more basic spatial and temporal composition of form, and ‘Change’ scales up to large-scale and long-term design effects. To anchor these themes in existing discourse and practice, architecture is a p­rimary frame of reference throughout to explore certain problematics. Accounts of ‘event’, ‘vernacular’, and ‘non-design’, and concepts of ‘becoming’, ‘in the making’, and ‘futurity’, thus extend a theoretical and practical basis for treating time in (interaction) design discourse. Implications for practice also emerge and are discusssed. Basic to the materiality of interaction design, technology puts time central to ‘M­aterial practice’. ‘Participatory practice’ moves beyond user i­nvolvement in design processes to participation in ongoing formation. Since t­emporal form extends design more deeply and further into future use, ‘Critical practice’ e­xamines effects and responsibility. More specific and concrete reflections are situated in relation to my experience in the design research programs ‘IT+Textiles’, ‘Public Play Spaces’, and ‘Static!’. Drawing from architectural discourse and from my own practice, this thesis maps out and builds up a territory of ideas, relations, and examples as an inquiry into issues of time in interaction design

Holy Cross 100 Books

In the early 1980s, Holy Cross faculty compiled a list of 100 books that are considered some of the fundamental classics of Western literature and beyond, and elements of a classic liberal arts education.https://crossworks.holycross.edu/hc_books/1000/thumbnail.jp

Biohacking and code convergence : a transductive ethnography

Cette thèse se déploie dans un espace de discours et de pratiques revendicatrices, à l’inter- section des cultures amateures informatiques et biotechniques, euro-américaines contempo- raines. La problématique se dessinant dans ce croisement culturel examine des métaphores et analogies au coeur d’un traffic intense, au milieu de voies de commmunications imposantes, reliant les technologies informatiques et biotechniques comme lieux d’expression médiatique. L’examen retrace les lignes de force, les médiations expressives en ces lieux à travers leurs manifestations en tant que codes —à la fois informatiques et génétiques— et reconnaît les caractères analogiques d’expressivité des codes en tant que processus de convergence. Émergeant lentement, à partir des années 40 et 50, les visions convergentes des codes ont facilité l’entrée des ordinateurs personnels dans les marchés, ainsi que dans les garages de hackers, alors que des bricoleurs de l’informatique s’en réclamaient comme espace de liberté d’information —et surtout d’innovation. Plus de cinquante ans plus tard, l’analogie entre codes informatiques et génétiques sert de moteur aux revendications de liberté, informant cette fois les nouvelles applications de la biotechnologie de marché, ainsi que l’activité des biohackers, ces bricoleurs de garage en biologie synthétique. Les pratiques du biohacking sont ainsi comprises comme des individuations : des tentatives continues de résoudre des frictions, des tensions travaillant les revendications des cultures amateures informatiques et biotechniques. Une des manières de moduler ces tensions s’incarne dans un processus connu sous le nom de forking, entrevu ici comme l’expérience d’une bifurcation. Autrement dit, le forking est ici définit comme passage vers un seuil critique, déclinant la technologie et la biologie sur plusieurs modes. Le forking informe —c’est-à-dire permet et contraint— différentes vi- sions collectives de l’ouverture informationnelle. Le forking intervient aussi sur les plans des iii semio-matérialités et pouvoirs d’action investis dans les pratiques biotechniques et informa- tiques. Pris comme processus de co-constitution et de différentiation de l’action collective, les mouvements de bifurcation invitent les trois questions suivantes : 1) Comment le forking catalyse-t-il la solution des tensions participant aux revendications des pratiques du bioha- cking ? 2) Dans ce processus de solution, de quelles manières les revendications changent de phase, bifurquent et se transforment, parfois au point d’altérer radicalement ces pratiques ? 3) Quels nouveaux problèmes émergent de ces solutions ? L’effort de recherche a trouvé ces questions, ainsi que les plans correspondants d’action sémio-matérielle et collective, incarnées dans trois expériences ethnographiques réparties sur trois ans (2012-2015) : la première dans un laboratoire de biotechnologie communautaire new- yorkais, la seconde dans l’émergence d’un groupe de biotechnologie amateure à Montréal, et la troisième à Cork, en Irlande, au sein du premier accélérateur d’entreprises en biologie synthétique au monde. La logique de l’enquête n’est ni strictement inductive ou déductive, mais transductive. Elle emprunte à la philosophie de la communication et de l’information de Gilbert Simondon et découvre l’épistémologie en tant qu’acte de création opérant en milieux relationnels. L’heuristique transductive offre des rencontres inusitées entre les métaphores et les analogies des codes. Ces rencontres étonnantes ont aménagé l’expérience de la conver- gence des codes sous forme de jeux d’écritures. Elles se sont retrouvées dans la recherche ethnographique en tant que processus transductifs.This dissertation examines creative practices and discourses intersecting computer and biotech cultures. It queries influential metaphors and analogies on both sides of the inter- section, and their positioning of biotech and information technologies as expression media. It follows mediations across their incarnations as codes, both computational and biological, and situates their analogical expressivity and programmability as a process of code conver- gence. Converging visions of technological freedom facilitated the entrance of computers in 1960’s Western hobbyist hacker circles, as well as in consumer markets. Almost fifty years later, the analogy drives claims to freedom of information —and freedom of innovation— from biohacker hobbyist groups to new biotech consumer markets. Such biohacking practices are understood as individuations: as ongoing attempts to resolve frictions, tensions working through claims to freedom and openness animating software and biotech cultures. Tensions get modulated in many ways. One of them, otherwise known as “forking,” refers here to a critical bifurcation allowing for differing iterations of biotechnical and computa- tional configurations. Forking informs —that is, simultaneously affords and constrains— differing collective visions of openness. Forking also operates on the materiality and agency invested in biotechnical and computational practices. Taken as a significant process of co- constitution and differentiation in collective action, bifurcation invites the following three questions: 1) How does forking solve tensions working through claims to biotech freedom? 2) In this solving process, how can claims bifurcate and transform to the point of radically altering biotech practices? 3) what new problems do these solutions call into existence? This research found these questions, and both scales of material action and agency, in- carnated in three extensive ethnographical journeys spanning three years (2012-2015): the first in a Brooklyn-based biotech community laboratory, the second in the early days of a biotech community group in Montreal, and the third in the world’s first synthetic biology startup accelerator in Cork, Ireland. The inquiry’s guiding empirical logic is neither solely deductive or inductive, but transductive. It borrows from Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of communication and information to experience epistemology as an act of analogical creation involving the radical, irreversible transformation of knower and known. Transductive heuris- tics offer unconvential encounters with practices, metaphors and analogies of code. In the end, transductive methods acknowledge code convergence as a metastable writing games, and ethnographical research itself as a transductive process

Ethical governance in healthcare and health inequalities : the case of antimalarial intervention in sub-Saharan Africa

Contexte and problématique : Une des raisons pour la création du concept de santé mondiale était de lutter contre l’ensemble des inégalités de santé à travers les populations mondiales. Cette mission sera à nouveau soulignée le 12 décembre 2012 par le groupe de travail mondial sur les soins de santé, et sera encore soulignée en 2017. Malgré tous ces efforts, elle reste toujours une raison forte pour le renforcement stratégique des interventions de la santé à l’échelle mondiale vers la réalisation homogène de la santé universelle. En effet, cette recherche était instiguée par le fait qu’au XXIe siècle, l’Afrique subsaharienne est toujours l’épicentre mondial du paludisme (la malaria), malgré les décennies d’engagements pour la libérer de cette maladie. Par conséquent, les enfants en Afrique subsaharienne sont encore 15 fois plus susceptibles de mourir avant leur cinquième anniversaire que les enfants du même âge dans le monde occidental. Pire encore, j’ai également observé ces inégalités entre les pays de l’Afrique subsaharienne, et que cet écart augmente à mesure que de nombreux pays où le paludisme est endémique deviennent holoendémiques. Par exemple, entre 2000 et 2016, l’époque des objectifs du Millénaire pour le développement, de nombreux pays de la partie Ouest de l’Afrique subsaharienne (qui est généralement plus endémique du paludisme), ont enregistré une augmentation drastique des calamités liées au paludisme contre toutes attentes. Donc, où est le problème ? Autrement dit, quelle est la cause principale de cet échec ? Comment améliore-t-on la situation, compte tenu des ressources disponibles ? Objectif : Ces déséquilibres remettent en cause la recommandation de l’éthique du care et des droits humains à la santé selon laquelle personne ne devrait être désavantagé d’avoir ce qu’il faut pour réaliser ses droits à la santé. Surtout, cette recommandation a été soutenue par l’OMS avec son appel du millénaire en faveur de la santé pour tous, en ne laissant personne de côté. Sur cette note, l’objectif principal de cette recherche est de proposer une stratégie de recherche qui guidera les interventions antipaludiques en Afrique subsaharienne afin de produire les résultats les plus équitables et impacter la vie de populations vulnérables durement touchées par cette maladie. De ce fait, son objectif procédural vise à investiguer de manière systématique les racines des perturbations qui freinent les diverses initiatives antipaludéennes en Afrique subsaharienne à réaliser un déclin équitablement égal du paludisme entre les pays afin de donner aux populations la possibilité équitable aux droits de santé. Il est aussi de déterminer un mécanisme qui pourrait amener toutes les initiatives antipaludéennes au-delà de ces difficultés. Il est enfin de proposer et de démontrer une nouvelle stratégie d’intervention efficace pour l’Afrique subsaharienne. Méthodes et Résultats : De la littérature scientifique, appuyées sur des évaluations organisationnelles et gouvernementales, j’ai obtenu les données statistiques sur l’état du paludisme en Afrique subsaharienne de 2000 à 2016. Selon les analyses qualitatives et quantitatives de ces données, il existe des inégalités évidentes du paludisme en Afrique subsaharienne de l’Est à l’Ouest, et le côté Ouest est le plus touché. Malgré la certitude de ces inégalités, les recherches antipaludiques, bien que l’ensemble de ces dernières soit le fondement des interventions efficaces, se focalisent loin de la concentration de cette maladie. Alors que 58,45% des calamités du paludisme se concentrent dans l’Ouest de l’Afrique subsaharienne, 61,07% des recherches antipaludéennes se concentrent à l’Est. Malheureusement, ces recherches non-stratégiques désorientent l’intervention avec des résultats non représentatifs. En général, les diverses activités d’interventions antipaludéennes sont calibrées, réglementées et modelées selon les données présentées par les recherches. Cette désorientation défavorise le côté Ouest qui est généralement le plus endémique. Par conséquent, ses citoyens sont devenus complètement submergés par une multitude de marasmes de santé liés au paludisme, et ils meurent de façon vulnérable dans leur misère. Par exemple, entre 1990 et 2016, l’Afrique subsaharienne a enregistré un nombre cumulé de décès dus au paludisme de 19.136503, et le côté Ouest avait 11.184418, devant le côté Est avec 4.768660, et le Centre avec 3.183425. Mais à la fin de l’ère des objectifs du Millénaire pour le développement, 7 des 14 pays d’Ouest ont enregistré des augmentations drastiques des décès dus au paludisme, contre seulement 2 sur 17 à l’Est. Analyse critique : De façon générale, lorsque l’on fait face aux inégalités en matière de santé, et que l’on envisage plutôt les résultats en termes d’équité (égalité équitable), celle-ci devient centrale dans le processus d’intervention, ce qui permet d’impacter les populations selon leur besoin. Dans cette optique, la théorie de la gouvernance éthique dans le domaine des soins de santé devient la théorie d’opération par excellence pour maîtriser les inégalités, et parvenir à l’égalité équitable comme un aspect de justice sociale. La gouvernance éthique est une théorie pragmatique de l’éthique appliquée qui valorise la « contextualisation » et qui associe care et justice au « besoin » comme facteur principal des opérations. Insérant cette notion dans la situation du paludisme en Afrique subsaharienne comme soulignée ci-dessus, je présente la greatest-need target antimalarial intervention strategy, une nouvelle stratégie d’intervention antipaludique que j’ai façonnée pour Afrique subsaharienne. La démonstration probante de cette stratégie avec les statistiques réelles sur le paludisme provenant de l’Afrique subsaharienne indique la probabilité de changements positifs dans les résultats antipaludiques en Afrique subsaharienne. Évaluation et Conclusion: Cette thèse exhume les problèmes socio-épidémiologiques qui occupent depuis plus de cinquante ans les experts de la santé mondiale dans le cadre de la lutte contre le paludisme dans les pays d’Afrique sub-saharienne. Fondamentalement intéressée à établir les mesures correctives qui pouvaient y apporter des changements positifs, elle a démontré l’hétérogénéité de l’endémicité du paludisme dans l’ensemble de l’Afrique subsaharienne. Si nous adoptons l’angle de l’éthique appliquée, les diverses activités de lutte contre le paludisme devraient être localisées en fonction de cette hétérogénéité, c’est-à-dire de manière proportionnelle l’une à l’autre. Dès lors, elles produiront des résultats suffisamment représentatifs pour guider un calibrage plus juste et équitable des ressources, et bien orienter le processus d’intervention en fonction des besoins. Cela conduira facilement à l’atteinte d’un déclin équitable du paludisme entre les pays subsahariens. Par conséquence, les inégalités diminueraient, donnant ainsi l’opportunité égale aux populations durement touchées par le paludisme de voir réalisés aussi leurs droits à la santé. Mais pour que ce processus réussisse, il faut une collaboration interdisciplinaire inclusive dans la conception des interventions, une contextualisation impartiale dans la mise en œuvre et une intégrité éthique élargie. Récapitulation : Dans cette recherche, j’ai 1/ diagnostiqué une relation inverse entre les engagements de FAMR en Afrique subsaharienne et l’intensité du paludisme, 2/ démontré de manière illustrative le mécanisme d’intervention de soins de santé proprement nécessaire pour maîtriser les inégalités de santé, et 3/ utilisé les connaissances issues de la démonstration au point 2 pour concevoir et proposer un modèle innovant d’intervention qui pourrait modifier les dynamiques négatives causées par le diagnostic du point 1. NOTE : Étant donné que cette thèse est écrite en anglais, le résumé en français a été adapté de la version anglaise. Ainsi, je conseillerais fortement aux lecteurs de lire au moins la version anglaise de ces résumés.Background and Problem Statement: The main reason for establishing the concept of global health was to fight health inequalities among and across the populations of the world, and, even more importantly, to enforce global healthcare interventions towards attaining Universal Health Coverage. This mission will again be emphasized on 12 December 2012 by the global healthcare taskforce, and reemphasized anew in 2017. I was inspired to conceive this research project by the discovery that in the 21st century, in spite of these emphases, sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) still is carrying the brunt of the global malaria burden. As consequence, children in SSA are 15 times more likely to die before their fifth birthday as compared to children of a similar age bracket in the Western world. This reality challenges the decades of antimalarial engagement to liberate this part of world from the grip of this health hazard. Worst of all, I also witnessed serious malaria inequalities across countries within SSA, and how the inequality-gap increases as many malaria-endemic countries become holoendemic. For example, between 2000 and 2016, the era of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), many countries in the malaria endemic western part of SSA recorded drastic increases in malaria calamities. Given that before the institution of MDGs, the western part of SSA already was declared malaria endemic, and considering that MDG #3 emphasized the fight against health inequalities to ensure health for all in all parts of world, I am challenged by 3-in-2 questions. What or where is the main cause of the antimalarial failure leading to these imbalances? Or at what stage of the intervention process does this failure originate? How can this outcome be reversed? Aim and Objective: These imbalances challenge the admonitions of the ethics of care and of human rights to health, which caution that no one should be disadvantaged from having what it takes to achieve full health potentiality. Above all, the World Health Organization (WHO) has supported this call with its millennium advocacy of health for all which they emphasized that it is leaving no one behind. Thus, the aim of the present study is to contribute towards the mitigation and alleviation of the health vulnerability of the malaria hard-hit citizens in malaria-endemic countries in SSA and minimize malaria calamities. To that effect, my main objective is to design and propose a prospective antimalarial research strategy that would guide antimalarial intervention in SSA to produce fairer results that could impact the lives of vulnerable malaria hard-hit populations. Therefore, the procedural objectives of the present study are to investigate the source of the main hurdles that have disturbed various antimalarial endeavours in SSA, and to establish how all the populations in SSA can secure equal opportunity to regain their human rights to health. That is, to determine a pathfinding mechanism through which various antimalarial endeavours could achieve equality in malaria decline across SSA, and then propose and demonstrate an innovative model to guide antimalarial intervention in SSA. Methods and Findings: I systematically extracted malaria data for SSA from the scientific literature, and complemented them with information from organizational and governmental (grey) publications. My results from the qualitative and quantitative analyses of malaria statistics for SSA between 2000 and 2016 show conspicuous inequalities in malaria endemicity across countries in SSA from east to west. These results also show that antimalarial funding and research in SSA—the bedrock of an efficient antimalarial intervention process—have been concentrated away from areas where malaria is most intense. For example, 58.45% of malaria calamities are recorded in the western part of SSA, whereas 61.07% of antimalarial funding and research is directed to the eastern part. Consequently, this inverse relationship provides unrepresentative data, thereby misguiding the antimalarial intervention process in the part of the world at the greatest disadvantage for the malaria endemic countries in the western part. Thus, the citizens of many of those countries become completely vulnerable to various malaria comorbidities and calamities, and die in squalor. For example, between 1990 and 2017, the whole of SSA had a cumulated malaria death toll of 19,136,503: 11,184,418 in western SSA, 4,768,660 in eastern SSA, and 3,183,425 in central SSA. Between 2000 and 2016, 7 of 14 countries in western SSA recorded drastic increases in malaria deaths as compared to only 2 of 17 in eastern SSA. In other words, only 7 of 14 countries in western SSA recorded positive changes in malaria deaths as against 15 of 17 in eastern SSA. Discursive Analysis: From a general perspective, antimalarial resources, services, and intervention processes are calibrated, regulated, and modelled based on research results. When confronting health inequalities, healthcare equity becomes the central concept that guides the intervention process. Since healthcare equity helps professionals avert the possibility of health inequities, they must have adequate dispositions to judge where and how to direct their resources and services. Thus, I have established the theory of ethical governance in healthcare as the main theory par excellence to help them with their rationale of social justice to overcome health inequalities and achieve equitable health equality. This impetus indicates the contribution of the insight from the ethics of care in developing this research from its conception to its objective. The theory of ethical governance in healthcare is a pragmatic interdisciplinary theory of applied ethics that valorizes contextualization, and brings care and justice together while using the need of the populations as the main factor of operation. After analysing the malaria situation in SSA in light of this philosophy, I have designed and proposed the greatest-need target antimalarial intervention strategy as a novel intervention model to fight malaria in SSA. This is a prospective strategy into which is endowed the potential to enhance an efficient antimalarial intervention process in SSA from funding through research to intervention. I formulated it to be pragmatic in process, interdisciplinary in content, and context-sensitive in approach. Although this model is still in the form of a theory, my probability demonstration with real malaria statistics from SSA indicate that it could bring encouraging positive change to antimalarial outcomes in SSA. Evaluation and Conclusion: This thesis refreshed the socio-epidemiological problems that have puzzled global health experts for more than fifty years in relation to the fight against malaria in SSA. Fundamentally interested in establishing corrective measures that could bring about positive changes to this effect, it has clearly demonstrated the heterogeneity of malaria endemicity throughout sub-Saharan Africa. From the perspective of applied ethics, it specifies that the modelling of various activities in the chain of antimalarial intervention process in that part of world must be proportional to the heterogeneity of malaria endemicity. This insight is of paramount importance at the level of funding and research, since it is the bedrock of efficient antimalarial intervention process in that part of the world. Proportional funded antimalarial research (FAMR) is capable of producing representative and reliable data to provide a fairer calibration of the available resources, and to facilitate an equitable orientation of the intervention process. With respect to malaria in SSA, only a proportional antimalarial intervention process has the potential to attain equality in malaria decline across countries so to minimize the inequality-gap. A proportional antimalarial intervention process would give hard-hit populations in malaria endemic countries the opportunity to enjoy their rights to health, even at a minimum. But the successful execution of the proposed antimalarial intervention process in SSA needs an inclusive interdisciplinary collaboration in content building, an unbiased contextualization in implementation, and an open-ended ethical integrity in its frameworks. With these qualities, it will be productive, effective, and efficient in managing variations that characterize the diverse malaria vector factors in that part of the world. Recapitulation: In this research, I have 1/ diagnosed an inverse relationship between FAMR engagements in SSA and the malaria endemicity, 2/ illustratively demonstrated the appropriate healthcare intervention mechanism necessary to subdue health inequalities, and 3/ used the insight from the demonstrations in point 2 to design and propose an innovative intervention model that could reverse the negative dynamics caused by the diagnoses in point 1

From Recovery to Discovery: Ethnic American Science Fiction and (Re)Creating the Future

My project assesses how science fiction by writers of color challenges the scientific racism embedded in genetics, nuclear development, digital technology, and molecular biology, demonstrating how these fields are deployed disproportionately against people of color. By contextualizing current scientific development with its often overlooked history and exposing the full life cycle of scientific practices and technological changes, ethnic science fiction authors challenge science’s purported objectivity and make room for alternative scientific methods steeped in Indigenous epistemologies. The first chapter argues that genetics is deployed disproportionally against black Americans, from the pseudo-scientific racial classifications of the nineteenth century and earlier through the current obsession with racially tailored medicine and the human genome. I argue that the fiction of Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due, and Andrea Hairston reveals the continuing scientific racialization of black Americans and complicates questions of humanity that still rise from genetic typing and medical testing. Chapter 2 interrogates the nuclear cycle, revealing what has been erased—the mining of uranium on the Navajo Nation, nuclear testing on Paiute and Shoshone land in the United States, similar tests on Indigenous soil in Kazakhstan, and nuclear waste buried in the New Mexico and Texas deserts. I contend Leslie Marmon Silko, William Saunders, and Stephen Graham Jones reveal the destructive influence of the buried nuclear cycle on Indigenous people globally, as they posit an Indigenous scientific method with which to fight through their novels. The third chapter exposes how the Latina/o digital divide in the United States elides a more disturbing multinational divide between those who mine for, assemble, and recycle the products that create the digital era and those with access to those products. From mining for rare earth elements in the Congo to assembling electronics in Mexico’s maquiladoras and “recycling” used electronics across the developing world, the novels of Alejandro Morales, Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, and Ernest Hogan reveal the hidden price of the digital world and demand representation—digital, scientific, and historical. Chapter 4 builds on current discussions of Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer to argue that Chicana/o and Indigenous authored science fiction films reveal how the global harvesting of natural resources has expanded to include life itself and organisms’ interiors. Films and other visual productions by Robert Rodriguez, Reagan Gomez, Federico Heller, Jose Nestor Marquez, Rodrigo Hernández Cruz, and Nanobah Becker predict biocolonialism’s expansion as they create worlds reflecting current practices where life forms become no more than patented, mechanized resources for neocolonial capitalist production and consumption

Actants, Agents, and Assemblages: Delivery and Writing in an Age of New Media

This dissertation redefines the rhetorical canon of delivery by drawing on interdisciplinary theories of technology and materiality, including hardware and software studies, assemblage theory, and actor-network theory. Rhetorical theorists and composition scholars have correctly equated the technological medium with delivery, but also have focused exclusively on the circulation of symbolic forces rather than the persuasive agency of technology itself, thus eliding the affordances and constraints posed by technological actors at the non-symbolic levels of hardware, software, protocol, and algorithms. I establish a historical precedent in classical theorists such as Demosthenes, Cicero, and Quintilian that acknowledges their understanding of the role of nonhuman actors in rhetoric. In contrast to contemporary views of an active human subject using a passive technological object to achieve a communicative aim, I extend these classical understandings of materiality by articulating a vision of technological agency where rhetorical agency and delivery are equally distributed across human and nonhuman actors and assemblages. This account of delivery enables rhetorical scholars to study how material artifacts and writing technologies circulate, transform, and affect rhetorical consequences as they enter into various associations and shape emergent political publics. Through new media case studies from activist newsgame designers and algorithmic art, I establish a form of multimodal public writing that reconceives of political community building in networked spaces as a process that necessarily involves the consideration of procedural, protocological, and algorithmic rhetorics and literacies. By examining how delivery occurs through a complex ecological and material milieu, I define a more nuanced theoretical framework that allows rhetoricians and composition theorists to more productively address the various non-symbolic aspects of digital rhetoric and nonhuman agency that increasingly serve as a condition of possibility for the ways we learn to write and communicate toda