Research

2020 was a year of “racial reckoning,” particularly in the movements to address Anti-Asian racism (Sinophobia specifically) and the overwhelming resurgence of Black Lives Matter. This sparked public commitments from workplaces across the country, from higher education to corporate, towards investing in DEI and social justice.

My final semester at SDSU, I chose to examine progress on SDSU’s DEI vision, using the Journalism & Media Studies (JMS) department’s unit Diversity Plan as a case study, despite resistance from the LDT program's leadership.

As the paper demonstrates, institutional change management is incredibly difficult even with sincere buy-in, especially for DEI initiatives. Now that years have passed since these plans were announced, the paper is not just a case study of SDSU’s plan, or even a case study example of higher education DEI initiatives in the wake of 2020. SDSU is also a workplace. Many workplaces outside of higher education also announced DEI commitments. In my paper, I applied learnings from the case study and accompanying literature review. 

My senior year at Scripps, I researched and wrote a thesis on queer representation in media.

The thesis performs a textual analysis of two for-profit science fiction texts in which the authors implanted queer content: Bryan Singer's X-Men films and James Robert's Transformers comic series, "More Than Meets the Eye." 

The argument uses queer media representation and Western identity politics lenses into its critique. By interrogating reality through the masquerade of an impossible universe, science fiction affects how subversive a text can be. When authors designate the natural and the unnatural in a strange universe, they designate what and who belongs in our society. Whatever they imagine has an effect on our reality.