This module aims to provide an overview of some of the historical approaches to the relationship between affect, emotion and work, and to bring those to bear upon the contemporary politics of work under different contexts of precarity. Specifically, it examines the relation between work and affect under present conditions of post-Fordism and of the neoliberal organization of production, time, and subjectivity. Using cinematic texts as primary references, the goals of this module are to point to bothcapital's exploitation of affect, but also capital's production of affect, as these intersect with the concerns of gender and precarity.

The following two sections provide two approaches for thinking about how forces of capital both exploit and produce affect. Each section provides different resources for thinking about how exploitation and affects can yield new subjectivities and different forms of sociality. These subjectivities and sociality do not necessarily reproduce capital, and can in fact yield forms of resistance. After discussing some of the relevant theoretical issues, each section then suggests ways that these can be understood through readings of films.

“Automating Discovery and the Engineering of Off-Earth Futures” examines NASA’s efforts to engineer what is described as “autonomous scientific discovery” in the Mars Exploration Program and its fleet of Mars Rovers through artificial intelligence and machine learning. At the intersections of Science and Technology Studies, Feminist Science and Technology Studies, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, “Automating Discovery” asks: What are the material conditions and histories of the Mars Exploration Program rovers as increasingly autonomous scientific laboratories? And, building on the field of laboratory studies, what is the rover as laboratory when read through the fields of Feminist Science and Technology Studies, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies? In what ways is this rover a historical material product of the long histories of US settler colonialism, imperialism, and global racial capitalism? To address these questions, each chapter of “Automating Discovery” examines a different aspect of the material conditions that shape the fantasy of autonomous scientific discovery and the rovers of the Mars Exploration Program as autonomous scientific laboratories. What political stakes of life in our current inter-planetary moment does such an intervention articulate and make clear? How can such an intervention guide anti-colonial research practice? To answer these questions, “Automating Discovery” historicizes and contextualizes NASA’s efforts to engineer autonomous scientific discovery through US imperial and colonial relations in the transpacific. In so doing, “Automating Discovery” seeks to position the Mars rover as an “autonomous colonial laboratory,” and articulate critical strategies through which the expansion of such a laboratory might be resisted.

This dissertation makes two interconnected arguments. First, I trace a historical pattern of transnational, trans-imperial, anti-racist and anticolonial educational cooperation and solidarity between Asian Indian and African American thinkers and organizations during the first half of the twentieth century. Secondly, I show how the U.S. State Department during the 1950s used various forms of international education as a means of displacing the transnational relationships between African American and Asian Indian communities, and supplanting them with a state-to-state relationship between India and the United States, with the goal of bringing a newly independent India into Cold War alignment. Together, the dissertation’s chapters reveal education as centrally located within the nexus of transnationally-linked decolonization movements, the long Cold War, and the global politics of race, particularly between around 1915 and 1965. Using an interdisciplinary methodology that combines archival research with close textual analysis, biographical tracings, and juxtaposition of literary and historical documents, I show how education took center stage over these five tumultuous decades – an eventful half-century during which antiracist and anticolonial activists joined hands across national and imperial borders, and a rising U.S. empire-state both clashed and compromised with decolonization movements abroad and antiracist human rights movements at home.

In this dissertation, I argue data sediments gendered histories of space and place. Through examining archives, datasets, and public records, I read for the patterns of brief mentions of Muslim women over time and space. I read the brief mentions of Muslim women as a part of the process of datafication cementing knowledge about them through these patterns. Across time and space, Muslim women are constantly rendered as passive victims in the archive-to-data cycle. Instead, I argue for a reading practice that centers these brief mentions as pushing against the limits of the archives and datasets.

This dissertation reads articulations of caste across cultural texts, focusing on 20th -21st c. South Asia and Brazil. As a Native American Indigenous Studies inquiry, this project considers how caste nuances notions of indigeneity and de/coloniality, and as a relational inquiry, this project traces caste across period and place towards complicating hegemonic U.S. formulations of race and inequity. Reading methodologies vary per chapter (organized by films, feminist texts, abolitionist writings, and mixed-genre race/caste literatures) but generally draw upon frames in Native American Indigenous Studies, Subaltern Studies, New Materialisms, and women of color feminisms. The dissertation hypothesizes caste as culture of im/material stigma as well as ontoepistemology for understanding contemporary global inequity. And it argues that the natureculture re/production of caste relies on material-discursive notions of “blood” effectively partitioning Non/Life hunger vs. commensalities along biopolitical lines of difference.

This dissertation focuses on semi-structured and informal interviews with five Salvadoran activists living in the U.S. diaspora that transnational support Central American national politics, five Central American asylum seekers, and several activists that work in San Salvador. Using interdisciplinary methods like critical ethnography and participant observation, I explore the transnational, intergenerational organizers in the Salvadoran U.S. diaspora that use reproductive justice to connect to an array of activist communities in the U.S. and El Salvador.

Critical ethnography and cultural studies are important methods for this dissertation because it affords me the opportunity to move from a fixed set of moments or knowledge while also attending to the complexity of lived reality, and the position of the researcher (Madison, 2012). My participant observation hours at marches, protests, meetings and informal conversations in both San Salvador and the U.S took place with three organizations: CISPES (The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador), the San Diego Migrant and Refugee Coalition and the Otay Mesa Detention Resistance (San Diego/Tijuana). I discuss not only reproductive autonomy, but also the right to “reproduce” children and communities in healthy and safe environments by introducing water privatization and migrant rights and reproductive justice concerns. My intervention in ethnic studies and queer of color critique as a Central American scholar are to extend the reproductive justice issue beyond a North American and heteronormative context. In my expanded conceptualization, reproductive justice constitutes forms of life-giving power that move care work beyond biological understandings of the reproductive.