I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, with affiliations in the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Hawaiʻi Research Center for Futures Studies, and the International Cultural Studies Program. My writing and teaching engage critical and feminist theory, surveillance and sensing technologies, media, aesthetics, and the ongoing reverberations of colonial violence in both visual culture and computational form.
Much of my work has explored how global security regimes operate not only through surveillance and data extraction, but also through aesthetic, libidinal and sensorial fields. My research and publications have focused extensively on how the ‘Middle East’ is continually produced as a testing ground for global architectures of control through emerging technologies. I am the recipient of the Fulbright Scholar Award in the Middle East and North Africa Regional Research Program, and have done fieldwork in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Lebanon. I also served for several years as core faculty for the Arab Council for the Social Sciences' Working Group on Critical Security Studies in the Arab Region, including its affiliated Summer Institute in Beirut.
My work has been published in Security Dialogue, Critical Studies on Security, the European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, International Studies Review, Contemporary Political Theory, and Globalizations. I served as Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review, an open-source, peer-reviewed journal that examines misinformation and disinformation from an interdisciplinary perspective. At the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa, I teach courses on global poltics and international relations, Middle East politics, political theory, gender and sexuality, U.S. foreign policy, and the politics of media.
In parallel to my academic work, I am also a tattoo artist and founder of a women-led studio in Honolulu committed to creating affirming spaces for body-based aesthetic practices. Working in Hawai’i, I continue to expand my understanding of the layered genealogies of this artistic practice on the islands, from traditional to military and settler motifs, and the ways in which history, ecology, and resilience are inscribed and negotiated on the body.