The Impossibility of Indigenous Politics: Participatory Medical Design and the Limits of Settler Democracy in Taiwan

Date
Dec 9, 2024, 4:30 pm6:00 pm
Location
Morrison Hall, Room 224

Speaker

Details

Event Description
Aaron Su

Aaron Su is a doctoral candidate working across medical and environmental anthropology, the anthropology of technology and design, and Indigenous studies. 

Aaron’s dissertation focuses on novel government programs that demand the participation of Indigenous communities in the innovation of medical and agricultural technologies. Drawing on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork, “Settler Democracy: Indigenous Self-Sufficiency and the Limits of Participation in Taiwan” centers on 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. Ultimately, Aaron's book project theorizes that participation is a new mutation of Indigenous recognition politics that masks crucial differences between statistically-driven nation-building and Indigenous self-determination—two different quests for “self-sufficiency”—in a politically precarious contemporary Taiwan, where questions of autonomy loom large. Works from this project were recently honored by three Paper Prizes (Winner, Association for Asian Studies; Honorable Mention, Associations of Political and Legal Anthropology and Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing) for this theorizing of participation.

Sponsors
  • Princeton Native American and Indigenous Studies Working Group (PAIISWG)
  • Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative
  • Land, Language, and Art, a Humanities Council Global Initiative