Campus Directory

Aaron Su

Assistant Professor

Anthropology

Aaron Su is an anthropologist who researches how today’s emerging promises of progressive technological innovation are reconfiguring ideas of health, the environment, and ethnic and Indigenous inequality globally.

Aaron conducts ethnographic fieldwork across Taiwan, China, and the U.S., and his book projects critically examine the emergence of two concepts central to contemporary design and innovation. His first book dissects the notion of “participation.” The Demand to Participate (under advanced contract with Stanford University Press) looks at the Taiwanese government’s recent response to longstanding Indigenous inequalities through policies of participatory and community-centered design in health and agriculture. It argues that participation, despite its benevolent veneer, constitutes a novel form of governing global Indigenous communities that measures and tabulates cooperation, while nonetheless producing new spaces for resistance and dissent.

His second project, An Atlas of Self-Sufficiency, asks why, in a post-global moment, inward self-reliance (zijizizu) has become an organizing metaphor of contemporary technological solutions. It looks at new “circular bioeconomy” residences and neighborhoods throughout Taiwan, China, and the U.S.—as well as the technologies within them—which promise self-sufficient enclosure from political, environmental, and pandemic crises by producing energy and food from waste. He argues that promises of self-sustaining life often promise to escape worldly inequality rather than remedy it, and he probes the manifold roots of the self-sufficiency concept, from geopolitical conflicts and corporate environmental remediation projects to fantasies of lunar colonization.

http://aaronsu.net/