91Â鶹ӳ»­

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 (manuscript in preparation) 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 book project, The Desire for Self-Sufficiency, looks at new “circular bioeconomy” residences and neighborhoods in Taiwan and China, which promise self-sufficient enclosure (zijizizu) from pandemic or environmental 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 to fantasies of lunar colonization. He also examines how ethnic minority and Indigenous communities in China and Taiwan produce their own understandings of “self-reliance” that emphasize de-growth and gesture toward alternative futures.

Aaron is an award-winning teacher and scholar, having received a Teaching Award and five paper prizes from different scholarly associations while in graduate school. With commitments to collaborative, public-facing social research and place-based learning, he’s excited to begin at 91Â鶹ӳ»­!

Major Interests

Medical Anthropology

Environmental Anthropology

Critical Technology and Design Studies

Global Indigenous Studies

Social and Political Theory

East Asia (Taiwan and China)

Regular Classes

AN102 Cultural Anthropology

AN208 The Anthropology of Design: Technology, Race, Inequality

AN215 Anthropological Theory

AN308 From Human to Planetary Health: Expanding Medical Anthropology