Michelle Lee Brown

Agur!

As noted on the Home page, I'm Euskaldun (Basque, Iparralde region). My ancestral and ongoing land and waters are Lapurdi, in the Biarrtitz/Miarritz area. My paternal family is Northern German. I grew up on Wampanoag territories around Buzzards Bay, Cape Cod, MA, and have studied on Kanaka Maoli lands and waters around Honolulu, HI.

 

Currently I am at Washington State University on Yakima and Umatilla territories. I started here last year, after a supportive fellowship from NAIS at Dartmouth College.

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In 2021 I completed my doctoral dissertation in in the areas of Indigenous Politics and Futures Studies from the Political Science Department at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. My dissertation is titled (Re)Coding Survivance:

Relation-Oriented Ontologies of Indigenous Digital Media, and is currently being worked into a book manuscript.

 

I center relational commitments – as complex as they can be - to human and nonhuman kin, and BIPOC feminist theory and praxis in my teaching and research. 

 

My current areas of focus are noted below, but much like eels and tides - they shift and flow.

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Indigenous and Aboriginal A.I., TEK Tech, and Digital Media

• Researching theoretical and material interventions 

• Speculative design technology workshops 

Global Indigenous and Aboriginal studies

• Attenuating to where and how these are engaged in political and social contexts

• Indigenous and Aboriginal IR: sovereignty networks and global support routes

"No Wave" Feminisms and Queer Praxis

• Black and Indigenous feminist and queer solidarity building and support networks

• Community building

• Working within the tensions of difference and, as Eve Tuck notes,  'valuing the irreconcilable'

Speculative Fiction and Euskalduna Futurisms

• Speculative fiction as iterative testing ground for imagining and building:

  • Renewed kinship and communtiy formations​

  • Protocols and practices for learning, for relationship building and repair

  • Diplomacy models for human and nonhuman species 

  • Radical technologies

Oceanic Relations

• How do we define roots and routes within coastal communties?

• How to we return to these practices and protocols when on others' lands and waters?

• How do flow and reciprocity entwine?

2021 - present

Washington State University

Assistant Professor, Digital Technology and Culture Program