Conferences
This is a record of conferences I've attended for academic talks / presentations.
May 8th, 9th, 2026
University of Michigan
April 24th, 25th, 2026
North Vancouver City Library
This flash talk for the 2026 Cascadia Seminar in Medical Anthropology, themed “Multiple Futures: Intergenerational Voices and Global Connections,” introduces my work at the intersection of disability, media, and medical anthropology through the documentary “The Cat that Lives in Your Dreams.” In five minutes, I will briefly sketch how collaborative filmmaking with autistic artists and disabled communities unsettles narrow clinical understandings of autism while opening up alternative futures of care, kinship, and communication across Korea and its diasporas. Framed as a prompt for conversation rather than a full research talk, the presentation invites discussion about how medical anthropology might engage more deeply with multimodal, disability-centered methods in an intimate, participatory seminar setting like Cascadia.
April 15th-17th 2026
University of Arizona
This poster presentation for the 2026 University of Arizona Disability Studies Conference, titled “Angled Accountability: Experimental Filmmaking and the Politics of Care,” introduces my work at the intersection of disability documentary, kinship, and public anthropology through the film “The Cat that Lives in Your Dreams.” In this session, I trace how collaborative filmmaking with autistic artist Jin Li, her sisters, and disability arts networks in Korea and New York makes visible the uneven negotiations of caregiving, authorship, and translation across lecture stages, galleries, and post-screening Q&As. Framed as a proposal of “angled accountability” as a methodology of care, the poster invites conversation about how disability studies and visual anthropology might rethink spectatorship, dependency, and interdependence by using multimodal, disability-centered methods that foreground both the ethics of looking and the infrastructures that make disabled flourishing possible.
This panel presentation for the 2026 NEKST Conference at the University of Michigan, titled “Perfumed Ecologies: Disability, Scent, and Media Collaboration in Korean Crip Worlds,” introduces my work at the intersection of sensory anthropology, disability care, and Korean Christian worlds through the figure of Jin Li’s fragranced home. In fifteen minutes, I trace how synthetic laundry scents and “freshness” idioms like siwonhada and gaewoonhada operate as atmospheres of both protection and governance, linking domestic infrastructures, church-based cure discourses, and Hallyu disability mediascapes to the management of autistic sensory life. Framed as a proposal for “olfactory ethics” rather than a finalized argument, the paper invites discussion about how Korean studies and medical anthropology might rethink han, care, and eugenic legacies by attending to chemically produced interiors and by using collaborative, film-based methods that make air, scent, and disability politics mutually perceptible in a seminar setting like NEKST.
September 25th 2026, 2PM (ET)
online
This Encore presentation for the Disability Research Interest Group (DRIG) of the American Anthropological Association will revisit and expand on my recent work as a filmmaker and anthropologist, focusing on my documentary “The Cat that Lives in Your Dreams.” Drawing from my broader research on disability, media, and Korean cultural production, the presentation will introduce the film’s central questions, situate it within disability anthropology and disability studies, and reflect on the collaborative process of working with autistic artists and communities. I will also discuss how the film engages with DRIG’s commitment to centering disabled people’s experiences in knowledge production, and invite conversation about the possibilities and limits of documentary as a mode of disability-centered ethnographic practice.
July 21st-24th, 2026
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland (joining virtually)
This panel presentation for the EASA2026 HOAN panel “Beyond Polarised Histories of Anthropologies: Female Ethnographers and Folklorists between the Mid‑19th and Early 20th Centuries” introduces my paper, “Black Joy in Many Media: Zora Neale Hurston and the Unwritten Histories of Ethnography and Folklore.” In fifteen minutes, I revisit Hurston’s multi‑media ethnographic practice—across fiction, film, song, and autobiography—and its recent cinematic reassemblies to show how Black joy, autoethnography, and synesthetic media unsettle male‑ and White‑polarised canons of ethnography and folklore. Framed as a contribution to more entangled, sensorial histories rather than a purely archival recovery, the paper invites discussion about how the history of anthropology might re‑center Black women folklorist‑ethnographers as theorists of method, and how attending to sound, touch, and affect in Hurston’s work can inspire less polarised, more dialogical histories of the discipline.
This panel presentation for the EASA2026 session “Embodied Difference and the Ecologies of Interaction: Language, Disability, and Neurodivergence in a Polarised World” introduces my paper, “Humming Against Cleanliness: Autistic Vocality, Christianity, and Communicative Friction in Korean Disability Worlds.” In fifteen minutes, I follow autistic artist Jin Li’s humming, praise songs, and tactile routines across Korean churches, rehabilitation centers, and disability arts spaces in Seoul and New York to show how her sensory vocal practices exceed clinical labels of “atypical language” and church idioms of cure, purity, and moral uplift. Framed as an invitation to think with communicative “frictions” rather than resolve them, the paper opens discussion on how autistic vocality becomes a world‑making repertoire through which autonomy, dependence, and spiritual worth are negotiated, and how attending to these practices might help linguistic and medical anthropology rethink credibility, intelligibility, and wellbeing in polarized religious, medical, and artistic ecologies.
This panel presentation for the EASA2026 session “Imagining inclusive worlds from a fragmented position: How can collaboration, equity, and inclusion be pursued from within a fragmented disciplinary landscape?” introduces my paper, “Disability Anthropology as Crip Time: Taking Up Space in a Fragmented Discipline.” In fifteen minutes, I draw on crip time and crip futurity to show how disability anthropology refuses the discipline’s default ableist temporality—its expectation of endlessly mobile, non‑disabled researchers—and instead treats pauses, asynchronous collaboration, and variable pacing as necessary conditions for rigorous, accountable work. Framed less as a solution than as an experiment in “staying with the trouble,” the paper invites discussion about how disability‑centered, action‑oriented, and Indigenous‑inspired approaches can turn media, archives, and festivals into spaces of crip occupation, offering practical ways to pursue collaboration, equity, and inclusion from within anthropology’s own precarious, fragmented landscape.
June 25-26 2026
Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria (joining virtually)
This panel paper for the 13th Korean Screen Culture Conference (KSCC) 2026 at the University of British Columbia, titled “Extraordinary Attorney Woo and the New Disability Media,” examines how the hit series Extraordinary Attorney Woo reconfigures autistic representation within contemporary Korean and transnational screen culture. In fifteen minutes, I situate the show’s global popularity alongside Korea’s dominant “autistic savant” trope, then offer a close reading of key visual motifs—especially the CGI whale and “narwhal among belugas” metaphor—to show how they translate sensory and cognitive difference on screen and frame disability as relational rather than purely individual. Framed as an inquiry into authorship and ethics rather than a finalized argument, the paper invites discussion about how Korean screen studies and disability media scholarship might rethink visibility, intersectionality, and “appropriate casting” by attending to who tells disability stories, how consultation works, and what kinds of autistic lives remain unimaginable even in ostensibly progressive series like Extraordinary Attorney Woo.