Paper short abstract:

This paper outlines a reflexive ethics of collaborative art-making and epistemic hybridity in order to challenge rigid biopolitical categorizations of people. As a case study, I engage with collective behaviors of resistance to anti-Asian violence referred to as flocking (Jeung 2022).

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, using decolonial theoretical approaches, I analyze creative and collaborative processes within the new media art project titled, ‘Flocking,’ which attempts to destabilize Eurocentric epistemic stances on corporeality. As a researcher, scholar, artist, and activist, my practice relies on a continuously reflexive approach to my own perspective. Through a feminist theoretical approach known as ‘standpoint theory’ (Harding 2004), I consider how my affinity with Chicanx politics can extend towards understanding other transnational and antiracist movements. This, in turn, informs my analysis of peoples’ responses to anti-Asian acts of racism in the United States. I engage in the method of anthropological content analysis of public media texts and interviews (c. 2020-2022) associated with collective acts of resistance known as ‘flocking’ (Jeung 2022). Through analyzing ‘Flocking,’ I bring to the fore collective knowledge making, social relations, and practices of collective dissent by socially marginalized groups. Ultimately, assembling an extended reality (XR) project informed by decolonial theoretical approaches provides an opportunity to design inclusive, interactive, and polymodal art and epistemological processes that challenge articulations of Eurocentric biopolitics.