​My research focuses on the strategic uses of memory work in diasporic communities in the United States, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. It addresses the interrelated physical and material, emotional and intellectual, and intimate and public processes of the archives in ethnic communities, social groups, and knowledge-making societies. It is especially attuned to the effects and affects of remembering and reproducing collective identities, and how the engagement of such participatory activities animate social kinships, political solidarities, and professional networks. It explores the trauma and resilience, ruptures and continuities, and the heterogeneities, hybridities, and multiplicities of such groups: their histories, experiences, and cultures. It includes the analysis of gendered narratives among these knowledge communities through an array of sources: personal archives, professional groups, cultural heritage organizations, food practices in the home and at restaurants, and the aesthetics of production through handicrafts and the flexible manufacturing of technical devices and medical equipment. I collect oral histories and conduct archival research and ethnographic fieldwork.
Information and archival sciences, ethnic studies, digital humanities infrastructures, social science metadata architectures, social and biomedical knowledge communities, oral histories research, visual ethnography, affect theories, feminist techno-sciences, science and technology studies.