Who Taught Me

Inspired by Aimi Hamraie’s list of who taught them, I’d like to make a (non-exhaustive) list of the people and things who taught me how to be a person and a researcher. Doing this is my way of fighting the great man theory approach that still tends to dominate academic framings. Academia provides precious little avenues to acknowledge and validate all of the people, labor and resources that shaped us, so here’s a page to celebrate the “interdependent researcher”!

This page is under construction. I need to more fully collate my notes but for now, have some bullet points.

• Thinking and writing critically

  • Ryan Sample - for giving me my first push in what writing the power of writing could be
  • Brinkema - for opening my eyes to the beauty of the humanities. “When I’m lost, theory helps”
  • Crystal Lee and Jonathan Zong - for providing community in the challenging times

• Thinking critically about the built environment

  • TL Taylor - for exposing me to critical thinking about the social aspects of infrastructure
  • Sara Hendren - for that simple provocation of “how does the body meet the world”

• Tracing power

  • Dad - for raising me to question
  • sadun - for org charts and yearbooks

• Beauty of mentorship

  • Chris Harrow - for the enthusiasm for how beautiful math can be
  • Michael Leamy - for taking a chance and always believing in me
  • Greg Xie - for trusting me from start to finish of the development of a researcher
  • The Terrascope DnD crew (Max, Rin, Daniel, Grey) - for the wide experiences and making me feel “adopted”

• “Ableism is at the root of your oppression”

  • “You deserve love just for being human” - Alex, Darby, Noor, Kris
  • I fought hard to be soft – that cohost post

• Empathy is hard yet beautiful since you will never be able to understand the experience of another

  • Jonah, SQuAT, Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing – for providing the nudge when I was wrong
  • Reading road signs on a road trip of the US, giving a distributed yet immense sense of the loss that Indigenous people experienced

• Narratives matter. The stories of the stories

  • Daniela Rus – the power of framing
  • American Gods - Neil Gaiman
  • Mehitabel Glenhaber – why history matters

• Maintaining interdisciplinary hope

  • Julie Shah - “I know all the ways that systems can fail. And yet we still build”
  • David Mindell - in a time when it seemed like age must lead to cynicism, giving a different perspective

• There’s always a spot for the weirdos

  • Nate Mattias - insisting on avoiding the funding
  • Ryaan Ahmed - for expanding my world beyond my limited boxes
  • Kate Darling - for facing things with strength and poise
  • Angela Chen - for making my soul sing with being understood