Book in progress, tentatively titled Raising Bodhisattvas: Picture Books and Parenting in Modern Taiwan:

In this book, I argue that Buddhist picture books are not simply a form of religious entertainment and education for children, but create a Buddhist form of parenting for the modern era. How to make buddhas and bodhisattvas accessible and appealing to children? Depict them in the visual idiom of cute, and give them narratives in which they interact with young people. How to make historical monks, distant and a bit boring, relevant for modern times? Show them as occasionally mischievous, and recast their virtues in the language of modern education. How can kids do something like make merit in contemporary times? Tell stories about environmentalism, honoring difference, and other prosocial behavior—in ways that align with public education. Although on the face of it, the audience for picture books would seem to be children, extensive use of paratext (prefaces, introductions, postfaces, notes) help parents both in childrearing and in understanding Buddhism in modern ways. The very act of reading together becomes an expression of an ethical commitment to a certain kind of parenting.

Ongoing research: A Genealogy of Moral Surveillance in China

Surveillance of various forms and scopes has come to define the contemporary era, and surveillance practices are the site of considerable anxiety. We are being monitored in ways that do not seem to be transparent or controllable to the average person. Nowhere is the surveillance society more apparent than in China, with a near-constant stream of news reports. This project will explore how technology has reshaped interpersonal relationships by looking historically at moral surveillance in China. I hope to show that current practices of social credit and other types of surveillance have long roots in history, and thinking about present technologies with reference to the past—highlighting both continuities and ruptures—helps us to better understand the motivations and mechanisms behind present-day practices. Further, considering surveillance from a non-Western perspective will help to refine how we conceptualize technologies of presence in a global context, how surveillance shapes communities, and how technologies may make possible certain forms of resistance.

Part of the Public Theologies of Technology and Presence program, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation