I am currently a postdoctoral researcher with the “Design and Aesthetics for Environmental Data” project headed by Jussi Parikka, with Paolo Patelli under the Digital Design and Information Studies department at Aarhus University, Denmark. Previously, I was part of the Asian Urbanisms Cluster at the Asia Research Institute as a Postdoctoral Fellow.
research
I received my PhD in Cultural Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory from the University of California, Davis.
My research interests lie broadly in the intersections of contemporary architectural history and theory, critical geography, feminist Science Technology and Society (STS) studies, environmental humanities and visual and media culture and aesthetics. Engaged in methods of discursive, literary, historical, archival and formal analysis, I am interested in how notions and forms of technology, the ‘environment,’ the past and the future, are co-constituted and transformed through modes of design as well as projective and speculative fiction and discourse.
current PROJECTS
I am currently examining the discourses, logics and aesthetics of the ‘energy island’ as an infrastructural imaginary and proposition of global techno-ecological transitional landscapes.
I am also working on a book project which examines the discursive and aesthetic relationship between the urban and the planetary scale through figures of ‘planetary urban futures.’
In examining tropes, designs and models and speculative fictions on how the city is becoming a planet and the planet becoming a city, the book project attempts to trace how ‘humanity’ – ‘we’, as ascribed by predominantly Western designers, planners and policymakers – have been and will be conceptualizing ‘our’ collective future of habitability in relation to (neo)colonial sociotechnical imaginaries of growth.
collaborations
I have worked with various research organisations and projects, which include The Centre For Liveable Cities (2016), the Feminist Research Institute at UC Davis (2019), the Cities Research Cluster at SMU (2020 – 2021) as well as the “Longitudinal Study to Quantify and Qualify the Impact of the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) Framework For E-Waste in Singapore” Project (2021, Singapore Management University, in collaboration with Singapore Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment).
A member of the Singapore chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), I have contributed to the 2023 Helsinki Biennal (with Critical Environmental Data), Broadsheet (Contemporary Visual Art +Culture), Evental Aesthetics, and The Ideological Guide to the Venice Biennal.
May Ee Wong, PhD. Researcher and writer 