**As I’ve continued my studies, I have a few adjustments for this piece. The original shape is preserved as follows.
It was a fall afternoon in Brooklyn, there walking with a friend who tells me about a world named Veritas; the currency is called Karma. “Imagine,” he says, “everyone is biometrically connected by the social and environmental cost of their actions.” We laugh as I wonder if it could work—this revision, a potential history of an abundant world where capital never accumulated but, instead, circulates as life-force. Immediate limitations surface in remembering the issues of surveillance and eugenics in biodata, the appropriation of Indian cosmologies, the naturalization of hierarchies and castes: the assumption that how it is is how it goes. A year later, and I wonder. The following describes my thought process in request of admission for doctoral study, and to write the requisite dissertation.
Intellectual Trajectory
This dissertation advances an intervention in Man’s ownership of money. Money, like communication, mediates. Driving what moves and matters, it forges a path, while similarly taking on a life of its own. Bodies also mediate—through space, synapses, sensations, sounds; through avowed and ascribed identities, abilities, and capacities. In agreement that the value of money is a social construct, and that the health and safety of a body is in many ways controlled by the national, ancestral capital of patriarchy, I designate the biopolitics of belief. But where Anzaldúa observes that “we perceive the version of reality that it [our culture] communicates,” I wonder what it takes to shift into the somatics of spirit. That is, what if currency sounded more like karma?
Many fields of research constellate this dissertation, including rhetorical ecologies, feminist science studies, critical race theory, Indigenous epistemologies, and affect theory. My advisor, Dr. Ashley Cordes, inspired much of these interests by illuminating the non-extractive innovation thriving in Indigenous communities, despite the ongoing violence of colonization. My work with these fields culminates in my final master’s project, “Mycelium in Mind: Making Mycomorphic Magic,” where I describe imperial anthropocentrism within the notion that we project reality from the predictive processing of our brains. Instead, by surrendering to the mycelial medium’s intelligence while creating and viewing art, I sought to reframe cognition as ecological rather than human-centered, concluding with a call for reverence in what seemingly exceeds the self.
Theoretical Framework
My research interests have since grown alongside de-anthropocentrism, into the mirror of perspectivism, and toward alchemizing colonized realities for community world-building. Inspired by Mignolo’s call for "pluriversal worlds as a universal reality" and Viveiros de Castro’s point that “a point of view is in the body,” I view embodiment as its own world, or cosmological principle, reflected in an intersubjective field of subjectivity. Living materials anchor this field; they host the variations in relational practices between bodies. Within this frame, materials are distorted from origin and layered across lived experiences, such that reality multiplies and money, too, becomes multiple. No longer a neutral coin for accumulation, money transforms into an embodied force that simulates and provides dialogue for the multidimensional flows of energy between beings.
The conversion of money to karma amplifies the relational complexity between embodied worlds. Following Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism, I recognize my understanding of karma as mediated and multiplied through anglo whiteness, and so never karma proper. Still, I find the concept compelling in its holistic rendering of responsibility. Attending to whiteness and citizenship as an inherited economy of harm, I build on Cram’s notion that “inheritance bears recursive layers of residual violence.” This approach reframes "privilege" as a violent asset and activates pathways toward embodied, system-level reparation and restitution. In tracing how different bodies enact their many karmas differently, I channel pluriversal, nonlinear economies that reorient value around reciprocity, rather than extraction.
Applications: Capital, Health, and AI
Holding karma as an enriched and embodied point of view, I turn toward the rhetorics of capital and healthcare. American healthcare, sutured to corporate profit, defines care through institutional structures derived from raced and gendered histories of medicine, biopower, and land theft. While this system stratifies agency and capacity, alternative medicines and embodiment practices empower the body’s innate intelligence, providing grounds for intricate boundary work between systemic control and well-being. This analysis also highlights the relations between stress-related disease, ancestral genetics, epigenetics, and environmental health, showing how individual and planetary stress mirrors the systemic and material strains of late-stage capitalism. Drawing these interconnections, I explore how decentralizing capital works in tandem with redefining biomedical boundaries—today, a vast domain of AI-mediation.
Emergent data science and health AI risks reproducing colonial control while simultaneously creating matrices for better healthcare distribution. To continue alchemizing inaccessible economies into shared, agentic, and multi-dimensional currencies, I explore decentralized healthcare data through Indigenous protocols of artificial intelligence and data sovereignty. Indigenous researchers have long recorded stewardship through ethical data practices, modeling reciprocal technologies embedded in kinship with non-humans and the environment. Rather than appropriating these sciences, their research reflects, by contrast, the exploitative and extractive AI developed by the colonized mind. If perspective lives in the body, can it drop the predictive brain machine into an embodied and regenerative force situated to unlearn imperialism and support pluriversal worlds?
Research Environment
I imagine writing this dissertation at ________. Rhetorical study requires conceptual risk and interdisciplinary synthesis. My work bridges intellectual disciplines and somatic practice, moving fluidly between the corporeal and empirical, the micro, meso, and macro realms. As traditional departments compartmentalize the disciplines, rhetoric enlivens their convergence while questioning knowledge production, where thought becomes form. The meta-connective essence of rhetorical study generates affective capacity for world-building and post-institution research. It is invigorating to see that _________ Rhetoric aligns with this creative passion.
Future Contributions
As an artist and educator, I’m consumed by transformation. My goal is to reintroduce a framework that reorients communication, technology, and economies toward embodied reciprocity and abundance. In exploring money as karma, I aim to contribute a grammar of value that connects spiritual accountability, ecological interdependence, health, and data ethics. This research demonstrates that value is practiced and mutable, that more careful forms of currency and consciousness can emerge.
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References, both narrowly and broad:
Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
Ashley Cordes, Indigenous Currencies: Leaving Some for the Rest in the Digital Age (2023).
Colleen Derkatch, Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
E. Cram, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and the Making of the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022), 6.
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, ed. and trans. Peter Skafish (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014), 67.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 16.
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020).
Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
Jason Edward Lewis et al., eds., Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper (Honolulu: Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Working Group, 2020).
Karma R. Chávez, The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021)
Tahu Kukutai and John Taylor, eds., Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an Agenda (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2016).
Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality, and the Grammar of Decoloniality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 449–514.