Aaron Su, sixth-year Anthropology graduate student, has received an honorable mention from the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA) for his paper titled “The (Im)possibility of Indigenous Politics: Collaborative Medical Design and the Limits of Settler Democracy in Taiwan.” This paper was submitted to the Annual APLA Graduate Student Paper Prize.

The selection committee noted that this is a “well-written, well-structured piece that brings a familiar set of concerns to novel material in Taiwan. It is a poignant, detailed account of Taiwan’s governmentality that disempowers Indigenous communities in familiar approaches of 'participation.' The paper is well-written, backed by critical theory and rich with ethnography sufficient even for a non-Taiwan scholar to understand and appreciate the submission's potential contribution to the scholarship.”

This paper is an adapted part of Aaron’s dissertation (co-advised by professors João Biehl and Carolyn Rouse), which analyzes novel government programs demanding the participation of Taiwan's Indigenous communities in the innovation of medical and agricultural technologies. Participatory design, the paper argues, makes Indigenous politics impossible by depoliticizing Indigenous dissent and converting it into user feedback, thus nullifying efforts at self-determination.