RESEARCH & WRITING

My research training started with a third-grader whining to her father (a country kid with an alphabet soup after his professional title) that she was bored. He cocked his eyebrow in parental disdain and replied with a single letter of the alphabet. I then had to pull the corresponding volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica set in our hallway and read until I was no longer "bored." It usually took under three flips of the pages.

When the internet came about, it taught something important that an encyclopedia could not: always check your sources. Once I understood that, it became a cultural study unto itself. Is there such a thing as an objective human artifact? The encyclopedia felt authoritative because it was heavy and alphabetical. The internet felt suspicious because anyone could touch it. But the bias was always there — in both. It was just better hidden in the ones that smelled like libraries.

That question — whose knowledge, organized by whom, toward what end — is the one I have been asking ever since, in museum evaluation reports, in NSF-funded program assessments at tribal sites, in teachers guides, and most recently in an essay series about what happens when a neurodivergent human runs headlong into an AI trained on neurotypical norms. I looked it up, they call it "ethno-epistemology." I call it a normal day in my neurodivergent brain.