Discipline and disciplining have been a set of processes wielded throughout history to order, control, and extract. These processes have served as efficient colonial tools and have been so intimately indicative of the way institutions wield and disseminate power that in 1976, French philosopher Michael Foucault theorized as a new form of power: disciplinary power. In my research, I explore the concept of discipline as it exists in the collegiate system, through the perspectives of Foucault's 'Discipline and Punish' and la Paperson’s 'A Third University is Possible,' while drawing inspiration from Niccolò Machiavelli's 'The Prince' to shape writing style. Rooted in the field of critical university studies and motivated by personal reflections, this project takes the form of a "how-to" guide for cultivating a docile body and aims to explore the limits and potentials of discipline within the context of STEM education at the University of Washington. As part of my methodological approach, I incorporate and analyze various university spaces’ contributions to the overall built environment and campus power structure(s). I ask what it takes for place to become space, or more simply put, how the various disciplinary bodies that inhabit space shape or alter its meaning, and vice versa. I present this project as part of an active effort to critique the colonially and penally adjacent power structures upon which many universities are built. While my research and reflections remain focused on the University of Washington, they may serve as a case study for most of modern Western academia. Through this work, I hope to advance the push towards decolonial and interdisciplinary futures within STEM and academia, at large.

In this project, I explore the settler colonial dynamics that shape Wilderness Therapy, a for-profit carceral institution that has come under scrutiny for allegations of abuse despite their mission of curing “troubled teens” through the healing benefits of the outdoors. Specifically, I investigate the relationship of Wilderness Therapy to Indigenous land dispossession, violent cure-based medical models, and power and privilege within incarcerated communities. As someone who has been to Wilderness Therapy, I am interested in exploring the web of entanglements among carceral institutions, and how my experience and research can dismantle the carceral state and prioritize equitable reparations. My research takes the form of a novel written in a hybrid structure that braids fiction and nonfiction sections. The fiction part of my novel follows a student through her journey at Desert Destinies, a made-up Wilderness Therapy Center based on the average statistics of my research. The thesis of the nonfiction work postulates that Wilderness Therapy perpetuates slow colonial violence, meaning violence that replicates colonial structures and takes place in hidden ways over such a long period of time that it is invisibilized and naturalized. My research has taken many different forms and has been guided by various methodological approaches, including ethnographic research; close readings of archival documents, including my own journals from my time incarcerated; bibliographic research in the fields of Indigenous Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, and the Environmental Humanities; and creative writing. Through this project, I hope to imagine a decolonial future beyond the carceral state in which we address the slow violence inflicted by society on a personal and community level.