Degrees
2012, BA English, University of California at Berkeley
Bio
Trisha Federis Remetir is a doctoral candidate at UNC Chapel Hill who writes about transpacific migration, representations of water extractions, interspecies entanglements, coloniality, anglophone Filipinx and world literatures, and gender. In her research and teaching methods, she is committed to pushing the boundaries of literary, cultural, and media studies to examine questions of race, gender, and settler logics, while thinking about futures of care, transnational solidarity, and abolition with students.
Trisha’s dissertation, Unfamiliar Waters: Representations of Resource Extraction in the Philippines, 1970s to present, argues that extractive projects in waters in and around the Philippines have altered the composition of water, both on material and representational scales. By examining examples of water in transnational Filipinx contemporary poetry, 1970s Filipino social realist film, historical archives, and other media, this project pushes against the assumption that the Philippines’ relationship to the Global North is solely defined by extraction of inanimate resources on land (such as oils and minerals)—in fact, this project argues that 20- and 21st century extractive water projects are focusing more on the management of renewable resources and regulating the movement of animate beings (such as human bodies and fish), to the detriment of all. The three chapters, entitled Saltwater, Freshwater, and Storms, each take on three “types” of water as they were redefined by various moments of resource extraction, such as transnational migration patterns set into place during the Marcos authoritarian regime, movements to nationalize freshwater spaces for aquaculture, and tenuous responses to ever-increasing typhoons. This project makes significant contributions to the Critical Filipino Studies, Feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), and media and cultural studies by conversing with scientific archives and artists as they make sense of their changing relationships to water and aquatic life. And lastly, the project contends that Filipino/a/x water aesthetics also challenges extraction’s singular vision of water by uncovering manifold ways of living in relation to water. In so doing, artists and cultural producers in this study alter water’s cultural and material makeup as well.
Trisha’s forthcoming work can be seen in the edited collection Ecologies in Southeast Asian Media and Popular culture, and in public digital humanities projects as a 2020 Imagining America PAGE fellow. She has taught courses in digital humanities, world literature, ocean literature, and film.
Publications:
2021 (Forthcoming) “Aquaculture Visions, Techno-Settler Hierarchies, and The Mysterious Milkfish (1982),” edited collection Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, ed. Paul Michael Atienza and Dr. Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez.
2020 (Forthcoming) “National Properties, National Ecologies: Postcolonial and ecocritical engagements with Mikhail Red’s Birdshot (2016),” edited collection Ecologies in Southeast Asian Media and Popular Culture, ed. Dr. Jason Telles and Dr. Charles Ryan.
Teaching Awards
2020
- Imagining America Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellow
Awards
2021
- Digital Dissertation Fellowship
2020
- Chancellor’s Doctoral Candidacy Award
- Humanities for the Public Good Grant
- UC Speculative Futures Collective grant
- Southeast Asian Language Council Tuition Support Award
- Imagining America Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) Fellow
2019
- Pre-Dissertation Exploration Award
- Summer Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellow
- Institute of the Arts and Humanities Travel Award
- Representing Migrations Humanities Lab Fellowship (Duke)
2018
- Summer Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship
