Kelsey Chen

Kels (she/they) is investigating the nesting of ancient and future worlds in science-fiction and speculative art. Her work focuses on how silkpunk and Asian American sci-fi build future-worlds that invoke ancient wisdom traditions to reconceptualize what technology is and could be--show how the technic can exceed the language of dominion, control, and optimization--and offer critique of and alternatives to the wreckage of the present world and the conditions which threaten the very possibility of a future. Lately, she has been very interested in ritual, computational poetry, numerology, mathematics & magic, qigong, and ghosts.

Physical practices are also a crucial part of her work as a theorist: tattooing, tea, qigong, sculpture, divination. She reads everything: palms, numbers, tea leaves, sunlight, books.

Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity Fellow