hkornstein

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hkornstein@arizona.edu
Kornstein, Harris
Assistant Professor
Affiliate in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies
Assistant Professor, College of Information Science
Assistant Professor, Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural & Critical Theory
Assistant Professor, LGBTQ+ Institute
Assistant Professor, School of Art

Harris Kornstein is a scholar and artist whose research and practice broadly focuses on queer play through contemporary technologies and digital cultures, media art/activism, visual culture, disability, and queer and trans studies. Their current book project, Digital Enchantment: Drag, Play, and Other Queer Strategies Toward More Just and Joyful Technologies, considers what we might learn from drag performers to creatively counter many of the harms of digital technologies (related to surveillance, artificial intelligence, online harassment, disinformation, and so on), through playful techniques of misuse, obfuscation, and reinvention. They are also co-editing an anthology How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press, forthcoming 2025) analyzing the experiences of disabled New Yorkers during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Harris's research has been published in journals like Surveillance & Society and Curriculum Inquiry, alongside several edited volumes such as Queer Data Studies, and their essays have appeared in publications like The Guardian, Wired, and Salon. Additionally, their research has been supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and they are the recipient of an Early Career Scholars Award from the University of Arizona Office of the Provost and a Helen H. Chatfield Impact Award from the College of Humanities. As a media artist, curator, and drag queen, they have presented work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Institute for Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, ONE Archives, and numerous universities, galleries, and festivals. They have also published two children’s books. Harris holds a PhD in Media, Culture & Communication from NYU, an MFA in Digital Arts & New Media from UC Santa Cruz, and a BA from Swarthmore College.

Currently Teaching

PAH 201 – Applied Humanities Practice: Techniques and Technologies for Public Enrichment

This course introduces the common techniques and technologies involved in applied humanities work, providing students with the concepts and skills they need to plan, conduct, analyze, and evaluate conceptually rigorous, publicly-facing, and community-enriching projects. Over the course of the semester we will: 1) survey practical approaches and research methods commonly used in the applied humanities; 2) examine exemplary projects that have employed these ways of doing, and in the process gain insight into how to adapt them for other projects; and 3) explore a variety of tools and technologies that support data collection, sharing, analysis, and implementation, culminating the design of your own applied humanities project.

PAH 350 – Health Humanities: Intercultural Perspectives

We are all participants in receiving and interpreting healthcare. This course will encourage and support the development of participants' abilities to gain expanded knowledge and to engage actively as critical, discerning, humane participants in the present and future delivery of healthcare and of health and wellness in any context. The course provides theory and practice in an inclusive and applied approach to humanities-based ways of thinking and knowing. We are all participants in receiving and interpreting healthcare, so all students are welcome. For students with the goals of advanced study in the health or other related professions: this course will enable you to provide healthcare, shape policy around it, or engage with health and wellness in other capacities in our globally connected world. As participants in the course you will engage with an inclusive, outward-facing, and applied discipline. You will be offered tools to improve transcultural communication skills by deep reading and reflection on core humanities approaches to the world of health and wellness and their interaction with global cultures.

We will use a mixture of discussions and small and whole group activities. Course activities may include active engagement in discussions online and in class, and critiquing a range of written texts, from those written by classroom peers to academic papers, literary texts of various kinds, or film narratives on health, wellness, and global understandings of those issues.

PAH 498H – Public and Applied Humanities Honors Thesis

Students must contact the faculty member with whom they would like to pursue a thesis with well before the beginning of the semester. The student must work with the Instructor to design a thesis.