Kornstein, Harris | Public & Applied Humanities

hkornstein@arizona.edu

Kornstein, Harris

Assistant Professor

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 420 – Innovation and the Human Condition: Learning How to Improve Life in the Community and Beyond

This course will equip students with the skills to use the humanities intellectual and analytical traditions to identify and pursue strategic responses to opportunities for innovation in the human condition. Over the course of the semester, students will draw on a range of humanities-based ways of seeing and doing to: 1) identify opportunities for improving the human condition at the community level and beyond; 2) analyze the cultural, political, and economic conditions that influence such opportunities; 3) design technological, industrial, and socio-cultural innovations that are directly responsive to these opportunities; and 4) develop strategic storylines that effectively convey the merits of these innovations to relevant stakeholders.

We will begin by forming small teams of student innovators. Each team will engage, experience, and internalize the course content through a series of activities and tasks that include: 1) identifying a community-based issue or opportunity that warrants an intervention; 2) analyzing the issue or opportunity through secondary research; 3) formulating an innovative strategy that is data-driven and based in the principles and concepts central to the humanities intellectual and analytical traditions; 4) refining and enhancing said innovative strategy through primary research; and 4) developing and delivering a multi-faceted presentation (visual, oral, written) of the strategy to a panel of experts.

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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.

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