About
S. Hayley/Harlin Steele (they/she/ze/he) is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at UC Davis, with a dual Designated Emphasis in STS (Science and Technology Studies) and Performance and Practice. Their present work explores the emerging practice of using gamemaking as a way of organizing learning in the college classroom (see:
Steele 2023). They are a project director at
ModLab, the Digital Humanities Laboratory at UC Davis, where they have organized several projects to better incorporate ecological data into a variety of media. In 2021 they served as a NASA intern, and also that year they chaired and organized the
Climate Data Relations panel at the annual gathering of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S). Their interest in developing stronger relations between the humanities and geoscience began in 2009, when they co-organized the inaugural conference ‘
Understanding Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities‘ at Portland State University, which was a seminal gathering in what is now often called Sustainability Studies. Steele is an Advanced Research Affiliate with the
Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab at the University of California (USC), and has participated in the biannual
Critical Code Studies Working Group (CCSWG) since 2016. They were a 2019-20 UC Davis Provost’s Fellow, a 2020 Mellon Public Scholar, and were selected as a HASTAC Scholars Fellow for the 2018-20 and 2021-23 cohorts.
Steele has been part of the cooperative movement since 2011, and presently they are an economist with the
California Economists Collective (CEC) and are on the steering committee of
Cascade Cooperatives. They are a former Development Director for
Land Action, a mutual aid network for squatters and guerrilla farmers based in Oakland, CA. From 2013-15 they served as one of three core organizers for
Villagecraft, a hands-on learning network in the San Francisco Bay Area that grew to over 1500 learners and 50 facilitators. Their artistic and cultural work has taken a variety of forms including pieces in e-lit, larp, netprov, and transmedia. Their creative work includes
Thermophiles in Love (2016), a 5-gender dating game that incorporates biological data about microorganisms in a playful critique of gender bio-essentialism, which served as a proof of concept for their theoretical work on a critical design methodology they call “
gender playability.” They received their MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University in 2014. Their writing has appeared in
Slingshot, Subversas Magazine, East Bay Express,
The International Journal of Roleplaying, and
[Trigger]: A Journal of Catarealism and Speculative Sexuality. Presently, they are on Planned Leave of Absence (PELP) from UC Davis while serving as a faculty member in the Department of English at Western Washington University (WWU).
profile art by Brandon Graham.
