Dr. Bernadette "bird" Bowen

Hello and welcome to my personal website.

 

My name is Dr. bird and I am an award- and grant-winning critical media ecologist (art, activism, academia), author, content creator, Media & Communication PhD, & a certified expert in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies. More specifically, I am an expert in identities, relationships, technologies, and systems of power. And, unlike most traditional philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and neuroscientists, I offer critical, mediated, communicative insights.

​

Alongside a handful of colleagues since 2019, I have helped spearhead a critical feminist wave of media ecology that incorporates cultural studies. I further exemplify my personal critical media ecological framework in my dissertation and publications since finishing my PhD. I am also a content creator and have written a (so far) two-part memoir series about mass neuroqueer self-realizations happening in the algorithmic envirusment (environment + virus). My nine-part poetry book Hindsight of Twenty/20s is also available on paperback and hardcover. On January 19th, 2025, I updated and expanded my dissertation into my newest book We Are F**king Machines: Why We Are Like This and What We Can Do About It.

 

My concerns are critically epistemic (knowledge-related), sensoric, environmental, and relational, media ecologically, sociologically, and communicatively-informed. Meaning, I highlight the otherwise taken for granted logics and profit-driven actions of late stage neoliberal colonial capitalism in our eugenically biased human mediated environments.

 

Lately, in my work, I am documenting happenings of the ongoing algorithmic envirusment (environment + virus) era that reveal to us ways our ideas of authority, legitimacy, and education are breaking down (for better and for worse). On one hand, we are undergoing a global grieving process of individual / systemic failures. On the flip side, this moment also highlights what I've referred to as the Limited Intelligence of our Environmental, Relational, Algorithmic Envirusment, and Artificial Intelligence. And these topics are just the beginning...

 

Personally and politically, I continue to be inspired by a wide variety of critical thinkers who unpack mediated ways we come to know what we know. All my work is about things that have happened, things that are happening, and an illumination of liberatory ideas of what is possible in our future by re-viewing ideas of the former. I acknowledge all mediated environments on- and offline as interconnected evidence of our sociosexually violent ecologies. The material realities that I explore in my publications and posts are never “just a theory”. They are all applied. They have either been applied, are being applied, or escalate consequences. And in this system, the consequences they often escalate are devastations.

 

As a means of practicing what I preach, within my poetry, memoirs, and content, I choose to feel towards my pain that, at first, I (and most people), spent(/spend) my(/our) life(/lives) numbing, mocking, and/or running away from. I firmly believe that these raw experiences illuminate intersectional lessons we can grow from. My praxis blurs arbitrary boundaries of private and public life and exposes results of embodiment, publicly, and often in real time.

 

Everyday I continue living I find joy, humor, and pleasure as effortlessly as I do the traumas of our world. I remind folks not to be afraid to embrace hope and to speak their authentic embodied truth. These are lifesaving enactments. And I know they are -- because I'm alive.
 
What you see here differs depending on which medium (computer/device) you choose to view it from. In other words, the medium is the message of who I am here.

​

Become a free or paid subscriber to my SubStack to receive updates on my what I'm up to.

 

Business inquires (podcasting, mentorship, sponsorship, collaboration, consulting, research, writing, copyediting, guest lectures, keynotes, etc.)? Let's set up a time to chat.