Alex Ouyang

Alex Ouyang joined the Jameel Clinic in 2022 as a Communications Officer. Previously, she was the Marketing Manager at Embr Labs, an MIT-founded wearable technology startup where she got her start with science communication. She received her Bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Non-Fiction Writing from the University of Pittsburgh where she was a Humanities and Social Sciences Research Fellow for the Keywords Project, lead by Colin MacCabe and Jonathan Arac.

The Keywords Project was a decade-long collaborative research project between the University of Pittsburgh and Jesus College, Cambridge, ending in 2017. The effort was based on on Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, first published in 1976 when Williams was the most important socialist thinker in Britain, and is considered one of the founding texts in the field of Cultural Studies as a work less concerned with linguistic semantics and more emphasis on the cultural and social forces transforming the meanings of words. The latest edition, Keywords For Today (2018), intends to update Williams’s original Keywords by providing crucial contexts and histories for our 21st century vocabulary. Keywords For Today updates 40 of Williams’s original entries like nature, realism, and violence while adding 85 new entries, including Ouyang’s entry on security.

She has a deep appreciation for the art of storytelling in all mediums. Her favorite storytellers include Italo Calvino, Ursula Le Guin, and Hayao Miyazaki.