Hayley/Harlin Steele (they/she/ze/he) is BasedMIP's Lead Narratologist and is presently directing the development of the BasedMIP prototype as part of their dissertation work. Steele has been a Project Director at ModLab, an Emerging Media Laboratory at UC Davis since 2019, and an Assistant with the Feminist Research Institute since 2024. They have taught courses in writing and Science and Technology Studies (STS) at UC Davis, including STS 110: "Data, Computing, and Law." They have worked at NASA and are an affiliate of several IPCC-affiliated climate modeling communities.
From 2023-24, she became a faculty member of the English Department at Western Washington University, where they taught courses in literature and creative writing. Ze holds an MFA in Nonfiction writing from Portland State University. He is presently a PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies at UC Davis, with a Designated Emphasis (DE) in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Performance and Practice.
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Since 2019, Steele has lead a number of teams at UC Davis that have investigated leading climate models, and as part of this work, they have found fossil-fuel-funded misinformation congealed some of the models used by the UN and world leaders to try and make decisions regarding future climate.
Steele explored one types of fossil-fuel-funded misinformation in leading climate models in this talk: "Feminist and Anti-Racist Interventions into Leading Climate Models," which was delivered at the 2025 gathering of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S), the leading gathering for historians of science and social scientists who study STEM practices.
In 2022, Steele organized several teams to attend Scenarios Forum, a leading gathering for climate data scientists, work that ultimately had an impact on leading climate modeling regimes. Steele has also served as a mentor to interns from Davis Data Driven Change (D3C), a student-led data justice organization, as a judge for D3C's first annual "change-a-thon" in 2025.
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Steele's media art includes their work as a co-director of the transmedia pieces Destination Wedding 2070 (2019), a dark comedy set in the year 2070 in which climate change is the ultimate wedding crasher, and Thermopiles in Love (2016), a 5-gender dating game lampooning gender bio-essentialism centering the most resilient microorganisms on the planet.
As part of zir research into game-based education, Steele published the first paper to articulate "learning through gamemaking" as a generalizable teaching method in 2023. Their invited chapter "Larp as Medium, Larp as Message: Some Notes on Managing a Diegetic Commons" is slated for publication in Narrative Play: Interactivity, Art, and Digital Storytelling, ed. Philip A. Klobucar, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in 2025.
Follow Harlin/Hayley Steele on Academia.edu
Image caption: Harlin/Hayley Steele inside Adrian Piper's art piece "Art for the Art World Surface Pattern" (1976) at the SF MOMA.