#TechofPower: Place

BORDERLINES ANNOUNCES THE LAUNCH OF A NEW COLLABORATIVE PROJECT WITH THE TECHNOLOGIES OF POWER PROJECT AND THE JOINT PUBLICATION OF A NUMBER OF SHORT VIDEO LECTURES FROM THE VIRTUAL CONFERENCE. THis LECTURE SERIES TITLED ‘PLACE’ FEATURES THREE TALKS BY KATE CHANDLER, BRITTANY MECHÉ, ELI NELSON

This week’s Technologies of Power: Tracing Empire at Home and Abroad lecture series features a discussion around the theme of Place, specifically Land and Geographies. Learn and explore how technologies of power and empire have shaped multiple terrains domestically and transnationally.

From imperial projects that devastated entire regions in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa to the domestic expansion of explicit white supremacy, surveillance, and policing, US technologies of power have generated a multidirectional and dialectical relationship between foreign wars and domestic issues.

Funded by the Humanities War & Peace Initiative Grant at Columbia University, Technologies of Power will encourage intersectional conversations on race, empire, technologies, and policing that break the boundaries between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic,’ ‘abroad’ and ‘home,’ ‘technology’ and ‘power.’ 

7 conversations. 21 scholars, writers, and activists. 

Dr. Katherine Chandler's research examines the intersection of technology, media and politics through a range of scales and forms. Her first monograph, Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare, studies unmanned aircraft from 1936 - 1992. She asks how life and death are adjudicated through conditions organized as if control were ''unmanned.'' She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in New Media. Her work has been published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; Humanity: International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience and qui parle: Critical Humanities and Social Science. Her second project, “Drone Publics,” is funded through Georgetown University’s competitive pilot grant program.



Brittany Meché is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of Environmental Studies, Security Studies, African/Diaspora Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College. Brittany earned her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and her work has been featured in Antipode, Society and Space, and in the edited volume A Research Agenda for Military Geographies. Brittany previously served as the Gaius Bolin Postdoctoral Fellow at Williams College and the McMillan-Stewart residential fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She is completing a book manuscript about security interventions, climate change, and the afterlives of the empire in the West African Sahel.



Eli Nelson (Kanien'kehá:ka) is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Williams College and Director of Fellowships at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2018. Dr. Nelson's current book manuscript, Sovereign Knowledge: The History of Native Science in the United States Empire, traces the history of Indigenous scientific knowledge production under the settler-colonial rule, what is frequently conceived of as "Native science," across different national contexts and disciplines in the 19th and 20th centuries. In addition to the history of Native science, Dr. Nelson works on and teaches critical Indigenous theory, as well as Indigenous science fiction and futurism, and gender and sexuality.

Full transcript of the webinar with the Q&A portion of the talk.

Follow the @techofpower project on twitter and stay tuned for the next talk on 10/22/21.

Prepared with the editorial assistance of Nishat Akhtar.