[Air-L] CfA 4S Toronto: Technological Frontiers of Body & Land

[Jillian (Lee) Crandall]

Dear Colleagues:

We invite you to submit an abstract to our Open Panel
<https://www.xcdsystem.com/4sonline/abstract/abstract.cfm> at the next 4S
Annual Meeting in Toronto.

*Title: *TECHNOLOGICAL FRONTIERS OF BODY AND LAND
*ID* # 38
*Deadline: *April 30, 2026
*Organizers: *J. Lee Crandall, UC Berkeley (Geography); Ajung Ryoo, UC
Berkeley (Anthropology)
*Session Description*

In this open panel, we seek to critically explore the concurrent forms and
formations of technological “frontierism” on land and body. We will analyze
the evolving role of technopower and technological experimentation on the
long duree of frontierism as connected with settler colonialism. The
technological frontier has long had implications on land and lives,
including ontological questions concerning nature and the human.
Re-mobilizing Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” (1920), we posit
that the frontier has always been technologically mediated in various forms
of conquest and dispossession, enacting a strategic emptying-out of land
through the “elimination of the native” (Wolfe, 2006). This process opens
up a so-called blank slate on which a privileged group of “technologically
advanced” settlers can remake the land and, in so doing, remake and
cultivate themselves and future populations. Turner’s thesis remains highly
relevant considering the confluence of Silicon Valley and the US federal
government’s recent call to “reopen the frontier” to build new high-tech
“freedom cities,” claiming to revitalize the American dream. Technological
frontier imaginaries extend beyond Westward expansionism and Manifest
Destiny, and bring curious political convergences of reactionary
conservative and technologically progressive Silicon Valley mindsets toward
jurisdiction-shopping and the acquisition of new territories (e.g. charter
cities, network states) on which to experiment with new
AI/drone/military/bio technologies. These efforts aim to contest and
supersede not only the limits of economic and urban growth, but also limits
of the body and life, by developing new eugenic and life-extending
technologies. This interdisciplinary panel traces the “nexus[es] of power”
(Ginsburg & Rapp 1995), “global assemblages” (Ong & Collier 2005) and
mediating “surrounds” (Landecker 2016) that configure the concurrent
technological frontiers, and questions the new ontological conditions and
implications created by them (Haraway 1991).
*Extra Details:*

While Silicon Valley frontier logics are often centered on the United
States, we are interested in submissions that consider technological
frontiers of the body and land transnationally, taking into account the
geographic specificities of legal, regulatory, political, and spatial
constraints and affordances. Relevant paper topics might include, but are
not limited to, research on: case studies of new-tech cities and
technological frontiers; transhumanism, gene-editing, and technological
experimentation on/for longevity; projects on space flight and space
infrastructure.

We are particularly interested in cultivating an inter/multidisciplinary
panel. While much work has been done independently in the fields of
geography, urban studies, anthropology, and feminist STS on geographic and
bodily frontiers, fewer research has brought these trajectories together
with multi/interdisciplinary perspectives. We see this cross-disciplinary
conversation through an STS lens as the panel’s primary affordance, which
will offer a unique contribution to our respective disciplinary fields.

Please reach out to me with any questions, and we look forward to your
submission.
All Best,
Lee
-- 
Jillian (Lee) Crandall (they/them)
PhD Student <https://geography.berkeley.edu/jillian-crandall>, Department
of Geography
University of California, Berkeley
*Recent Publication*: Crandall, J. (2025). Plotting cryptoeconomic
imaginaries and counterplotting the network state
<https://doi.org/10.1016/j.peg.2024.100028>. Progress in Economic
Geography, 3(1).
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