Andrea Miller

Andrea Miller is assistant professor in the departments of Telecommunications and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and director of the Feminist Technocultures Lab, housed in the Bellsario College of Communications and College of the Liberal Arts. Miller earned their Ph.D. in cultural studies with a designated emphasis in science and technology studies from the University of California, Davis, and a master's degree in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from Georgia State University.

In their research and teaching, Miller draws from transnational and postcolonial feminist studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies to consider how technology, security, and empire shape sensibilities of race and gender. Their work has examined the racialized and gendered logics of drone warfare and preemption, the criminalization of online speech acts and incitements to violence, predictive policing and biometric surveillance technologies, and US counterterrorism policy. Miller’s publications have appeared in journals such as Public Culture, Antipode, Gender, Place and Culture, and Small Wars & Insurgencies as well as various edited collections. Miller currently serves on the editorial board for Big Data & Society and, alongside Cindy Lin and Tina Chen, is coediting a special issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias, "Computational Environments."

Miller’s current book project examines the “cyber ecosystem” as a remediating concept for the US security state, where remediation entails a twinned logic of place-based reconciliation and sensory organization. Drawing from ethnographic and archival research in the Central Savannah River Area of Georgia and South Carolina, home to US Army Cyber Command and a rapidly growing cybersecurity market, they chart the extensive invocation of the cyber ecosystem by actors throughout the military and security sector, higher education, and economic development—tracing the cyber ecosystem through Cold War–era defense projects and cybernetic formulations of ecosystem ecology to the racial legacies of the post-Reconstruction US South. Not simply an innocent metaphor used to describe an increasingly networked digital world, the cyber ecosystem marshals the force of natural law and scientific precepts to govern how the security state senses and makes sense of, or remediates, relationships between global security and tech capital, affective and political economies of race and gender, and the technoscientific infrastructures, anxieties, and failures of US empire.

• Feminist Technocultures Lab

Books

“Sensing the Cyber Ecosystem: Politics of Remediation in the Liberal Security State.” Book manuscript. Under review.

Articles and Book Chapters

“Encountering Ethnographic Gestures: Reflections on the Banality of Cybersecurity and STS Ethnographies of Practice.” In States of Surveillance: Ethnographies of New Technologies in Policing and Justice, eds. Maya Avis, Daniel Marciniak, and Maria Sapignoli, 42–60. London: Routledge, 2024.

“The Fungible Terrorist: Abject Whiteness, Domestic Terrorism, and the Multicultural Security State.” Co-authored with Lisa Bhungalia. In “Global Counterinsurgency and the Police-Military Continuum,” ed. Stuart Schrader. Special issue, Small Wars & Insurgencies (2022): 1–24.

“Cyber Insecurities and Racialized Threat in the Embattled Urban Ecosystem.” In Insecurity, edited by Richard Grusin, 139–164. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2022.

“Securing Nature's Return: Environmental Policing and Ecosystem Ecology at the Savannah River Site Nuclear Reservation.” In Violent Order: Essays on the Nature of the Police, edited by David Correia and Tyler Wall. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2021.

“Data-Driven Policing and the Colonial Database.” In Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance, edited by The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2021.

“Drones as ‘Atmospheric Policing’: From US Border Enforcement to the LAPD.” Co-authored with Caren Kaplan. Public Culture 31, no. 3 (2019): 419–445.

“Shadows of War, Traces of Policing: The Weaponization of Space and the Sensible in Preemption.” In Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, edited by Ruha Benjamin, 85–106. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

“(Im)Material Terror: Incitement to Violence Discourse as Racializing Technology in the War on Terror.” In Life in the Age of Drone Warfare, edited by Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan, 112–133. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

“Intervention Symposium: Introduction to Algorithmic Governance.” Co-authored with Jeremy Crampton. Antipode. May 2017.

“Protocological Violence and the Colonial Database.” Antipode. May 2017.

“Review: An Imperialist Love Story: Desert Romances in the War on Terror by Amira Jarmakani.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 24, no. 5 (2017): 748–750.

“Ghost Photography in the War on Terror: Manadel al-Jamadi and the Shadow of Surveillance.” Media Fields Journal 11 (2016): 1–8.