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).

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.