Conference Grant Reports: Lee Crandall at AAG 2025

We are pleased to support our students sharing their work at the premiere conferences in their field. Lee Crandall presented "Plotting Cryptoeconomic Imaginaries and Counterplotting the Network State" at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Detroit, Michigan. From Lee:

This past March I attended the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Detroit, Michigan, where I presented my work "Plotting Cryptoeconomic Imaginaries and Counterplotting the Network State" at the panel "Technology, Power, and the City." This presentation was based on a paper I published earlier this year in Progress in Economic Geography, in which I present the ways in which cryptocurrency is increasingly becoming a key plot device in building power for tech venture capitalists proposing and building new tech cities across the globe. During the conference, I was honored to receive an award for "Best Graduate Student Paper" from the Digital Geographies Specialty Group of the AAG.

For the remainder of the conference, I was able to build academic networks with internationally- based scholars in the digital geographies and economic geographies communities, both of whom are thinking about new media in varied ways. Highlights of my conference participation included diverse sessions where I learned about building feminist mapping tools; the speculative nature of data centers; and questioning spaces of digital platform labor, automation, and urban economies. Thank you to BCNM for helping to fund my conference travel!