Author Meets Critic

Co-Sponsor(s):

Population Health Initiative

In this presentation, Erin McElroy will discuss Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times, just published with Duke University Press. The book maps out processes of gentrification, racial dispossession, and economic predation that drove the development of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area and also looks at how that logic has become manifest in postsocialist Romania. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Romania and the United States, McElroy exposes the mechanisms through which the appeal of Silicon Valley technocapitalism devours space and societies, displaces residents, and generates extreme income inequality in order to expand its reach. The book also explores how in Romania, dreams of privatization have updated fascist pasts, often in the name of anticommunism. At the same time, McElroy accounts for the ways that activists resist Silicon Valley capitalist logics, building upon socialist-era worldviews not to restore state socialism but rather to establish more just social formations. Attending to the violence of Silicon Valley imperialism, McElroy reveals technocapitalism as an ultimately unsustainable model of rapacious economic and geographic growth.

---

Erin McElroy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington, where their work focuses upon intersections of gentrification, technology, empire, and racial capitalism, alongside housing justice organizing and transnational solidarities. McElroy is author of Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times (Duke University Press, 2024), and co-editor of Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (PM Press, 2021). Additionally, McElroy is cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project—a data visualization, counter-cartography, and digital media collective that produces tools, maps, reports, murals, zines, oral histories, and more to further the work of housing justice. At UW, McElroy runs Landlord Tech Watch which produces collaborative research and collective knowledge regarding the dispossessive technologies of landlordism. Such commitments inform their work coediting the Radical Housing Journal—an open access publication that foregrounds housing justice research transnationally.

 

Nassim Parvin is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington (UW) Information School where she also serves as the Associate Dean for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Access & Sovereignty (IDEAS). Dr. Parvin’s interdisciplinary research integrates theoretically-driven humanistic scholarship and design-based inquiry to explore the ethical and political dimensions of design and technology, especially as related to questions of democracy and justice. Rooted in pragmatist ethics and feminist theory, she critically engages emerging digital technologies—such as smart forests or artificial intelligence—in their wide-ranging and transformative effect on the future of collective and social interactions. From 2018-2023, Dr. Parvin served as the co-lead editors of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, an award-winning journal in the expanding interdisciplinary field of STS.

 

Jenna Grant is a cultural anthropologist working in the fields of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, multimodal anthropology, and Southeast Asia Studies. Her research centers on Cambodia, an important place for thinking through postcolonial and Cold War histories in contemporary medical, technological, and visual practices. She theorizes these practices as care and repair, which relate to both health care specifically but also a more general understanding of care for the self and collective that involves ongoing repair of infrastructures, relationships, and beings. She has developed her research questions, methods, and commitments in three different directions: medical imaging and visual practices of health care in Phnom Penh; Cambodia as a site of experimental global health sciences; and experiments in collective care in Cambodia and the U.S. Her book, Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh (2022), was published by UW Press.