Claire Fitch

Claire is a Postdoctoral Associate working with Dr. Kalindi Vora and the Feminist Intersectional Science and Technology Studies Lab. She holds a Doctorate in Geography and the Environment from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Master’s of Science in Human Geography from the University of Amsterdam. Working at the intersection of human geography and STS, her research explores the interrelation and co-constitution of spatial configurations and sociotechnical conditions. She works in the tradition of feminist, anticapitalist and decolonial geographies to investigate site-specific forms of techno-capitalism and the spaces, relations, and practices they create.

Her current research examines the technology industry in Austin, Texas, considering how place-based logics of relation shape emergent technological and spatial imaginaries. This project tracks how contemporary tech industries negotiate with pre-existing urban spatial configurations—how they are mobilized to reconfigure or reproduce geographic structure and experience, and how they mediate imaginaries of spatial futures. Centrally, it considers how the city’s tech industry and its techno-cultures have been shaped by Central Texas’ geographic histories of settler colonialism, frontierism, racial capitalism and spatial segregation. This work illuminates how racial capitalist and techno-liberal configurations of gender, race, and class are reproduced in the contemporary projects of techno-capitalism. She writes with commitment to embodied and situated ethnographic practice, tracing the variegated forms with which techno-capitalist spatial imaginaries circulate, concentrate, and materialize in Austin’s tech industry and its subjects. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals including Digital Geography & Society, Human Geography, Sociology Lens, and Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, as well as in multiple collected editions including the Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Cultural Geography.