About
Andrea Miller is Assistant Professor of Telecommunications and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University, where they also head the Feminist Technocultures Lab located within the Bellisario College of Communications and College of the Liberal Arts. Drawing from transnational and postcolonial feminist theory, science and technology studies, and cultural studies, Miller examines the emergence of technoscientific practices and infrastructures through histories of militarism, policing, and empire. In particular, they are interested in how technology and security shape sensibilities of race, gender, and place.
Their publications and research have examined the racialized and gendered logics of drone warfare, cybersecurity, and preemption; the criminalization of online speech acts and material support for terrorism prosecutions in the US war on terror; predictive policing and biometric surveillance technologies; and the politics of algorithms, databases, and remote sensing.
They have also contributed chapters to the anthologies Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Parks and Kaplan 2017), Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Benjamin 2019), Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance (The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project 2021), Violent Order: Essays on the Nature of the Police (Correia and Wall 2021), Insecurity (Grusin 2022), and States of Surveillance (Avis, Marciniak, and Sapignoli 2024). Their work has appeared in Media Fields Journal and Gender, Place & Culture, as well as coauthored articles with Caren Kaplan in Public Culture (2019) and Lisa Bhungalia in Small Wars & Insurgencies (2022). In 2017, they coedited the Antipode forum “Algorithmic Governance” with Jeremy Crampton.
Miller’s current book project examines the “cyber ecosystem” as a remediating, or sensing and sense-making, concept for the US security state. 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 wide 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 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.
Alongside Cindy Lin and Tina Chen, Miller is currently coediting a special issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias, “Computational Environments” (see here for call for submissions). They also serve as a member of the Editorial Board for Big Data & Society; Board Member of The Print Factory in Bellefonte, PA; and, previously, Public Interest Technology Research Lead for the NSF Gen-4 Engineering Research Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3).
Miller earned their PhD in Cultural Studies with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies from the University of California, Davis, in 2020 and their MA in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Georgia State University in 2014. Before arriving at Penn State, Miller taught at Florida Atlantic University from 2020–2022 as Assistant Professor of Social Media and Digital Cultures in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, where they also served as Director of the Sensing & Surveillance Initiative within the Center for the Future Mind.