S. Freeman
Appointments
Postdoctoral Fellow
Biography
S. is a political geographer and interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of critical humanitarianism, queer and feminist STS, geographies of violence, and border and migration studies. Specifically, S.'s work asks how humanitarians are mobilizing new technologies to adapt to a world defined by increasing movement and, in so doing, are redefining what constitutes political life for a digital age. Their current book project takes up this question in South Sudan, attending to how displaced bodies are recognized, counted, and turned into 'target populations' for humanitarian intervention through practices of large-scale data collection. Approaching quantification as both a relational and spatializing practice, their work shows how calculative practices like biometric registration and geospatial population estimates come to assign differential value to aggregate life in bounded spatial terms, terms of evaluation that reveal how, where, and whose lives are made to matter in the process of aggregation. Their research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.
Education
PhD - UC Berkeley
MA - The New School for Social Research
BA - Northwestern University
Publications
Under review - Freeman, S. “On Doing Research and Feeling Bad: Gender and the Residual in Long-term Research.” Submitted to Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience.
Accepted - "Aiding the Kill Machine: Surveillance Topographies, Digital Confinement, and the Making of ‘Humanitarian’ Landscapes.” Invited chapter in Real, Imagined and Digital Bordering: Perspectives and Practices of Divided Worlds (Routledge, 2027).
Freeman, S. (2026). Making the ‘beneficiary’: Humanitarian biometrics and the politics of place. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 44(2), 281-297. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758251346267
Winner of the 2026 Virginie Mamadouh Outstanding Research Award,
Political Geography Specialty Group
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