S. Freeman

S. is a political geographer and interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of critical humanitarianism, queer and feminist STS, geographies of violence, and borders 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.