Allegro Wang's Paper For Top Student Paper

Allegro Wang, a Ph.D. candidate, is up for the Top Student Paper in the NCA American Studies Division. The paper, "Time-Space Compression as Trope: Drone Surveillance on the US-Mexico Border" is about how Project Maven, a system being designed by Palantir to integrate drones with AI capabilities, is legitimized within a broader cultural narrative of a migration "crisis." Spatially, these tropes are used to narrow the audiences attention to the border as a specific area under threat, limiting which persons are (dis)allowed from approaching the border. Temporally, statements on Maven narrow the audience's attention to 1) a "crisis" in the present, bracketed from histories of ongoing structural injustice, and 2) an illusory choice about the future, where the audience is compelled to decide between complacency in the face of this "crisis" or to accept the intervention of Maven, securing a future where the (white) American citizen-subject can thrive. 

Congratulations, Allegro!