Geography PhD Students Jillian (Lee) Crandall and Alexis Wood, both awarded 2026 CRWS (Berkeley Center for Right Wing Studies) Mini-Grant Reasearch.
Alexis Wood's project, "State of Mine (Mind): Affective Geographies of California's Rural North" examines how digital landscapes shape rural identity and political mobilization in northern California's secessionist movement amid ongoing economic, enviornmental, and social change.
Her project explores how "felt distance" and anxiety circulate through digital spaces and reshape physical landscapes, combining ethnography, computational analysis, archival research, and experimental cartographic methods. By examining the relationship between digital technologies and rural socio-political movements, her work offers new insight into identity formation, political polarization, and the growing influence of right-wing movements in a digital age.
Jillian (Lee) Crandall's project, "Experimental Governance in New Tech Cities," examines the intersection of Silicon Valley–linked techno-economic liberalism and far-right extremist ideologies in the development of new tech cities worldwide. Her project investigates how these ideas have moved from fringe discourse into mainstream policy and investment, materializing through emerging infrastructures such as cryptocurrency systems, AI, drone manufacturing hubs, and experimental urban developments oriented toward continued capitalist expansion.
Read all the 2026 Mini-grant dissertations here!