dr. JL (Jess) Bier

Biography

Jess Bier is an associate professor of urban sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Overall her work engages with the social and political impacts of scientific and technical knowledge.

Jess's research is situated at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and critical geography. She draws on theories of racial capitalism, Black feminism, decolonial theory, and feminist theories of technoscience. Her first book, Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine, analyzes the ways that landscapes of military and humanitarian occupation have shaped digital cartography in Jerusalem and the West Bank since 1967.

Jess is currently the principal investigator of the ERC-funded Digiports project, which seeks to better understand how injustices are reproduced in times of radical technological change. Digiports focuses on how the digitalization of container shipping is reshaping racial and labor inequalities in Rotterdam, Shanghai, and Los Angeles. The project team also contribute to debates over the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in reworking contemporary capitalism.

Jess's dissertation received the 2016 Maastricht University Dissertation Prize, awarded to the best dissertation submitted to the university during the previous two years. From 2013-16, Jess was a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-Funded Monitoring Modernity project at Erasmus University, where she conducted ethnographic research on the international efforts to monitor financial flows following the 2007-08 financial crisis.

PDFs of Dr. Bier’s publications can be downloaded from www.jessbier.org/publications.