After presenting the only talk about Yellowjackets at SCMS 2023 — one of only two at the conference focused on the show until this year — it was a thrill to join a panel of scholars all discussing different aspects of the show. My talk, "No Return, No Reason," addressed Yellowjackets' complicated and trauma-influenced relationship to nostalgia.
Was honored to be invited to participate in an amazing workgroup meeting of CIFAR: Humanity's Urban Future ahead of this year's AAG meeting. An international group of urban geographers, all concerned with the various ways the tech industry intersects with and shapes cities, gathered at the UC Santa Cruz campus for a day of short presentations and moderated discussion, followed by a weekend touring the greater Bay Area.
Had an excellent time this past weekend at The Stoke Sessions, a critical look into surfing and skateboarding cultures organized by the Surf/Skate Studies Collaborative at San Diego State University.
This year I finally made it to Denver for SCMS, where I would have been in March of 2020 were it not for the whole global pandemic. I presented on '90s nostalgia, xennial/elder millennial memory and Yellowjackets and Paper Girls, among other shows about women from the same generation that use catastrophe, horror tropes, and fractured, recursive timelines to trouble of the question of who gets to look back fondly.
Delighted to announce that I'm a doctor! I completed my dissertation "Autonomous Motives: Tech, Shared Mobility, Privatization, and the Utopian Imaginary in the Bay Area" with the help of my wonderful committee: Miriam Greenberg (chair), Rick Prelinger, and Hillary Angelo.
Very excited for a bit of good news right now: Wheels de Amor, a short doc that I played a part in making, is an official selection for No Man's Land Film Festival’s flagship program in Denver this March! The space No Man’s Land is cultivating in outdoor sports for representation of women and gender-nonconforming … Continue reading Wheels de Amor at No Man’s Land FF
Very proud that a map I created as part of my dissertation research has been published in the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project's new atlas of gentrification, displacement, and resistance in the Bay Area, Counterpoints. It's thrilling to finally see these great essays and beautifully produced visualizations in print. The volume is available from PM Press this … Continue reading Counterpoints: An Atlas of Displacement and Resistance
As the world shut down last year, I was anxiously refreshing Twitter for news that SCMS 2020 — due to be held in late March, in person — would be canceled [Narrator: it was]. After a year's delay I'll finally get to present my accepted talk: "The Core Cannot Hold: HBO’s 'Chernobyl' as a Disaster Parable and the Limits of the Dystopian Imaginary."
Looking forward to presenting at the upcoming annual conference for the Society for Utopian Studies at UC Berkeley. This year's theme is "Disruption, Displacement, and Disorder" in the Bay Area, and I'll be presenting on my research into the Google Buses, the history of BART, and the push for self-driving cars.
Really pleased to announce the launch of a site overhaul for UC Santa Cruz's Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL), for which I did the build, site design, and some of the development.
Kristin M. Miller 
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