Nicole Mayberry

Dr. Nicole K. Mayberry is a cultural geographer and political theorist whose research examines the relationships among race, space, power, and technology. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University. She holds additional faculty affiliations with the University Design Institute, Barrett, The Honors College, the School of Sustainability, and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society. She is also a Faculty Fellow with the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes and a Senior Global Futures Scientist with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.

Mayberry's scholarship brings together cultural geography, political theory, science and technology studies, and Black studies to examine how stories, institutions, and cultural artifacts produce racialized understandings of place and belonging. Her work develops the framework of "cartographies of subordination" to explain how systems of domination become embedded in the narratives, infrastructures, and imaginaries that shape everyday life. Her research focuses particularly on anti-Blackness in the United States and the Americas and on the spatial dimensions of emerging technologies, culture, and political life.

Her work has appeared in journals including Somatechnics and in edited volumes published by Routledge, Springer, and Rowman & Littlefield. She is the author of the forthcoming book I, Robot Slave: Robot Stories and Shrouded Cartographies of Anti-Blackness (University of Georgia Press) and co-author, with Michael M. Crow and Derrick M. Anderson, of Artifacts of Abundance: How Design Links Science, Technology, and Organizations to Social Progress (Johns Hopkins University Press).

In addition to her research, Mayberry contributes to work on higher education transformation through the University Design Institute, where she serves as Thematic and Research Editor of The Co-Lab Brief. She also co-hosts the Doc to Dock Podcast, an interdisciplinary conversation on place, politics, culture, and power.

Mayberry earned her Ph.D. in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology from Arizona State University, where she also received her M.A. in Political Science and B.S. in Political Science.