Lisa Parks

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, IIT@MIT

Papers

Total Citations

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About

Lisa Parks is a leading scholar at the intersection of media studies, science and technology studies (STS), and critical geography. Her research fundamentally rethinks how media technologies—from satellites and drones to AI assistants—reshape power, perception, and everyday life. Parks’s most influential work, *Beyond the Command* (2021, 47 citations), draws on feminist STS to argue that machine designers are not crafting neutral objects but are actively engineering new relationships between humans and machines, a crucial intervention in debates about AI and robotics. She is also a foundational voice in drone studies, editing the landmark volume *Life in the Age of Drone Warfare* (2017, 10 citations), which provides a critical language to assess the historical, geopolitical, and cultural dimensions of drone technology. In this work, Parks demonstrates how drones generate specific ways of visualizing targets and spaces of war, transforming them into tools of remote control and surveillance. Through her incisive analyses, Parks has profoundly influenced how we understand the material and political stakes of media infrastructures, making her an essential thinker for students and researchers exploring technology, power, and global media.