Alexis Emily Wood

The State of Jefferson is a state secessionist movement amidst economic, environmental, and social crises in Northern California. Centering the concept of “felt distance,” this project examines how digital landscapes shape rural identities and political mobilizations, manifesting anxieties in digital spaces and reshaping the physical landscape. Drawing on an experimental cartographic approach read through a Benjaminian lens, this research combines ethnographic field work, computational analysis, and archival methods to propose a retheorizing of space which articulates the role of digital technologies in both identity construction and rural socio-political movements. In doing so, “State of Mine(Mind)” proposes that the constellations of historical narrative, accounts of lived experience in Northern California, and a new method of mapping these fragments together are central to explaining deepening political polarization and the growing popularity of right-wing movements.