I’m Nicole K. Mayberry, a cultural geographer, political theorist, author, and professor at Arizona State University. I research and write about the stories we tell about who we are, the lies buried within them, and the worlds they build. Moving across race, place, popular culture, and technology, I trace how anti-Blackness travels through stories and takes material form in the world around us. At the heart of my scholarship is a desire to read stories as maps, uncover the myths we inherit, and imagine the world otherwise.

Long before I had the language to describe this as scholarship, I was drawn to stories. I began college as a creative writing major, convinced that writing was how I would make sense of the world. When I later moved into political science and political philosophy, I did not leave that orientation behind. I found myself reading philosophical texts alongside the cultural artifacts I encountered in everyday life, looking for the places where abstract ideas surfaced in films, books, technologies, and popular culture.

During my master’s training in political science, that instinct led me to stories about robots. I became fascinated by the recurring fantasy of technological rebellion: the machine created in humanity’s image that inevitably rises against its maker. Why did we imagine that creating something like ourselves must end in destruction? Was this a warning about technology, a confession about humanity, or evidence that something remained unresolved in the master-slave relationship?

Those questions eventually became the foundation of my doctoral research. My training in the human and social dimensions of science and technology gave me new ways to examine the relationship between culture and technological development. Geography taught me to ask where stories come from, how they move, and where they settle. Rhetoric and histories of whiteness taught me to attend to what stories omit as closely as what they say.

I came to understand stories as maps. They locate people within social worlds, establish boundaries around belonging, and make systems of power appear natural or inevitable. Their fictions can reveal deeper truths, particularly when we follow them across space and time. Stories do not remain stories. They enter institutions, inform technological design, shape cultural expectations, and influence the futures we believe are possible.

Today, my scholarship moves among cultural geography, political theory, Black studies, critical theory, and science and technology studies. I am especially interested in the ordinary stories a society tells about itself: stories about freedom, progress, technology, identity, and belonging. I examine what those stories reveal, what they obscure, and how their underlying assumptions become embedded in the places, institutions, and technologies that organize everyday life.

Across my research and teaching, I return to a deceptively simple question: What happens when the stories we inherit become so familiar that we stop recognizing them as stories? My work attempts to make those narratives visible, map where they have traveled, and uncover what they have taught us to mistake for truth. Once we can see the worlds that stories have built, we may also become better able to imagine them otherwise.