[Commlist] Drone Cultures: A Virtual Symposium, 8-10 December

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  Drone Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Symposium

This three-day symposium brings together academics, artists and 
researchers to explore drone cultures from multiple perspectives and 
practices with the aim of generating dialogue across disciplinary 
boundaries to better understand the diversity of drones and drone 
cultures. How has drone vision influenced contemporary visual culture? 
How do practices, aesthetics, techniques and technologies move back and 
forth between military and non-military contexts? How have artists, 
writers and filmmakers critiqued, adopted and innovated drone 
technologies? How have drones changed how power is exercised and 
experienced? What cultures have sprung up around drones in conservation, 
activism, amateur photography and other contexts? How are drones and 
other remote sensing systems shaping and shaped by our desires and 
imaginaries? What does the proliferation of drones mean for the future 
of the human?

DECEMBER

8-10

Drone Cultures will be held live on Zoom, with Caren Kaplan’s Keynote 
lecture also streamed to YouTube Live and available for viewing after 
the event.

Session times and other information is available via the Eventbrite link 
below and at the Symposium Website <https://www.dronewitnessing.com/>.

*REGISTER VIA EVENTBRITE NOW* 
<https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/drone-cultures-an-interdisciplinary-symposium-tickets-126484327027>


      /*Keynote: Caren Kaplan, UC Davis */


      /Sensing Everyday Militarisms: Tracing the Transnational Circuits
      of “Pandemic Drones”/


      Perhaps it was inevitable that the emergence of a global viral
      catastrophe would engender media stories about “pandemic drones.”
      Amid the reports of small drones delivering medicine to remote
      locations or, facetiously, dropping off wine bottles to
      vacationers stranded on cruise ships, and the ubiquitous use of
      drones to record images of emptied cities under lockdown
      conditions, we can discern other significant signs of the
      intersection of transnational capital, regional and global
      conflicts, and operations of political and cultural power.
      Advocates of drones laud their precision, persistence, flexible
      mobility, and low-cost efficiency. These capacities undergird
      their burgeoning use in humanitarian and policing projects and in
      fields such as environmental and earth sciences along with
      industries as widely varied as agriculture, logistics,
      entertainment, and news media. Yet the Coronavirus era reminds us
      all too pointedly that the same aerospace and electronics
      industries that produce the drones that are in use in the violent
      conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh or in Yemen are akin to those being
      marketed to domestic police forces, coast guards, and private
      entities. When we trace the transnational circuits of “pandemic
      drones,” from Martuni, Azerbaijan to Westport, Connecticut to
      Mobile, Alabama to the Sea of Japan and elsewhere, we begin to
      sense the “everyday militarism” that structures air power in
      general and unmanned aerial vehicles in particular.

*Caren Kaplan*is Professor Emerita of American Studies at UC Davis. Her 
research draws on cultural geography, landscape art, and military 
history to explore the ways in which undeclared as well as declared wars 
produce representational practices of atmospheric politics. Recent 
publications include Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Duke 2018) 
and Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke 2017).


*Plenary Presentation: Alex Edney-Browne, Melbourne**
**/A Relational Analysis of US Drone Violence in Afghanistan/**
**The increasing use of high-technology military drones in the conduct 
of warfare has removed  people’s embodied and psychosocial experiences 
of war from public view and understanding (at least in the West). When 
the harmful effects of drone violence on people are recognised and 
communicated, this is mostly within the confines of quantitative data 
such as civilian casualty statistics. This paper argues that applying a 
relational approach to examining drone violence uncovers a far wider 
range of psychosocial and material/economic harms inflicted in drone 
violence. Focusing on U.S. drone violence in Afghanistan, it contends 
that the social relations between U.S. Air Force drone personnel and 
Afghan people living under drones need to be understood as relations of 
domination. These relations of domination (re)produce racism, sexism, 
poverty and social alienation, and are psychosocially and 
materially/economically harmful. To develop these arguments, the paper 
draws on interviews undertaken in Afghanistan, refugee camps in Greece 
and the United States in 2017.*

*Alex Edney-Browne **recently submitted her PhD in International 
Relations at the University of Melbourne. Alex’s research examines the 
lived experiences of drone violence in rural Afghanistan and the U.S. 
Air Force: specifically, the social relations between Afghan people and 
U.S. Air Force drone veterans, and the psychosocial and 
material/economic harms produced in those relations. Her broader 
research interests are in war and violence, security, counter-terrorism, 
legacies of colonialism and race and gender in international politics**.*

*Presenting Academics and Artists: *

Christine Agius (Swinburne)

Michele Barker (UNSW)

David Beesley (RMIT)

Olga Boichak (USyd)

Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox (Curtin)

David Chesworth (RMIT)

Sarah Eleazar (UT Austin)

Adam Fish (UNSW)

Jack Faber (Uniarts Helsinki)

Edgar Gómez Cruz (UNSW)

Jennifer Smith-Mayo (Maine)

Mitch Goodwin (Melbourne)

Kathrin Maurer (Southern Denmark)

Anna Munster (UNSW)

Tom Sear (UNSW Canberra)

Kate Richards (WSU)

James Rogers (Southern Denmark)

Simon M. Taylor (UNSW)

Yanai Toister (Tel Aviv)

Madelene Veber (UNSW)

Vaughan Wozniak-O'Connor (UNSW)

Anne Wilson (Deakin)

Andrew Yip (Coventry)

*Drone Cultures is convened by Dr Michael Richardson (UNSW) and Madelene 
Veber (UNSW).*

			
	
**


*Drone Cultures*builds on the*Drone Futures Seminar Series*hosted by 
theUNSW Media Futures Hub <https://mediafutureshub.org/>. You can watch 
those talks at the Media Futures YouTube Channel or listen along with 
additional interviews on the Media Futures Podcast 
<https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/media-futures-podcast/id1506530595>.

Drone Futures and the Drone Cultures Symposium are funded by an 
Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award.

We acknowledge and pay respect to the Traditional Custodians of the land 
on which we work and live, particularly the Bedegal, Bidjigal and 
Gadigal Peoples, and their elders past and present. Sovereignty was 
never ceded, and the struggle for justice continues.

**

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