Domesticating Drones: Drone Power and Meaning in Political Cartoons

• In Event: Crime Policy and the Media

Abstract

This paper examines the domestication of drones in the United States. Central to this domestication project is a contest over the meaning of drones as agents of the state come to regulate and exploit these contraptions while organizations envision practical applications for drone power. Drones are mobility systems, and their introduction into domestic space affords an opportunity to study the regulation of movement and its connection to power relations. Building on Tim Cresswell’s observation that mobility systems are “both meaningful and laden with power”, this paper analyzes political cartoons and the implications for power relations that these expressions about the meaning of drones signal. One salient theme in these renderings of the meaning of drones is their conversion from instruments of repressive power to systems associated with productive power. With this consideration of drone domestication through political cartoons, we seek to contribute to the insights of cultural criminology, conceived by Hayward as “a triadic framework concerned with meaning, power and existential accounts of crime, punishment and control”.

Authors

• Gregory J. Howard, Western Michigan University

• Kristen Witzel, Western Michigan University

• Dave Brundage, Western Michigan University