A Conversation on Drones, Robots and Mechanization of Politics: Unmanning and Research In-Progress

Abstract

This panel examines contemporary scholarship devoted to drones, robots and algorithmic war, expanding on Katherine Chandler’s Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (2020). It puts the book in conversation with four scholars who transform current research on drone warfare by foregrounding science and technology studies, critical race theory, gender studies and media studies. Unmanning considers failed experiments by the United States military to unman aircraft in the twentieth century. It analyzes how the drone’s human, machine and media parts are entangled with gender, race and nation. Through unmanning, political actions are disavowed as technological advances, while drone failures underline the limits of seeing from above. In response, Iván Chaar López will expand on the interrelation between the drone and nation, drawing from his monograph-in-progress The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology and Intrusion. J.D. Schnepf will discuss her work-in-progress, Drones and Domesticity: Women’s Work and the Maintenance of U.S. Imperial Culture, elaborating on themes of gender and US imperialism. Margaret Rhee will draw on her manuscript, How We Became Human: Race, Robots and the Asian American Body, to underline themes of race, technology and embodiment. Allen Feldman, author of “Of the Pointless View” in War and Algorithm (2019), will consider the visual culture of drone warfare.

Chair

• Kris Fallon, University of California, Davis

Presenters

• Iván Chaar López, The University of Texas at Austin

• J.D. Schnepf, University of Groningen

• Margaret Rhee, University at Buffalo

• Allen Feldman, New York University

• Katherine Chandler

Session Organizer

• Katherine Chandler