Event overview
Atmospheres of Crisis and Unbelonging in Humanitarian Drone Documentaries
This talk takes as its starting point the argument made during the first wave of critical drone studies, which primarily focused on drone warfare, that the drone is a ‘technology of racial distinction’ (Allinson, 2015). In this context, drones have been conceived of as atmospheric technologies that engage in ‘racialization from above’ (Feldman, 2011): that target the minoritized while rendering the Westphalian border fluid and contingent, engaging in ‘ordering without bordering’ (Agius, 2017). In this talk, I will extend and re-consider this argument for the realm of forced migration. Focusing on the use of drones at the borders, variously conceived, where migrants are delayed, contained, or rendered immobile, I ask how ‘civilian’ drone culture in the form of humanitarian drone documentaries makes visible the nexus of race, border, and atmosphere in new ways. In particular, I will explore how drone documentaries about forced migration involve ‘volumetric’ mediations that engage with three-dimensional space with complex heights and depths (Jackman and Squire, 2021). In doing so, they create spaces of vexed encounter and relationality between the seer and the seen, to present different atmospheres of migration: as crisis, from above, and as unbelonging, from below.
Beryl Pong is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, where she directs the Centre for Drones and Culture. She is the author of British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration (Oxford University Press, 2020), and the co-editor of Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology (Open Humanities Press, 2024). Her writing on drones and culture have appeared or are forthcoming in Big Data & Society, Collateral, Cultural Politics, Journal of War and Culture, and elsewhere. Her immersive installation about drone warfare, Beware Blue Skies, is showing at the Imperial War Museum, London until March 2025.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 13 Mar 2025 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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