Unmanning

Presented by Gender+ Justice Initiative, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Culture and Politics Programs.

Join us in welcoming Katherine Chandler to discuss her book Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers University Press, 2020). Dr. Chandler will be joined by professors Nathan Hensley, Caren Kaplan and Jennifer Rhee. The panel, explores the relevance of the drone for studying intersections between technologies, body, nation, and global divides.

Unmanning studies the conditions that create unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy of experimental, pilotless planes flown between 1936 and 1992. Characteristics often attributed to the drone—including machine-like control, enmity and remoteness—are achieved by displacements between humans and machines that shape a mediated theater of war. Rather than primarily treating the drone as a result of the war on terror, this book examines contemporary targeted killing through a series of failed experiments to develop unmanned flight in the twentieth century. The human, machine and media parts of drone aircraft are organized to make an ostensibly not human framework for war that disavows its political underpinnings as technological advance. These experiments are tied to histories of global control, cybernetics, racism and colonialism. Drone crashes and failures call attention to the significance of human action in making technopolitics that comes to be opposed to “man” and the paradoxes at their basis.

About the speakers:

Katherine Chandler is an Assistant Professor of Culture and Politics in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her research studies how technology and media create infrastructures that reinforce, challenge and transform the human body, local communities, nation state and a global public. She uses theories and methods from science and technology studies, media theory, geography, political theory and art practice. Her first book, Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare, was published in 2020 by Rutgers University Press. She received her PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.

Nathan K. Hensley is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he works on nineteenth-century British literature, critical theory, environmental humanities, and the novel.

Caren Kaplan is Professor of American Studies and affiliated faculty in Cultural Studies and Science and Technology Studies at the University of California, 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.

Jennifer Rhee is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Media, Art, and Text PhD Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research focuses on robotics and artificial intelligence in technology, visual and performance art, literature, and film.

Accommodations regarding a disability can be made by 4/7/2023.