KATHERINE CHANDLER

I am an associate professor of Culture and Politics in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. My research studies how technology and media create infrastructures that reinforce, challenge and transform the nation state and a global public. I use theories and methods from science and technology studies, media theory, geography, political theory and art practice. My scholarly research and essays have been published in Social Studies of Science, Interventions, Catalyst, Humanity and qui parle.

Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers University Press, 2020), my first monograph, examines failed experiments by the United States military to unman aircraft in the twentieth century. I look at how networked parts of the drone are entangled with gender, race and nation. Unmanning is a disavowal of politics as technology that serves and obfuscates American power.

My second book, Drone Publics, examines the international networks that promote drone innovation in Africa. I ask how the militaristic origins of drone aircraft are refashioned through commercial projects, humanitarianism and development. This research theorizes the concept of drone publics, interrogating the tensions between a collective good and the rubrics of protection, targeting and exploitation that persist in non-military drones.

I am also working on a co-authored book (with Hillary Mushkin) on arts, politics and technology called Drone Archive. The project utilizes drawings and feminist art practice to engage with the histories of power and control exemplified by drone aircraft.