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KATHERINE CHANDLER

Assistant Professor of Culture and Politics
Georgetown University

kfc9@georgetown.edu

MONOGRAPHS

Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare, Rutgers University Press, 2020.

Unmanning studies the conditions that make contemporary targeted killing through failed projects to build drone aircraft by the United States between 1936 to 1992. 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.

Drone Publics (In Progress)

Drone Publics studies drones designed to deliver medical supplies in Rwanda; unmanned aircraft to track poachers and endangered animals in Kruger National Park in South Africa; and a community mapping project by drones on Zanzibar.  It asks: Who do these systems protect? Who do they target? And who benefits? Excavating how personhood, governmentality and postcolonialism are embedded in these projects, the research complicates a simple refashioning of drones "for good." Rather, it situates these apparently novel uses within the military framework that gave it life.

PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES

“Making Terrorist Targets: Techniques of Power in the Horn of Africa from Drones to Anti-Terrorism Laws,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies [Special Issue – Terrorist Refugee, Casualty: Extrajudicial Bodies of the New Empires]. 21.6 (2019). 821-837.

I draw comparisons between the American drone program in the horn of Africa and anti-terrorism laws in Ethiopia to study how technologies and law produce bodies that can be detained, sanctioned and killed by the nation-state. On the one hand, targeted strikes carried out by the US military claim all military-aged males killed are terrorists unless proven otherwise. On the other hand, anti-terrorism laws in Ethiopia label journalists and others attempting to critique the state as terrorists, resulting in their imprisonment and exile.

“A Drone Manifesto: Re-forming the Partial Politics of Targeted Killing.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience [Special Issue – Digital Militarisms]. 2.1 (2016). 1-23.

Debates about today's unmanned systems explain their operation using binary distinctions to delimit "us" and "them" or "human" and "machine." Yet the networked actions of drone aircraft persistently undo these oppositions. I reconsider Donna Haraway's classic 1985 feminist technoscience essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” and ask how drone aircraft fit with and complicate Haraway’s analysis of human and machine relations she identifies as cyborg

“The Bee with an Electronic Brain: Cold War Drones in America.” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development. 6.2 (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 309-316.

I explore the visual culture of experimental drone projects developed during the Cold War through a text and photo essay. Triptychs overlay documentary materials with fabricated scenes to situate drone aircraft in domestic contexts. Cold War drones show mundane, day-to-day uses and test flights associated with mostly failed, experimental weapons systems built in the period. These images complicate the machine-like view of today’s drones and their target selection process, troubling the associations between unmanned aircraft and the War on Terror.

“5000 Feet is the Best: Re-viewing the Politics of Unmanned Aircraft Systems.” Knowledge Politics and Intercultural Dynamics. 5.1 (Barcelona, Spain, Barcelona Center for International Affairs, 2012). 63-73.

The article examines 5,000 Feet is the Best, a video installation by the artist Omer Fast shown at the 2011 Venice Art Biennale, and the video Drone Vision by artist Trevor Paglen. The artworks respond to the use of unmanned aircraft by the United States in its ongoing War on Terror. I analyze how these pieces represent the aerial view of the drone as a way of seeing shaped by politics and necessarily limited by this perspective. The artworks lay bare racial and national assumptions embedded in drone vision.

BOOK CHAPTERS

“American Kamikaze: Television Guided Assault Drones during World War II.” Life in the Age of Drone Warfare, Eds. C. Kaplan and L. Parks (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2017). 152-188.

This chapter expands on the concept of "interpretative flexibility". to examine how multiple interpretations of a technology unfold historically, illustrating the co-production of technology and cultural context. It studies a World War II assault drone project heralded as an American kamikaze, typically considered a failed effort. Multiple interpretations of the human and its opposite are at work. In World War II, the navy project opposed “humanism” to the assault drone. Today, military and government promote the drone as a more humane form of warfare. What is at stake in these flexible interpretations is not just the drone but who is its human counterpart.

“Where Are the Shoes.” Vincent Everywhere: Van Gogh’s Inter(National) Identities, Eds. R. Esner & M. Schavemaker. (Amsterdam, Netherlands, Amsterdam University Press, 2010). 63-75.
“Screening Catastrophe.” Techno-Aesthetic Perspectivizations of Milieu: A Reader, Eds. R. Ladewig & A. Seppi, forthcoming, co-authored with Nina Franz, 1-12.

LECTURES

“Drone Publics,” Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, November 12, 2020.
“Making Drones,” Art + Tech Speaker Series, co-hosted by Social Activism Speaker Series and Visual Culture Program Andrew Mellon Foundation Grant, Cal Tech, Pasadena, CA, May 15, 2019.
“Race Work of War Machines,” Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, November 7, 2018.
“Socio-technologies of Humanitarian Drone Missions in Africa: Three Case Studies,” Image Knowledge Gestaltung Cluster of Excellence Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, July 3, 2018.
“Drone Errans,” Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Berlin, Germany, June 12, 2018.
“Drone Publics,” Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, March 28, 2017.
“Technical Failures,” guest lecture for AMS 5: Technology in American Lives, University of California, Davis, January 26, 2017.
“A Crash History of Drones,” Center for Innovation, Universidade Federal do ABC, Santo Andre, Brazil, July 17, 2014.
“Mediating Militarized Landscapes,” Technology and Culture Studies 006, University of California, Davis, November 23, 2010 (with Javier Arbona).

WORKSHOPS

“From Attacking Targets in Angola to Protecting Endangered Wildlife: Drone Infrastructures in South Africa from 1981 to the present,” at Infrastructures of Injustice: Law and Conflict, University of Cambridge, UK, October 26-27, 2018.
“Notwithstanding the Deficiencies in the Plan, the Incident Was Not Managed According to the Plan,” at Everyday Militarisms: Lethal Entanglements, University of California, Davis, CA, September 20-23, 2018.
“Media and Arendt’s Publics” at Media, Image and the Political, Image Knowledge Gestaltung Cluster of Excellence Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, August 23, 2018.
UK-US Early Career Researcher Workshop – Violence, British Academy and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, MA, February 9-11, 2018.
“Death by PowerPoint,” at Remote Control: Scales of Mediated Intervention, Image- Knowledge-Gestaltung Cluster of Excellence, Humboldt University, June 29-30, 2017.
“Television Control,” Media, Society, Technology Working Group, Humanities Lab, American University, April 12, 2015.
“American Kamikaze,” at Reconfiguring Global Space: The Geography, Politics, and Ethics of Drone Warfare, School of Global and International Studies, Indiana University, July 14-17, 2015.
Archives of the Non-Racial, University of California Humanities Research Initiative Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory and Johannesburg Workshop for Theory and Criticism, June 29- July 21, 2014.
“Unmanning Politics: Drone Surveillance from 1960 to 1973,” at Military Optics and Bodies of Difference, The Center for Race and Gender Thursday Forum Series, University of California, Berkeley, February 27, 2014.
“Tele-scribing the Enemy: the Knowns and Unknowns of Television Targeting,” at Modes of Technoscientific Knowledge, International Winterschool, Paris 1-Sorbonne and Technische Universität Darmstadt, Manigold, France, January 19-25, 2014.
“Drones Crash,” for the panel “Creative Resistance: Reclaiming Citizen Power through Social Media & the Arts,” at Pan-Optics: Emerging Perspectives on Visual Privacy and Surveillance, CITRIS Center, University of California, Berkeley, March 6, 2014.
Thresholds: Seams, Scars, Reveals, Third Annual Princeton—Weimar Summer School for New Media, Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany, June 15-22, 2013.
“Drone Vision: Seeing ‘Others’ through Unmanned Systems,” at Speculating the Carceral Planet, Speculative Visions of Race, Science, Technology and Survival, University of California, Berkeley, USA, March 14-15, 2013.
“Technological Sensing: Unmanned Aerial Systems and the Politics of Feedback,” at Cultures of Surveillance, University College of London, England, September 29-October 1, 2011.
“Losing the Human: Politics of Non-Human Actors?” Respondent to Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History by Samera Esmeir, Rhetoric Department and the Institute of International Studies Manuscript Workshop, University of California, Berkeley, April 8, 2011.
Affected Territories: The Everyday Landscapes of Landmine Removal, Articulations: Annual International Workshop, Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, March 22-24, 2010.
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