The Cultural Life of Drones with Sara Matthews
Cultural Studies Graduate Program Salon Seminar
Event Details
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Thursday, February 25, 2021
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
via Zoom, email for the link to join
Cost: free
What does it mean to think of drones as culture? The term drone refers to a diverse range of systems--from palm-sized quadrotors to solar-powered aircraft that fly at 70,000 ft. for weeks at a time. But drone systems are not just technologies. They also animate particular ways of knowing and being known. These orientations are evident in everything from the practiced gestures of the workers who produce them to the algorithmic applications that interpret the patterns by which drones see and apprehend. By exploring the vocabularies and social practices associated with drone systems in the Kitchener-Waterloo region of southern Ontario, I trace how drone cultures express the intimate ties between everyday life and the military-industrial complex. To do this I discuss a recent exhibition that employs social documentary practice as a way of making evident the perceptual regimes that underlie drone vision, itself a form of ethnographic looking
Sara Matthews is Associate Professor in the Department of Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research and teaching are interdisciplinary and consider the dynamics of conflict and social change. Working primarily in the field of research-creation, her projects explore the relations between visual culture and martial politics as well as how communities craft creative modes of relationality and survival in response to practices of state securitization.
Contact Info
Please email culturalstudies-phd@trentu.ca to receive the Zoom invitation.