We live in an increasingly drone-saturated world. In this article, we bring drone scholarship and feminist geopolitics into dialogue to interrogate the drone-home. We re-orient military- and state-led accounts, foregrounding the growing range of non-state actors enacting and subject to the drone as it is increasingly employed in the Global North. In so doing, we develop the concept of ‘everyday droning’ as the honing and homing of military technology and drone capitalism. Examining militarization and enclosure at the scale of everyday home life, we urge future geographical work to engage with everyday droning being actively seeded in the domestic here-and-now.
The last two decades have seen a "volumetric turn" within Anglophone social sciences and humanities scholarship. This turn is premised on the idea that space may be better understood in three-dimensional termswith complex heights and depthsrather than as a series of two-dimensional areas or surfaces. While there is an increasingly diverse and rich set of scholarship accounting for voluminous complexities in the air, oceans, ice, mountains, and undergrounds, all too often this work foregrounds state and military-led approaches to volume. This has resulted in a limited methodological toolkit through which to explore voluminous complexities as they emerge and extend beyond military and state contexts. Often reliant on elite interviews, archives, and cartographies, there has been little critical discussion of both methodological practice and the "flatness" of research outputs articulating three-dimensional worlds. In this paper we address this by foregrounding the role of immersive and multisensory methodologies (sounding volumes, seeing-sensing drone volumes, and object volumes). To conclude, we offer avenues for further inquiry, including attending to shifting everyday voluminous experiences in the Anthropocene, and the need to diversify the communication of "volume" research.
Drones are increasingly understood and imagined as important actors, inhabiting and transforming aerial space. From their entrenched establishment within battlefield operations, drones have spawned into a diverse ecosystem of platforms and applications, increasingly punctuating domestic urban airspace. While occupying a status as exemplars of urban innovation, the drone poses, and remains bound to, a range of techno-cultural contestations – from challenges around airspace integration, to concerns around privacy, safety and pollution. Thinking with commercial drone futures, and specifically the logistics sector, this article interrogates the role of speculation in this unfolding techno-landscape. In so doing we turn to two key sites through which the drone is anticipated – namely patents and adverts – as lenses through which to investigate projected visualisations underpinning the emergent, envisioned and anticipated drone. We argue that such drone speculations do not simply and solely envision new means of circulating goods, people and information, but rather embody and act to promote a particular set of aerial desires and social relations. Critically unpacking envisioned notions of frictionless mobility, instant consumption, and the appropriation of vertical spaces and spectra, we argue that such speculative sites and practices importantly participate in a techno-fetishist agenda positing drone technology as a privileged and panacea agent of futurity, while often eliding its implications.<br /><br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>Drones are increasingly understood and imagined as important actors, inhabiting and transforming urban airspace.</li><br /><li>Interrogating the domestic drone, we offer a critical visual analysis of key sites through which it is speculated.</li><br /><li>While envisioning convenience from the air, commercial drone speculations also embody and promote particular aerial desires.</li><br /><li>We argue that staying with speculation enables the critical unpacking of notions of frictionless mobility, instant consumption and the appropriation of vertical space.</li></ul>
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