‘Everyday droning’: Towards a feminist geopolitics of the drone-home

Abstract

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.

Intimate technologies: Towards a feminist perspective on geographies of technoscience

“…Beyond household devices, feminist geographers also focus on other digital technologies that introduce new forms of control and surveillance in the home. With the concept of 'everyday droning', Jackman and Brickell (2022) push the boundaries of geopolitical accounts of the drone to include the banal militarisation and capitalist enclosure of homes and everyday domestic experiences via drone technologies. In her recent work on how the COVID-19 crisis was managed in India, Ayona Datta (2020) explores new modes of intimate surveillance that comprise the selfies quarantined persons took in their homes.…”

Drone sensing volumes

“…In thinking further with this reciprocity, one that recognises the multiple agencies at play and the afterlife of the victim's body, so too might we engage feminist work reminding us of the value of diversifying both the actors and relations at the centre of our accounts of geopolitical worlds, relations and volumes alike (Jackman & Brickell, 2022). Feminist geopolitics is instructive in foregrounding both the scale of the body and the site of the everyday.…”

“…It continues to be asserted that we have entered a ‘drone age’ (Coley & Lockwood, 2016). Following the cementing of a now established literature on the ‘dronification’ of contemporary warfare (see, for example, Gregory, 2011; Parks & Kaplan, 2017; Williams, 2011), growing attention is paid to the more‐than‐military drone as it is ‘domesticated’ in increasingly varied contexts, spanning civil, commercial and recreational applications (see, for example, Crampton, 2016; Jackman, 2022; Jackman & Brickell, 2022; Kaplan & Miller, 2019; Klauser, 2022, 2022a; Klauser & Pedrozo, 2015, 2017). While scholars have critically traced the ‘ascendancy’ of the ‘good drone’ (Jumbert & Sandvik, 2017, p. 1), so too is further attention urged to the ‘complex ways in which civilian life is lived with, through and against the drone’ (Bradley & Cerella, 2019).…”

“…Klauser (2022, p. 148) continues that police drones enact an ‘aerial geopolitics of security’ that relies upon and exerts power in ‘three‐dimensional ways’. Klauser's (2022) account underscores the utility of both empirically driven drone scholarship and that attentive to the ‘complex voluminosities’ of ‘mundane micro‐spaces’ which can be transformed by volumetric technologies (see also Jackman & Brickell, 2022).…”

“…In recognition that the ‘production’ of volumetric ‘knowledge’ is never simply or solely about just the waging of war or claiming of resources (Marston & Himley, 2021, p. 3), scholars have urged both the consideration of a ‘more diverse array’ of volumetric projects and practices (Harris, 2015, p. 602; see also Pérez & Zurita, 2020), and attention to more ‘everyday’ accounts of volume (Jackman & Squire, 2021). These impulses are echoed in drone scholarship through calls for greater attention to the ‘growing range of non‐state actors multiply mobilising, experiencing, and subject to the drone’ (Jackman & Brickell, 2022, p. 157), and for the formation of a ‘specifically domestic drone theory’ (Bradley & Cerella, 2019) recognising drones as ‘aero‐visual techniques of power’ (Klauser & Pedrozo, 2015, p. 290) that can at once enact and subvert ‘visibilities of control’ (Zuev & Bratchford, 2020, p. 442).…”