DRONE VISION AND PROTEST

Abstract

The paper considers how the motility and vertical spatiality of drone technologies offer an alternative infrastructure for protest providing distributed modes of seeing in real time across devices and platforms. In considering how the use of social media platforms can effectively repurpose drone technology away from militarised use, the paper explores the potential of drone vision to produce new forms of relational experience as part of a networked citizen activism that challenges the militarisation of civil society. Drawing on examples from the NoDAPL protest in North Dakota led by the Native American Sioux tribe, the paper argues that drone technologies, in braiding the politics of verticality with the politics of visibility, initiates a radical rethinking of the spatial politics of protest and counter-protest and seeing in real time.