[csaa-forum] Tomorrow: Drone Futures Seminar Series: Dr Ronak K. Kapadia, 12 August, a Media Futures Hub Event

[Michael Richardson]

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A virtual public seminar with
Ronak K. Kapadia (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Chaired by Michael Richardson (UNSW)
On the Skin: Drone Warfare, Collateral Damage, and the Human Terrain


This seminar will explore Kapadia's research into the contemporary multimedia art works by Iraqi American artist Wafaa Bilal and American artist elin o’Hara slavick, as a meditation on how the violence of US imperial and aerial warfare across the long twentieth century has devastated humans, animals, and social ecologies in the Greater Middle East. Kapadia’s reading of Bilal’s performances highlights the critical role of touch, embodiment, and the senses in forging what he terms a “queer calculus” to analyze the effects of US counterterrorism and their toxic afterlives. elin o’Hara slavick’s drawing and painting series Protesting Cartography or Places the United States Has Bombed offers an important intertext to Bilal’s corporeal mappings by confronting our collective failure of imagination about what bombs do to populations, bodies, and topographies. Together, these artists powerfully attest to the violent expanse of postwar US geopolitical power around the globe and make palpable the “sensorial life of empire.” Through close readings of their insurgent aesthetic projects, Kapadia traces an alternative affective map of the social worlds and populations disappeared by contemporary US drone strikes in Iraq and by extension in “Af-Pak,” Yemen, Somalia, Niger, and related sites of US forever warfare.

Ronak K. Kapadia is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His first book, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press, 2019), theorizes the queer world-making power of contemporary art responses to US militarism in the Greater Middle East. His new project, “Breathing in the Brown Queer Commons,” examines race-radical queer and trans migrant futurisms to develop a critical theory of healing justice and pleasure across transnational sites of security, terror, and war in the wilds of ecological chaos and US imperial decline.
AUGUST
12

Time: 10:00 am – 11:30 am AEST

Location: Drone Futures seminars will be streamed live to YouTube, where participants can converse and post questions. If you can’t attend live, you can register to receive a link to a recording of the seminar.

REGISTER VIA EVENTBRITE NOW<https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/drone-futures-seminar-1-ronak-k-kapadia-tickets-113940312542?ref=estw>



Drone Futures brings together leading artists, humanities and social science scholars whose research intersects with the emerging field of drone studies. From the neo-colonial violence of contemporary wars in the Middle East and Africa to the strange histories of unmanned aerial vehicles to activist uses in struggles for justice, this seminar series looks to the past and present to think into the future. By showcasing inter-disciplinary scholarship, it aims to spark new connections and inspire debate about how to build more just drone futures.

September 2: Antoine Bousquet (Birkbeck, University of London, author of The Eye of War: Perception from the Telescope of the Drone) and Jairus Grove (University of Hawaii, author of A Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World). 5PM – 6.30PM (AEST)

September 23: Katherine Chandler (Georgetown University, artist and author of Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare). 11AM – 12.30PM (AEST)

November 6: Thomas Stubblefield (UMass Dartmouth, author of Drone Art: The Everywhere War as Medium) 10AM – 11.30AM(AEDT)

November 26: Mahwish Chishty (UMass Amherst, artist<https://www.mahachishty.com/>) Time TBA
Register for upcoming seminars via the UNSW Media Futures Hub Eventbrite Page<http://unswmediafutureshub.eventbrite.com.au/?s=123375358>.
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The Drone Futures Seminar Series will culminate in the Drone Cultures Symposium<https://www.dronewitnessing.com/>, hosted virtually on the 8-10 of December by the UNSW Media Futures Hub<https://mediafutureshub.org/>.

Stay tuned! Drone Futures will be available as a limited series of the Media Futures Podcast<https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/media-futures-podcast/id1506530595>.

Drone Futures and the Drone Cultures Symposium are funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award.

We acknowledge and pay respect to the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live, particularly the Bedegal, Bidjigal and Gadigal Peoples, and their elders past and present. Sovereignty was never ceded, and the struggle for justice continues.









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