Research and Creative Projects

Drones and New Spaces of Social Protest in Mexico

Joe Bryan, Assistant Professor, Geography
Can the “civilian” use of drones improve understanding of the transformation of space associated with their military use? What potential do drones have for opening up new spaces of protest? This proposal will address these questions through exploratory research in Mexico, a country that is fast becoming “Latin America’s drone capital” thanks to a combination of open regulations and growing domestic drone industry. This project considers a third argument that sees the emergence of drone use as linked to the changing geography of security and state power associated with Mexico’s “Drug War,” crackdown on social movements, and racialized dispossession. This proposal operates under the premise that acceptance and use of drones is symptomatic of this spatial transformation of power relations.

Aligning Incentives: Pilot Research on Values and Innovation in UAS

Jill Dupre, ATLAS Associate Director
Many people foresee great societal gains from UAS, but an equal number of people fear the proliferation and potential abuses they represent. Mediation between these two poles of opinion is needed. The regulatory environment must adequately incentivize innovation; but it must safeguard society’s privacy and safety. As engineers seek to overcome technical hurdles, law and policy scholars need to have adequate input into the designs of UAS so that it is not too late to handle issues of privacy, security, and safety. Traditional research silos inhibit satisfactory approaches and strategies that can leverage the strengths of both technology-based and policy based disciplines to address complex social issues. It is vital that policy debates and approaches reflect engineering reasoning and realities and that American innovation be a reflective practice [6]. Without bringing these communities together and designing truly interdisciplinary research agendas, society risks neglecting key values.

Clytigation: State of Exception

Michelle Ellsworth, Associate Professor and Co-Director, Dance
As Associate Professor of Dance, I regularly produce work that combines choreography with video, text, web design, and performance installation to explore a range of challenging themes including gender, genetics, politics, and ecology. The recent trajectory of my creative work has been investigating questions about surveillance, incarceration, and identity. My research proposal Clytigation: State of Exception is an experimental performance work that collides Aeschylus’ “Oresteia” with dance, the Internet, and live video processing. Across multiple platforms, I demonstrate my “over-thecounter counter-terrorism” protocols for avoiding surveillance and interpersonal drama. Using an interpersonal drone as a body double, an ancient text, and some modern technology, Clytigation investigates the impact of wars on bodies and legal protocols. A web app accompanies the performance and allows Clytemnestra to shuffle, technologize, and outsource the Oresteia’s unpleasant narrative1.

Seeing from above, policing from below: Drones and the changing politics of knowledge and participation in conservation in Tanzania and India

Mara Goldman, Assistant Professor, Geography and Tara Grillos, Postdoc Researcher, Institute for Behavioral Science
Drones (unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs) are increasingly promoted for use in conservation, for both monitoring and enforcement purposes (Schiffman, 2014, see also http://conservationdrones.org/). Drones are presented as affordable and accessible technological solutions to improve wildlife counting, track wildlife movements in real time, track vegetation change and forest fires, and alert authorities on the ground to the activities of poachers (Pimm et al., 2015). Promising to transform ecology and improve conservation, drones are being promoted by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and embraced by national governments, particularly in the global south, where enforcement is often limited and expensive. Tanzania and India are two countries that have enthusiastically embraced the use of drones as part of their national conservation strategy, and to address growing concerns over resources “misuse,” in particularly poaching and deforestation (Sen 2013; Drones 2014). Yet conservation drones remain controversial (Humle et al., 2014), should be understood as part of a larger “droneworld” politics of surveillance and control (Shaw 2012), and thus present new challenges to on-going struggles to democratize conservation (Duffy, 2014). Both Tanzania and India have a long history of promoting “bottom-up” participatory processes in wildlife conservation and forestry management. This includes complex legislation regarding community participation in natural resources management, active civil society organizations, and NGOs working on various models of community based natural resource management (CBNRM) over the last several decades. Some of these NGOs are part of planning and implementing the national conservation strategies, which are now tied to drones. How will drones change the conservation landscape, in terms of knowledge production, participation in conservation, nature-society relations, and social relations with local communities?

Communication of Drone Enthusiasts

Rebecca Rice and Emma Collins, graduate students, Department of Communication
We plan to study a group of drone enthusiasts who meet weekly in Fort Collins, Colorado, to fly privately owned UAVs. The group boasts a 200-person membership, open to all levels of experience with drones. Potential areas for exploration with this group include member socialization and group norms, borrowed from organizational communication research. Potential research questions could include an examination of how broader discourses of militarization, securitization, masculinity, and neoliberalism impact this group and are communicated during meet ups.

Drones as Sound Collection Tools for Soundscape Artists and Acoustic Ecologists

Hunter Ewen, Instructor, Critical Media Practices
I am proposing the creation of a new, moving soundscape that will utilize drone-based audio recording and processing equipment. This creative piece of music (or sound-art) will be publically presented as the first major soundscape to be captured by drones. I will also develop a methodology for using drones for high quality sound-collection, which I hope to publish and present at international conferences.