Critical Drone Studies Conference: Drones in Society, Politics, and Culture

Critical Drone Studies: Drones in Society, Politics, and Culture

A Conference hosted by the Centre for Drones and Culture
With the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) and the Institute for Technology and Humanity (ITH)

From agriculture to logistics, from journalism to delivery, from war to peacebuilding: drones continue to differently impact the ways we live, work, tell stories, relate to one another, and imagine the future. Although the history of drones dates back to at least the early twentieth century – and, by some accounts, to ballooning in the eighteenth century – it is in the early twenty-first century that their presence became widespread and their impacts transformational. Debates continue to surround more risky drone developments, such as drones’ integration into autonomous, AI-driven warfare, and their illicit use for drugs and weapons delivery into prisons. However, alternative deployments show promise, including unmanned delivery of medicines to remote geographies, surveying of humanitarian crises and environmental disasters, and the creation of fresh visual idioms in photography, cinematography, gaming, and other forms of entertainment. Although the types of drones used in these spaces can be quite different, they often involve imaginaries of situational awareness, technological autonomy, and “distant intimacy” – of humans being physically apart from another person, object, or milieu while robots remain relatively close, at times even enabling affective feelings and cognitive impressions of access and intimacy.

While drone studies has tended to treat the use of drones in these spaces separately, the ambition of this conference is to engage in boundary work which moves the field towards a more heterogeneous, as well as normative, understanding of drones in society, politics, and culture: towards a critical drone studies that acknowledges both how individual motivations and creativity shape what a drone is and does, and how such engagements are also influenced by institutions and power. To this end, this is a reflexively interdisciplinary conference that encourages exploratory perspectives on drone pasts, presents, and futures, with a focus on probing the logics and narratives underpinning drone development, proliferation, and acceptance. Topics covered include:

• Drone wars
• Drones and civil liberties
• Drone humanitarianism
• Drone ecologies
• Drones and political economy
• Drone labour
• Drone aesthetics

This is an in-person conference sponsored by UK Research and Innovation. Registration is free. 

See here for more details: www.centrefordronesandculture/conference

Registration fee

This in-person event is sponsored by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). It is free to attend, and we would like to welcome as many people as possible. However, we kindly ask that you only register if you're sure and able to attend, as each no-show means someone else cannot participate. The deadline to register is 5th June 2026.

Note for conference speakers: this registration link refers to the general attendee registration. If you are presenting at the conference, you should already have registered via the link the organisers sent in March.