The Arts and Humanities Colloquium on Friday, October 17, from 10 to 11:30 in the Malaspina Theatre features Dr. John Hill, Writing Centre Co-ordinator at VIU, and Dr. Ann Rogers, a political scientist who has taught at VIU and is now at Royal Roads University, and is entitled The Rise of Drones: From the Great War to Gaza.
=0D=0A=Hill and Rogers began their research with a simple question: "What difference do drones make?" More specifically, they wondered about the military impact of these pilotless military aircraft. "There is this technology out there that people find interesting, alarming, disturbing, useful, and we were wondering does it actually make a difference that there's no one in the cockpit of this aircraft," said Hill in an interview with the Ladysmith Chronicle earlier this year.
=0D=0A=Drones, which are often thought to be recently devised tools inspired by 1950s science fiction, actually have a history that goes back to World War I. In their talk, Rogers and Hill will "trace the development of drone technology from early British and American efforts to create flying bombs and targets, and Second World War experiments with remotely controlled combat aircraft, through the pursuit of better spying tools during the Cold War and the Vietnam War, and on to the extensive use of drones both for surveillance and strike in the US-led War on Terror and Israel's actions in Gaza."
=0D=0A=As academics, Rogers and Hill also consider drones in a broader theoretical perspective, drawing on the ideas of the Canadian media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, who urged us to look beyond the specific task that a technology performs to consider wide-scale changes that it brings to society. The question with regard to drones, notes Rogers, is: "do people do things differently because of it?"
=0D=0A=The husband-and-wife team conclude that because there are fewer risks for a country using drones in terms of soldiers on the ground killed, "it lowers the threshold to the application of military-scale force." Moreover, with drones, individuals can be targeted. "They're picking off people a few at a time," says Rogers. The authors dub this the "nano-war" to try to capture the small scale of this new type of warfare.
=0D=0A=Hill and Rogers are eminently qualified to engage this topic. Both worked at Jane's Intelligence Review, she as a deputy editor and he as the China Watch editor. Jane's is a preeminent monthly journal on global security and stability issues. They are the authors of Unmanned: Drone Warfare and Global Security, which came out in the spring of 2014.
=0D=0A=Courtesy parking will be available for this presentation. Enter through Gate 5D (access from Fifth Street) and park in the lot to the right. From 9:15 to 10:00 am, students in safety vests will be near entrances to guide you and provide you with a pass for your dashboard. The pass will be good until 1:00 pm. (If this lot is full, go to gate 5F and park in one of the first two sections.
=0D=0A=Please note that there is one more presentation in our Fall series. It continues the theme of war and its consequences. On November 28. Terri Doughty and Dr. Justin McGrail will present Cultural Contact Zones: Wroclaw, Poland, a look at how modern writers and artists are recovering Poland's multi-ethnic history and creating identities in a historically war-torn country. Be sure, too, to watch for the line-up for the Spring 2015 Colloquium series.
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