Language and Thinking (L&T) Program Presents
Drones and the Experience of Warfare: A Workshop with Dan Gettinger, Co-Director, Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
Campus Center, Weis Cinema
11:00 am – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
11:00 am – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
For Language and Thinking Students
Over the course of human history, the experience of warfare has remained relatively constant, a central tenet of human experience: it is bloody, traumatizing, violent, and adrenalizing. But in 2016, in an airbase in Nevada, US Air Force pilots, sitting in small ‘ground control stations’ operate armed drones over several conflict zones thousands of miles away, watching closely, and, sometimes, firing upon the enemy. At the end of their shifts, these pilots return to their homes in the suburbs of Las Vegas, where they are expected to contend with all the minutia of domestic life; their minds, though, are still at war. We might therefore ask ourselves: In what ways does this represent a radical departure from warfare of the past, and what does this mean for the ways that war is understood and perceived? In this talk, students will be introduced to the realities of drone warfare today—how it complicates our understanding of war on a social, cultural, and institutional level. Students will explore whether, indeed, remote warfare counts as war, or if it represents an entirely new category of human experience. This presentation will integrate selections from Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others and Manuel Castell’s “The Spirit of Informationalism.” Led by Dan Gettinger, a founder and the co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College, a research and education initiative that explores the opportunities and challenges associated with unmanned systems technology in both civilian and military spheres.Wednesday August 10, 11am. Seating is limited to Language and Thinking students.
For more information, call 845-758-7141, e-mail [email protected],
or visit http://languageandthinking.bard.edu.
Time: 11:00 am – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Campus Center, Weis Cinema