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Critical Drone Studies: 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)

Venue: West Court, Jesus College, University of Cambridge, CB5 8BQ

Dates: Thursday 25th - Friday 26th June 2026

Registration will open shortly

About the Event

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

See the original conference call for papers (CFP) here.

Registration fee

This is an in-person conference sponsored by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The registration fee is £5, which covers all conference refreshments for the two days and holds your place.


Conference Programme

Draft programme is forthcoming.

Conference Venue

The conference venue is West Court, Jesus College, 22 Jesus Lane, Cambridge CB5 8BQ. On the map below, the entrance to West Court is identified in the red box with the yellow border:

Travel

By air:

From Heathrow Airport to Cambridge there are some options:

  1. Take the Heathrow Express from Heathrow to London Paddington. Then, take the London Underground (tube) to London Kings Cross St. Pancras; you can take the Circle Line or the Hammersmith and City Line train going eastbound. From London Kings Cross take the train to Cambridge. 

  2. Take the London Underground (tube) from Heathrow to London Kings Cross; you can take the Piccadilly train going eastbound. From London Kings Cross St. Pancras, take the train to Cambridge.

From Stansted airport to Cambridge there is usually a direct train. 

By train

The closest train station to Jesus College is Cambridge Station (not Cambridge North). There is a taxi rank right outside the station. Taxis take credit cards and contactless payment.

Bus:

From Cambridge Railway Station, you can take the No. 1 bus (to Christ’s College) or the Busway A (to Jesus Lane) northbound, then walk to Jesus College on foot. However, traffic can be very slow in Cambridge and it can be faster to walk. Jesus College is an approximately 34-minute walk from the station.

Car:

Parking is very limited and subject to availability in Cambridge, and not guaranteed at Jesus College. If you intend to drive, please contact us at drones@lcfi.cam.ac.uk for parking options.


Accommodation

We suggest the following reasonably priced accommodations within distance of Jesus College:

You might also consider staying in one of Cambridge's many guesthouses or bed and breakfasts: https://www.visitcambridge.org/place-categories/bbs-and-guesthouses/


Contact

Centre for Drones and Culture

Email us at: drones [at] lcfi.cam.ac.uk

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November 6

Re-imagining the World from Above: The Semiotics of Drone Visuals