In the drone's eye: An actor-network autoethnography of UAVs, power, and community-based monitoring
| dc.contributor.author | Watts, Riley | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-04-23T22:59:21Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-04-23T22:59:21Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2025 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This research examines the entanglements of drones, power, and community-based monitoring through a two-pronged approach. The first component, ohne:kanus, develops a preliminary framework for environmental monitoring by Oneida Nation of the Thames in response to community concerns about contamination from Green Lane Landfill. Through community mapping, consultations with Clan Mothers, and on-the-ground surveys, this work provides a toolbox of monitoring strategies to support Oneida self-determination and environmental governance. The second component employs autoethnography as an adaptive methodological approach, assembling an experimental framework that critically examines how UAVs, as tools of Western technoscience, shape power relations across multiple scales. Moving beyond counter-mapping as a representational tool, this research highlights how drones actively reconfigure material relations and governance dynamics through affect and embodied responses to their presence. By tracing the social, institutional, and technological networks in which UAVs operate through storytelling, this work aims to encourage further reflexive practices and institutional ethnographies that interrogate the role of drones in environmental monitoring. Findings suggest that UAVs disrupt the black-boxing of environmental data production, making visible the technological mediations that often go unnoticed in remote sensing. Ultimately, this research seeks to contribute to a broader conversation on how emerging technologies shape, reinforce, or challenge settler colonial governance structures in Indigenous-led environmental monitoring. | |
| dc.description.reviewstatus | Reviewed | |
| dc.description.scholarlevel | Undergraduate | |
| dc.description.sponsorship | Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Awards (JCURA) | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1828/21976 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.publisher | University Of Victoria | |
| dc.subject | community-based monitoring | |
| dc.subject | counter-mapping | |
| dc.subject | science and technology studies | |
| dc.subject | Indigenous resurgence | |
| dc.subject | affect | |
| dc.title | In the drone's eye: An actor-network autoethnography of UAVs, power, and community-based monitoring | |
| dc.type | Poster |