Sramana Majumdar "Violence, Identity and Self-determination:
Narratives of conflict from the Kashmir Valley"
4:15 PM, Monday 18 Nov
Room 239, BYC
Bryn Mawr College
Exposure Index Tired of paper and pencil questionnaires about integration and intergroup contact? Try the new and improved EXPOSURE INDEX (click tab above on this page).
|
One of Premier-elect Nawaz Sharif’s main campaign planks was stopping the U.S. drone strikes, which are overwhelmingly hated by the people of Pakistan. It has also been argued that the drone strikes play into the hands of Taliban propaganda by making it easy to portray the U.S. as a faceless, distant, and uncaring imperial power.
As drone pilots are never personally at risk and are often thousands of miles away it is easy to forget that they can still suffer psychological damage. Their very safety – the inequality/”unfairness” of their position versus their targets’ – could even make the stress greater.
This is yet another piece of information on the use of drones that is classified. It is known that there are documents on the subject, which implies the answer to be ‘yes’, however.
The use of drone strikes is public known, extensively documented, and – bizarrely – still classified and officially secret.
Egypt denied any cooperation with Israel on the strike, and even denied that a strike had taken place. This conflict between a government desiring drone strikes and a populace that sees them as signs of western imperialism and civilian casualties is familiar from Pakistan.
As the debate over the limits and uses of domestic unmanned vehicles heats up, the drone strikes abroad continue. Variations of this article (originally by AP) also appeared in the New York Times and The Guardian.
In Blomkamp’s Science Fiction parable of economic inequality, unmanned vehicles of all kinds are used to control, police, and oppress the protagonist and others. The most common use of unmanned vehicles in fiction has been – like this film – as tools of the antagonists and obstacles.
This article investigates the high variance in attempts to count civilian casualties of drone strikes. While the government has at times claimed that there were no civilian casualties, the studies looked at here indicate 7% to 34% of deaths were noncombatants.
Article states that a senior commander in a Pakistani Taliban group was killed. It also states that Pakistan continues to see the drone strikes as counterproductive and an affront to their sovereignty.
The goal of the project is an unmanned submarine capable of deploying smaller unmanned underwater and/or aerial vehicles. Unlike the Air Force, the Navy appears less culturally against unmanned vehicle, having tested long range autonomous vehicles for years, quietly implementing them for mapping and surveillance. This perhaps comes from decades of autonomous torpedo development. Deployable […]
|
New book by Asch Associate Director for Conflict and Visual Culture Jonathan Hyman: “The Landscapes of 9/11: A photographer’s Journey” Published by the University of Texas Press the book features 100 of Hyman's photographs and six critical essays that depict and discuss the emotional aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks -- a time when people from all walks of life created and encountered memorials to those who were murdered. Vernacular art appeared almost everywhere—on walls, trees, playgrounds, vehicles, houses, tombstones, and even on bodies. This outpouring of grief and other acts of remembrance impelled photographer Jonathan Hyman to document and preserve these largely impermanent, spontaneous expressions. This book, a unique archive of 9/11 public memory, is the result of his compiling a collection of 20,000 photographs, along with field notes and personal interviews. For more information about the book or to purchase it, visit the book's page at Amazon or Facebook.
|