I spend the first decade of my career in academia, dividing my time between teaching classes and conducting original research. My dissertation, Securing America: Drone Warfare in American Culture After 9/11 won the Michael H. Granof Prize at the University of Texas at Austin in 2017, an award recognizing the best dissertation at the university out of any field.
Securing America: Drone Warfare in American Culture After 9/11
An original multidisciplinary research initiative and book-length analysis in fulfillment of the requirements for my Ph.D.
Some background
With drones comprising over 33% of the U.S. military’s air fleet, I wondered: what consequences does that growing ubiquity have not only on military strategy, but on the fabric of everyday life in America? Existing analyses of drone warfare did not address that specific question: most analyses of the consequences of America’s growing push into drone warfare centered on the ethics, legality, or concrete effects of unmanned battle oversea. The story that I wanted to tell was as yet untold.
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My approach
This two-year project began first with a survey and analysis of existing research to deep-dive into fields from political science to security studies to the history of technology. I developed a comprehensive, multidisciplinary understanding of drone technology, and used that to fuel my research questions:
What kind of messages about drones do institutions like private military contractors, military recruitment organizations, or Hollywood send to consumers?
How could these consumers potentially feel about military drones and drone warfare as a result?
And what broader consequences of those messages could ripple through American society?
Methods
Textual analyses of advertising and marketing strategies in defense periodicals
Critical media analysis of videogames, films, theological teachings
Historical research of STEM education programs in the United States in the 20th century
Analysis of in-person science festivals and drone-related events
Screenshot from a short video trailer introducing a church sermon series
Findings
My analysis demonstrated that Americans tend to receive two different, but related, messages about drones in American culture through all of these diverse outlets:
The first message? Drones are your friends. They might seem like a scary technology, but they are as at home in your life as a common vacuum cleaner. They are there to protect you, not to harm you. They are agents of comfort.
The second? Drones are far more powerful than any other technology that has ever existed. They are incomprehensibly strong, durable, and aggressive. They are not your friends: they are vaunted objects to be regarded with both fear and awe.
Although these two messages might seem to contradict each other, I argue that, together, they work to make drone warfare more palatable – if not desirable – to everyday Americans.
Outcomes
Throughout the writing process, I secured over $70,000 in competitive grants and fellowship money to support my research, including the nationally competitive P.E.O. Scholar Award. Furthermore, Securing America was named the best dissertation out of any college or field at the University of Texas at Austin in 2017. I also published an academic article and a book chapter about some of the original research I conducted.
Finally, I became an expert in communicating complex information in plain language, as well as in analyzing and synthesizing data from multiple sources.