Callum Smith

I am an ESRC-funded PhD researcher in International Studies. My PhD thesis, provisionally titled 'Drones, Desire and Disaffection: Technopatriotism and its Futures in China', examines the role of drones in the formation of a powerful form of ‘technopatriotism’, which I understand as underscoring the so-called China Dream. As part of this research, I have conducted extensive fieldwork over the past 2 years, mostly in Shenzhen and Beijing, but also including visits to Hangzhou, Zhuhai and Abu Dhabi. Tracing the PRC’s mobilisation of the drone as a promissory object, I draw on this fieldwork to conceptualise technopatriotism as a material-semiotic atmospheric formation that is co-composed through subjects, affects and devices, often outside of human or state intention. I am interested in how this formation circulates affective attachments to a state-commissioned, drone-saturated future in ways that enhance, amplify and extend technopatriotism to make it durable. Indeed, my argument is that this durability is central to the China Dream: that technopatriotism is politically significant in its ability to scaffold a particular futurity of China as a global power that will persist amidst detachment and disaffection. 

Indeed, while acknowledging the resonance and resilience of this formation, my reserach also critically engages with the disobedient habits and flows of bodies that become entangled with Chinese drone technologies. Challenging the connectivist and affirmative tendencies that animate a lot of studies on affect, I am particularly interested in the detachments made available in moments of dysfunction, failure and disappointment, always circulating alongside attachments. Pursuing moments of disruption and contestation from the engineered and orchestrated promises of a technopatriotic dream, I therefore consider ambivalent relations across the drone trade show, practices of smart urbanism (including drone delivery) in Shenzhen, as well as fantasies of the drone techno-fix amidst ecological collapse. These include encounters such as boring drone spectacles, malfunctioning drone deliveries and sometimes laughable attempts to solve climate change with technology. Without positioning these encounters as straightforward forms of ‘resistance’, I am interested in how they nevertheless feed into, reshape and perhaps even subvert the technopatriotic formation I am interested in. 

I have related interests in the global politics of China, STS and New Materialism, and global circulations of techno-culture. 

Please feel free to contact me at [email protected]