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Militarized perception is always leaking into public culture, from the aerial prospect of balloon flight to the soldier's helmet camera. Increasingly, the mode of militarized perception most powerfully emergent in Anglo-American everyday life is that of the militarized drone: flattened, loitering, zooming, networked. This mode of perception is enacted by a logistic assemblage that is military in origin, one in which remote sensors, signal flows and autonomous processes work across complex human-machine networks. The paper tracks this new form of everyday militarism across four scenes of cultural life: the Predator on display in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum; the DJI Spark consumer selfie drone; recreational use of drones in Sydney, Australia; and the activist deployment of drones as witnesses in Hagit Keysar's artwork 'No Fly Zone: Jerusalem.' In doing so, the paper traces the forms and dynamics of drone perception to argue that an emergent 'drone culture' can be seen in the manifestation in everyday life of modes of perception distinct to the remote sensing apparatus of the militarized drone.

Like so many technologies before it, the drone promises liberation from the burdens of human existence: from work, wanting, waiting and even war. The drone, we are told, will watch our cities and our borders, it will deliver our goods and dispose of our enemies. It will do all this while keeping human bodies—or, rather, certain select human bodies—safe from harm (Chamayou 2015). Yet once the drone is abstracted away from the unmanned aerial vehicle and understood as the figure of autonomous, sensing technology (Andrejevic 2015), its logics become ubiquitous and its complex imbrications with our bodies inescapable. Essential to the emergent drone assemblage and to the affective form of its promise is the rising tide of techno-capitalism: military manufacturers, tech giants, start-ups, robotics labs, venture capitalists (Benjamin 2013, Gusterson 2017). This enfolding of military, industry and finance capital into the networked and mediating infrastructures of contemporary life means that drone capital is increasingly entangled in the everyday, impinging upon bodies and producing new modes, forms and flows of relation between the corporeal and the technical. Thus the promise of the drone is also the promise of a future transformed: of modes and flows of capital freed even further from the strictures and constraints of human labour; of space and temporality controlled; of technoaffected experiences of the body itself. Tracing the movements of drone capital from military expenditure, automated finance and logistics, this paper maps the affects of hope and anxiety that accumulate around the ambivalent figure of the drone and its bodily entanglements, impingements and potentials.

Disappearances keep appearing in the digital sphere: video circulates of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) beheading of a kidnapped journalist; MH370 vanishes into sky yet its real and imagined journeys are traced ceaselessly; friends learn someone close to them has died when Facebook 'memorializes' their page. Each is different: a lost airplane, unreported boat people and a deceased life. In the work of trauma studies scholars such as Cathy Caruth [1996. Unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative, and history. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press] and Shoshana Felman and D. Laub [1992. Testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. New York: Routledge], such events are felt but unrecognized, known to have happened but unable to be represented. Yet these are traumas that can be experienced with intensity and immediacy in the mediated worldings of the digital. They are encounters with radical absence. Affect theory offers the means to conceptualize this 'vicarious trauma' [Kaplan 2005, Trauma culture: the politics of terror and loss in media and literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, p. 87]; it bridges the conceptual gap between an event that happened and the meaning it contains. Since affect is 'the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other' [Massumi 2002, Parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 35], it offers a way of understanding trauma in keeping with the digital: fluid, moving, changeable, multitudinous and even contagious. This paper traces the contours of encounters with video beheadings, the vanishing of MH370, and markers of digital death as encounters with radical absence that are emblematic of the complexity of traumatic affect and mediated trauma in the digital sphere.

© 2017 by the author(s). Despite public awareness of their role, speechwriters occupy an anxiously liminal position within the political process. As the ongoing dispute between former Australian prime minister Paul Keating and Don Watson over the Redfern Speech suggests, the authorship and ownership of speeches can be a fraught proposition, no matter the professional codes. Crafting and re-crafting identity places speechwriter and speechmaker in a relation of intense intimacy, one in which neither party may be comfortable and from which both may well emerge changed. Having written speeches for Jack Layton, former leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, I know just how complex, uncertain and productive that relation can be. This article conceives of identity as transindividual, formed in the intensity and flux of encounter, and weaves together the personal and the critical to examine politics' speechwriting ghost.

'I know where she went, it's disgusting, I don't want to talk about it. No, it's too disgusting. Don't say it, it's disgusting, let's not talk'. That's Donald Trump, discussing Hilary Clinton taking a bathroom break. It is just one of the many things which disgust him. While his rhetoric about other races and religions steers clear of the word, his imagery evokes the rejection or ejection characteristic of disgust: deporting illegal immigrants, a wall on the Mexican border, a ban on Muslim travel. This paper argues that the affirmation, amplification and circulation of disgust is one of the primary affective drivers of Trump's political success. In doing so, Trump capitalizes on the tendency of political conservatives to be more intensely moved by disgust. Discarding, ejecting or blocking the sticky, disgusting object becomes a visceral and even contagious necessity. Sharing that recoil, as Trump does with his most passionate supporters, can forge an intense, enduring and binding relation. While the dynamics of disgust are most evident in the crowds at his rallies, it is also mediatized and transmitted through broadcast and social media. As the Trump era unfolds, it is crucial to understand disgust as a mode of affective politics.

ABSTRACTThis paper provides a subjective, personal account of the impact and effect which the collation and sharing of information had and continues to have on my family during the course of a child protection investigation. By sharing my story I hope to preserve my unique, subjective experience in the midst of an impersonal and highly invasive bureaucratic process in an attempt to bridge the power divide between the professional and parent. I do not attempt to analyse theory but rather feelings, and identify the differing perceptions of those involved. The importance of the professional maintaining an open mind and challenging any preconceived assumptions or judgements about a family is also stressed. Child protection work must ensure that policies and practice comply with the rights laid down in the Human Rights Act (1998) and the professionals involved must be seen to promote and protect the rights of all vulnerable individuals.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police has sparked protests and riots around the world. The policing of the pandemic reveals the racial biases inherent to law enforcement and state-led discipline, laying bare ongoing infrastructural inequalities that render racialized subjects more vulnerable to premature death at the hands of police and public health systems alike. With the video embedded in the article, we guide readers through thirty-nine seconds of rioting in Los Angeles on May 31, 2020, shot on a mobile phone and circulated virally on Twitter. The affected body of the witness indexes both the intensity of the event and the embodied experience of the witness, establishing a relation between the two. The experiential aesthetics of the video exceeds the content and this affectivity circulates with its mediation and movement through networked platforms. Such forms of affective witnessing allow for an attunement to political struggle that occurs through what Hortense Spillers would call the analytic of the flesh. Thinking at the intersection of Black studies, affect theory, and media studies, we argue that the flesh is an affective register crucial to the building of global anti-racist solidarities towards abolition.

The European Framework for Key Competences (2006) promotes a shared European identity as a priority for assuring a cohesive future for the European Union (EU), yet the development of a discrete European identity remains acutely contentious, with critics claiming it is too shallow to support the bonds of solidarity needed to engender and support a shared 'future together'. Most EU member states now have some sort of citizenship curriculum within their state education systems and most are aware that such programmes are difficult to introduce, to teach and to assess within conventional school curricula. However, much of the citizenship education literature tells us that educators are conscious of the problematic nature of exploring citizenship identities. Drawing on both philosophical perspectives and an empirical investigation undertaken by one of the authors, this paper argues that issues of belonging may prove a useful way to explore wider conceptions of citizenship. The research was designed to examine how visual art and citizenship education could be combined to explore and extend children's notions of European identity, using data from Images & Identity, an EU-funded 2-year curriculum development project on citizenship and art education in the Czech Republic, England, Ireland, Germany, Malta and Portugal.