'Droning on' in China: the disaffected futurity of technopatriotism

Based on multi-sited and multi-year ethnographic fieldwork in China and the UAE between 2023 and 2026, it reveals the ways that drones are mobilised across various domains to generate attachments to shiny visions of technological futurity, whilst simultaneously producing uneven forms and (non)intensities of detachment amid conditions of disaffection.</p><p dir="ltr">In showing this, the thesis makes three conceptual contributions to critical studies of the drone and transdisciplinary work on materiality and affect.

Firstly, it offers a theorisation of technopatriotism as a politically significant atmospheric formation that which attachments to state-commissioned technological futures are circulated and, crucially, made durable. Second, it conceptualises drone technologies as heterogeneous ‘attachment-detachment’ devices, in order to show how they make available attachment to state-led visions of progress, while concurrently enabling and recycling negotiated forms of detachment and ambivalence.