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The Good Robot podcast: what makes a drone “good”? with Beryl Pong
Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.
What makes a drone “good”? with Beryl Pong
In this episode, we talk to Beryl Pong, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where she leads the Centre for Drones and Culture. Beryl reflects on what it means to think about drones as “good” or “ethical” technologies and how it can be assessed through its socio-political context. Beryl examines the dual nature of drones, looking at both their humanitarian uses and the ethical implications of their deployment in civilian life. The discussion also touches on the aesthetics of drones and their representation in popular culture, concluding with a reflection on drone light shows as a new form of cultural expression.
Listen to the episode here:
Beryl Pong is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, where she leads the Centre for Drones and Culture and the project Droned Life: Data, Narrative, and the Aesthetics of Worldmaking. Trained in English literature and cultural studies, her work examines drones through aesthetics and culture, exploring how the form and affordances of technologies shape political power, ethics, and everyday life. She treats technology as something that can be closely read and analysed, drawing on methods from literary criticism to think about ethics and more socially just uses of technology.
You can find the episode reading list and transcript here.
About The Good Robot Podcast
Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney are Research Associates at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where they work on the Mercator-Stiflung funded project on Desirable Digitalisation. Previously, they were Christina Gaw Postdoctoral Researchers in Gender and Technology at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies. During the COVID-19 pandemic they decided to co-found The Good Robot Podcast to explore the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.
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