Doctoral Dissertation Research: Drone Pilots, Remote Warfare, and Militarism

Shifts toward remote warfare have disrupted the prior division between deployment and home life. The decompartmentalization of work and home is like to affect how members of the military engage in the work of remote warfare and to affect family relationships as households are less fully separated from military activities. To understand these dynamics, this doctoral dissertation project uses qualitative methods to investigate how the boundaries between home and work and between military and civilian life are being redrawn for service members and their families. The work advances our understanding of the dynamics of military operations as they spill over increasingly into home life. The project trains a graduate student in scientific cultural anthropology and disseminates results broadly to academic, non-academic, and stakeholder audiences. The labor of warfare has always seeped in some ways into homelife, but remote warfare has made the boundaries between work and home and between military and civilian life blurrier than ever before. To understand how porosity in these boundaries impacts military operations, this doctoral dissertation uses semi-structured interviews and participant observation of service members and their families to investigate the following: 1) how military personnel share military experiences with their families; 2) whether and how conducting warfare from home affects the conduct and experience of military operations; and 3) how military personnel and families understand and experience the shifting boundaries between work and home. The study advances scholarship in the anthropology of labor, kinship theory, and identity theory and more generally sheds light on questions of work-life disruptions that have been pervasive during the Covid-19 era. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.