Dr Katharine Hall, BA (Wesleyan University), MA (University of Minnesota), PhD (University of Minnesota)

Profile

I received my PhD in 2015 from the Department of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota, where I wrote my dissertation on the history of drone technology (Lethal Surveillance: Drones and the Geo-History of Modern War). Before joining the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, I held a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Society of Fellows and the Department of Geography at Dartmouth College. I work in the fields of international relations and security studies, political geography, and science and technology studies, and my research focuses on questions related to modern war and security, military and surveillance technologies, and the longer historical and racialized geographies of militarization and practices of state violence.

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Teaching

On Research Leave for Semester A.

Undergraduate Teaching

POL256 – War in World Politics

POL398 – American Politics, Carceral State and Social Movements

Postgraduate Teaching

POLM096 – War and International Security

Research

Research Interests:

I am currently working on two main projects. The first centers on British pilotless aircraft programs in the Interwar period, specifically the Larynx weaponized drone that was tested in Iraq at the end of the 1920s. The project aims to place the drone strike within a broader context of Western violence and scientific development and does so through focusing on the importance of the experimental and the experiment for understanding not only the development of military targeting drones but also for conceptualizing air power more broadly.

The second project looks at racialized violence and militarized urban policing practices. Currently focusing on the 1985 violent confrontation between the Philadelphia police and the MOVE organization, I am interested in investigating intersections of police violence, race, military technology, and state power, as well as connecting the MOVE confrontation to longer historical geographies of the militarization of police violence prior to September 11, 2001. 

Examples of research funding:

PhD research funding awards included the University of Minnesota Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2013-2014) and the Mark and Judy Yudof Fellowship in Science Policy and Ethics (2012-2013).

Publications

Journal Articles

2021 – “Martial Politics, MOVE and the Racial Violence of Policing,” Politics Online: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02633957211042732

2017 – “The Technological Rationality of the Drone Strike.” Critical Studies on Security 5(1): 28-44 (as Katharine Hall Kindervater)

2017 – “Drone Strikes, Ephemeral Sovereignty, and Changing Conceptions of Territory.” Territory, Politics, Governance 5(2): 207-221 (as Katharine Hall Kindervater)

2016 – “The Emergence of Lethal Surveillance: Watching and Killing in the History of Drone Technology.” Security Dialogue 47(3): 223-238 (as Katharine Hall Kindervater)

Other Publications

2020 – “Reading Geography and Geographers and Political Geography today,” GeoJournal Online: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10708-020-10201-8#citeas

2020 – “Jocelyn Wills. Tug of War: Surveillance Capitalism, Military Contracting, and the Rise of the Security State.” -Enterprise & Society, 21(3): 810-813.

2019 – “Linear Perspecitve, the Modern Subject, and the Martial Gaze,” online review forum for Antoine Bousquet’s The Eye of War, The Disorder of Things, Online at https://thedisorderofthings.com/2019/01/11/linear-perspective-the-modern-subject-and-the-martial-gaze/

2018 – “L’ère des drone.” In Bruno Cabanes, et al. , eds. Une histoire de la guerre. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

2017 – “Race and Resistance in the Predator Empire, Reading Ian Shaw’s Predator Empire: Drone Warfare and Full Spectrum Dominance.” Book Review Forum Essay. Political Geography 62: 216-222

2017 – Book Review of Predator Empire by Ian Shaw. Online at SocietyandSpace.org (as Katharine Hall Kindervater)

2014 – Review Essay. From Above: War, Violence and Verticality, by Peter Adey, Mark Whitehead, and Alison J. Williams, eds and Aerial Life: Space, Mobilities, Affects, by Peter Adey. Association of American Geographers Review of Books 2(4): 158-161 (as Katharine Hall Kindervater)

Supervision

I would welcome PhD proposals on topics related to the history of war and Western violence, military and/or security technologies and practices, and/or policing. I am also interested in supervising PhD work that connects more broadly to political geography, theorizations of liberal violence and power, critical race studies, and the history and philosophy of science and mathematics.

Current Students:

• Lizy Blake
• Fawzia Gibson-Fall
• Jesse Connuck
• Nawaf Alessa

Past PhD Students:

• Andonea Dickson