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

向远程战争的转变已经打破了先前部署和家庭生活之间的界限。工作和家庭的分离可能会影响军队成员参与远程战争的方式，也会影响家庭关系，因为家庭与军事活动的分离程度较低。为了理解这些动态，本博士论文项目使用定性方法来研究如何为军人及其家人重新划定家庭与工作之间以及军事与平民生活之间的界限。这项工作促进了我们对军事行动动态的理解，因为军事行动越来越多地渗透到家庭生活中。该项目培养一名科学文化人类学的研究生，并向学术界、非学术界和利益相关者广泛传播研究成果。战争的劳动总是以某种方式渗透到家庭生活中，但远程战争使工作与家庭、军事与平民生活之间的界限比以往任何时候都更加模糊。为了了解这些边界的孔隙度如何影响军事行动，本博士论文采用半结构化访谈和对服役人员及其家属的参与式观察来调查以下问题：1)军人如何与家人分享军事经验；2)在家作战是否以及如何影响军事行动的行为和经验；3)军人和家庭如何理解和体验工作和家庭之间不断变化的界限。这项研究推进了劳动人类学、亲属关系理论和身份理论方面的学术研究，并更广泛地揭示了在新冠肺炎时代普遍存在的工作与生活中断问题。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.