Technology and the Local Community: Uses of Drones in #NoDAPL Movement and Dandora Dumpsite Storytelling

Abstract

This article aims to explore the connection between drones and alternative journalistic narratives for local communities. Starting from the frame of digital technologies domestication, we explore how UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) could allow mediated practices of mobilization and resistance. By adopting an exploratory approach, we considered two case studies of drone journalism related to specific community issues that share similar characteristics of social inequalities and environmental risks and analyzed the journalistic work by Digital Smoking Signal, related to the #NoDAPL protests, and the African skyCAM reconstruction of the Dandora dumpsite in Kenya. As a result, we are able to show how the appropriation and use of drones can help communities to highlight some underinvestigated social issues. The analysis underlines two different ways of using drone technology to support the local community’s narrative, based on the level of involvement of the journalists in the community cause itself.