RICE UNIVERSITY Remaking the Pilot: Unmanned Aviation and the Transformation of Work in Postagrarian North Dakota by Marcel LaFIamme A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE Dominic Boyer, Chair Professor, Department of Anthropology aH4fy&£r*L>.Li*^ James Faubioi Professor, Department of Anthropology Radoslav Tsanoff Chair Zoe Wool Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology JffZ If. Ku^UU Steve Murdock Allyn R. and Gladys M. Cline Professor, Department of Sociology HOUSTON, TEXAS January 10,2018 ABSTRACT Remaking the Pilot: Unmanned Aviation and the Transformation of Work in Postagrarian North Dakota by Marcel LaFlamme This dissertation examines changing forms of expertise and their institutionalization as piloting becomes an activity undertaken on the ground rather than in the sky. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in and around the city of Grand Forks, North Dakota between 2010 and 2015, I show how the maturation and proliferation of unmanned aircraft or drones has precipitated changes in what it means to be a pilot that, in turn, index wider transformations in contemporary work. The forms of skill associated with operating an aircraft are revealed to be in flux, as drone pilots learn to compose environments for perception and action and to navigate new media infrastructures. Yet transindividual social forms also prove to be evolving, as the profession of piloting is riven by heterogeneous temporalities and as the hobby takes on new importance as a handler of exceptions. This dissertation seeks to push past the fascination with spatial discontinuity that marks so many responses to the drone, and to locate the elaboration of this technology in a particular, troubled place. In making sense of a coordinated, decade-long effort to position North Dakota as a center of the unmanned aviation industry, I develop an account of Plains biopolitics, a regionally specific mode of governance that aims to keep a sufficiently vital settler population in place by fostering an economic milieu in which potential outmigrants can and do choose to stay. It is, I argue, the failure of settlement that haunts Plains biopolitics, marking efforts to retain and grow the region’s (non-Native) population as at once a bid to maintain settler dominance and an expression of sublimated anxiety about settlement’s fragility. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS All projects have their backstories, and this one’s begins with a series of articles published in the New York Times under the title “Vanishing Point” in December 2003. I was in Paris for the semester, thousands of miles from the American Great Plains, but the poignant accounts of rural depopulation rendered by Timothy Egan and his colleagues captured my imagination. Not two months later, back in Cambridge, I met Ryan Thoreson, who first brought me out to North Dakota. It has taken years for a love affair back when we were “just kids” to mature into an abiding friendship, but I am very glad that it has. In January 2008, I moved to the small town of Independence, Kansas to accept a position as library director at Independence Community College. I expected this chapter of my life to lay the groundwork for my future research, but I did not expect to fall into such an irreverent, brilliant group of friends and co-conspirators: Ryan Andrus, Peter Ellenstein, Peggy Forsberg, Matt Hoven, Hannah Joyce-Hoven, Bruce Peterson, Tucker Porter, Jacob Shivers, Leslie Sklamberg, Carissa Thorlakson, and Kelly Webber filled those years with laughter and companionship. Marsha Hayes taught me that to flourish on the Plains, if you did not grow up there, was to be possessed of a rich inner life. Bill Bishop first alerted me to North Dakota’s investment in technology-based economic development with a story for the Daily Yonder. Brian Depew and others at the Center for Rural Affairs taught me about the unglamorous, vital work of building better rural futures. Rice’s Department of Anthropology has a proud legacy of pushing the boundaries of the discipline; its openness to emergent objects of inquiry, its enthusiasm for experimentation, and its commitment to treating graduate students as junior colleagues made it the ideal setting for me to pursue my doctoral training. Dominic Boyer coaxed me down to Texas for a visit and proved to be the model of a dissertation advisor: generous with his feedback; invested, but never overbearing; iv reassuring about the time it takes to write up (and the real work that begins once you do); ever on the lookout for opportunities to send his students’ way. James Faubion dazzled me with his erudition and pushed me to be more precise in my engagement with theory. Eugenia Georges honed my skills as a grantwriter, while Andrea Ballestero’s knack for the unexpected analytic move challenged me not to settle for stock answers. Zoë Wool’s readerly eye improved everything it touched. Outside the department, the Mellon Graduate Research Seminar taught by Judith Roof and Joseph Campana gave me a space to start exploring the scholarship on settler colonialism; Casey O’Callaghan and Steve Murdock also encouraged my cross-disciplinary forays. One factor that determined my choice of a doctoral program was the requirement that my fellow students be people from whom I felt like I could learn. Early on, Trevor Durbin and Casper Bendixsen’s collaborative research showed me that you needn’t wait for permission to pursue a good idea. Lina Dib’s artistic practice dared me to think beyond the text, while Valerie Olson and Maria Vidart-Delgado took an interest in me as a first-year student that I now realize was rare. Jessica Lockrem, Rebecca (Gimbel) Mantel, and Elizabeth Rodwell set the standard as the cohort ahead of my own. We five—Ereich Empey, Nessette Falu, Ian Lowrie, Nathanael Vlachos, and myself—took time to gel as a cohesive group, but came to rely on one another for insight and encouragement as our projects evolved. Special thanks to Ian, who has become one of my closest interlocutors and friends; he was the first to encounter many of the arguments in this dissertation in a Facebook Messenger window. Subsequent cohorts brought their talents to the department and left their own imprints on its intellectual life: I had the pleasure of working closely with Camille (Barnett) Cohen and Adam Webb-Orenstein as organizers of the New Directions in Anthropology conference, and with Svetlana Borodina, Baird Campbell, Mel Ford, Victor Giménez, Katie Ulrich, Ellie Vainker, and Drew Winter on digital projects for Cultural Anthropology. Dinner v parties with Baird and his husband, Victor Ancheta, were a highlight of the writing phase, as were the many nights at West Alabama Ice House. From 2011 to 2013, I had the good fortune of sharing an apartment with Aditya Shashi, a graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and his very fine cat Pauli. Aditya introduced me to his tremendous group of friends, including Jed Pixley, Sara Haber Pixley, Brian DeSalvo, Alex (Kirshner) Witus, and Lindsey (Anderson) Zuloaga, and I still grin to think of the hijinks that ensued at the Institute and, later, the Bakery, with Karen Rosenthall as an indispensable addition. Beyond the hedges of Rice, I found community at the Central City Co-Op and at Live Oak Friends Meeting. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation in the form of a Graduate Research Fellowship awarded in 2011 and, subsequently, a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (Award #1324297). In North Dakota, I am indebted to Delore Zimmerman and the team at Praxis Strategy Group, who hosted me during my first summer of preliminary fieldwork. Thanks to David Sprague and Dave Fulcher for their support of my research at the Grand Forks NASOC, and to the instructor pilot I call Tom for schooling me on the fine points of Predator operations; I’m happy to report that I’ve finally earned the nickname of “Doc.” At the University of North Dakota, Mark Hastings and Ben Trapnell facilitated my research, while the Department of Anthropology provided office space and a visiting affiliation. Doug McDonald was an invaluable sounding board. Working at the Grand Forks Public Library and singing with the Fargo-Moorhead Gay Men’s Chorus provided some welcome balance to a life otherwise consumed by fieldwork. Tyler Folkedahl, Marie (Strinden) Jensen, Nick Jensen, and Brett Lysne helped keep things in perspective, and my time in Grand Forks was enriched by their presence. vi I began the process of writing this dissertation in an old house ten blocks from the Mississippi River, in the company of Janna Morris, Kate McCarthy, Pat Barron, and Kase Persing. A visiting instructor position at St. Olaf College gave me the chance to teach two courses of my own design. Thanks to Tom Williamson and Chris Chiappari for their mentorship, and to Branden Grimmett for the invitation to give a chapel talk on vocation: some of the ideas first worked out there appear in the dissertation’s conclusion. I presented an early version of the introduction at the Workshop on U.S. Locations at the University of Chicago in 2016; thanks to Adam Sargent and Ella Butler for arranging the invitation, and to Kristen Simmons, Alex Blanchette, and Joseph Masco for their valuable feedback. Chapter 2 first appeared as a research article in Media, Culture and Society; thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for helping to clarify its framing. I presented an early version of Chapter 3 in the Colloquium Series in the Department of Anthropology at Rice, and I was honored to have the version that appears here recognized by the Society for the Anthropology of Work with the 2017 Eric R.