| Off-Base: Rethinking New Media Technologies and Military Everdayness, provides an alternative account of contemporary military transformations, particularly in their relation to new media technologies and formations. While many academic discussions of contemporary militarization focus on its more general impacts, and the new types of weapons and warfare it deploys and makes possible, this work provides an account of some of the seemingly banal deployments of new military technologies and techniques, particularly the ways in which they construct different modes of military embodiment and military space--for example, the way new media technologies and mobile health platforms reconfigure understandings of military health or wellness, or the ways in which affectively charged robots or animals are used to change understandings of soldiering or military families. It draws on a diverse archive of policy documents, media texts, and new technologies to provide an account of how notions like resilience, wellness, and post-traumatic growth are increasingly central to military culture, and are envisioned as being desirable and achievable through a combination of new forms of governmentality and new media technologies (like PTSD mobile applications, immersive virtual environments, etc.) This dissertation develops an account of the technologies of military everydayness, to be placed in conversation with some of the more developed discourses and accounts of the militarization of everyday life. |
