Drone Journalism and Community Voices

This paper aims to explore how Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), thanks to its vertical spatiality and movement autonomy which allows the conjuncture of above and below as a public space (Tuck S., 2018), could provide materials to enhance a community-based narrative. The growing use of drones in journalism, or “dronalism” (Goldberg et al., 2013), brings a new perspective to both the traditional visual coverage of news and the bottom-up journalistic practices, that rely mostly on mobile and social media coverage. Indeed, it seems to add further values to the journalistic storytelling and its advocacy. Starting from the case of the North Dakota Pipeline (DAPL) (Rafsky S., 2017), which well exemplifies the contradictions and potentials of drone journalism, and ending on the case of Dandora dumpsite in Kenya, we would like to go deeper into the debate by comparing two geographical areas, two distinguished realities which share some similar characteristics: social inequalities and environment risks. More in detail, we would like to explore how this technology could help communities in providing evidence for counter-narratives, juxtaposing the journalistic work ‘Digital Smoking Signal’ in Standing Rock with that one of African SkyCAM, in Nairobi. As part of an exploratory approach, we can outline two different ways of using drone technology for empowering community-based narrative, where the main difference regards the level of involvement of the journalists in the community cause itself.