Julia M. Hildebrand

Generative artificial intelligence services (such as ChatGPT, Claude.ai, and DeepSeek) are rapidly entering the classroom, offering both opportunities and challenges for students and educators. While AI can support personalized learning and efficiency, it also raises important questions about critical thinking and academic integrity in education. In this talk, I highlight some of the benefits and risks of AI as a teaching tool as well as a subject of study in the media and communication classroom.

This presentation draws on my book Aerial Play: Drone Medium, Mobility, Communication and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and the extent to which it draws on media ecological frameworks to unpack consumer drones in recreational and artistic spaces. The book delves into the ways camera drones, as media, transform spatial, mobile, visual, and affective relations in everyday geographies.

Through ethnographic fieldwork, auto-technographic reflection, and user interviews, I explore questions such as “How should we situate drone practices in recreational spaces?” and “What ways of seeing, moving, and being do hobby drones open up?” Across chapters about drone geography, communication, mobility, visuality, and human-machine relations, Aerial Play introduces novel frameworks for drone affordances, such as communication on the fly, disembodied mobilities, auratic vertical play, and drone-mindedness. The book shows how perspectives onto consumer drones as foremost unmanned aircraft, spying tool, or dangerous toy need to be widened to account for the full range of its risks and potentials.

The talk will emphasize how media ecological frameworks and methods open up important holistic avenues for studying proliferating technologies such as the drone. Moreover, I highlight how related approaches from mobile communication studies, mobilities research, human geography, and science and technology studies can enrich those of media ecology.