Drone Sensing in Emergency: Visuals, Volumes, and Vocabularies

This chapter explores drones as they are employed and experimented with to sense ‘for good’ through the lens of emergency service drone use in the UK. It brings drone scholarship interested in the drone’s visual regimes and sensory capacities into conversation with geographies of volume, namely thinking about space in three- rather than two-dimensional terms. Drawing upon focus group and interview data with members of UK emergency services and responders, it asserts the need for, and seeks to articulate, more nuanced vocabularies of drone seeing-sensing and volume alike.