Louise Hooper co-authors ‘Techno-legal Geographies: Consumer Drone Misuse and Harms’ in Gender, Place and Culture

The research article, ‘Techno-legal geographies: consumer drone misuse and harms’, is published in Gender, Place and Culture, an international journal of gender issues in human geography including feminist geographies of difference, resistance, and marginality.

The paper is interested in emerging techno-legal geographies of consumer drone misuse, and deploys a feminist analytic to interrogate drone-enabled harms. It brings drone geographies into dialogue with feminist legal and digital geographies, to interrogate the drone as a technology encountered and interpreted in legal terms and accompanied by gendered impacts.

Responding to calls for the expansion of the methodological toolkit underpinning the drone’s study while also affording geolegal attention to the drone, the paper draws upon focus groups designed in collaboration by a geographer and barrister and bringing together lawyers across diverse specialisms in an exploration of drone misuse and harm.

Louise Hooper is an established public law, human rights and migration lawyer at Garden Court Chambers. Her practice over the last 20 years has involved a focus on human rights, equality and dignity. She views strong commitment to and enforcement of universal human rights standards as fundamental to the rule of law and she is committed to holding those responsible for breaching the human rights of others to account. Louise has worked with the Digital Futures Commission and 5Rights in the UK and UNICEF in the Balkans on child data and digital rights in education. She was an independent gender advisor to ITFLOWS, an EU funded consortium developing migration prediction technology.  She has also worked as an advisor assisting tech start-ups implement human rights risk assessments.