Heike Henderson, a professor of German in the Department of World Languages, contributed a chapter to the recently published “Transnational Crime Fiction: Mobility, Borders and Detection” (Palgrave Macmillan 2020).
Her chapter, Crime and Detection in a Virtually Mobile World: Tom Hillenbrand’s “Drohnenland”‘ (pp. 185-201) investigates Hillenbrand’s dystopian thriller “Drone State,” a German crime narrative that expands and transcends traditional ideas of mobility by including an alternate reality that exists parallel to current time and space. In a world where drones monitor everything and everyone, the almost unlimited mobility of data and digital simulations provides a stark contrast to the actual mobility of the population under surveillance.
Focusing on the effects of digital surveillance and the future of policing, Henderson explores global and local connections, limits of mobility and opportunities for personal agency based on creativity in the use of new technologies. Henderson further discusses the price of convenience and security and the dangers of blindly trusting digital data that can easily be manipulated. Her chapter can be found at the following link:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-53413-4_10