Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

This paper makes a case for understanding air power through the lens of police. After first rethinking a key period in the history of air power (colonial bombing campaigns) as a police mechanism, the paper then moves to consider the impoverished conception of war and police in contemporary critical theory. The final section turns to perhaps the most pressing issue in current air power debates, namely drones, and suggests that a consideration of air power as police power helps us read drones as a continuation of the police logic inherent in air power since its inception.

Shifts in the production of national and global territories have coincided with new forms of biopolitical governance and surveillance, producing a simultaneous expansion and contraction of spatial and temporal mobility. In the logistics industries the mainstreaming of Radio Frequency Identification, the extended monitoring networks of GPS telematics, and the implementation of voice picking in warehouses have all had significant impacts on the mobilities of labour. Given the increasing scholarly interest in logistical geographies, this paper investigates these three advancements put to use for the regulation of bodies in the market environments of global capital from a technohistorical perspective, to provide a frame for further discourse on global supply chains, labour struggles, and security cultures.

What may the moment of territorial repossession and resettlement reveal to us about the practice of modern statehood? This paper discusses several key aspects of the Soviet occupation and incorporation of East Prussia in 1945–49: its juridical and administrative configuration into a zone of exception through militarized ‘closing’, the unequal invocation of citizenship rights and duties of Soviet settlers and the creation of legal and political limbo around German civilians, and the categorical production of social distinctions that separated the Soviet ‘us’ from the German ‘them’, together with a simultaneous articulation of a new, obscured identity—the spy. It demonstrates the thoroughly spatialized politics of settlement refracted through everyday experiences of travel, settlement, and cultural encounter. It argues on the basis of these findings that unintelligibility and ambiguity play a more complex role in statecraft than is often recognized.

This paper contributes to current debates concerning affect and the nonrepresentational subject by introducing the concept of the interruption as a means of exploring the politics both of experience and of the feeling body. By thinking about the way in which affect is theorised in Spinoza's Ethics alongside a critique of the subject that draws on Foucault, I position the interruption as an event that elicits a mode of critique that enables an interrogation of both the sociality of affect and the somatisation of politics. This paper explores three events that I describe as interruptions, and demonstrates the utility and scope of such a concept.

Following Butler's argument that understanding the operations of power requires an examination of the contexts of ‘infants' emergence’, this paper explores the potential for infant geographies. Butler points to the importance of infancy to subjection, the formation of psyches, and the ‘fiction’ of an interior or socially anterior self. Attention to infants' everyday geographies therefore has the potential to unravel how individuals are subjected; how power becomes an embodied part of individuals' subjective identities, operating creatively to produce subjects with agency, and, at the same time, limiting and circumscribing appropriate subjectivities. A critical reflection on Butler suggests a need to focus upon how subjection occurs in specific material spaces, and the role of a host of human and nonhuman others to the process of subjection. Also pertinent is a fuller exploration of how diversities of kinship and nonkinship social relations might lead to other constellations of power in the subjection of infants. How the geographies of infants can be operationalised methodologically and epistemologically is also explored. The paper has broader resonance to issues of subjection; to how embodied inequalities are reproduced, transformed, or both; to questions of agency; and to concerns to deconstruct an autonomous, thinking, rational, human subject within human geography—reconfiguring individuals as constituted within emotional and psychic interdependency.

This research examines how a group of mothers in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand are developing and maintaining emotional and familial links with their children of a variety of ages via video calls using Skype. More specifically it seeks to deepen understanding of how seeing one's child or children as part of the communication affects mothers' feelings towards their children. The research is informed by Sara Ahmed's work on ‘queer phenomenology’ and the ‘cultural politics of emotions’, which enabled a critical engagement on mothers' and children's embodied and emotional relationships via screens that convey ‘real-time’ images. Interviews with thirty-five mothers, twenty-four of whom use Skype to contact their children or maintain contact with their own mothers, revealed that the dwelling places of bodies are no longer just rooms in homes where mothers, and children's flesh and emotions rub up against each other on a daily basis but screens across which voices and, even more importantly, images are shared. More than half the mothers who were interviewed reported that using Skype with real-time video to see their children reduced feelings of distance. They also reported that ‘seeing’ their child or children enables them to assess their children's well-being more accurately. In this way the computer screen, as object, by portraying moving visual images, is ‘reorientating’ mothers' and children's bodies offering a seemingly closer physical and emotional proximity than in the past.

This paper argues for the use of ‘fractals’ in theorising sociospatial relations. From a realist position, a nonmathematical but nonmetaphoric and descriptive view of ‘fractals’ is advanced. Insights from the natural sciences are combined with insights on the position of the observer from Luhmann and notions of assemblages and repetitions from Deleuze. It is argued that the notion of ‘fractals’ can augment current understanding of sociospatialities in three ways. First, it can pose questions about the scalar position of the observer or the grain of observation; second, as a signifier of particular attributes, it prompts observation and description of particular structuring processes; and third, the epistemic access afforded by the concept can open up possibilities for transformative interventions and thereby inform the same. The theoretical usefulness of the concept is demonstrated by discussing the territory, place, scale, and networks (TPSN) model for theorising sociospatial relations advanced by B Jessop, N Brenner, and M Jones in their 2008 paper “Theorizing sociospatial relations”, published in this journal (volume 26, pages 389–401). It is suggested that a heuristic arising from a ‘fractal’ ontology can contribute to a polymorphous, as opposed to polyvalent, understanding of sociospatial relations.

Michael Haneke's film Code Unknown (2000) depicts an interracial confrontation on the Paris Métro, which the critical literature has tended to discuss as a comment on European multiculturalism. In this paper I argue that this scene must also be understood as a variation of a string of similar interracial subway scenes that emerged in the New Hollywood era of American cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s. Reflecting interconnected changes in the American city and film industry, this subterranean scene constitutes a key example of a new form of graphically violent urban cinema. Haneke being an ardent critic of American entertainment violence, the appropriation of this scene in Code Unknown allows us to evaluate his counteraesthetic in ways that bridge thematic and auteurist approaches, and that take into account the crucial role of the spectator.

This paper proposes a framework for understanding what novelist Georges Perec has called “the rest” that we live through, the qualities of experience and meaning-making in everyday, in-between spaces, and the ways in which people make sense of the big world through the small. The work explores how common neighborhood places are essential to people's lives, and its framework of “layered dynamics” suggests ways of understanding an individual epistemology of everyday place. The paper grapples with what Doreen Massey has called a “global sense of the local” and how the meanings we make in our most common places relate to our understanding of the larger world, as well as the reciprocal process by which place helps shape us. Drawing on environmental psychology and differing theoretical conceptions of the individual, as well as innovative methods involving neighborhood tours and photographs with residents of a small neighborhood in Oakland, California, this work explores how, through emergent and often conflicting experiences, the everyday physical world around us derives a variety of individual significances. This paper suggests that these spaces are crucial for study and concern, not only for environmental psychologists and geographers but also for planners. The framework proposed here is a range of dynamic and emergent layers that let us understand the complexity of what neighborhoods are really for: as the sites where individual and place meanings are made through a reciprocal dynamic process.

This paper examines the risks generated by human activity in outer space, exploring the possibility of extending Ulrich Beck's ‘world risk society’ thesis beyond the globe. Through the use of three case studies looking at (1) the use of nuclear power in space missions, (2) the proliferation of space debris, and (3) proposed space solutions to environmental problems, it argues for the usefulness of some of Beck's concepts whilst providing a critique of some of his central theoretical assumptions. In particular, the inadequacies of Beck's accounts of economic power and subjectivity are highlighted throughout the paper, and used to suggest that Beck's optimism about the emergence of a cosmopolitan public sphere is misplaced. The paper finishes by arguing that Beck's understanding of a ‘reinvention of politics’ based on the intrusion of risk into everyday life cannot cope with the kinds of risk discussed in the paper. It concludes that it is only through greater recognition of the depth of the economic and psychic structures at work that the politics of risk in outer space can be challenged.