Isla Forsyth

What are surfaces

What are surfaces? “So much of life occurs at the surface that, as students of the human scene, we are obliged to pay far more attention to its character (subtlety, variety, and density) than we have done. The scholar’s neglect and suspicion of surface phenomena is a consequence of a dichotomy in western thought between surface and depth, sensory appreciation and intellectual understanding, with bias against the first of the two terms.” Tuan (1989, page 233)

Designs on the desert: camouflage, deception and the militarization of space

Throughout the Second World War camouflage was employed to conceal and counterfeit the military’s presence in diverse landscape habitats; a technology designed to wipe out revealing patterns and inscribe false forms, all in order to make of enemy reconnaissance a glass eye. It was on the plains of the North African desert that the technology proved its effectiveness for military strategy. The desert was an expansive, shifting environment, demanding a new relationship between modern militarism and knowledge of the earth’s surface. Where aerial reconnaissance could threaten to expose military desert designs, other forms of visual literacy were developed to engage with the vertical, as well as the horizontal, plane, all in order to camouflage military movements. This paper critically considers the triangulation of the technology of the aeroplane, and the camera, alongside the granular surface of sand. It explores the working practices of British desert camoufleurs, a diverse group of practitioners, including artists, scientists, filmmakers and, less expectedly, a magician, who were handpicked by the military due to their skills in visual literacy. Their innovations in camouflage form a narrative focusing on the development of desert-based design practices that subsequently arose from military engagements with this environment. The paper seeks to show both the aesthetic and the political implications of these military incursions into the desert, telling how the militarization of the desert exploited a land of mirages to deadly effect.

Subversive Patterning: The Surficial Qualities of Camouflage

During the mid-20th century there was new utility in combining scientific, artistic, and military knowledge for the development of effective military camouflage. When WWII was declared the military began recruiting seemingly disparate specialists, such as surrealist artists, a zoologist, and a magician to train in concealment: to become camoufleurs. Across diverse environments and battlefields these camoufleurs plied their trade of secrecy, in the process militarising landscapes and their knowledges. This paper will explore how camouflage was developed for different interrelated surfaces during war, whether for the sea in WWI, the earth, or in response to aerial warfare. In particular this paper will explore the surface of sand in the Desert War in WWII, which demanded a new relationship between modern militarism and knowledge of the earths surface, in order to develop effective camouflage. In turn, it will reveal that camouflage was a defining factor influencing the geographies of the desert as a theatre of war, transforming it into a bewildering topography requiring, as one soldier put it, ‘mental guts’.

A Bear's Biography: Hybrid Warfare and the More-Than-Human Battlespace

This paper makes an intervention highlighting the animal dimension of military geographies as an overlooked yet illuminating aspect of the hybrid nature of warfare. By bringing animal geographies into dialogue with critical military geographies and with a focus on relational ethics, the processes, performance and consequences of the more-than-human nature of the battlespace are examined through a vignette of Wojtek the bear. Wojtek was a mascot, pet and officially enlisted soldier of the Polish Army in the Second World War who travelled the desert plains, helped to fight at the Battle of Monte Cassino, before being demobbed with his fellow Polish comrades in the UK, eventually ending his civilian days in Edinburgh Zoo. Although a well-known figure Wojtek and his biography have predominately been used as a means to explore the Polish soldiers’ experience of the Second World War with the result that the bear as an animal is absent. This paper, therefore, puts the bear back into his biography in order to acknowledge the role and lived experience of animals in the military. Further, it suggests that exploring the place of animals in the military requires geographers to articulate the hybrid nature of warfare and also to explore the ethico-political relations this produces.

(Dis)entangling Barad: Materialisms and ethics:

In the wake of the widespread uptake of and debate surrounding the work of Karen Barad, this article revisits her core conceptual contributions. We offer descriptions, elaborations, problematizations and provocations for those intrigued by or invested in this body of work. We examine Barad’s use of quantum physics, which underpins her conception of the material world. We discuss the political strengths of this position but also note tensions associated with applying quantum physics to phenomena at macro-scales. We identify both frictions and unacknowledged affinities with science and technology studies in Barad’s critique of reflexivity and her concept of diffraction. We flesh out Barad’s overarching position of ‘agential realism’, which contains a revised understanding of scientific apparatuses. Building upon these discussions, we argue that inherent in agential realism is both an ethics of inclusion and an ethics of exclusion. Existing research has, however, frequently emphasized entanglement and inclusion to the detriment of foreclosure and exclusion. Nonetheless, we contend that it is in the potential for an ethics of exclusion that Barad’s work could be of greatest utility within science and technology studies and beyond.

More-than-human warfare

War breeds experimentations in hybridity. The pursuit of power and domination drives and is shaped by ever-evolving, faster and extensive forms of violence which are enabled and conducted by complex networks of knowledge, politics, economies, technologies and lives. War breeds experiences of hybridity. The execution of state-sanctioned violence is enacted by the entangling and destruction of bodies, materials, environments. This paper suggests that by including, or more precisely acknowledging the place of the more-than-human in biography cultural geography can inject lifeblood into dry military histories, locate the precarious presence of humanity in spaces of violence and expose warfare to be inherently hybrid in its implementation and enactment. This paper argues that personal and embodied biographies of those who experience warfare, which although still anthropomorphic in focus reveal that control and power do not exclusively reside within the human but are produced through more-than-human relations. Therefore, one important contribution that cultural geography can make to studies in warfare is an appreciation of the juxtapositions of both biographies of the overlooked and more-than-human encounters in the everyday expressions of state-sanctioned violence.

Beyond geopower: earthly and anthropic geopolitics in The Great Game by War Boutique

This article reconsiders the nature of art and geopolitics and their interrelations via a discussion of The Great Game, an artwork by War Boutique dealing with successive British military interventions in Afghanistan. As we discuss, The Great Game is richly suggestive in terms of the earthly materials and forces at work in geopolitics, or geopower. The main goal of our discussion, however, is to show how pursuing such concerns leads us back towards a consideration of the anthropic and thus beyond geopower. We argue that framing art and geopolitics in terms of the earthly, the affective and the inhuman is suggestive but underplays much of what art is otherwise taken to be, sometimes even within accounts framed in earthly terms. To develop this argument, we first provide an extended discussion of the The Great Game, in which we consider its entanglement of earthly and anthropic dimensions of geopolitics. We then bring this discussion to bear on work that rethinks geopolitics and art through geopower to highlight the continuing need to contend with the anthropic. Third, we discuss how our understanding of art and geopolitics is enhanced by reflection on what makes artistic engagements with geopolitics artistic, considering how The Great Game has moved through a series of artworlds. In conclusion, we underscore the extent to which art is suggestive as an onto-epistemological form of inquiry into geopolitics as well as an aesthetic–political practice with regard to it and reflect on some of the wider stakes of the discussion.

a feminist menagerie

abstractThis paper appraises the role of critical-feminist figurations within the environmental humanities, focusing on the capacity of figures to produce situated environmental knowledges and pose site-specific ethical obligations. We turn to four environments—the home, the skies, the seas and the microscopic—to examine the work that various figures do in these contexts. We elucidate how diverse figures—ranging from companion animals to birds, undersea creatures and bugs—reflect productive traffic between longstanding concerns in feminist theory and the environmental humanities, and generate new insights related to situated knowledges, feminist care-ethics and the politics of everyday sensory encounters. We also argue, however, that certain figures have tested the limits of theoretical approaches which have emerged as the product of dialogue between feminist theory and environmental studies. In particular, we explore how particular figures have complicated ethical questions of how to intervene in broad environmental threats borne of anthropogenic activities, and of who or what to include in relational ethical frameworks.