Peter Adey

If mobility is everything then it is nothing: Towards a relational politics of (im)mobilities

This paper is concerned with conceptions of mobility and immobility. Although I argue that practically everything is mobile, for mobility to be analytically useful as a term we must focus on the contingent relations between movements. Building upon theories of mobility from geography, sociology, cultural studies and, in particular, Urrys ‘mobility/moorings dialectic’, the paper draws these ideas out using examples from the airport terminal.

Facing Airport Security: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Preemptive Securitisation of the Mobile Body:

This paper explores how the mobile body and, specifically, the face have become a site of observation, calculation, prediction, and action in the process of moving across borders. The paper explores how in the circulatory space of the airport/border, the bodys circulatory systems, biological rhythms, and affective expressions have become objects of suspicion—mobile surfaces from which inner thoughts and potentially hostile intentions are scrunitized, read, and given threatening meaning by the newest modes of airport security and surveillance. Examined according to the vectoral modes of historicity and virtual possibility, as well as the internal and external play of intention and feeling, the paper uncovers an increased attention to differential axes of mobility—of past and future, surface and interior. The paper situates these techniques within the preemptive biopolitical securitisation of mobility across borders which, it is argued, has found its referent object in the primal realm of affective capacities.

Architecture/Affect/Inhabitation: Geographies of Being-In Buildings

Architectural design operates beyond symbolic and representational interpretation. Drawing on recent “nonrepresentational” geographies, we demonstrate how architectural space can be rethought through the concept of affect. We explore how individual buildings and their architects preconfigure, limit, and engender particular affects to accomplish very particular goals. Our analysis is based on two buildings in the United Kingdom: an ecological school and an airport. We demonstrate how affects both enable and constrain practices such as teaching, playing, and relaxing that render different buildings as uniquely meaningful places. The affects designated to and by these buildings are indispensable to the specification of particular styles of inhabitation, in ways not previously considered by architectural geographers.

Surveillance at the Airport: Surveilling Mobility/Mobilising Surveillance

In this paper the author is concerned with the relationship between mobility and practices of surveillance, examining their interconnections within the modern airport. Recent deliberations about airports define these spaces as free, empty of power and social relationships—open to mobility. The author questions these assumptions and explores the surveillance practices that work to control and differentiate movement, bodies, and identities within the airport. Four examples are discussed, ranging from techniques that ignore mobile passengers towards those that simulate them. The airport is argued to offer perhaps a blueprint for public space, intensifying the surveillance of movement through mobilised and combined forms of monitoring. The author concludes the paper by reflecting upon the implications for the mobility and identity of the passenger as spaces such as airports become increasingly reflexive.

‘May I Have Your Attention’: Airport Geographies of Spectatorship, Position, and (im)Mobility:

This paper is concerned with the immobilities which airports induce and force to occur by positioning passengers through various and perhaps unconscious technological arrangements and performances of spectatorship. Through a conceptual reworking of spectatorship, these processes are explored through examples which range from the first airports, which functioned as city destinations from which to watch aircraft, to the carefully structured terminals of today. The airport is rethought as a space not merely to travel through but one which is designed to hold people in specific spaces. The paper also discusses the rationale behind these occurrences as they do not happen by random but are dictated by the forces of airline and airport regulation and economics.

Anticipating emergencies: Technologies of preparedness and the matter of security:

In this article, we examine contemporary ‘resilience’ through UK preparedness – an apparatus of security enacted under the legal and organizational principles of UK Civil Contingencies and civil protection legislation and practices. By examining the design, practices and technologies that constitute the exercises performed within Civil Contingencies, the article first suggests that the manner in which exercises have been mobilized as examples of preparedness and apocalyptical imaginations of the ‘unthinkable’ should be understood within the highly specific societal and political contexts that shape them. More substantially, the article then provides a nuanced understanding of the life of the security assemblage through an in-depth analysis of the exercise and its design, materials, play and contingent relations. Seeking to deepen and widen concerns for what matters in security studies, animated by concern for objects, bodily affects, contingencies and excess, the article contends for a more serious concern with how security and its practices can surprise, shock, enthral and disrupt in a manner that need not only be associated with failure.

Affect and Security: Exercising Emergency in ‘UK Civil Contingencies’

In this paper we explore the relation between affect and security through a case study of one technique for making futures present and actionable: The use of exercises in UK emergency planning after the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act. Based on observation of exercises and interviews with emergency planners, we show how exercises function by making present an ‘interval’ of emergency in between the occurrence of a threatening event and its becoming a disaster. This ‘interval’ is made present through a set of partially connected affective atmospheres and sensibilities. By making futures present at the level of affect, exercises function as techniques of equivalence that enable future disruptive events to be governed. Through this case study we argue against epochal accounts that frame the relation between affect and security in terms of an ‘age of anxiety’ or a ‘culture of fear’. Instead, we understand security affects to be both a means through which futures are made present in apparatuses of security and a part of the relational dynamics through which apparatuses emerge, endure, change, and function strategically.

Positioning place: polylogic approaches to research methodology

This article focuses on the difference that place makes to methodological practice. It argues, following Sin, that the spatial contexts in which methods are carried out remain ‘largely excluded from any theorization of the social construction of knowledge’ (2003: 306). Through viewing ‘place’ as both a social and a geographical entity (following Cresswell, 1996), this article argues that although the importance of social relationships in methodology is widely accepted (through, for example, processes of researcher reflexivity), the influence of the ‘where of method’ has received less attention. The article addresses this issue by arguing for the explicit consideration of the geographical dimension of place in methodology. It does so by introducing the notion of a polylogic approach to method. The polylogic approach moves away from the conventional configuration of method as a dialogue (e.g. between researcher and researched) and towards method explicitly including researcher, researched, and the geographic place of methodology.

Air’s affinities Geopolitics, chemical affect and the force of the elemental

In the midst of renewed geographical and geophilosophical interest in the Earth, the biosphere and, specifically, what has been called an ‘aerography’, this article explores how air might be made sense of as elemental. As a different way to apprehend elements to notions within the turn to a material–affective thing–power, assemblage theory or geophysical processes and complexities, the article explores air by apprehending it through chemical–alchemic notions of affinity and a political–mythic philosophical elementalism. In so doing, it is suggested that we might bring the air to account rather differently.

The software-simulated airworld: anticipatory code and affective aeromobilities

This paper is concerned with the way in which airspaces are organised, managed, and understood by virtual representations—software simulations that are tested and used both preemptively and in real time. We suggest that, while airspaces are often understood as simulations themselves—models and blueprints for real-world futures—they are among the most mediated of all contemporary social environments, produced not only through code, but based on scenarios which predict and plan for future events—real vitalities that might come true. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples of aeronautical software simulation employed by civilian and military aviation, we explore how code has become increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous in response to the challenges set by the mobilities the simulations model and the affective susceptibility of the corporeal body that uses them. The paper explores how software simulations work to structure and mediate behaviour by producing specific emotional and affective experiences in order to prepare the body for future encounters.