Landscapes of authority, affect and public memory

This project addresses both the experience of authority or the specific spatialities of authoritative relations through an empirical analysis of spaces of authority. My own personal contribution to these debates concerns their relation to concepts of affect and public memory, building on my previous work on affect, politics and subjectivity.

The two empirical spaces that make up this project have been chosen to specifically address these concerns, and to produce research that will contribute towards a long-term research plan to investigate and chart the affective and experiential dimensions of neoliberal landscapes. The two spaces are:

  • Chatham Docks and the landscapes of post-industrial loss
  • Soldiers’ bodies, authority and the militarisation of everyday life

Landscapes-of-authority-and-public-space

Memorial for Drummer Lee Rigby, Woolwich, London

Project timeframes

The project ran from 2012 to 2014.

 

Project aims

Chatham Docks and the landscapes of post-industrial loss

This involved an exploration of heritage and popular memory in relation the post-industrial landscape of Chatham dockyard. It also involved a mixed-method ethnographic research strategy, incorporating interviews with former dockers and their families, document analysis and participant observation in order to consider the spatial modalities of experience that emerge from engagement with living memory (both individual and collective) of the docks and provide a means of investigating the role of labour, masculinity, community and loss in the production of post-industrial authority and experience.

Soldiers’ bodies, authority and the militarisation of everyday life

This project addresses the affective, embodied and experiential aspects of political authority through an analysis of spaces of militarisation, particularly those sites that bring to visibility military bodies. These sites include the Invictus Games, the repatriation ceremonies in Carterton, Oxon and Wootton Bassett, and spaces of everyday militarism including fundraising events for military charities and military style fitness classes. The project extends my interest in the politics of affect, considering the means through which encounters between bodies and spaces of militarism produces particular political-affective responses, intensities and atmospheres.

The project draws on recent Wellcome Trust funded work on Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain and collaborations with other members of the Understanding Conflict: forms and legacies of violence research cluster, and contributes to the emerging field of critical military studies, as well as debates in affect theory, nonrepresentational theory and body studies.

Project findings and impact

Output, findings and impact will be updated in due course.

Research team

Dr Leila Dawney

 

Output

Papers currently in preparation.

Preliminary research has been presented at the following:

11 February 2016: Geography Departmental Seminar, University of Exeter,  “Adjusting intangibles”: embodiment and affect in sensate regimes of war

10-11 December 2015 Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: A Thirty Year Retrospective, Brighton, UK “Visibilities of Wounding and the Mediation of Affect”.

September 1-4, 2015 Annual Meeting of the Royal Geography Society with the Institute for British Geographers, Exeter, UK: “Soldiers’ bodies, authority and the militarisation of everyday life”.

21 April 2015 Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Chicago, Il “Authority’s grip: attachments and alienations”

Partners