Moving forward with Legal Geographies at RGS 2014

We have been delighted with the response to our recent Legal Geography call for papers for RGS 2014, with submissions coming from the UK, France, Italy, Australia, Brazil, the United States (3), covering empirical work in Nauru, Estonia, Cambodia as well as the US, UK and Europe. We have submissions from disciplines including law, geography and politics. As a result we’ve got 15 great papers for our session, and this is a very positive response rate, which bodes very well for this (re)emergent hybrid field.

Antonia Layard (University of Bristol) and I have had to secure special permission from the RGS to run a three-part session to fit all of these papers in. We’re delighted to have heard back this morning that this permission has been granted. The breadth of coverage and strength of the proposed papers have helped us to secure this dispensation. The RGS’ conference is focused upon ‘co-production’ this year, and so our array of topics, scales of analysis and the global reach of the papers has helped to press the right buttons. We’ve decided on the session title ‘Moving forward with Legal Geographies’ – the plural here reflecting the wonderful variety of legal geographic endeavour and concern that the papers attest to, and the ‘moving forward’ bit pointing to the way that the papers show the boundaries of legal geography being stretched both methodologically and theoretically.

We don’t yet know which day (27, 28 or 29th August) our session will run. That will be notified to us around April. There are more details about the conference here:

http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Annual+international+conference.htm

Antonia and I are collaborating to promote Legal Geography and to develop a UK community with active links to the established LG communities in Australia and Northern America, but also to help spread the focus out from its Anglo-Saxon predominance. To that end anyone who’s interested can join our open conversations at our (very basic but workable) wiki site:

http://lawandgeography.wikidot.com/.

We are also currently guest editing a Legal Geography special edition of the International Journal of Law in the Built Environment, to be published towards the end of the year (papers currently in review), and are working upon our own LG outputs (jointly and individually).

As a taster of our session’s content, here’s the overarching session description from our proposal document:

This legal geography stream proceeds from the assumption (which appears to be widely accepted, though critiques are always welcome) that space, society and law are co-constituted, that there is a nexus, which ebbs and flows, co-producing the legal, spatial and social everyday. Legal geography has, in other words, been ‘born’. Given this assumption, this stream aims to consider how the cross-discipline is being applied and extended, presenting papers that identify new and ongoing lines of spatio-legal inquiry, research and theory.

The first session, Legal productions of spaces and environments, focuses on the co-production of legal, economic and political practices and principles across space. By examining diverse examples ranging across the judicial imagination’s regard for Brazilian environments, the Severnscape and the relational networks formed through contract law in West Midlands engineering supply chains, it asks how legal discourse and practices contribute to the making and control of identities, relationships and sites of encounter at multiple scales. Reaching back through an American reading of E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters and considering Italian constructions of ‘security’, the session also investigates how scale is used as a framing device to govern across social and spatial distances.

The second session, Interrogating assumptions of legal closure, investigates the critique of legal practice, that it is enclosed, which lies at the heart of legal geography. The session begins with two papers, drawing on material from UK/European legal decisions and empirical legal work in New Mexico, which demonstrate the effect that legal closure still has in governing space. However, papers investigating legal pluralism, in domestic violence in Cambodia, ‘Indian country’ in the United States and constructions of families in Ghana and the United States, illustrate the slippage, and discretion, in formal legal rules when studied as ‘laws in action’.

The third session, Legal materialities, asks how spaces and places are themselves co-produced – legally and politically as well as socially and spatially. It emphasises the importance of materiality, asking how the spatio-legal is implicated in managing places (including the International Court in the Hague, the island of Nauru, a Derbyshire cotton mill and an Estonian car park) as well as troublesome resources such as phosphate, dye and nuclear wastes. The session considers, in particular, how the spatio-legal frames and marshalls the arrangements of things in space and constellates the environments of which they form part. It also considers how law is translated into flows of matter, giving rise to resultant assemblages of materials, provisions and practices and their resultant landscapes.

As the conference approaches I will post more details here, identifying the speakers and more about their papers.

In closing, here’s a glance across to ‘where next’ visions offered up by two recent synoptic reviews of the Legal Geography field, one from Australia and one from North America/Israel:

“Legal geography would benefit from deepening its connections with posthuman and critical animal studies scholarship and from studies of the vibrancy of matter (Jane Bennett 2010), and its science and entanglements (Karen Barad 2007) in particular. Such explorations will ground legal geography in corporal matters, moving us away from abstract notions of space into “more-than-human” (Sarah Whatmore 2006) legal geographies…. Although legal geographers are already actively engaged with postcolonial theory, science studies, poststructuralism, thing theory, performativity and many other fields, we should be engaging with still more fields, such as the humanities and posthumanities, physical geography, economics, psychology and psychoanalysis, material culture, architecture, organizational studies, and visual culture.”

(Braverman et al 2013: 20-21)

And:

 “…By situating law in space, that is, within its physical conditions and limits, legal geography encourages place based knowledge to form law’s basis. We are advocating for a paradigmatic shift, from the alienation of people and place in law and geography to their necessary connection. In this way legal geography provides both intellectual insight and real-world application: it can produce work of practical policy relevance as well as speak truth to power.”

(Bartel et al, 2013: 349)

The array of presentations at RGS 2014 respond very positively to those pointers to new areas of a relational and materiality focussed legal geographic enquiry, they also embrace other territories of investigation called for by Braverman et al (2013) variously addressing rural legalities, spatio-temporal effects, pragmatism, legal pluralism, the relationality of power and purpose, variation of scale and comparison across jurisdictions alongside that interrogation of the materiality of law’s objects, law’s spaces and law’s habits.

 

References

Bartel R, Graham N, Jackson S, Prior J.H, Robinson D.F, Sherval M and Williams S (2013) ‘Legal Geography: An Australian Perspective’, Geographical Research, 51(4), 339-353.

Braverman I, Blomley J, Delaney D and Kedar A (2013) The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography, Buffalo Legal Studies Research Paper Series, Paper No. 2013-032, SUNY Buffalo Law School, New York.

Image source: Vellum parchment at UK parliamentary archives via http://londonhistorians.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/the-parliamentary-archives-with-london-historians/ photo by Peter Twist.

 

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19 bunkerologists set to talk about Cold War Bunkers at RGS 2014

“Military bunkers are…a key component of our urban condition, if not always consciously acknowledged as such…sensitivity to military bunkers can offer an essential anchor in material culture…” John Armitage quoted in Schofield (2009: 1)

I’m delighted to announce that the proposed Cold War Bunkers: Exceptionalism, Affect, Materiality and Aftermath conference session will be going ahead at the 2014 Royal Geographical Society Conference, in London at the end of August.

Together with my co-convenors John Beck and Ian Klinke, I’ve today finalised the programme and there will be a total of 17 papers, spread across four consecutive panel sessions. That’s a full day of bunker talk, from 9am through to 6.30pm.

We’ve had to obtain special permission in advance from the RGS to have a four part session, but they were impressed by the diverse range of disciplines to be featured, the international draw of the event and how well it fits with the conference’s theme of ‘co-production’.

Our session summary describes the day’s aim as follows:

The Cold War era defensive concrete structures that proliferated in the late Twentieth century were a co-production of myriad material and discursive processes. This session will investigate this meld by bringing together contributions from scholars working across a number of disciplines (geography, tourism, cultural studies, politics, history, fine art and archaeology to name a few) – thus forming its own cross disciplinary co-production, a multi-modal interrogation of the bunker. The day-long set of four panels will explore the histories, meanings, materialities and fates of Cold War Bunkers, across a range of scales; from individual human encounters to their role as semi-secret nodes and exceptional spaces in global geo-political systems.

Cold War bunkers are anomalous spaces – ‘heterotopias’ (Foucault  1967) and yet primal too, womb-like. Virilio (2009) has pointed out the atavistic and ‘cryptic’ characters of bunkers. Like stone chambers beneath Christian churches, they function as places of shelter, worship and salvation. Beck (2011) has written of the ‘ambivalence’ of host cultures to the decaying remains of these structures, and of how no settled meaning is possible for these now abandoned places given their apocalyptic but also contingent nature: for, these are remnants of a war that never was, places of preparation for an endtime that never came. Others (McCamley 2007; Bennett 2011, 2013) have written of those who engage in eager and earnest projection of meaning onto these places, many of whom seem inspired to do so in order to make sense of that era of brooding melancholy attached to prospective nuclear war.

The papers assembled for this day-long session will examine the origins and operational life of these places, their subsequent acculturation (or lack of it), their material legacies and attempted repurposing.

We hope by mid April to know which day (27, 28 or 29 August) our session will run, and I will provide further details here as they emerge (including copies of the speakers’ abstracts). It will be possible for people to register to attend one day of the conference for around £165, please see the RGS 2014 website for more details:

http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Annual+international+conference.htm

But, for now, here’s a thematic summary of the event – looking briefly at who’s involved in each of the four stages of the session and what they will be focusing upon.

 (1): encountering the bunker

I will open this session by looking at why (some) people want to gaze at bunkers – and build on my previous work (e.g. The Bunker (2011), Bunkerology (2011), Who Goes There? (2013) and Concrete Multivalence (2013)) by looking further into the psychocultural effects of the exposure of the last Cold War generation to bunkers and anticipated apocalypse in the early 1980s era of the Cruise Missile. John Beck (Westminster University: Dirty Wars (2010), Concrete Ambivalence (2013)) will then look at the relationship between cinematic portrayal of bunkers during the Cold War and the bunker-like condition of the cinema theatre itself. This will then lead into sound artist Katherine Sandys examining the ‘myth of the Cold War bunker’ in terms of the bunker’s symbolic resonance and illustrate this by taking us through her installation work (and perhaps also mentioning her chilling audio conditioning work for the Churchill Museum in the heart of the Cabinet War Rooms bunker). Matthew Flintham (University of Newcaste: The Military Pastoral Complex (2012)) will then examine the bunker’s place within the ‘military sublime’ by means of his film treatment of the Torås Fort mountain-bunker complex in Norway.  This session will then end with Zoe Svendsen (University of Cambridge) taking us through her ‘Bunker Project’ (2005-08) which created performance pieces based upon exploring hidden war spaces of Cambridge, and the link from that project to her theatre company – Metis Arts’ – 3^rd Ring Out production which co-opted members of the public into simulating climate change crisis command within adapted shipping containers.

 (2): the bunker as exceptional space

Silvia Berger Ziauddin of Columbia University / University of Zurich will open stage 2 with a glimpse of her forthcoming book length study of Swizerland’s bunker building programme, looking at how the ubiquity of the Swiss domestic bunker was assimilated into daily life. Ian Klinke (University of Oxford) will then, in contrast, explore the command bunker’s link to geo- and bio-politics, based upon his study of the West German government’s bunker at Marienthal – excavating this site as a ‘camp’, and looking at the parallels to its former incarnation as a concentration camp. Martin Dodge (University of Manchester: Eyeballing (2004)) and Richard Brook (Manchester School of Architecture) will then examine the infrastructural bunker-work beneath Manchester – the ‘Guardian Telephone Exchange’ – situating their case study within a wider consideration of Cold War urbanism. Then Maria Alejandra Perez (West Virginia University) will examine the political and military purposing of natural cave complexes within Cuba during the Cold War – looking at the militarization of Cuban cave science and exploration.

(3): the bunker as post traumatic landscape

The papers in this stage will all consider the human/landscape relationship in the aftermath of the Cold War. Bob Clarke (Exeter University) will examine the ‘disenfranchisement’ of the Royal Observer Corps volunteers whose Cold War ‘taskscape’ (Ingold 2000) suddenly disappeared in 1991, leaving obscure material traces of a local-national network of fallout monitoring stations. Following on from this Steven Leech (University of Manchester) will report upon his oral history work with former Cold War radar engineers, looking at the potent links between identity and grass-roots heritage work. Gunnar Maus (University of Kiel) will then outline his ethnographic investigations of memory work and meaning making around the ruins of Cold War heritage in Germany, having accompanied geocachers, urban explorers and heritage enthusiasms in their physical engagement with these relic structures. Then attention will turn to the UK’s Cold War ‘museums’ as Inge Hermann (Saxion University, Netherlands) reports upon her study of the motives and meaning making of tourists visiting these sites.

(4): ruination and afteruse

In the final session attention will turn to the afterlife of Cold War bunkers. It will consider artistic engagements with Cold War bunkers in the widest sense: considering how their representation in contemporary art, and the resultant tropes influence conservation, repurposing or destruction strategies. First, Stephen Felmingham (Plymouth School of Art) will report upon his attempts to find new ways to interrogate bunkers, in his case through the medium of drawing. Stephen’s work will link back to the previous speakers’ attempts to portray the trauma of severance of Cold War workers (e.g. the ROC) from their once purposive landscape. Louise K. Wilson (University of Lincoln, Notes on A Record of Fear (2009)) will then survey the iconography of Orford Ness (ex) military testing range, and its hegemonic status in Cold War bunker art and literature showing how these tropes are engaged in a complex feedback loop with the landowner’s (The National Trust) vision for the nurturing of the decay of the former military structures left in this nature reserve as a sublime ‘ruinscape’. We will then hear from Rachael Bowers and Kevin Booth how English Heritage manages its ‘York Cold War Bunker’, gaining valuable insight into their curatorial decisions and dilemmas. Finally, Dutch architect Arno Geesink will outline his bunker conversion projects in Arnhem, showing how the brutal resilience of bunker structures resists their eradication. Theese structures, above all others, force us to adjust our will to their materiality.

References:

Beck, J (2010) Dirty Wars – Landscape, Power and Waste in Western American literature, University of Nebraska Press

Beck, J (2011) ‘Concrete Ambivalence: Inside the Bunker Complex’, Cultural Politics, 7, 79-102

Bennett, L (2011). ‘The Bunker: metaphor, materiality & management’. Culture and Organization, 17, 155-173.

Bennett, L (2011). ‘Bunkerology – a case study in the theory and practice of urban exploration’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29, 421-434.

Bennett, L (2013). ‘Who goes there? Accounting for gender in the urge to explore abandoned military bunkers’. Gender, Place and Culture. 20, 630-646

Bennett, L(2013) ‘Concrete Multivalence – practising representation in bunkerology’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31 (3), 502-521

Dodge, M. (2004) ‘Mapping secret places and sensitive sites: examining the Cryptome “eyeballing” map series’, Society of Cartographers Bulletin 37, 5-11

Foucault, M (1967) ‘Of Other Spaces’ in Leach, N. (1997) Rethinking Architecture – a reader in cultural theory, Routledge: Abingdon.

Flintham, m. (2012) ‘The Military-Pastoral Complex – contemporary representations of militarism in the landscape. Tate Occasional Papers No 17: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/military-pastoral-complex-contemporary-representations-militarism

Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment – essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill, Routledge: Abingdon.

McCamley, N. (2007) Cold War Secret Nuclear Bunkers – the passive defence of the Western world during the Cold war, Pen & Sword: Barnsley.

Wilson, L.K. (2009) ‘Notes on A Record of Fear : on the threshold of the audible’ Leonardo Music Journal, 16, 28-33.

Schofield, J (2009) ‘Considering Virilio’s (1994) Bunker Archeology’ in Schofield’s Aftermath: Readings in the Archaeology of Recent Conflict, Springer: New York, pp. 1-13

Virilio, P. (2009) Bunker Archeology, Princeton Architectural Press: New York (Trans. George Collins).

Artwork:

Stephen Felmingham – Transition #3 – a drawing of the view from a ROC Post, influenced by the primitive ‘ground zero indicator’ (a pin hole camera device stored at these posts to indicate the direction and elevation of a nuclear blast): more here:

http://www.artrabbit.com/all/events/event/43989/the_violet_club_stephen_felmingham

This post is New Uses for Old Bunkers #37