Anniversary Workshop: Stuart Elden: Volume, Nature, Fluid – Thinking the Materiality of Political Spaces

This discussion session will focus on three papers that seek to think about the interrelation of political and physical geography. The first is by Stuart Elden, and seeks to build on work on vertical geopolitics by Eyal Weizman and Stephen Graham, and to connect that to work on urban exploration. Taken together, this work allows us to begin to think about territories as volumes, not just as areas, thinking about height and depth instead of surfaces. Engaging with the work of Peter Sloterdijk and Paul Virilio and using examples from the West Bank and Israel’s border with Lebanon it begins thinking about material aspects of political space in three dimensions. Derek Gregory’s article thinks about the bio-physical features of war – the interrelation of bodies and spaces in armed conflict. It looks at three material registers, three forms of nature – the mud of the First World War, the deserts of North Africa in the Second World War, and the rainforests of Vietnam. The third paper, by Phil Steinberg and Kimberley Peters pushes this work still further, in breaking from fixed and grounded understandings of matter. Its specific focus is the ocean, seen as a way of engaging with fluidity and flow rather than fixity. Taken together these three papers seek to develop new ways of thinking about the relation of politics and space. They provide a background to Elden’s lecture on ‘Terrain – the Materiality of Territory’.

Required Reading

Elden, Stuart 2013 ‘Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power”, Political Geography, Vol 32 No 1, pp. 35-51.

Gregory, Derek 2016 “The Natures of War”, Antipode, Vol 48 No 1, pp. 3-56.

Steinberg, Phil and Peters, Kimberley 2015 “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol 33 No 2, pp. 247-64.