Erlanger Vorträge zur Kulturgeographie

Geography, GIScience, and society at large continue to grapple with the implications of newly emerging geospatial media – an ever-expanding range of interactive Internet and mobile technologies that enable collection, compilation, mapping, and dissemination of spatial data by vast numbers of people. The so-called ‘geoweb’ presents fundamental challenges for three or more decades of GIScience theory and practice developed in relation to conventional geographic information systems, and re-situates a number of the concerns of critical GIS scholars with regard to the societal significance of geospatial data and technologies. In this paper, I show how some of the longstanding concerns of critical GIS scholarship can illuminate several of the fundamental arenas of societal transformation stemming from the geoweb: Global and local social relations around privacy and surveillance, socio-technological

practices of activism and civic engagement, and the education of citizens prepared to engage a geoweb world. I use examples from my own recent research in each of these arenas to characterize the specific nature and implications of these transformations and to point to the pervasive presence of social, political, and technological inequalities in each arena. One of the most important legacies of critical GIS scholarship to carry forward into geoweb research and practice is its deep attention to and intervention in inequalities and exclusions wrought through digital spatial data and technologies. Creating a more just GI society in the face of new spatial technologies demands our ongoing effort to sustain these commitments.

practices of activism and civic engagement, and the education of citizens prepared to engage a geoweb world. I use examples from my own recent research in each of these arenas to characterize the specific nature and implications of these transformations and to point to the pervasive presence of social, political, and technological inequalities in each arena. One of the most important legacies of critical GIS scholarship to carry forward into geoweb research and practice is its deep attention to and intervention in inequalities and exclusions wrought through digital spatial data and technologies. Creating a more just GI society in the face of new spatial technologies demands our ongoing effort to sustain these commitments.

It is now well established that both the "war on terror" and its descendents have been heavily constituted through highly urban discourses, materialities and practices. This lecture, which draws on a major book with the same title published recently by Verso, seeks to demonstrate that new ideologies of permanent and boundless war are radically intensifying the militarization of urban life in the contemporary period. The lectures delineates the ways in which contemporary processes of militarisation -- which surround what I label the "new military urbanism" -- raise fundamental questions for critical urban scholarship because of the ways in which they work to normalise the permanent targeting of everyday urban sites, circulations, and populations. Focusing primarily on US military security and military doctrine, culture and technology, this lecture explores the new military urbanism’s five inter-related foundations in detail. These are: the urbanisation of military and security doctrine; the links between militarised control technologies and digitised urban life; the cultural performances of militarised media consumption; the emerging urban political economies of the ‘security’ industries; and the new state spaces of violence. Following the elaboration of each of these themes, the lecture concludes by identifying ways forward for critical urban research in exposing and confronting the normalization of the new military urbanism.

It is now well established that both the "war on terror" and its descendents have been heavily constituted through highly urban discourses, materialities and practices. This lecture, which draws on a major book with the same title published recently by Verso, seeks to demonstrate that new ideologies of permanent and boundless war are radically intensifying the militarization of urban life in the contemporary period. The lectures delineates the ways in which contemporary processes of militarisation -- which surround what I label the "new military urbanism" -- raise fundamental questions for critical urban scholarship because of the ways in which they work to normalise the permanent targeting of everyday urban sites, circulations, and populations. Focusing primarily on US military security and military doctrine, culture and technology, this lecture explores the new military urbanism’s five inter-related foundations in detail. These are: the urbanisation of military and security doctrine; the links between militarised control technologies and digitised urban life; the cultural performances of militarised media consumption; the emerging urban political economies of the ‘security’ industries; and the new state spaces of violence. Following the elaboration of each of these themes, the lecture concludes by identifying ways forward for critical urban research in exposing and confronting the normalization of the new military urbanism.

Late modern war is increasingly fought in the borderlands, by which I mean to emphasize both conflicts in the shatter-zones of former empires and a blurring of the conceptual borders of war itself. In the wars fought by the United States and its allies in the early twenty-first century, models of late modern war bleed into one another. A primary purpose of this presentation is to explore this entanglements in the global borderlands.

Close attention is paid to the combination of war from a distance – the use of drones as weapons systems – with the invasive intimacy of contemporary counterinsurgency; to the hybridization of military and intelligence operations through the pursuit of undeclared "shadow wars" in the borderlands; to the production of war economies at the intersection of a highly visible, nominally legitimate global economy with the circuits of a "shadow globalization", and to the imminent death of the figure of the civilian who is transformed into insurgent/terrorist or buried as collateral damage. All of these depend on particular performances that produce in parallel the space of the target; the space of the alien other; and the space of the exception.

Late modern war is increasingly fought in the borderlands, by which I mean to emphasize both conflicts in the shatter-zones of former empires and a blurring of the conceptual borders of war itself. In the wars fought by the United States and its allies in the early twenty-first century, models of late modern war bleed into one another. A primary purpose of this presentation is to explore this entanglements in the global borderlands. Close attention is paid to the combination of war from a distance the use of drones as weapons systems with the invasive intimacy of contemporary counterinsurgency; to the hybridization of military and intelligence operations through the pursuit of undeclared "shadow wars" in the borderlands; to the production of war economies at the intersection of a highly visible, nominally legitimate global economy with the circuits of a "shadow globalization", and to the imminent death of the figure of the civilian who is transformed into insurgent/terrorist or buried as collateral damage. All of these depend on particular performances that produce in parallel the space of the target; the space of the alien other; and the space of the exception.