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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Charlotte Veal
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).
The emergence of air power in the 20th Century marked a new era of warfare. Speed, covertness, mobility, and verticality emerged as the buzzwords. This paper examines experimental body-centred encounters with verticality during preparatory parachute training at Ringway Aerodrome 1940–1945. I trace how falling bodies encountered, were organised in, and harnessed space for air-led warfare and, by extension, how vertically moving bodies perform alternative geopolitical realities. First, the paper outlines a political geography of falling and calls for greater critical conceptual thinking on the micro-practices capable of exerting geopolitical influence. Second, I outline three design principles cultivated through military parachuting. Repetition, relationality, and alignment advance theorisations of the organisation of aerial space, and affirm the entangled geographies of embodiment, verticality, and geopolitics. I draw upon the Royal Air Force's practical airborne training programme as a means for enacting ‘high readiness, forced entry’ operations through the amalgamation of man, technological-non-human, and air. The paper argues for the achievement of air power and the performance of aerial supremacy through gravity and falling. This has important implications for unpacking the corporeal mobilities and training practices by which geopolitical realities are known, embodied, made, and articulated, and of the role of elite performances of aerial mobility in disrupting inter/national aerial sovereignty.
Author(s): Veal C
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Political Geography
Year: 2021
Volume: 86
Print publication date: 01/04/2021
Online publication date: 24/02/2021
Acceptance date: 08/02/2021
Date deposited: 25/02/2021
ISSN (print): 0962-6298
ISSN (electronic): 1873-5096
Publisher: Elsevier Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102354
DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102354
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