Progressive Geographies

Gastón Gordillo shares an update on his ongoing work on terrain, for a forthcoming conference at UBC. Very sorry to miss this one – I’ll still be in Melbourne, talking about a related topic. Gastón and I have organised two sessions on terrain at the AAG meeting in Chicago in April, where we will be presenting our work along with a range of others (see line-up for session 1 and 2).

Below is the abstract of my essay “Terrain as Insurgent Weapon: An Affective Geometry of Combat in the Valley of Death,” which I’ll present at the workshop Space, Materiality, and Violence, at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia, March 20-21. This is my most thorough attempt yet to theorize terrain, based on how the mountainous terrain of the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, affected warfare in the region. In the next few days, I’ll be posting excerpts on this blog. I’m really looking forward to this workshop, which will bring together among the best thinkers in the field, such as Eyal Weizman (our keynote speaker), Derek Gregory, Craig Jones, Caren Kaplan, Jake Kosek, Léopold Lambert, Catherine Lutz, and Shaylih Muehlmann.