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Geography, Geology and the Environment

Dr Peter Adey

Title: Reader
Phone: (+44) 01782 7 33165
Email:
Location: William Smith Building : F27
Role:
Contacting me: Make an appointment via e-mail
Adey_Peter

I am lecturer in cultural geography and course tutor for the Dual Honours Human Geography programme. I arrived at Keele in 2006 following an ESRC post-doctoral fellowship and PhD studentship at the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth.

My research is involved in examining the relationship between mobilities and security. Through the Emerging Securities Unit at Keele I am involved in several research projects on resilience, security and population control (funded by ESRC, AHRC and Leverhulme Trust) and I am currently supervising PhD studentships on civil contingencies, astropolitics and environmental security. I would welcome applications on topics such as mobility, securitisation, circulation and futures.

Broadly my research can be divided into two interlocking areas:

Mobilities

Peter Adey Book1 At the heart of my concern is mobility, and I have been keen to investigate mobility as both empirical problem and theoretical device, particularly in how we begin to understand lives lived on the move which are mediated by various technological assemblages. Here, I locate mobility as a kind of relation, drawing together bodies and landscapes, humans and technology, person and other. This interest has been inspired by work within the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ or ‘mobility turn’. A recent book Mobility, goes into all of these themes in much more detail. So far the book has picked up some positive reviews and is being adopted onto mobility related module programmes.

With David Bissell and other mobile colleagues, this work is being developed towards further interdisciplinary perspectives, pushing new directions towards mobility. A major Handbook on Mobilities is currently in progress with Routledge, whilst a special issue of The Journal of Transport Geography is under review.

Security and Circulation

Peter Adey Book2 Much of my focus on mobility has been directed towards processes of security, particularly through the world of aero-mobilities, that is both commercial and military aviation. Informed by ideas concerned with the relationship between circulations and securitisation, several book and research projects have developed through this theme. Aerial Life: spaces, mobilities, affects, draws on diverse case study examples from contemporary airport security techniques, drone aircraft deployment over Afghanistan, to the origins of pilot testing in Britain and Germany. The book examines aerial life in terms of the bodies and subjectivities caught in the middle of its wonder and violence. Informed by contemporary theories of securitisation, mobility and the politics of affect, it asks how aerial mobilities sow the seeds of their own destruction; how the human subject has been imagined and transformed by the aeroplane, and, finally, how what counts as human and indeed, life, is radically altered by the aeroplane’s motion.  

So far reviews have been very positive. For instance, Mark B. Salter wrote that the book,

“brings together a fascinating set of theoretical concerns and empirical cases [...] with a gravity of purpose and a lightness of touch that make for an incredibly rich book”.

Whilst Steve Graham suggested that it:

“offers a vitally important riposte to the long neglect of aerial cultural politics in the social sciences. Aerial Life is a brilliant tour de force. Incisive, comprehensive, fresh and, above all, topical – this is the book which can guide us as we address the geographies of the aerial.”

Just recently this work was even broadcast as part of the BBC three-part documentary The Secret Life of the Airport (see this link, it has been broadcast on BBC Two and BBC Four).

Several funded research projects are currently running in relation to these themes in collaboration with colleagues at Durham, Newcastle and Keele. Two projects: Staging and Performing Emergencies (ESRC) and Security and Regulation in a Time of Terror (Leverhulme) examine governmental techniques as they address the population-as-problem in relation to violent, uncertain and complex events.  

Air

Continuing the work of the above, I have just started a book project for Reaktion’s new ‘earth’ series which will develop and advance Peter Sloterdijk’s writings on air and its quality of ‘explication’: an utter dependence of biological, technological and political life upon the environment it must breathe. Air will develop a cultural and political history of how the air has been harnessed in order to manage, improve, alter and sometimes kill human life. Examples will range from the origins of gas warfare and prosthetics of protection to defoliation in Indochina; from Haldane’s pioneering work on respiration to the politics of comfort in the air conditioned environments of Dubai and the splintered spaces of the megacity.

Download Peter Adey publication list here.

Selected Publications

  • Adey P. 2010. Aerial Life: spaces, mobilities, affects. London: Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Adey P, Bissell D, Urry J. 2010. Mobilities, meetings, and futures: an interview with John Urry. ENVIRONMENT AND PLANNING D-SOCIETY & SPACE, vol. 28. link> doi>
  • ADEY P. 2010. Vertical Security in the Megacity: Legibility, Mobility and Aerial Politics. Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 27(6), 51-67. doi>
  • Adey P. 2009. Facing airport security: affect, biopolitics, and the preemptive securitisation of the mobile body. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 27(2), 274-295. doi>
  • ADEY P. 2009. Mobility. London; New York: Routledge.

Full Publications List show

Books

  • ADEY P. 2012. Air. London: Reaktion.
  • ADEY P, Whitehead M, WILLIAMS AE. 2012. From Above: the politics and practices of the view from the skies. London: Hurst.
  • Adey P, Bissell D, Hannam K, Merriman P, Sheller M. 2012. Handbook of Mobilities. Routledge. link>
  • ADEY P, ANDERSON B, BISSELL D, CRANG M, HARRISON P. 2012. Key Concepts in Cultural Geography. London: Sage.
  • Adey P. 2010. Aerial Life: spaces, mobilities, affects. London: Wiley-Blackwell.
  • ADEY P. 2009. Mobility. London; New York: Routledge.

Journal Articles

  • Anderson B and Adey PN. 2012. Affect and Security: Exercising Emergencies in UK Civil Contingencies. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.
  • Adey PN, Anderson B, Lobo-Guerrero L. 2012. An Ash Cloud, Airspace and Environmental Threat. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.
  • ADEY P and ANDERSON B. 2011. Anticipation, Materiality, Event: the Icelandic ash cloud disruption and the security of mobility. Mobilities, vol. 6(1), 11-20. doi>
  • Adey P. 2011. 'Ten thousand lads with shining eyes are dreaming and their dreams are wings': affect, airmindedness and the birth of the aerial subject. CULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES, vol. 18. link> doi>
  • Adey P, Bissell D, Urry J. 2010. Mobilities, meetings, and futures: an interview with John Urry. ENVIRONMENT AND PLANNING D-SOCIETY & SPACE, vol. 28. link> doi>
  • ADEY P. 2010. Vertical Security in the Megacity: Legibility, Mobility and Aerial Politics. Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 27(6), 51-67. doi>
  • Adey P. 2009. Facing airport security: affect, biopolitics, and the preemptive securitisation of the mobile body. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 27(2), 274-295. doi>
  • ADEY P. 2009. Holding Still: the private life of an air raid. m/c journal, vol. 1(12). link>
  • Budd L and ADEY P. 2009. The Software Simulated Airworld: anticipatory code and affective aeromobilities. Environment and Planning A, vol. 6(41), 1366-1385.
  • ADEY P. 2008. Aerial Geographies. Geography Compass, vol. 5(2), 1318-1336.
  • ADEY P. 2008. Airports for children: mobility, design and the construction of an airport education. Built Environment, vol. 4(33), 417-429.
  • ADEY P. 2008. Airports, Mobility, and the Calculative Architecture of Affective Control. Geoforum, vol. 1(39), 438-451. doi>
  • Adey P. 2008. Architectural geographies of the airport balcony: Mobility, sensation and the theatre of flight. GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B-HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, vol. 90B. link> doi>
  • Kraftl P and Adey P. 2008. Architecture/affect/inhabitation: Geographies of being-in buildings. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 98(1), 213-231. doi>
  • ADEY PN, Budd L, Hubbard P. 2007. Flying lessons: exploring the social and cultural geographies of global air travel. Progress in Human Geography, vol. 31(6), 773-791. doi>
  • Adey P. 2007. 'May I have your attention': airport geographies of spectatorship, position, and (im)mobility. ENVIRONMENT AND PLANNING D-SOCIETY & SPACE, vol. 25. link> doi>
  • Adey P. 2006. Airports and air-mindedness: Spacing, timing and using the Liverpool Airport, 1929-1939. SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY, vol. 7. link> doi>
  • ADEY P. 2006. If mobility is everything then it is nothing: towards a relational politics of (im)mobilities. Mobilities, vol. 1(1), 75-94.
  • ADEY P. 2004. Secured and Sorted Mobilities: examples from the airport. Surveillance and Society, vol. 1(4), 500-519.
  • ADEY PN. 2004. Surveillance at the Airport: Surveilling Mobility/Mobilising Surveillance. Environment and Planning A, vol. 36(8), 1365-1380. doi>

Chapters

  • Adey PN. 2012. Airports. In Globalization in Practice. Thrift N, Tickell A, Woolgar S (Eds.). Oxford University Press.
  • ADEY P. 2012. Wave, Animal, Form: Air-War, Graham Sutherland and the ‘Sensation of conflict’. In Spatialities: The Geographies of Art, Architecture. Martin C (Ed.). London: Intellect.
  • ADEY P. 2011. The Private Life of an Air Raid: stillness, mobility, affect. In Stillness in a Mobile World. Bissell D and Fuller G (Eds.). London: Routledge.
  • ADEY P. 2010. Airports: terminal/vector. In Geographies of Mobilities: practices, spaces, subjects. Cresswell T (Ed.). Aldershot: Ashgate.
  • ADEY P. 2010. John Urry. In Key Thinkers in Space and Place. Hubbard P, Kitchin R, Valentine G (Eds.). (2nd ed.). London: Sage.
  • ADEY P. 2009. Getting into the flow: airports, aeromobilities and airmindedness. In Aeromobilities. Cwerner S, Urry J, Kesslering S (Eds.). London: Taylor & Francis.
  • ADEY P. 2008. Mobilities and modulations: the airport as difference machine. In Politics at the airport. Salter MB (Ed.). Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press.
  • ADEY P. 2007. 'Above us only sky’: themes and simulations at Liverpool John Lennon Airport. In The themed space. Lukas SA (Ed.). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
  • ADEY PN. 2006. "Divided we move" : the dromologics of airport security and surveillance. In Surveillance and Security. Monahan T (Ed.). London Routledge.
  • ADEY P and Bevan P. 2006. Between the Physical and the Virtual: Connected Mobilities. In Mobile technologies of the city. Sheller M and Urry J (Eds.). London: Taylor & Francis.
  • ESC-10008  Human Geography - A Changing World
  • ESC-20004 Advanced Systematic Geography
  • GEG-20010 Practical Human Geography
  • GEG-20015 Space and Society
  • GEG-30012 Mobile Geographies