Campus "Tours of Duty": Unsettling Everyday Militarisms through Walking

Abstract

was closed and transformed into the Western Signal Corps School, a radar and radio training school for the US Army. Th is article analyzes the militarized past and present at the University of California (UC) Davis through our "Militarized Arboretum Walking Tour. " Th e tour comprises multiple stops through the university's Arboretum botanical garden and central campus. By combining archival materials with situated observations on natural and built environments, participants examine how militarized and colonial systems, landscapes, and legacies impact and refl ect ordinary life beyond the spectacle of the battlefi eld or wartime. We analyze how our walking tour, as a historical geographic method, off ers participants novel ways of understanding and analyzing local and global, historical and present, issues of "everyday militarism. " We focus particularly on how the tour "unsettles" the campus environment undergraduate students encounter as a quotidian living and working space, and off er both direct student refl ections and our own pedagogical insights on walking tours as an engaged strategy to teach both the local and transnational history of US empire.

Introduction: Domestication of War

“…These transnational workshops brought together scholars (across disciplinary boundaries and academic stages), artists, and activists to ruminate on the often-unexamined ways in which militarized logics and legacies of violence are embedded in everyday life. It was in the spaces facilitated by these transnational encounters that several scholarly projects came to be, including an edited special issue, "Everyday Militarisms: Hidden in Plain Sight/Site" (Kaplan, Kirk, and Tess 2020), two conference panels on everyday militarisms (American Studies Association in Honolulu 2019 and the Cultural Studies Association of Australia in Brisbane 2019), and an article discussing walking as a method to deconstruct militarized landscapes (Kirk and Moeller 2020). This Special Section adds to these contributions by concentrating on domesticity and practices of domestication.…”

Political ecologies of a university and land at Cairo's urban periphery: The American University in Cairo's suburban desert campus

“…More recent work uses a political ecology frame to analyze university-based and often student-driven fossil fuel divestment campaigns (Belliveau and Dempsey, 2021; OHealy and Debski, 2017) and sustainability and climate change initiatives (Nelson, 2020; O’Neil and Sinden, 2021). Such research provides an important analysis of social movements, the neoliberal university, and the financialization of higher education, but is not often linked to material campus land, other landholdings, the colonial present of land relations, or land-use research on campus (Ladd, 2020; Kirk and Moeller, 2020).…”