Embodying militarism: exploring the spaces and bodies in-between

Dyvik, Synne L; Greenwood, Lauren

doi:10.1080/23337486.2016.1184469

Cited by 40 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…The idea of reflexivity has been more resonantly advanced (e.g. Ben-Ari 2014; Carreiras and Caetano 2016;Carreiras, Castro, and Frederic 2016;Dyvik and Greenwood 2016).…”

Section: Critical Military Studies and Reflexivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledge in and of military operations: enriching the reflexive gaze in critical research on the military

Danielsson

2020

Critical Military Studies

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This article analyses the recent military 'turn to reflexivity' in relation to current reflexive commitments in critical studies of the military. With reflexivity, military organizations have begun to inquire into its own role as a producer and user of knowledge, and into the constitutive effects of knowledge in and on the world. A reflexive concern with the conditions and effects of knowledge has thus made militaries sensitive to the epistemic dimensions of military force. The broader socio-political implications of the military's attention to epistemics, in terms of how knowledge may constitute and bring into being novel socio-political orderings, make it an urgent task to explore this development in relation to the reflexive state of critical research on the military. The first argument that I make in the article is that existing reflexive commitments in critical military studies are conceptually able to target scholarly-military epistemic interactions and the constitutive effects thereof, but less able to address epistemic distinctions in terms of how knowledge is produced and how different conditions shape the content of knowledge. This, however, is what is needed to critically address the military reflexive development. Based on this, I argue secondly that a fruitful broadening and enriching of the reflexive gaze may be achieved by further taking reflexivity in a Bourdieusian direction-a move that ultimately works complementary to existing reflexive commitments in critical military studies.

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“…The idea of reflexivity has been more resonantly advanced (e.g. Ben-Ari 2014; Carreiras and Caetano 2016;Carreiras, Castro, and Frederic 2016;Dyvik and Greenwood 2016).…”

Section: Critical Military Studies and Reflexivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledge in and of military operations: enriching the reflexive gaze in critical research on the military

Danielsson

2020

Critical Military Studies

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“…The 9/11 terror attacks, however, prompted renewed interest in military practices, their spatialities, and with the emergence of a feminist geopolitical trajectory (Åhäll & Gregory, ; Hyndman, ; Sharp, ; Sylvester, ) saw political geographers, alongside scholars in international relations and security studies (Wilcox, ), shift their focus toward micro questions of the body. Although there remain those who argue that we have yet to fully conceptualise the complexities through which the doings and makings of war come to be embodied (Dyvik & Greenwood, ; see McSorley, ; Pain, ), significant strides have been made to deepen our knowledge of the relationship between the body and war.…”

Section: Militarism Embodiment Aestheticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The art of parachuting: Embodied geopolitics, aerial aesthetics and dance‐based combat training at Ringway Aerodrome, 1940–1946

Veal

2019

Trans Inst British Geog

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The emergence of air power as the pre‐eminent method of warfare prompted a decision, made at the highest level, to form a new arm of the British military. The Central Landing Establishment was founded as parachuting headquarters in 1940, and tasked with developing and implementing the means for training and delivering airborne forces to the ground. With woeful shortfalls in aerial knowledge, experimentation proved crucial. The paper examines the recruitment and synthetic ground training of the British Parachute Regiment at Ringway Aerodrome (1940–1946), and their experimental exchanges with “specialists” in the art of falling. More specifically, in the absence of a recognised landing technique, and with associated high injury rates, Ringway turned to movement theorist Rudolf Laban to advance its embodied aerial practice. The paper will explore how militaries have long recognised the centrality of such embodied and aesthetic regimes to the doing of geopolitics. In particular, it foregrounds the multifaceted, micro‐bodily practices – operating through complex interconnected spatialities – that comprise the waging of war. In turn, it asserts the significance of the aesthetic in understanding how geopolitics takes place and is implemented in the world. In doing so, the paper unpacks the “art” within the art of war.

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“…There is a growing literature on war and embodiment, and the embodied experiences of military service, war, and violence (e.g., Bickford 2008; Dyvik and Greenwood 2016; Finley 2011; Hautzinger and Scandlyn 2014; Howell 2014; MacLeish 2015; McSorley 2014; Messinger 2010; Terry 2017; Wool 2015). My interest here, however, is in the biomedical and biotechnical imagination of warfare and what happens before embodiment and violence.…”

Section: War Anticipation and Imaginationmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Idiophylaxis to Inner Armor: Imagining the Self-Armoring Soldier in the United States Military from the 1960s to Today

Bickford

2018

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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All militaries try to develop a “winning edge” in warfare. More often than not these attempts focus on new weapons systems and weapons platforms, on new ways of maximizing the offensive capabilities of a military through firepower. These attempts can also involve the training and development of soldiers, including performance enhancements to make them fight better, longer, and smarter than the enemy and to counter human frailty on the battlefield. These concerns and problems have long held the interest of the U.S. military. This article traces the development, rationale, and legacy of one such attempt to deal with human frailty and the “body problem,” a kind of military futurism devised at the peak of the Cold War. Dr. Marion Sulzberger envisioned creating soldiers who had their own kind of special “biological armor,” or what he termed “idiophylaxis.” In 1962, he presented a paper at the Army Science Conference at West Point titled “Progress and Prospects in Idiophylaxis (Built-In Individual Self-Protection of the Combat Soldier).” Sulzberger's call was for a radical rethinking of the combat soldier and the ways in which soldiers were imagined, designed, and developed. His goal was to “armor” the individual soldier both internally and psychologically through new forms of biomedicine and biotechnology. The interventions he detailed in 1962 live on today in the U.S. military's soldier performance enhancement research programs, including DARPA's recent “Inner Armor” program and desire to make “kill-proof” soldiers.

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Embodying militarism: exploring the spaces and bodies in-between

Cited by 40 publications

References 19 publications

Knowledge in and of military operations: enriching the reflexive gaze in critical research on the military

Knowledge in and of military operations: enriching the reflexive gaze in critical research on the military

The art of parachuting: Embodied geopolitics, aerial aesthetics and dance‐based combat training at Ringway Aerodrome, 1940–1946

From Idiophylaxis to Inner Armor: Imagining the Self-Armoring Soldier in the United States Military from the 1960s to Today

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