It's a bird! It's a plane! An aerial biopolitics for a multispecies sky

Abstract

Bird strikes were catapulted into headline news in 2009 when US Airlines flight 1549's engines ingested a flock of Canada geese and lost all power, leaving the pilot no option but to ditch into the freezing cold Hudson River. Although everyone on board survived, thousands of birds were killed in the years that followed in attempt to redress aviation safety concerns. This article follows the story of Flight 1549 and considers the different stages of bird strike prevention at a variety of sites: the factory, the airfield, the sky and the accident aftermath. Drawn from empirical research and grey literature analysis of aviation safety documents, it unpicks the various assemblages that are formed at each site and how they are gathered together through inhuman air forces. Situated within theories of biopolitics, it moves beyond a materialist analysis of the solid and the visible and attends to the immateriality of air and its elemental properties which are integral to both life and death. Through an analysis of the aerial as a socio-material spatial categorisation, it considers bird strike management within a multispecies perspective by examining the frictions and entanglements of both human and non-human agency that are generated by differential air spaces. By highlighting the different forms of biopolitics produced by the aerial, it shows how configurations of life shift in relation to the dynamic and unpredictable inhuman forces of air, and how aviation safety practices attempt to harness these forces.

Animal geographies II: Killing and caring (in times of crisis)

“…Beyond conservation, further rationales for killing emerge. The safety discourse is enrolled in diverse contexts, including bird strike in aviation (Wrigley, 2018) and disease control (Chan, 2016). Chan’s (2016) study of cat culling in Singapore during the 2003 SARS outbreak has new relevance in light of COVID-19.…”

“…This research is part of a move in animal geographies toward bio- and necropolitics (e.g. Crowley et al, 2018; Greenhough et al, 2018; Margulies, 2019a; Wrigley, 2018), to which I will turn with greater attention in my third and final report.…”

“…This call is being answered. Recent work explicitly engages the political, through gender (Doubleday and Adams, 2019; Must and Hovorka, 2019; Patchin, 2020), justice (Brown et al, 2019; Pitas and Shcheglovitova, 2019), capital (Barua, 2019; Klein, 2019; Satizábal and Dressler, 2019), biopolitics (Margulies, 2019a; Wakefield, 2019; Wrigley, 2018) and the ongoing consequences of colonialism (Bluwstein, 2018; Isaacs and Otruba, 2019; Margulies, 2019a; Pratt, 2019; Wilson, 2019). Second, as in other fields of geography, relational approaches are being widely applied in animal geographies.…”

Aerial visibilities: towards a visual sociology of the sky

“…The aim of this special issue is to gather diverse perspectives that help us examine various facets of the dyad of verticality and visibility. Following Wrigley and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2016), we intend to bring sky and air into the view of visual sociology and argue that there is more to the sky than phenomenological and geopolitical dimensions (Wrigley 2018). The articles within this issue emphasise the need to rethink the aerial in terms of complex relations between humans, technological artefacts, vertical superstructures, and non-human others to examine the ways they can unsettle notions of aerial biopolitics.…”

The digital peregrine: A technonatural history of a cosmopolitan raptor

“…Environmental humanities scholars have long been interested in human–avian relations (e.g., Petri, 2019; van Dooren, 2019; Wrigley, 2018). Amid these recent ‘winged geographies’ (Petri and Guida, forthcoming), there is specific interest in urban birds and digitised birdwatching activities.…”