Global Futures Speaker Series - Peter Adey Event

Overview: Dr Peter Adey will discuss the start of a project that seeks to reconcile interdisciplinary and critical approaches to evacuation mobilities - from social science to engineering, to art and literature. His paper will indicate the blurred socio-material and legal status of the evacuee, a subject moving through multiple categorisations of identity, rights and needs, through multiple fields of concern, duty and obligation and through a variety of registers, from the geopolitical to the aesthetic. The paper asks just what is at stake in the surveillance, categorisation, mobilisation and treatment of the evacuated subject? It explores the imperfect systems that record and manage evacuated populations made socially, technically and legally indistinct. It questions the violence of one becoming-evacuee and the motion of returning; unpicks the negotiation and ambiguity of identity as profiles and registration practices are continuously befuddled, escaped, and ultimately got wrong; and, it follows the consequences of all this for our mobile lives made potentially more vulnerable by the very systems intended for our security.

Dr Peter Adey is Reader in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He leads the Geopolitics and Security MSc, is Chair of the Social and Cultural Geography research group of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers, and was recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2011. Peter is member of the international advisory boards of the journals Mobilities; Resilience; and Geography Compass and is also author of Mobility (2009); Aerial Life: spaces, mobilities, affects (2010); Air (forthcoming 2013) and co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook of Mobilities (2013) and From Above: verticality, war and violence (2013).