Forging volumetric methods

Abstract

The last two decades have seen a "volumetric turn" within Anglophone social sciences and humanities scholarship. This turn is premised on the idea that space may be better understood in three-dimensional termswith complex heights and depthsrather than as a series of two-dimensional areas or surfaces. While there is an increasingly diverse and rich set of scholarship accounting for voluminous complexities in the air, oceans, ice, mountains, and undergrounds, all too often this work foregrounds state and military-led approaches to volume. This has resulted in a limited methodological toolkit through which to explore voluminous complexities as they emerge and extend beyond military and state contexts. Often reliant on elite interviews, archives, and cartographies, there has been little critical discussion of both methodological practice and the "flatness" of research outputs articulating three-dimensional worlds. In this paper we address this by foregrounding the role of immersive and multisensory methodologies (sounding volumes, seeing-sensing drone volumes, and object volumes). To conclude, we offer avenues for further inquiry, including attending to shifting everyday voluminous experiences in the Anthropocene, and the need to diversify the communication of "volume" research.

History and philosophy of geography I: Heterodox progress, critical scepticism and intellectual voluminosity

“…To think thus volumetrically (Jackman and Squire, 2021) and topologically 6 the aforementioned ‘operational space’ allows us to keep strengthening the plurality of voices, languages, approaches and qualities that geographers display worldwide, without occluding the very conditions that both enable and constrain such a project. To resist the turbulent conditions of mainstream academy may mean to bring about ‘intellectual voluminosity’ (Barnes, 2022: 258) to the space in which the writing and thinking about geography’s past, present and future occurs: to descent as a way to diverge, to reintegrate and reinterpret as a way to bear fruit, to sidestep as a way to avoid the beaten track, to revisit as a way to escape any remnants of Adamism or presentism in today’s geographic thinking, and to divert and delay as a way to bring thoughtfulness to the difficulties, paradoxes, contradictions, disturbances and ambivalences that make progress to be plural.…”

‘Everyday droning’: Towards a feminist geopolitics of the drone-home

“…Its scholars have long attended to the home's 'co-manifestation at a range of spatial scales' from the 'micro to the homeland' (Brickell, 2012a: 575). Yet, drawing inspiration from scholars cognisant that 'our primarily twodimensional conceptualisation of cities and spaces needs revision' (Jackman and Squire, 2021;Jensen, 2020: 417), this article asks questions of the vertical and volumetric dimensions of the home, and their commodification and capture via the drone. In attending to the geographical volumes of home, it is possible to crack open the aerial and atmospheric in new ways.…”

Drone sensing volumes

“…In parallel, scholars across the social sciences are increasingly mobilising the concept of volume to (re)consider space in three‐, rather than two‐dimensional terms (Adey, 2013; Elden, 2013; Jackman & Squire, 2021; Weizman, 2002). Through the lens of volume, space is explored not as a surface or area, but in terms of its complex heights and depths.…”

“…While work on volume is increasingly widening to explore a growing diversity of contexts, it has historically foregrounded military and state‐led approaches to and interventions in volume (Jackman & Squire, 2021). This focus is echoed in the critical questions asked of geopolitical volumes, those predominantly centring upon practices and processes of calculation, ‘control, enclosure and exclusion’ (Squire & Dodds, 2020, p. 4) and resulting in the formation of a ‘rhetoric’ of volume (Benwell, 2020, p. 93).…”