Governing and securing the territorial volumes of burial: transformations in the political economy and domestic geopolitics of death

Drone sensing volumes

“…In the context of struggle between ‘Palestinian campaigners and Israeli authorities’ in a Muslim cemetery, Leshom (2015, p. 36), asserts the importance of attending to ‘subterranean spatialities’ as sites of geopolitical power and ‘necropolitics’. In this vein, writing of shifts in the context of ‘burial in England during the 19th century’ as a result of the ‘abolition of the church rate’ and ‘imposition’ of a new burial act, Byron (2022, p. 1) explores both the ‘domestic geopolitics of burial space’ and the ‘political economy of death and burial’. Demonstrating the ‘complicated relations and processes that remake and weave meaning into often unseen depths’ (Marston & Himley, 2021, p. 1), Byron (2022, p. 4) highlights the enactment of ‘new logics in respect of property, security and capacity’ as a result of ‘forms of volumetric and material governance’ of burial.…”

“…In this vein, writing of shifts in the context of ‘burial in England during the 19th century’ as a result of the ‘abolition of the church rate’ and ‘imposition’ of a new burial act, Byron (2022, p. 1) explores both the ‘domestic geopolitics of burial space’ and the ‘political economy of death and burial’. Demonstrating the ‘complicated relations and processes that remake and weave meaning into often unseen depths’ (Marston & Himley, 2021, p. 1), Byron (2022, p. 4) highlights the enactment of ‘new logics in respect of property, security and capacity’ as a result of ‘forms of volumetric and material governance’ of burial. Byron (2022, p. 2, 1) thus argues that we can understand burial volumes as ‘ecologies of material, political, social and affective relations exerted across height and depth’, turning attention to questions of ‘how burial volumes are governed, understood, contested and coexist’.…”

“…Demonstrating the ‘complicated relations and processes that remake and weave meaning into often unseen depths’ (Marston & Himley, 2021, p. 1), Byron (2022, p. 4) highlights the enactment of ‘new logics in respect of property, security and capacity’ as a result of ‘forms of volumetric and material governance’ of burial. Byron (2022, p. 2, 1) thus argues that we can understand burial volumes as ‘ecologies of material, political, social and affective relations exerted across height and depth’, turning attention to questions of ‘how burial volumes are governed, understood, contested and coexist’.…”

“…Thinking with Byron's (2022, p. 1, 2) attention to both ‘affective and embodied sensibilities’ and the ways ‘the material politics of death is intertwined with socio‐affective forces’ more widely, enables a reflection on Mike's project anew. With his drone, Mike searches out ‘surface anomalies’—namely ‘details that the human eye would miss’ when ‘walking past’ at ground level but that ‘stand out like a beacon in aerial imaging’ (correspondence 2020, 2021).…”

Filling the hole? On new geographies of the subsurface

“…Today, an outpouring of articles, monographs, special issues, and edited volumes in geography and overlapping disciplines exists concerning vertical and voluminous subsurfaces (Bebbington and Bury, 2013; Billé, 2020; Kinchy et al, 2018; Marston and Himley, 2021; Nieuwenhuis and Nassar, 2020; Squire and Dodds, 2020; Woon and Dodds, 2021). Adding to literatures on urban undergrounds (Connor and McNeill, 2022; Graham and Hewitt, 2013; McNeill, 2020), geographers have extensively examined caves and cavers (Della Dora, 2011; Pérez, 2013, 2016, 2021), mines and miners (Bebbington, 2012; Lahiri-Dutt, 2022; Marston, 2019), tunnels and tunnelers (Melo Zurita, 2020; Slesinger, 2020), groundwater and its use (Ballestero, 2018; Bessire, 2022; Kroepsch, 2018), bunkers and defense (Klinke 2018; Garrett and Klinke 2019), burial practices (Byron, 2022; Clark and Hird, 2014; Kearnes and Rickards, 2017), and a variety of subsurface infrastructures (Barry and Gambino, 2020; Forman, 2020). 1 In the moment it takes to utter “deep time,” a “subterranean turn” has been declared (Squire and Dodds, 2020: 4).…”