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

Abstract

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.

Addressing Military Sexual Violence by Proposing a Social Media Influencer Model

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Embodying vertical geopolitics: Towards a political geography of falling

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