Description
The paper examines parachute combatants experimental body-centred encounters with verticality during parachute descents at Ringway Aerodrome Manchester, 1940-1945. I trace how falling bodies encountered, were organised in, and produced space for air-led warfare and, by extension, how falling bodies perform alternative geopolitical realities for States. First this paper will conceptualise a political geographies of falling. I call for greater critical conceptual thinking on the art of falling as a body-centred micro-mobility, capable of exerting geopolitical influence through mobile bodies penetrating and occupying inter/national air space. Second, I outline three design principles cultivated during the act of falling in order to advance theorisations of the production of aerial space. Repetition, proximity and alignment, I argue, are key principles through which moving bodies produce, and are products of, a vertical geopolitics. In particular, I turn to the Royal Air Force’s practical airborne training programme – from captive balloon and aircraft – as a means for enacting ‘high readiness, forced entry’ operations through the amalgamation of man, technological-non-human, and air. By bringing the embodied geopolitics and military geographies literatures into conversation with mounting scholarship on verticality, this paper focuses on the production and performance of political space through falling. This enables for a critical assessment into the entangled geographies of bodies, non-humans and atmosphere within vertical space, but more specifically how gravity-defying bodies realised a, high speed, covert mobility capable of global vertical dominance and for disputing inter/national aerial sovereignty.
