A critical geopolitics of observant practice at British military airshows
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper demonstrates how visual cultures of militarism take shape as part of a ‘thick’ geopolitics of being‐in‐place. It draws on historical accounts of, and empirical observations at, British military airshows, which it interprets via the concept of ‘observant practice’. The paper argues that the imaginative and rhetorical force of military spectacle and popular militarism are tied to its markedly enclavic spatiality, i.e. to seeing and doing in‐place. By taking seriously the spatial and sensory experience of British airshows, the paper extends recent work in critical geopolitics that questions the spatialised politics of experience, and brings them into dialogue with cultural geographies of tourism. It provides a brief history of the spectacular origins of aviation and of the use of airshows to the practice of statecraft, and demonstrates how airshows are an important element in the cultural phenomenon of militarisation. The paper takes forward debates around ‘the vision thing’ in critical geopolitics by illustrating why the notion of observant practice should not be dissociated from consideration of the spaces in and through which militaries become the object of visual curiosity. It expands, therefore, the potential of observant practice as a critique of popular military cultures.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it