Visualizing liminal military landscape: a small scale study of Armed Forces Day in the United Kingdom

Abstract

ABSTRACT Armed Forces Day is a military-centric event in the UK introduced into the public calendar during 2009 following recommendations made from The Report of Inquiry into National Recognition of Our Armed Forces. Despite the significance of these events requiring the situating and performance of military values, personnel, equipment and activities within otherwise civic spaces, academic research and critical commentary into the implementation and development of Armed Forces Day is limited. Influenced by autoethnographic work from critical human geography focussing on the materiality, spatiality and embodied experiences of military airshows, and seeking to extend some insights from the original text Military Geographies, the aim of this paper is to observe the situatedness and performance of Armed Forces Day to be what is defined herein as ‘liminal military landscape’. Through conducting a small-scale study of Armed Forces Day 2017 in Liverpool, employing observational techniques including notetaking and documentary photography, during this event urban space was found to undergo spatial ‘transitions’; have ‘portals’ opened through which temporality and materiality invoked past experience into the present; and create newly established liminal ‘thresholds’ waiting to be crossed between the seemingly contiguous spaces of civic and military.