Something or nothing: on the joys and errors of reading people by their bookcases

February 23, 2026 Leave a comment

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“And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special wariness of others.”

Erving Goffman (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Vintage Books: New York p.229

I like reading people by their bookshelves. It’s a fairly standard 20th century habit of the chattering classes to attempt to do so, and this passtime is anchored in an assumption that that the display of books is intentional (by the book owner) and can be taken by the observer to be a summation of the book owner’s tastes.

I mostly indulge this hobby when watching commentators on international affairs being interviewed on television news. I peer around the side of the talking head, I strain, squint and often-times tilt my head to try to make out the titles on display. Sometimes I spot a book by the distinctive design of its spine or front cover, other times I actually make out the title.

Increasingly nowadays these talking heads are very intentional – they position copies of their own books in a prominent position, literally setting out their stall for all to see. This feels a bit crass to me, but only because I don’t remember it being done ‘back in the day’ (and maybe it was, but Standard Definition TV images never let these shameless plugs reach the eyes of the viewers).

It it is still a standard authority indicator to speak with a wall of books behind you. But sometimes the interviewee’s home office is their spare bedroom and the books case behind is sparce to say the least, a few random domestic ornaments and some mid-brow fiction titles. These send the sign that this authority on Yemen (for example) can read, and likes to kick back and relax with Harry Potter when not thinking about Yemen. But call me old fashioned, a few books about Yemen in the bookcase would help me take the speaker’s words more seriously. So, maybe this emptiness is worse than heavy duty self-promotion. If this speaker has written seven books about Yemen maybe I’d prefer to have that shoved into my face.

It is fun also to look at what else creeps in – the quirky reveals that suggest a complexity of character and interest, of the intermixing of two or more inhabitant’s book collections. These are comparatively rare (in my experience even longstanding co-habiters don’t seem to intertwine their book collections, at least not in their home office(s)).

The strangest character read that I’ve been offered by an interview in recent months was with an international relations commentator based in Germany. He was interviewed not with his book shelves in view, but rather with his CD collection on display behind him. This middle aged authority figured opined on matters of European political economy whilst I constructed a succinct account of his formative 20s and 30s listening to Franz Ferdinand, Kasabian and Kraftwerk.

It’s a fun game trying to read these authority figures via their book shelves. But whilst it can be very curated behaviour – with every book displayed in order to create an effect, more often there is less control than this, and it is the incongruities and tells that fascinate.

Since covid took our interactions online (courtesy of Zooms and Teams) a few hundred folk have peered down the electric pipes that lead into my attic study. They have had the pleasure of staring at the book shelves behind my desk. Occasionally someone has commented on what they have seen on the shelves behind me, but mostly they have kept their interpretations to themselves. At times I’ve experimented with filters to try and mask the visual distraction that my cluttered shelves must comprise, but my relatively lo-spec laptop chops my ears off when I use a filter, which I find distracting (and quite unnerving). So. I’ve carried on in “full display”, not really giving much thought to what viewers (colleagues, students, interviewers) might make of what they are able to see.

But what I know – but they don’t – is that this is not my only bookshelf! So, what they can see is but a fraction of my more-books-than-I-will-ever-get-the-chance-to-read collection. And each bookshelf spread around my house accounts for a particular phase of book gathering. For instance my books about bunkers sit elsewhere in my office. There’s no big reason for there being out of sight of my webcam, there has been no effort made to hide these from public view. It’s just that the shelves behind me were full of more general environmental, law and social science materials before I went down that particular rabbit hole and needed somewhere to store that pile of books. Elsewhere in the house there are history books, climate change monographs and recent tomes on AI and the future of work. But these just happen not to be stored on the shelves that are in front of the camera.

Also out of sight (because they predate my co-opting this attic room as my office) are downstairs shelves featuring fiction (an almost – but not quite – intermixing with my partners’ fiction books) and then in a stairwell sit my collection of ‘cultural anxiety’ books. These are books purchased from the early 1990s onwards from charity shops as people discarded their early 1980s onwards education into the existential challenges of feared apocalypses. This collection now spans urban dereliction / land contamination, the rise of the internet and Y2K, globalisation, 9/11, the ‘war on terror’, the 2008 crash and covid. How these books wash up in charity shops approximately 10 years after they are published and the crisis is raging is what fascinates me.

Viewing all of these bookshelves would enable a fuller reading of me than just that sub-set viewable on screen. But even then the reading would be a limited one, for not all of the books that I own are in physical form. Many books sit on my Kindle and there are also hundreds of books sitting in thematic folders in Perlego awaiting a future free year or two in which those enticing tangents could be fully explored. My Perlego roster opens up whole vistas of non-physical rabbit holes from recent years: ‘Antarctica, Mars & Oceans’; ‘Portuguese Coastal Defence’; ‘Oil, Gas & Carbon Capture’; ‘Campus Development’; ‘Social Theory & Thing Theory’. And then there are the hundreds of folders of pdfs holding articles, policy papers, research notes on topics that may – or may not – have any physical presence upon any of my book shelves.

So, staring at a bookshelf is a imprecise way to get to know someone. But it can still be fun.

Image Credit: my attic office as filtered through ChatGPT.

Filed under Archives, repositories and data stores, Dwelling, house & home, Materiality & memory, Meaning making, Time capsules, Tracework, Urban mining

Tending towards something: on values, change and curiosity

January 27, 2026 Leave a comment

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“Never lose a holy curiosity. Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value. He is considered successful in our day who gets more out of life than he puts in. But a man of value will give more than he receives.”

Albert Einstein, speaking a few weeks before his death in 1955 (quoted in the 2-5-55 issue of TIME magazine)

A year ago I was sitting in a function hall. Normally the space was used for weddings, and its luscious ivory curtains, ornate pedaments and crisp table cloths spoke to that. But today was a careers fair for jobs in nature conservation. I was there as a favour to someone I knew. My role was to chat to students about careers in this field. These punters shuffled into the hall and I arranged some sweets on my table to try and attract the passing traffic. All I had to offer was my experience from my years in Higher Education teaching in the natural and built environment sector, and my career before that as an environmental lawyer.

Half a dozen conversations ensued that afternoon, and I remember each one. Some were with energetic undergraduates, clearly destined for existing careers in something but unsure of which path to focus upon. Others were conversations with less confident souls, who just wanted any door to open and for someone to see their potential and give them a chance to make a contribution. I felt for them all. I hope that my words of encouragement and suggestions for angles and opportunities of approach helped. I was left with the feeling that they did. And that was a nice warm feeling to take away, and something that I held onto deep down inside throughout 2025, as a few days after this event I started my most recent job: a quasi-judicial governmental role. Having left my long-standing university position in the Spring of 2024 I’d been searching around for my next chapter, and I’d thought that re-visiting my lawyer side would be the way to go.

But, increasingly as 2025 marched on I found myself missing the pastoral side of my old academic job, and those pleasant experiences. That warm feeling gained in that wedding hall kept niggling away at me. This was an odd internal conversation because it pitted the blunt force of a jobbing judicial mindset against the contrastingly fluid and nebulous realm of values, purpose and big “what do I want out of life?” questions. Some days pragmatism (or cynicism) won out, but at gut level the signalling from within was pretty clear and consistent. Two conclusions were there waiting to be noticed: that that job wasn’t right for me and also that the signage for another path was already erected and clear to see, if I could bring myself to look.

So, now, in early 2026, I now find myself as a volunteer career coach and mentor working with academics, university and sixth form students. I am doing what I’ve always enjoyed doing and I’m coming away with that feeling of having given something of value to others, and to have enjoyed the process of doing so. I also remain engaged in academic projects alongside this, writing articles, editing the Journal of Property, Planning and Environmental Law, and collaboriating internationally around Legal Geography.

This isn’t a story of an easy transition. It has been a scary and uncertain journey. Not all days have felt as clear-cut (or clear-minded) as others. But here’s where I stand now, and I can see a path ahead. Looking back I think that my long-winded machinations could have been shortened by working with a career coach. So, going forwards I’d like to be the guide that I didn’t have in my own tortuous process.

That’s not to say that friends and family didn’t help me along the way – they certainly did. They have provided love (soft and tough – as appropriate), reassured me of my abilities and their regard for those, and I have also found that in conversation with them I would hear myself presenting a more incisive, summarised, version of my internal monologue. But they also carried the burden of my glum, withdrawn days and the impenetrability of my incessant internal processing. Some days I did not want to talk about where my head was at, partly because my conclusions on that day were too unstable, but also because the stakes of sharing those thoughts with friends and family felt too loaded and/or indulgent.

The benefits of a coach or mentor are that they are there specifically for that particular journey and its conversations, and their lives (and identities) are not also entwined with yours in myriad other complex ways.

Picture credit: https://xerte.nottingham.ac.uk/play_22886#page1

Filed under Meaning making, Mentoring & Career Coaching

The Bin Looks Back: Silent Judgment, Breaking Bad, and the Rise of the Reverse Vending Machine

December 18, 2025 1 Comment

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“New tasks emerge where machines reach their limits — in empathy, judgment, creativity, and hope….Automation scales output; augmentation scales intelligence.” http://www.futureneers.io/blog, 8/11/25

One of the small pleasures of rewatching Breaking Bad is noticing, again and again, how oddly it is filmed. Not just the obvious bravura sequences—the desert vistas, the meth-lab montages, the moral rot unfolding in close-up—but the quieter, stranger choices. The camera keeps ending up in places cameras are not supposed to be. Inside cupboards. Inside fridges. Inside washing machines. And, most memorably, inside rubbish bins.

These shots are not rare accidents or one‑off visual jokes. They are a recurring motif. The viewer looks outwards from darkness, framed by plastic rims, metal lids, or greasy apertures, as human characters loom above, distorted, impatient, careless. We see Walt, Jesse, Skyler, Saul, and others from below, as if from the point of view of the discarded.

It is tempting to read these shots merely as stylistic novelty—a show showing off. But novelty alone does not sustain repetition across five seasons. Something else is going on. The bin, I want to suggest, is not neutral. It is watching. And in watching, it is judging.

This blog post is about that gaze—and about how it might help us think about an apparently unrelated development: the planned introduction of reverse vending machines across England from October 2027, under the Deposit Scheme for Drinks Containers (England & Northern Ireland) Regulations 2025. These machines, developed under the oversight of the government‑appointed Delivery Management Organisation (DMO), will also look back at us. And like the bins in Breaking Bad, they will do so silently, mechanically, and with an unsettling moral clarity.

Filming from the Wrong Place

The “inside-the-bin” shot in Breaking Bad is disorientating because it reverses a familiar hierarchy. Normally, rubbish bins are endpoints. They receive. They contain. They disappear things. They are the bottom of the chain. But when the camera is placed inside them, they become origins of perspective. They are no longer passive; they are observational.

From inside a bin, the human body looks clumsy and excessive. Hands enter the frame aggressively. Faces appear partially, cut off by the rim. Dialogue becomes brusque, transactional. The characters are not performing for one another; they are performing for the act of disposal itself.

The bin witnesses moments of concealment, panic, guilt, and denial. Guns are thrown in. Evidence is dumped. Bodies (sometimes dissolved, sometimes not). The bin becomes complicit, but never consenting. It absorbs consequence without comment.

Crucially, the bin never reacts. It does not move. It does not speak. It does not forgive. It simply records.

In that sense, the bin’s “judgment” is not emotional or moralistic. It is infrastructural. The bin judges by existing. By being there when things go wrong. By holding what should not have existed in the first place.

This is a deeply Breaking Bad idea. The show is obsessed with systems that do not care: chemistry, markets, cartels, cancer, capitalism. The bin belongs to this ecology. It is a mundane object that outlives intention. Walt may rationalise his actions endlessly, but the bin receives the material residue without narrative.

Judgment Without Voice

What makes these shots powerful is precisely that the bin does not accuse. There is no finger‑wagging. No moral soundtrack. The judgment emerges from framing.

By placing the viewer inside the bin, the show forces us to occupy a position usually denied to consciousness. We become the thing that receives the fallout. We are asked, briefly, to identify not with the chooser but with the container.

This matters because Breaking Bad is a show about justifications. Everyone has reasons. Everyone has a story. The bin has none. It does not know why the gun is here. It does not care about Walt’s pride or Jesse’s trauma. It merely holds the object, inertly, damningly.

In this way, the bin functions almost like an environmental conscience. It is the physical world registering harm long after rationalisations have moved on.

From Fictional Bins to Real Machines

This brings us, unexpectedly but inevitably, to reverse vending machines.

From October 2027, consumers in England (and Northern Ireland) will encounter a new kind of everyday object as part of the Deposit Return Scheme (DRS), established under the Deposit Scheme for Drinks Containers (England & Northern Ireland) Regulations 2025. Plastic beverage bottles and cans will carry a refundable deposit, reclaimable when the container is returned to a collection point—often via a reverse vending machine (RVM).

These machines are being developed and standardised under the oversight of the Delivery Management Organisation (DMO), a body tasked with designing and managing the system by which consumers return containers and receive payment. The DMO has already published detailed technical specifications for RVMs, outlining how they must identify, accept, reject, compact, record, and account for returned items (see: https://dmouk.com/news/dmo-publishes-reverse-vending-machine-rvm-specification-a-key-milestone-for-the-deposit-return-scheme/).

On one level, this is a straightforward environmental policy instrument. On another, it is something stranger.

Because unlike a traditional bin, the reverse vending machine does not simply receive waste. It evaluates it.

The Machine That Looks Back

The RVM is not a passive container. It scans barcodes. It checks shapes. It measures weight. It decides whether the object you are offering is valid or invalid, compliant or non‑compliant. It accepts or rejects. It keeps records. It allocates value. And in doing so, it introduces a subtle inversion of agency.

When you place a bottle into a reverse vending machine, you are not discarding it. You are submitting it. The machine inspects your offering. If the bottle is crushed, dirty, or incorrect, it may refuse it. The slot closes. The screen flashes. The transaction fails.

Anyone who has used an RVM in countries where they already exist knows the peculiar feeling this creates. You are briefly at the mercy of an object. You stand there holding waste that is not yet waste. You wait to see whether the machine will approve of how you have behaved.

This is not unlike the Breaking Bad bin shot.

In both cases, the object occupies a position of evaluative stillness. The human actor hovers awkwardly above, hoping not to be found wanting.

Silent Moral Infrastructures

What connects the rubbish bins of Breaking Bad and the reverse vending machines of future England is not morality in the conventional sense, but moral infrastructure.

Neither bin nor machine lectures. Neither explains itself. Both simply operate according to rules that pre‑exist the individual moment. And both force humans to confront the material consequences of their actions without narrative cushioning.

In Breaking Bad, the bin receives the residue of moral collapse. In the DRS, the RVM receives the residue of consumption. In both cases, the object asks—silently—what have you done with the things you used?

The difference is that the RVM will be explicitly designed to look back. Screens, lights, scanners, slots. It will face the consumer directly. It will perform judgment procedurally, not symbolically.

And yet the affect may be similar. A faint embarrassment. A moment of exposure. The sense that the object knows something about you.

Watching the Watchers

There is a final, deeper connection here. Breaking Bad uses bin‑perspective shots to remind us that no action truly disappears. Disposal is an illusion. Things persist somewhere, watched by systems we do not control.

The DRS institutionalises that insight. It makes disposal reversible. It insists that objects return to the system. It refuses the fantasy of “away”.

In that sense, reverse vending machines are bins that have learned to remember.

They will log transactions. They will count returns. They will generate data. They will, in aggregate, tell stories about our habits that we cannot easily explain away. The judgment they cast will not be moral but statistical—and perhaps that is more unsettling.

Conclusion: Living with the Gaze of Objects

When Breaking Bad places us inside a rubbish bin, it momentarily aligns us with the world that bears the weight of human decisions. It asks us to feel what it is like to be the thing that remains after intention has passed.

Reverse vending machines will do something similar, but permanently, and at scale. They will stand in supermarkets and public spaces, quietly evaluating our behaviour, one bottle at a time.

They will not accuse us. They will not forgive us. They will simply accept—or reject—what we offer. And like the bins in Breaking Bad, they will remind us that the material world is not indifferent. It records. It persists. It looks back.

Even when it says nothing at all.

NB: The above was written by AI (GPT 5.2). I’ve never previously used AI in any way to generate material for this blog. But I thought it was time to give it a try. Having now done so, I feel dirty, shocked – but also humbled. The AI came up with more angles than I’d thought of, I almost felt that it understood me, that it ‘got’ the idea that I had fed it. This is – of course an illusion – but wow. Maybe I’m redundant now. Or maybe not, juxtaposing Breaking Bad’s distinctive shots and linking this to judgment and reverse vending machines was my original idea. AI wouldn’t have made that juxtaposition. But it did run with the ball I gave it…

Here’s the prompt I used:

“write a 1,500 blog post in the style of https://lukebennett13.wordpress.com about how there is a novelty in how the tv series Breaking Bad is filmed. The novelty is that there are often camera shots filmed from inside objects looking out at the human characters and their actions. A frequent example of this is shots filmed from inside rubbish bins. Link this observation to the idea that perhaps these shots are intended to suggest that the inanimate object (i.e. the bin) is casting silent judgment upon the characters and their observed actions. Then link this to the planned introduction of so-called reverse vending machines in England from October 2027 in accordance with the The Deposit Scheme for Drinks Containers (England & Northern Ireland) Regulations 2025. The reverse vending machines are being developed by an organisation called the Delivery Management Organisation (DMO) which has been given responsibility by the government for developing ways in which consumers will be able to return plastic beveridge bottles to shops and receive their payments for returning such items. The DMO’s technical specification for the design of reverse vending machines is here: https://dmouk.com/news/dmo-publishes-reverse-vending-machine-rvm-specification-a-key-milestone-for-the-deposit-return-scheme/?_gl=1*1pixp8x*_up*MQ..*_ga*ODg4MjIwNTIxLjE3NjYwNzg2NTI.*_ga_7JP9L9KDY6*czE3NjYwNzg2NTAkbzEkZzAkdDE3NjYwNzg2NTAkajYwJGwwJGgw . Ruminate on how these reverse vending machines will be like the rubbish bins in Breaking Bad: they will both be casting silent judgment on the humans and their actions.”

Image Credit: https://images.kinorium.com/movie/shot/400796/w1500_52120074.jpg

Filed under AI, ANT, OOO and Thingology, Infrastructure, Law & things, Meaning making, Urban mining

Into place (with the wolves): a Legal Geography Special Issue of the Journal of Property, Planning & Environmental Law, is now available

November 10, 2025 Leave a comment

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“It is time to address the places of law and ask: How and why does place matter in legal geographical scholarship? What can be found beyond the generic legal places? And What are the unexplored or underused potentials of place in legal geography?”

Päivi Kymäläinen (2025) ‘Legal Geography II: The possibilities and disruptions of place’, Progress in Human Geography, 49(3): 323-331.

I’m pleased to announce the publication of a legal geography-themed special issue of the Journal of Property, Planning & Environmental Law. Jointly guest edited by Gustav Stenseke Arup (Karlstad University, Sweden) and Jenny Kanellopoulou (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK), their editorial for the Special Issue is available here: Legal geography: discussions across borders, scales and landscapes.

The Special Issue presents four articles, each originating from a legal geography panel at Lund University, Sweden’s Critical Legal Conference in 2024. Each article uses innovative methods by which to explore the legal geographies of four very different places. Whilst the Special Issue was the product of a separate line of flight, the four articles deftly rise to the challenge set above by Kymäläinen.

Gustav Stenseke Arup’s own contribution – ‘A legal geography of wolves in Swedish landscapes: a morphogenetic approach’ – examines the normative landscape inscribed onto Scandinavia by a variety of measures aimed at protecting (or controlling) wolves. Gustav teases out the processual interrelations of morphology, wolf-worldmaking and human spatio-legal schema, which constantly make and re-make the legal geography of the wolves. Here law (and other socio-cultural) factors must mesh with ecological and geological processes. Gustav shows how law is importantly constitutive in forming the wolves’ landscape, but also that other very different factors have a key influence too, including the death of Ursula von der Leyen’s pony in 2022. As Gustav notes:

“When wolves move, their movements affect law like waves in a pond and cause intense vibrations in the landscapes, influencing elections, legislation, as well as legal and illegal hunting. Through their actions, such as attacking reindeer, livestock, elks, hunting dogs or just wandering around being wolves, they affect ecological and social processes, which contribute to shaping laws, their interpretations and effects.” (124)

In his article ‘The unfree sea: a legal geography of the dark fleet’, Dhiraj Nainani (National University of Singapore) takes us onto the high seas, to observe the shadowy movement of thousands of ageing oil tankers of ambiguous legal identity as they engage in the illegal trade in sanctioned oil and in doing so constantly interrupt the (supposedly) smooth architecture of the international law of the sea. Dhiraj uses legal geography as a fresh (processual) way of exploring the limits of any claimed stable and all-encompassing legal regime on the ‘high seas’. As Dhiraj puts it:

“In surveying the various human, non-human and sovereign actors that are implicated in the dark fleet, as well as its vast materiality – the vessels, the offshore companies that serve as flag registries, owners and insurers, and the variety of documents and technologies used to tether and untether these vessels from the law – this paper demonstrates how the fleet exposes the fragility of modern international law in mapping, regulating and protecting the spatiality of the sea. Seemingly caught between the political idealism of State sanctions, a salient complicity with global trade, the opaque role of corporate sovereignty, and the desire to safeguard the marine environment, the law struggles to adequately comprehend the “black box” or “antimatter” that is the “darkness” of the fleet, and in so doing fosters an unfree sea” (86).

Meanwhile, Emma Pratchett (Northumbria University, UK) examines a darkness dwelling within the homes of asylum seekers, using Remi Week’s horror film as a provocative vehicle by which to present ‘A cinematic jurisprudence of homemaking in ‘His House’ (2020)’. Emma presents this film’s portrayal of the uncanny (unsettling) and probationary (temporary, unstable) site of asylum seeker accommodation as:

“a particular theorisation of the law, in which the cinematic text captures the affective and aesthetic dimensions of the juridical framing of space (MacNeil, 2004). Reading the sensory depiction of the “timespace” of the probationary home the film provides an innovative lens through which to examine how the law shapes – and negates-spaces of inhabitation in the asylum process. A law-as-film approach adopts an interpretation of law as a form of visual representation of norms, read through a critical analysis of the various codes of meaning-making observed through, for example, camera framing and shot sizes, mise-en- scene or the use of sound” (73).

Emma’s analysis juxtaposes an analysis of uneasy dwelling as shown via these cinematic techniques, with asylum law’s satisfaction with a basic ‘adequacy’ of provided accommodation, and the wider context of a presenting a deterring (and hostile) environment to asylum seekers. This is a context in which homeliness is structurally undermined by spatio-legal configurations of space and time, and left fundamentally ‘unsettled’.

In ‘Legal geography, estuarine landscapes and the Anthropocene’ Caroline Buffery (Royal Agricultural University, UK) adopts a multi-generational perspective in order to observe how “sequent legal occupance” (successive use and alteration by varied owners across time) forms, maintains and evolves the landscape of three UK estuaries (the Severn, the Thames and the Humber). In doing so, Caroline revives and applies an ‘old’ method of geographical landscape analysis (sequent occupance) and inserts (and shows the importance of) a legal dimension of that analysis. Caroline emphasises how estuaries are dynamic environments, constantly made, and re-made, both by natural fluvial processes and by human intervention (and both physical and normative). She reminds us that landscape is something ‘made’ (both as an act of viewing, and material intervention). Positioning her analysis of the distinct local-legal factors shaping the evolution of each of the three estuaries (pollution on the Severn; overfishing on the Thames and erosion on the Humber) Caroline looks towards the global challenges facing the future (climate change) and the importance of including the local-legal (and its change over historical time) in any analysis and understanding of the future of these dynamic landscapes, as:

“It is suggested that the conceptual approach of sequent legal occupance can create a framework to provide an alternative method for the understanding of the relational nature between law and landscape, repositioning the focus of legal geography by moving away from the more transcendent notions of space to elaborate on notions of place and time.” (113).

Gustav’s article and the SI editorial are available open-access, and can be read here and here. Meanwhile Emma’s, Caroline’s and Dhiraj’s articles are available for subscriber access here.

As Editor in Chief of this journal, I’m keen to attract more legal geography scholarship to this journal. So, if you have a proposal for an article or a themed Special Issue please do get in touch (l.e.bennett@shu.ac.uk).

Image Credit: Luke Bennett (2025) as originally presented here: https://lukebennett13.wordpress.com/2025/02/27/legal-geography-a-place-first-approach/

Filed under ANT, OOO and Thingology, Dwelling, house & home, Ghosts of place, Law & place, Law & things, Meaning making

Diaries of a nobody: Is the unexamined life worth living?

October 22, 2025 Leave a comment

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“He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances.”

James Joyce (1914) Dubliners

He’s done it again. My son’s lastest YouTube video essay ploughs furrows that I’ve always been ruminating upon myself throughout my adult life. This time he’s documented the obsessive journalling of Robert Shields, a Mid Western, mid-Twentieth Century everyman, who took it upon himself to document every 5 minutes of his life (and in the process created a very sizeable archive of material for posterity).

By his own admission Mr Shields was hoping that by accumulating thorough evidence of his life (including his bodily functions) future researchers would be able to gain insight into lived-life in ways that ellude us in the present.

His archive was donated to Washington State University, along with a dowry to enable/ensure its preservation. But like all things, Mr Shield’s boxes will likely turn to dust at some future point (feel free to speculate here on your favourite Deep Time engine of entropy).

Meanwhile, I’ve reached that age where I’m starting to realise that my hoard of old diaries, A’level notes, 2000AD comics, Smash Hits and LPs which had been sitting untouched in my attic for over 25 years are not a kind or helpful donation to posterity. If I don’t even ever examine this stuff (or know for precisely what future purpose I’m retaining it) then I shouldn’t be inflicting it on my kids.

It is said that Socrates declared at his trial that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. That still makes sense to me – but increasingly I’m realising that simply accumulating stuff for posterity should not be an end in itself. If someone’s going to “examine” this life then it’s only likely to be me (by and for me, and during my life). Sure, great authors can be better understood via interrogation of their archives, but us nobodies can only really pass on highlights, conclusions and shared moments. We need to do the editing, posterity won’t likely be all that bothered with the bulky raw material of our ordinary lives.

Picture credit: Luke Bennett, 2025

Filed under Archives, repositories and data stores, Dwelling, house & home, Materiality & memory, Meaning making, Time capsules, Urban mining, Wandering

CFP for the Second International Conference of Critical Legal Geography, Concepción, Chile: 17-20 March 2026

September 25, 2025 Leave a comment

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“the South should not be reduced to a source of raw data that are to be inserted or simply included into the Northern theory factories”

Diana Ojeda & Nicholas Blomley (2024) ‘Grounding legal geography: Conversations on law, space, and power across disparate geographies’. Politics & Space, 42(3):325-333 at 326.

I had the pleasure of attending the First International Conference of Critical Legal Geography, which was held in Turin, Italy in February 2024. The Call For Papers for the Second iteration of this gathering has recently been finalised (I’m a member of the Conference’s Steering Committee), and I copy it below.

Hosting the next event in South America marks the truly global, inclusive intentions of the Critical Legal Geography network, and echoes the agenda-setting work of Ojeda and Blomley in seeking to develop productive, collaborative, academic conversations between legal geographers in the North and South, as reported in their 2024 article quoted above. Their article introduces a Special Issue which explores the situated (grounded) nature of Colombian and Canadian legal geographies, as explored via a series of collaborative workshops between 2017 and 2019. Their concern is with the practice of doing legal geographies, acknowledging the plurality of such knowledge and investigation and “the uneven geopolitics of knowledge” (326). The authors’ aim is to “provincialize” legal geographic enquiry so as to better see how its knowledge rises up from locality and to see again the “power-ridden processes of co-constitution of law and space” (326) – i.e. colonial domination. Advocating a North / South co-production of knowledge (rather than just making the South intelligible to the North) Ojeda & Blomley (2024) speak directly and clearly to both of the legal geography project’s splicing foci.

The conference in Concepción will further that equitable co-production. Here’s the CFP:

Second International Conference of Critical Legal Geography

Universidad de Concepción, Chile 17-20 March 2026

Description

The second International Critical Legal Geography Conference brings together transdisciplinary scholars to discuss the mutual constitution of space and law, broadly conceived. The conference follows the first international CLG conference held in Turin (Italy) in February 2024.

This call intends to create an open space for projects that engage with the ‘big tent’ that is critical legal geography. We welcome a variety of thematics and approaches. Given the locality of the conference in Concepción, Chile, we wish particularly to invite scholars whose work focuses on topics that are important in this context (Indigenous territories; extractive borders; the appropriation of common goods; the consequences of climate change; alternative spatial imaginaries) to apply. The intention is to generate debate concerning the current imbrication of law in sociospatial processes of all kinds with an emphasis on the value of perspectives from the South; however, given the general nature of the conference, we welcome contributions on other questions relevant to critical legal geography, such as:

#energy and extraction #(post)(neo)(settler) colonialism #Indigenous rights

#the global/the local #method #anthropocene #climate change

#future spaces #more-than-human legal geographies #blue legalities

#housing #migration #informality/illegality #borders #property #land use

#cities/urban #spatial justice #legal pluralism #infrastructures #spatial justice

The emphasis of the conference on indigenous rights and environmental issues will be reflected not only in a series of parallel thematic sessions, but also in some excursions. Actually, the Bio Bío Region of Chile, home to a significant population of the Mapuche people, has been the site of longstanding struggles over land rights, cultural recognition, and environmental justice. Indigenous organizations in Bio Bío have engaged in legal, political, and direct action strategies to reclaim ancestral lands, protect sacred sites, and assert autonomy over natural resources. These efforts often challenge prevailing models of economic development and call for alternative frameworks grounded in Indigenous cosmovision and territorial rights. Excursions and meetings with local communities will enable participants to gain first-hand knowledge of these issues, which will stimulate research projects on these topics.

Location

Universidad de Concepción, Chile

Edmundo Larenas 234, Concepción, Chile

Submissions

Those interested in participating have two options:

One is to respond to one or more keywords by submitting an abstract (max 500 words). Name(s), affiliation(s), and short bio(s) (maximum 200 words) of the authors must be included as well.

The second option is to self-organize and propose a thematic session. In this case, authors should submit a broad overview of the session, together with the titles and short abstracts of the contributions (minimum 3, maximum 4), names, affiliations, and short bios of the participants. In the spirit of dialogue and flexibility, if we receive an individual proposal that also suits a proposed thematic suggestion, we may ask you to create space for the additional presentation.

In selecting abstracts, we will make every effort to reflect diverse perspectives, in particular, from groups which are under-represented. Such considerations will not be limited to gender, race, ethnicity, ability, and economic status, and will take into account intersectional diversity as a whole.

Deadline

The deadline for submissions is 10 November 2025. We will respond to all submissions by 28 November 2025.

Fees & Grants

Fees: No conference fee is requested.

Grants: The conference will provide a limited number of grants to financially support participants experiencing financial hardship, with a particular attention to Indigenous scholars, Palestinians and other scholars impacted by war, conflict, and humanitarian crises in their home countries. People interested in receiving such grants must get in touch with the organizing committee after the acceptance of their contribution.

Organizing Committee

Voltaire Alvarado Peterson (Department of Geography), Paula Quijada Prado (Department of Geography), Verónica Delgado Schneider (Department of Environmental Law), Noelia Carrasco Henríquez (Department of History), Matthew W. Caulkins (Department of Urbanism-Intercultural and Indigenous Studies), Robinson Torres Salinas (Department of Sociology), Edilia Jaque Castillo (Department of Geography-Multihazards Studies).

Steering Committee

Hadeel Abu Hussein (Erasmus University); Marco Allegra (University of Lisbon); Voltaire Alvarado Peterson (University of Concepción); Nufar Avni (Hebrew University of Jerusalem); Tugba Basaran (University of Cambridge); Luke Bennett (Sheffield Hallam University); Francesco Chiodelli (University of Turin); Philip Hubbard (King’s College London); Isabella Leroy (University of Amsterdam); Gail Lythgoe (University of Edinburgh); Elya Milner (Technical University of Berlin); Daniela Morpurgo (Polytechnic University of Turin); Matteo Nicolini (University of Verona); Elsa Noterman (University of Nottingham); Andrea Pavoni (University Institute of Lisbon); Jae Page (University of Toronto); Giacomo Pettenati (University of Eastern Piedmont); Benjamin Ralston (University of Saskatchewan)

Funders

The conference has been funded by: Fondo de apoyo para la organización de Congresos y Encuentros de Investigación VRID (University of  Concepción); ANID-FONDECYT Regular N°1251553, ANID-FONDECYT Iniciación N°11240564, ANID-FONDECYT Iniciación N°11241033 and ANID-Fortalecimiento de Programas Doctorales N°86220002 (University of  Concepción); Law and Society Association Grant 2025 “Spatial Justice in the Americas”.

Image credit: “All shall be equal before the law: justice graffiti in Cape Town, South Africa” by Ben Sutherland is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Filed under Law & place, Meaning making, Territory

The lines from the ledge(r): ink, paper, photograph, mountain

August 26, 2025 Leave a comment

“I started to draw pictures. Not of people, or buildings or street scenes. Of mountains. It was fun at first, then a fascinating pastime, building a mountain on a blank sheet of paper…Memories crowd in on you as you delicately bring to life on paper the various features of the mountains you have seen so often. Your pen moves through a mist of dreams…”

A. Wainwright (1993) Memoirs of a Fellwanderer. Michael Joseph: London, endpaper.

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The lines move down, layer by layer across the page. It started brilliant white, but the page now has miriad shades of grey: folds, pits, crevasses, shade and shadow. This is still just a sheet of paper. Still just a spreading of marks on a surface. But so much more is summoned to view by the arrangement of these marks.

I discovered Wainwright’s drawing’s by chance in a holiday cottage. Our accommodation was very well equipped for lakeland walkers, with a maps and guidebooks a-plenty. Arranged prominently upon the bulky mantleshelf was a full set of Wainwright’s lakeland walking guides. I was aware of Wainwright as a phenomenon – books covering hundreds of upland walks, and held in high esteem by those who like that sort of thing. But I’d never actually seen one of his books. I had taken them to be portal-like, a means to an end. Effective guides to successful walks. But, oh – turning the page revealed those books to be a destination in and of themselves, everypage testimony to Wainwright’s desire to summate each area visited. The reader was welcomed in with Wainwright’s wry handwritten text, his innovative mapping and his ink-on-paper drawings of the key scenes.

I was captivated, and for the following few hours I travelled through the pages, traversing vast hills and delving into deep valleys with my eyes. This was first class armchair adventuring!

And what struck me most was the drawings. At first I took them in as illustration – they helped to welcome me to the new place that each page presented, and I could travel within the pictures following the lines and seeking to make out the subtleties of the scene. Then, staring a bit longer (as when staring at a real mountain) matters of scale started to become unstable. How big was this mound, and what was it about the arrangement of the lines of the page that summoned that sense of the collosall? Instead of seeing a mountain, you felt it.

In his day job Wainwright was an accountant, working for a local authority. There seemed something painstaking and accurate about his drawings. I marvelled at him ascending lakeland hills each weekend to get the measure of these uplands. I imagined him standing exposed on a ridge, the wind buffeting his easle, but his meticulous mark making proceedings regardless – in a race against the inevitable fading of daylight (and the necessities of making it back down hill in time to catch the last bus out of these wild parts). I assumed that he was gathering detail, in order to faithfully account for it.

In a way it seems that his was – but I was suprised to find that the pulling together of his visual account of each mountain did not take place out on the hillside. Instead he relied upon memory and photographs as the basis for his drawing to take place later, back in the comfort of his own home.

At first I felt a bit disappointed by this – not so much by the thought that he’d composed his images at home. That seemed a wise choice, given the necessity of keeping the paper pristine and the marks fully under his control. No, what seemed a bit artless was the thought that he had transcribed the images from a photograph onto paper. That (conceptually) seemed a bit reductive. Yes, there would be skill in being able to replicate what the photo had recorded, but if the photo was as good (or even better) than its reproduction in the drawing then why bother? Why not just let the photograph speak for itself?

And then I saw the photographs that Wainwright used for his drawings. Like this one (which is the same view of Scafell Crag and Mickleore as the drawing above) the photographs were so detail-less, and low resolution! Taken as ‘snaps’ on a fixed focus basic camera these images were so much less than Wainwright had achieved with his drawing.

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Yet, like some whizzy 21st century AI image enhancement software could do in seconds nowadays, Wainwright (working simply with pen. link, paper and time) had taken the basic (bland) phtographic image, added his visual recollections of the day, his intimate familiarity with light on rock surfaces, and interpolated vast additional layers of detail, to provide an image with vast, additional depth and character.

Wainwright wasn’t a great photographer and had a rubbish camera – but he could certainly draw and summon mountainousness.

Source: Scafell Crag & Mickledore (drawing and photograph) page 99 of: A. Wainwright (1993) Memoirs of a Fellwanderer. Michael Joseph: London

Filed under Cliffs, crags and crevasses, Climbing, parkour and other playscaping, Enthusiasm, Materiality & memory, Meaning making, Stone, brick, concrete, Tracework, Wandering

Counting the days, my son: competence, diffraction and failures of communication.

July 28, 2025 Leave a comment

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“Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world of today.”

André Breton

Noticing. Naming. Counting. That’s at the heart of existence, right? We strive to understand the situations that we find ourselves in and then look for patterns. When we find the patterns we then want to tell folk about what we have found. Or we want to keep the patterns to ourselves, and (somehow) monopolise advantage from them.

Either way we live in the soup. The soup of potential meaning. The universe brings the raw material and we make the connections on aspects that matter to us (leaving oh so much else unremarked, unnotice, uncounted, unnamed).

I started this blog over 15 years ago, as a vehicle for sharing the connections and juxtapositions that I’ve noticed when giving my life in the built environment extra attention. I was interested both in understanding competence (how we all learn how to exist and pragmatically operate within a day to day world of concrete objects) and also diffraction (how meaning making can become obsessional, oddly tuned and/or otherly through different modes of valorisation and attentiveness). I wanted also to understand the limits of meaning making and its attendant communication: to peer into those circumstances (for instance attempting to send effective warnings about nuclear waste sites across deep time) where the sharing of meanings fails. And the three aspects are inter-connected. It has always seemed to me that it is those circumstances of diffraction (by the obsessive artist) or communication breakdown (by those seeking to encode a place or situation) that best reveal how – most of the time we’re pretty competent at making sense of the physical world as we pass through it – but that that competence is a journey along a fine line.

I recall an episode from a very early episode of the TV series Lost (before it got too carried away with ridiculous layerings of diffraction and ended up, just plain silly). The survivors of the plane crash, tentatively explore inland, having landed on the island’s coast. They ascend higher and higher and towards the summit detect a radio tower. As they draw nearer to that anomalous man-made artefact on a the otherwise Edenic tropical island, they start to pick up a radio signal. It is all cloaked in static at first. Slowly a regularity in the transmission become discernable. There is a pattern there. Getting closer, words start to be clearer, but they are in an unfamilar language. Eventually one of the survivors recognises the language as French. With effort they eventually work out what the spoken portion of the repeating message is.

But I forget now what that message actually was. Instead what has stuck for me was the way in which this distress signal was encoded with a count. At the end of each repetition, the radio system added another spoken number at the end, prefixed with one word: “iteration”. The excited anticipation of the crash survivors started to fade as they came to realise that this distress message was now many years old. They had been thrilled at the prospect of others to be found on this island, but once they had calculated the length of each instalment’s transmission and then worked out just how many years it would have taken to get to today’s iteration, they realised that such folk were long gone.

That lifeless counting haunts me. A system set in motion by a human but now simply carrying on – sentinel like – in the absence of the life that had once launched it, and the redundancy of the message’s continuing call for aid.

We live nowadays in world saturated with counting machines. Our vital bodily signs, our search engine usage, our shopping lists, our communications: all are accummulating for a purpose and a posterity that lies beyond us. The datafication (and gamification) of everything is the ‘new normal’. But what if we jump back to a time just before we became able to instruct machines to observe and record our every living breath?

Let’s choose 1965.

Let’s purge our minds of the ease nowadays of counting our lives. Let’s instead figure such counting as a strange manual (diffractive and obsessive) artistic project. And to do this, let’s countdown with Roman Opalka…

…and this blog post is with thanks (and fatherly pride) to Disambi, who just happens to be my son. When I saw his latest piece, it produced a wry smile. Disambi is channelling the same questions that have haunted me over these many years. He’s found his own path to these questions. But he’s doing it for his generation, addressing their matters of concern and their modes of meaning-making.

So, I’m juxtaposing here: bringing the YouTuber into conversation with this old-school wordy blog.

Image source

Roman Opalka (1965) Infinity via https://arthur.io/art/roman-opalka/infinity-1

Filed under Built environments, Meaning making, Time capsules, Wandering

Why I’m Not Writing About Bunkers Today

June 25, 2025 Leave a comment

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“Along the side of the road is a parapet to prevent accidents, which enabled me to look down and be as giddy as I pleased; for the amusing thing about my taste for steep places is, that I am very fond of the feeling of giddiness which they give rise to, provided I am in a safe position.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1781 (1996), The Confessions. London: Wordsworth Editions. p167.

I have no idea whether or not the recent US bombardment of Iran’s underground uranium enrichment site at Fordow has or hasn’t produced fundamental damage to the interior of this subterranean complex. What is clear though is that current conflict in Gaza, Iran, Israel, and Ukraine sees the return of the bunker to global politics and the world’s media. The spectre of secret underground lair and the frailty of bodies seeking to shelter from aerial attack in improvised or exotic shelters once more stalks the streets of the real.

It is all very saddening and feels quite separate to the spirit in which many years ago (circa 2008) I started thinking about and then researching the ‘afterlives’ of the Cold War’s then-redundant nuclear shelters. That project was driven by a sense of wanting to make sense of a scary world (of my childhood, back in the 1980s) in which nuclear attack seemed a real prospect. My project in the post Cold War context of the late 2000s was to encounter the physical remains of these sites in order to face and surface that hidden past and its supressed feelings. It culminated in my book In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker (2017, Rowman & Littlefield International).

That project was sublime – in Jean Jaques Rousseau’s sense. It was about standing safely at the endge and gazing back into the recent past at what never-quite-happened (and seemed increasingly anachronistic). The point for Rousseau is that the sublime thrill of exposing yourself to the frisson of a vast danger only works if you are actually spectating from a safe position. In 2008, in the UK at least (and that’s an important caveat) things felt safe, and bunkers could be positioned by researchers, artists and redevelopers as almost playful objects. Playful, but with an added (but safe) frisson of existential darkness. You could look, ponder, maybe laugh and then turn away. The Cold War bunker was a totem of a ‘road not taken’. Or at least, that’s how it mostly resonnated in popular culture.

Yes, there was still a threat of nuclear war (and/or a threat of conventional bombing for many around the world). But that wasn’t the dominant framing that was being employed then. Instead there was (almost) a scheudenfraude, a sense of “look at how silly the world once was. But we’re over that now.”

Occasionally though, the movie-villan trope of the baddie’s extensive underground lair would be invoked in contemporary politics, as discussed in my piece on Tora Bora here: https://lukebennett13.wordpress.com/2016/08/24/old-uses-for-new-bunkers-38-the-post-cold-war-rise-and-occasional-fall-of-underground-lairs/

But in the last few years the framing has changed. People are sheltering in assaulted cities and villages around the world. There is nothing playful that can be written about bunkers these days, and it feels somewhat strange that there was a time when that even seemed possible.

So, that’s why I’m not writing about bunkers today. Today they are not sublime. They are real and present and relate to a world of viseral danger.

Image source: Iran’s Fordow Uranium Enrichment Facility before and after the June 2025 US bombing: https://c.ndtvimg.com/2025-06/9e60hcd_iran-fordow_625x300_23_June_25.jpeg?im=FitAndFill,algorithm=dnn,width=1200,height=738

Filed under Bunkers, Cliffs, crags and crevasses, Meaning making, Ruins, Subterreanea

“Two o’clock and all’s well!” On the comforts of the local night watchman

May 23, 2025 Leave a comment

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Watchman!    What of the night?

No light we see,–

Our souls are bruised and sickened with the sight

Of this foul crime against humanity.

The Ways are dark—-

            “I SEE THE MORNING LIGHT!”

John Oxeham (1916) ‘Watchman! What of the night?’ in All’s Well (New York: George H Doran Co)

Some nights it feels like you haven’t slept at all. Perhaps your mind is churning on a work or family dilemma. Whatever the cause you note the passing of the hours as you slowly transit, inexorably, through the night towards the morning. And the night feels a lonely, strange time. You are in the dark and disconnected from other souls. Your senses reach out for signs that the world – both the physical world and specifically the social world – is still out there. In the fretful silent stillness of night your ears strain to register the aliveness of every occasional passing car, the creak of a tree branch and, as dawn starts to appear, the eager twitter of birds. Ah, those pesky birds and that cruel early morning summer sunshine! Now you have no chance of getting back to sleep.

Our culture is haunted by nighttime. It is a disruption to our engagement with the world. We know deep down that it is a phase of sequestration – that we are required to withdraw then from the world, to surrender to unconsciousness and to trust that the day will come again. It probably will, it always has before. But you also know that one day – hopefully far off – will actually have been your last.

And our culture has developed all sorts of descriptive and navigational devices to enable us to speak of this nether-time, how we surrender to it and what it is to be awake when we really should be sleeping.

After a night of disrupted sleep I find myself sensitised to every comment that I hear that seems to reference the politician’s “many sleepless nights about that decision”; the confessional “what keeps me up at night” or a new parent’s accounts of a work turned upside down by the errant (to an adult) sleeping pattern of a newborn. And once you start zero-ing in on such commentary you seem to find it everywhere. It is almost as though to be awake (unwantedly) at night is to be losing control: with thoughts or the demands of others undermining the ability to function properly.

And just as individuals struggle to cope with the strangeness of travelling wakefully through the night, so have societies developed approximate ways of semi-civilising the night and its other-worldliness. Think here about the pre-modern fear of the dark and of the ‘witching hour’: street lights now keep contemporary creatures (and fears) of the night somewhat at bay. Medieval monks (in a world before clocks) marked out the phases of day and night with regular prayer sessions. And now we have bedside clocks (or phones) to connect us to a regular flow of orderly time across the 24 equally spaced hours of the day.

But what is 2.34am? It feels much less knowable than 2.34pm. 2.34pm is just after lunch, a time to re-engage with work tasks or to engage with executing an afternoon’s outing. But 2.34am is shapeless through being purposeless. 2.34am is secret time, you are not supposed to see it. You should be asleep!

On those occasions where something has required me to get up and do things in the middle of the night I’ve felt the arbitrariness of our time-coding, and also the emptiness of our streets. It can all feel very much like the scenes of a post-apocalyptic film, in which the protagonist wanders an abandoned city-scape, with no humans left in sight. Oddly, the empty road can feel exhilarating. It is so much easier to get from A to B when no-one else is trying to do so. But it can feel unsettling too.

So, the solitude of the night can only ever be a limited consolation. We are social (and sociable) creatures after all. We need someone to tell us that “Its 2 o’clock and all’s well” as the early modern nightwatchmen would have done, keeping guard over the town and marking out the passage through the oddity of the night and heralding the continuity of civilisation, law and order.

But my world has no church bell or watchman’s cry to mark the passage through this night. I must travel instead through the dark time with my robotic clock or phone counting the hours.

Unless.

Unless one day I set up a trail camera in my garden and the next day happened to glance at the footage that it captured. Nothing remarkable – just my cat pacing around the garden. To and fro, acting out routines of earnest purpose: that plant really needed to be sniffed at that very moment of time, and instinct or habit then demanded a meander across to a couple of broken plant pots.

Through this I came to see that my own garden has a nightwatchman; someone measuring out an orderliness within the night, and oblivious unlike me, to the rigid distinction between day (a time to do stuff) and night (a time to be unconscious). Watching the cat go about its business in the depths of the night, with no less and no more strength of purpose than when observed doing so in daylight, made me realise that surrender to the doing-nothingness state of the night is a human condition. The rest of the world is getting on with projects across all hours of the day. And what strikes me most of all is the way in which this glimpse of a non-human ordering of time as seen in the cat’s nocturnal wanderings sat framed by the very human timecoding of the trail camera recordings.

It is irrelevant to the cat that it sniffed the plant at 2.34am. But I find it strangely comforting to know that it did so. The next time I’m lying awake fretfully at that time I’ll think of the cat and not feel so alone or powerless in the depths of the night.

Image Reference: https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/221107011-close-flip-clock-calendar-turns-slowly-day-234

Filed under ANT, OOO and Thingology, Dwelling, house & home, Meaning making, Territory, Tracework, Wandering

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