Aerial Visibilities: New Thoughts and Further Possibilities

This book brings together diverse perspectives from a range of geographic settings and feature contributions from some of the key thinkers in the field. It explores various facets of the relationship between verticality and visibility, offering insights that deepen the understanding of this dynamic dyad.

This volume brings the sky and air into the view of visual sociology and argues that there is more to the sky than phenomenological and geopolitical dimensions. The chapters use the common thread of aerial visibilities to emphasise the need to rethink the aerial in terms of complex relations between humans, technological artefacts and devices, vertical superstructures, and non-human others. This rethinking helps unsettle notions of aerial biopolitics. The chapters in this book foreground the visual to ask to what end the image of – or efforts to create images through – vertical registers shapes our understanding of the vertical world, the communities, and users this vertical world engages or impacts upon.

This book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of visual sociology, geography, urban studies, media studies, anthropology, and cultural studies, as well as those exploring the intersection of technology, politics, and spatial theory.

The chapters in this book were originally published in Visual Studies.

Dennis Zuev is Senior Researcher at CIES-ISCTE, Lisbon, Portugal, and a coordinator of the Research Lab for Cultural Sustainability at the University of St. Joseph, Macau, China. He is also a member of Urban Transitions Hub, University of Lisbon, Portugal. He co-founded (in 2006) ISA Research Committee in Visual Sociology. In 2018, he published Urban Mobility in Modern China: The Growth of the E-bike (2018) and co-authored the book Visual Sociology: Politics and Practices in Contested Space with Gary Bratchford (2021).

Gary Bratchford is Associate Professor of Photography at Birmingham City University, UK. He is the co-editor of Visual Studies Journal and Visual Culture in Britain. He was President of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee for Visual Sociology (RC57) from 2018 to 2023.