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Military and Post-Military Landscapes

An exploration of how heritage issues affect military and post-military sites.

Professor Woodward's longstanding work on military landscapes is part of a broader body of work developed over the years on the geographical constitution and expression of militarism and militarisation.

Heritage issues intersect her work on military and post-military landscapes in three distinctive ways.

The first concerns the heritage issues pertaining to the preservation, interpretation, access and adaptive re-use of military and post-military sites which have recognised heritage value.

The second issue concerns the discourses about nationhood, national identity and military power which are mobilised through military landscapes (both active and post-military sites), where the use and interpretation of heritage is significant to those discourses.

The third issue concerns the practices of former military personnel in developing and maintaining associations and attachments with military landscapes (ranging from specific structures to larger sites, including places of previous deployment on active operations), and the significance of heritage issues in the development of these associations and attachments.

Military Landscapes

Funder: AHRC under grant RES/0321/7283 Caring for Post-Military Futures, Care for the Future programme small grant 2013. Small grants for fieldwork, School of Geography Politics and Sociology, 2014.

Duration: On-going. The work started with fieldwork in 2009, and has continued since then. The overall objective is to write a book about military and post-military landscapes, and heritage issues are part of this debate.

PI: Professor Rachel Woodward - Geography, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology

Publications

Woodward, R. (2014) Military landscapes: agendas and approaches for future research., Progress in Human Geography 38 (1): 40-61

Woodward, R. (2014) Military pastoral and the military sublime in British army training landscapes. In I.D. Rotherham and C. Handley (Eds.) War & Peat, Sheffield: Wildtrack Publishing, pp.45-56.

Woodward, R. (2014) Looking at military landscapes: definitions and approaches. In Renaud Bellais and Josselin Droff (Eds) The Evolving Boundaries of Defence: An Assessment of Recent Shifts in Defence Activities. Contributions to Conflict Management, Peace Economics and Development Volume 23,pp.141-155. Emerald Publishing, UK.

Woodward, R. (2010) Military Landscapes / Militære Landskap: The military landscape photography of Ingrid Book and Carina Hedén. In Pearson, C., Coates, P and Cole, T. (Eds) Militarised Landscapes: Comparative Histories and Geographies. Continuum, London, pp. 21-38.

Woodward R. (2004) Military Geographies. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford. RGS-IBG book series