Early results presented at Neue Kulturgeographie 2023: Geographies of Overlapping Crises

2023 brought the return of the Neue Kulturgeographie conference series, a mainstay of Cultural Geography in Germany. For this year’s theme, Geographies of Overlapping Crises, two project members presented early results from fieldwork in Germany and the UK. Katharina Ciax’s paper, Urbane Plätze und Anti-Terror. Eine atmosphärische Analyse der affektiv-räumlichen Versicherheitlichung auf dem Breitscheidplatz (Urban Squares and counterterrorism: An atmospheric analysis of the affective-spatial securitisation of the Breitscheidplatz) analyses the atmospheric transformation of the central square in Berlin in terms of its changed security infrastructure. Sam Berlin’s paper, Affective counterterrorism and atmospheric policing, introduces fieldwork conducted on Project Servator, a novel British counterterrorism policing programme, to show how police are increasingly interested in reading and manipulating atmospheres to understand and secure vulnerable spaces.