Ian G.R. Shaw's research while affiliated with University of Glasgow and other places

... Scholars also illustrate how nonhumans, such as animals, vegetation or objects take part in struggles around border control (Boyce, 2016;Squire, 2014;Sundberg, 2011). Others point to the role of new technologies, such as drones, robots or algorithms, in shaping the spatial arena of the political (Braun et al., 2010;Shaw, 2016;Vincent J. Del Casino Jr et al., 2020). There have also been a number of works seeking to integrate assemblage thinking into political geography and critical geopolitics (Allen, 2011;Depledge, 2013;Dittmer, 2014;Müller, 2015). ...

... The air of the tropics, with its high humidity and warm temperature, was thought to cause laziness and licentiousness: "Air is expressed as fever and stagnation, merging burgeoning scientific discourse over the spread of disease, social attitudes towards morality, sexuality and gender and a fearful colonial rule mulling over governmental techniques to treat the health, hygiene and disorder of public life" (ibid: 81). Williams (2010) and Shaw (2016), are however united in their efforts to cast scrutiny on the contemporary issue of drone warfare, showing in part that the ability of drone operators to carry out aerial surveillance is highly dependent on favourable weather patterns including cloud cover and wind speed. ...

... However, it is crucial to acknowledge the underlying systemic mechanisms that push certain applications of AI. In the same way that the opposition against the use of facial recognition at border control should acknowledge the underlying racist migration system that encourages the use of such technologies (iBorderCtrl No, n.d.;La Fors & Meissner, 2022), or that the opposition against the use of AI in a military context should acknowledge the underlying issue of imperialism and military power structures (Shaw, 2017); the opposition against the use of AI as a growth-accelerator should acknowledge the underlying capitalist economic system. Indeed, our economic paradigm lies at the core of why technologies are used as growth accelerators. ...

... The systematic use of UACV's (Unmanned Aerial Combat Vehicles) takes advantage of the volume which provides new opportunities for surveillance and precision targeting. As Derek Gregory (2011) claims, drone warfare should not be reduced to a mere 'video game' projection as it sometimes is, because it involves the construction of separate 'atmospheric enclosures' (Shaw, 2017), of new forms of (aerial) subjectivity and, essentially, of new lifeworlds, all grounded in the connected isolations of the foam, contractually and logistically compartmentalised and judicially supervised. The desire to immunise such hyper-individualised and hyper-compartmentalised spaces, often by fusing together militaristic forms of aerial occupation and aerial warfare with the vertical logics of capital accumulation (as represented by commercial and corporate use of drones), leads to the emergence of complex crisscrossing patterns of aerial circulations and produces ample security anxieties that naturally and necessarily metamorphose two-dimensional battlegrounds and three-dimensional battlespheres into true rhizomatic 'battlefoams' (Shaw, 2017). ...

... In the last two decades, the design and utilisation of semi-autonomous unmanned systems have gone the furthest in the air force. 2 Unmanned aircraft systems, commonly known as drones, can have fixed wings or multirotors and serve a variety of purposes: reconnaissance, surveillance, patrolling, intelligence gathering, tracking, and lethal missions. While there has been increasing research in various disciplines that delves into the political, legal, military, social, and ethical aspects of drone operations of intelligence gathering, tracking, and targeted killings aimed at the enemy (Gregory 2011;Holmqvist 2013;Strawser et al. 2014;Chamayou 2015;Allison 2015;Shaw 2016a;Gusterson 2016;Grayson 2017;Hazelton 2017;Enemark 2017;Meisels 2018), there is a lack of emphasis on how drones are utilised as a tool of the command-and-control system aimed at the performance of one's own fighting human force on the battlefield. For instance, Shaw (2016b) and Chamayou (2015) have tackled the technology of dronopticon, but only in regard to its civil utilisation in the policing of urban areas or aimed at specific segments of populations. ...

... The greatest immediate consequence of the Vietnam War was the enormous death toll. During the conflict, a total of 2 million Vietnamese civilians, 1.1 million North Vietnamese military personnel, and 200,000 South Vietnamese troops were killed [2]. In 1975, Communist forces took control of South Vietnam, and the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam the following year. ...

... Additionally, evidence demonstrates that the bioaccumulation of microplastics in lower trophic levels may aid in biomagnification of microplastics and their contaminants to higher order non-human animals, negatively impacting the marine food web (Carberry et al., 2018). Moreover, non-human animals are defined by their distinct umwelt, which is the interconnectivity between a species and their environment (Shaw et al., 2013). Organisms have differing ways of perceiving and methods used to act upon their surrounding environment (Schroer, 2019). ...

... This approach differs fundamentally from some of the more mainstream bodies of literature, which tend to assume that infrastructure is an inert product of a meticulously calculated design process that is undertaken by impartial engineers (Ashcraft and Mayer, 2016;Lamri et al., 2020;Wang et al., 2020). Other strands of the mainstream literature assume that infrastructure is largely an outcome of politics in that its existence, form and functioning are substantially shaped by power laden social relations (Bijker, 2007;Bakker, 2012;Larkin, 2013;Shaw and Meehan, 2013;Obertreis et al., 2016). ...

... 56 The most important targets, as determined by computer analysis, are brought before a committee headed by the president, which determines who to kill. 57 However, the process is shrouded in secrecy. Drone strikes are largely conducted by the CIA, which avoids scrutiny, and the techno-bureaucratic system disperses responsibility among many actors, making it difficult to hold anyone accountable. ...

... They depict spaces that operate under entirely different conditions, thus demonstrating how these conditions would impact human life. Through this, absolute impossibilities allow for ways of sensing and seeing, as well as thinking and dreaming of fundamentally different geographies (Shaw and Sharp, 2013). Some approaches, however, insist on the blurriness between reality and fiction. ...