ABSTRACT
The airport has become a complex and overdetermined site and sign of the new security that has come under increased academic scrutiny, which enables and constrains differential mobility by systems of surveillance and control; the management of vision, space, and time; and by harnessing affect or emotion (Lyon 2003; Adey 2008). Airports are also a sign of the politics of everyday life; they represent the dream of free, technologically enabled mobility and the vulnerability that this global network lays bare (Augé 1995; Gordon 2004; Iyer 2001). Fuller and Harley say “the airport is a complex machine, a series of interdependent and cross-reference systems, functions, jurisdictions and modalities. What the airport is, depends on where you are in it, and how and why you are travelling through it” (2005: 17). As a signal site of ‘national’ security, Feldman observes, “The ramping-up of security procedures at the airport produces a kind of condensation point for anxieties surrounding the balance between liberty and security in the political community as a whole” (2007: 334). Because of the complexity and vulnerability of the civil aviation system, airports have become hypersecuritized spaces, where policies, technologies, and methods of control that would be unimaginable elsewhere are commonly accepted. This chapter builds on previous critical analyses of airports and the subjectivities created by their modes of care and control (Adey 2004; Lyon 2006; Salter 2007).2 Airports are the subject of sustained analysis in the study aviation business, transport and human geography, tourism studies, surveillance studies, anthropology, law and society, and political science (Salter 2008).
