Repurposing Liverpool's Waterfront as a LIminal 'Military Landscape': a Photographic Essay

Abstract

This photo essay documents via analytic autoethnographic observations the experience of being a ‘show-goer’ at a public civil-military event in the UK. Hosted by the city of Liverpool during 2017, Armed Forces Day witnessed transient civic-spaces across the city’s waterfront be transformed into what is defined here as a ‘liminal military landscape’. Following established research within human geography studying British military airshows, this photo essay makes use of visual methods and fieldnotes as forms of data collection and analysis. Used in concert to provide analytic autoethnographic observations, these methods help articulate Armed Forces Day as a nuanced experience that served more purposes than generating military recruitment. Instead, it is suggested that this civil-military event repurposed the civic space of Liverpool’s waterfront to promote ‘liberal militarism’ as a cultural product, through which the military promoted its own imagined heteronormative institutional identity to the public via various recruitment activities, objects and props.