Although a universally condemned affect, aggression endures and persists. It takes many forms: it can be assertive or passive, impulsive or cautious. Aggression can traumatise, innervate and radicalise individuals or social groups. It can poison atmospheres. Whilst not an institution or perhaps even a social relation, aggression often acts as an ethos and structural precondition for violence, be it physical, verbal, or emotional. Although aggression may become formalised in institutions such as the battlefield or the market, it also assumes other more informal and hidden shapes. Often, it operates precisely through the absence of something else, such as care or love.
Rather than exploring aggression as innate to the human condition, we are interested in examining aggression as a social affect that may destroy, cement or produce socio-material relations. Our starting point is thus that aggression takes place in that it targets the buildings, technological infrastructure and ideological fabric that enable social relations. But aggression also inheres in those very architectures. Paradoxically, it often acts as a socio-material defence mechanism against aggression itself.
Whilst psychologists and biologists have long debated the question of aggression, social scientists in general and geographers in particular have tended to neglect or dismiss it as unworthy of further scholarly attention. In attending to the spatiality of aggression, we seek to determine what contemporary research in human geography may have to offer to this debate. We will do so by investigating eight architectural spaces which are fundamentally tied up with aggression: the prison (Judy Pallot, Oxford), the bunker (Silvia Berger, Zürich), the ruin (Ruth Olden and Hayden Lorimer, Glasgow), the refugee camp (Hanno Brankamp, Oxford), the construction site (Asli, Duru, Oxford), no man’s land (Noam Leshem, Durham), homelessness (Danny Dorling, Oxford) and the algorithm (Louise Amoore, Durham).