Mair, Kimberly

I teach social theory, digital culture, and about the contradictions implicit in orientations of care.

My scholarship is concerned with social theory, communication, and aesthetics (the senses). I am primarily interested in implicit forms of communication that cannot be attributed to what might be presumed to be the intentional and direct acts of individuals or solely human subjects. Instead, I am interested in relational and sensorial modes of communication that are enacted between human and non-human entities in built environments, artistic formations, and forms of collective instruction, as well as how the conventions of movement, speech, and writing are implicated.

My archival research on urban guerrilla movements in the former West Germany provided the basis for my forthcoming book Guerrilla Aesthetics: Art, Memory, and the West German Urban Guerrilla, which emphasizes the sensorial rather than rational aspects of guerrilla communications of the Red Army Faction, 2nd of June Movement, and the Socialist Patients' Collective. Much of the book traces the cultural and artistic responses to these movements and the period of struggle between the state and guerrillas.

I recently completed a SSHRC Insight Development Grant funded archival research project that resulted in a book, The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain. During the crisis of the Second World War in Britain, official Air Raid Precautions made the management of daily life a moral obligation of civil defence by introducing new prescriptions for the care of homes, animals, and persons displaced through evacuation. Government publicity campaigns communicated new instructions for care formally, while the circulation of wartime rumours negotiated these instructions informally. Rumours that explicitly repudiated the improper socialization of evacuees also produced a salient, but contested, image of the host as a good wartime citizen who was impervious to the cultural invasion of the ostensibly "animalistic," dirty, and destructive house guest. Simultaneously, explicit contestations over the value of the lives of pets, conceived as animals who do not work, placed attention on the animal caregiver whose use of limited provisions or personal sacrifice could be judged. Together, formal and informal instructions for caregiving reshaped everyday habits during wartime against a projected image of the good citizen committed to the war and nation. Meanwhile, Mass Observation was there, enacting a watchful form of care by surveilling civilian feeling and habit. This book examines how the Mass Observation movement recorded and shaped the logics of care that became central to the daily routines and discourses of civil defence in homes and neighbourhoods. Mass Observation often reversed the direction of the imperative logics that organized civil defence, asking those who occupied positions of power to do what it asked of civilians on the home front.