Dugan Meyer

My work is focused on critical geographic approaches to (in)security in the United States. I am especially interested in the infrastructural dimensions of police power, particularly the capacity of policing—as a spatial technology—to produce and shape social landscapes in a variety of contexts, from border regimes to housing markets to a range of affective economies. 

I am currently collaborating with Colter Thomas on a project called “Infrastructures of Control: Visualizing Security and Surveillance in the U.S. Borderlands”. This project aims to create a visual archive of U.S. border security infrastructure. To achieve this, Colter and I are conducting fieldwork research along nearly the entire length of the U.S. border with Mexico. Guided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s publicly accessible map of U.S. Border Patrol surveillance technologies—a map to which we are also contributing through our work—we are locating and documenting, through photography and other methods, surveillance towers and other forms of security infrastructure in a wide range of landscapes, from remote and desolate patches of desert to sandy river deltas to small towns and bustling metropolises, residential backyards, public parks, community college campuses, private ranches, and more. Our work is supported by the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry at the University of Arizona and the Mellon Foundation, as well as the W.A Franke Honors College. 

You can find some of my photographs and writing from this project on my website, www.duganmeyer.com, and view some of Colter’s photographs on his website at https://colterthomas.com/deterrence. You can read a short photo essay from our work published in the Border Chronicle here: Surveillance Occupation in the U.S. Borderlands: A Narrative Photo Essay by Colter Thomas and Dugan Meyer. We will also be hosting an exhibition of Colter’s photographs, supported by other documentary and research materials from our collaboration, in the courtyard of ENR2 on the University of Arizona campus from April 8-26, 2024. This is an ongoing project, and more of our work will be available soon. 

I am also engaged in an ongoing collaboration with Dr. Stefano Bloch focusing on the racial and affective politics of white liberalism in the context of gentrification. You can find links to our work in the list of publications below. 

I have also worked with Drs. Mark Kear and Margaret Wilder—and others—on research exploring the economic, administrative, and affective borderscapes through which displacement is produced as an everyday fact of life for many residents of manufactured housing. You can find links to some of this work in the list of publications below. 

Academic Publications: 

Bloch S and Meyer D (2023) Displacement and affective economies in gentrification research. Dialogues in Urban Research 1(3): 248-251. Link: http://tinyurl.com/58t4paea 

Kear M, Wilder MO, Martinez-Molina KG, McCann L, and Meyer D (2023) Home thermal security, energy equity and the social production of heat in manufactured housing. Energy Research & Social Science 106. Link: http://tinyurl.com/z75c794b 

Bloch S and Meyer D (2023) Displacement beyond dislocation: An affective methodology for gentrification studies. Dialogues in Urban Research 1(3): 206–225. Link: http://tinyurl.com/5n7r9uut 

Kear M, Meyer D, and Wilder M (2023) Real property supremacy: Manufactured housing and the limits of inclusion through finance. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 113(8): 1900-1917. Link: http://tinyurl.com/2x9zbjre 

Meyer D (2020) Security symptoms. cultural geographies 28(2): 271–284. Link: https://tinyurl.com/y84723y7 

Bloch S and Meyer D (2019) Implicit revanchism: Gang injunctions and the security politics of white liberalism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 37(6): 1100-1118. Link: https://tinyurl.com/ybahdw49 

Kear M, Handschuh T, Launius S, Hartman J, Meyer D, Christopherson G (2018) The "Manufactured Housing Gap" in Tucson and Pima County: Introduction and Preliminary Analysis. White Paper #12. Making Action Possible in Southern Arizona (MAP Dashboard). Link: https://tinyurl.com/yd3kvxp4