Dr Jacob Miller

I am a human geographer interested in the relationship between consumer culture and urban space. My early research focused on shopping malls as unique socio-spatial technologies that shape contemporary life in profound ways. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, I explored the transformation of the historic Abasto market into a shopping mall in the 1990s and experimented with mobile interviews and visual methodologies to explore the affective and emotional geographies of the building and its place in the city. I then continued developing these methodologies in another project focusing on a controversial shopping mall development in southern Chile, the Mall Paseo Chiloé. Built nearby a UNESCO World Heritage site (a colonial era church), the mall sparked a rich debate around the meaning of space, identity, landscape, development and more.    

More recently, I have researched how tourist and leisure spaces are shaped by politics and military geographies specifically. I have worked with colleagues to investigate military museums in southern Arizona (USA) and how they frame military ruins, such as abandoned missile silos and retired aircraft, as well as how urban space more generally is shaped by military infrastructures.

Other research on the politics of consumption includes a book entitled Spectacle and Trumpism: An Embodied Assemblage Approach (2020, Bristol University Press / Policy Press) that examines the relationship between consumer culture and the rise of Trumpism. Here I develop the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and others to put forward a contemporary theory of the “spectacle” as a long-standing force in consumer culture that paves the way for Trumpism.

I am currently involved in the study of urban retail decline in the U.K. In my second book, Retail Ruins: The Ghosts of Post-Industrial Spectacle (2023, Bristol University Press / Policy Press), I draw on Derridian hauntology, psychogeography and critical urban studies to put forward the idea of the retail ruin as a pressing contemporary issue. This builds on previous research with colleagues on the geopolitics of ruins at an abandoned military post in northern Chile in the Atacama Desert.  

Overall, my research draws on post-structuralist theories and qualitative methodologies to understand the intersections of space, society and identity in the contexts of rapid urban change and the role of consumerism in society today.

• Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
• Retail Ruins: The Ghosts of Post-Industrial Spectacle, Miller, J. 25 Apr 2023
• The Assemblages of (Counter) Spectacle – Mega-Retail in Post-Dictatorship Chile and Beyond, Miller, J. 1 Oct 2023, In: Environment and Planning A
• Museum as geopolitical entity: Toward soft combat, Miller, J., Wilson, S. 1 Jun 2022, In: Geography Compass
• The ruin(s) of Chiloé?: An ethnography of buildings de/reterritorializing, Miller, J. 1 Jul 2022, In: Cultural Geographies
• Post-phenomenology, consumption and warfare on the urban leisure path, USA, Miller, J., Das, A. 1 Nov 2021, In: Geoforum
• The geopolitics of presence and absence at the ruins of Fort Henry, Miller, J., Prieto, M., Vila, X. 1 Feb 2021, In: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
• Spectacle and Trumpism: An Embodied Assemblage Approach, Miller, J. 18 Nov 2020
• Spectacle, tourism and the performance of everyday geopolitics, Miller, J., Casino, V. 1 Nov 2020, In: Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space
• Embodied Architectural Geographies of Consumption and the Mall Paseo Chiloé Controversy in Southern Chile, Miller, J. 4 Jul 2019, In: Annals of the American Association of Geographers
• The face of the state on the U.S.-Mexico border, De La Ossa, J., Miller, J. 1 May 2019, In: Emotion, Space and Society

Geography PhD June 30 2016