Dr Jacob Miller

Jacob is a human geographer interested in the relationship between consumer culture and urban space. His early research focused on shopping malls in South America and how they are unique socio-spatial technologies that shape contemporary life in profound ways. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, he explored the transformation of the historic Abasto market into a shopping mall and experimented with mobile interviews and visual methodologies to explore the affective and emotional geographies of the building and its place in the city. He then continued developing this approach in another project focusing on a controversial shopping mall 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, he has researched how tourist and leisure spaces are shaped by politics and military geographies specifically. He has worked with colleagues to investigate the military museums of southern Arizona (USA) and how they frame military ruins, such as Cold War-era 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 (Bristol University Press / Policy Press, 2020) that examines the relationship between consumer culture and the rise of Trumpism. He develops the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and others to offer a contemporary theory of 'the spectacle' as a long-standing force in consumer culture that paves the way for Trumpism. 

He is currently involved in the study of urban retail decline in the U.K. In his second book, Retail Ruins: the Ghosts of Post-Industrial Spectacle (Bristol University Press / Policy Press, 2023) he draws on Derridan hauntology, psychogeography and critical urban studies to put forward the idea of the retail ruin as a pressing contemporary issue. This builds on his previous research with colleagues on the geopolitics of ruins at an abandoned military outpost in northern Chile in the Atacama desert. 

Overall, his work draws on post-structuralist theories and qualitiative methodologies to understand the intersections of space, society and identity in the contexts of urban change and the role of consumerism in the world today.