Dr Jacob Miller

Assistant Professor

School: Geography and Natural Sciences

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.

Campus Address

Ellison B310
Northumbria University
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 8ST

Email Jacob

Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

Cultural and Urban Geographies

Consumption and consumerism

Retail spaces, especially shopping malls and U.K. high streets

Tourism and lesiure

Ruins and ruination

Military Geographies and everyday militarism

Critical social theories

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Retail Ruins, Revisited, Miller, J. 2 Mar 2026, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the City, Retail, and Consumption, Hoboken, NJ, Wiley
The Multiple Speeds of Infrastructural Violence, or Putting Flesh on the Boneyard, Wilson, S., Miller, J., King, H. 25 Nov 2024, In: Annals of the American Association of Geographers
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