Tristan Sturm

Queen's University Belfast, Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Faculty Member

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Senior Lecturer of Human Geography at Queen's University Belfast
Address: http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/gap/Staff/AcademicStaff/DrTristanSturm/

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Papers by Tristan Sturm

Introduction. Book Review Forum: Sacred subdivisions: the postsuburban transformation of American evangelicalism, by Justin Wilford

This chapter discusses the crucial role of handwork in historical practices of astronomical repre... more This chapter discusses the crucial role of handwork in historical practices of astronomical representation, focusing particularly on Anton Pannekoek's Milky Way drawings. Using a range of cases, it explores how the acts of seeing, knowing, and drawing interacted to benefit observers, especially as a form of scientific labour. This functions as background for understanding the role of drawing and photography in Pannekoek's graphical work. This paper activates the notion of handwork in relation to labour to make it historically relevant for astronomy's representational practices, but also to connect these to broader political and epistemological trends. It will be shown that Pannekoek's emphasis on manual labour acted as a bridge between photography and drawings, and more generally, as an important cross-over point between Pannekoek-the-socialist and Pannekoek-the-astronomer.

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Review: Passing Orders: Demonology and Sovereignty in American Spiritual Warfare

Variegated environmental apocalypses

Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene, 2021

Tracing Belfast’s Water: new materialist interventions in infrastructure and design

In this book, Tracing Belfast&amp;amp;#39;s Water, we seek to make visible the buried histori... more In this book, Tracing Belfast&amp;amp;#39;s Water, we seek to make visible the buried histories, geographies, infrastructures, and architectures of water in Belfast by tracing the water network, unearthing its contents, mapping its history, allowing it to reflect back our cultures and built environments. Water, and the infrastructure that delivers and disposes of it, is a taken-for-granted resource: it is infra (meaning invisible)- structure. Employing New Materialism theories, including more-than-human geographies, to architectural design and co-production we explore climate change related future flooding, lead exposure via lead water pipes, the history of water plumbing in Belfast, water scarcity, oral histories of the docks, and filmic reflections of the Lagan River. ISBN: 9781909731066 Creative Commons use.

Pedagogy + workshop

The Immanence of an Imminent Apocalypse: Christian Zionists and Israel as the New Redeemer Nation-and-State

Relegere

Christian Zionists Support Israel’s Risky Policy Decisions", Oped in Jerusalem Post

Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report

the arab world geographer, 2017

“Anxious Apocalypticism, Meaningful Millennialism”, Oped in Rabble.ca

“The Day After the Rapture”, Oped in Toronto Star

The end of the world is coming – just not this Saturday

Introduction: Mapping the end times

The Free Gaza Flotilla and the Christian Zionist Response: Territory, Media, and Race

Human Geography, 2011

Repeated attempts by activists and aid volunteers to break Israel's unilaterally recognized b... more Repeated attempts by activists and aid volunteers to break Israel's unilaterally recognized borders around Gaza have been most often met with violent resistance from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). In this paper, I argue that “Freedom Flotilla”, the ninth attempt at challenging Israel's blockade of Gaza by sea, has been challenged through a delegitimization campaign leveled on the behalf of powerful Christian Zionists. This campaign of discursive dispossession has taken at least three strategic forms: (1) the performance of the doctrine of terra nullius; (2) a culture jamming counter-media project; and (3) a biblically based racialized division of the world. These Christian Zionist discourses are important to consider in understanding the conflict because they have effects that influence how the conflict is to be framed, as well as material effects, and because they resonate with Israel's increasingly powerful religious settler movement and culturally conservative Ameri...

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Religion, neoliberalism, planning: an analysis of Northern Ireland’s ‘superchurch’

Religion, State and Society, 2021

This article adds to and develops extant work on the comparatively under-explored but important l... more This article adds to and develops extant work on the comparatively under-explored but important link between religion, neoliberalism, and planning. It is noticeable that mega/giga-churches are recalibrating the religious and physical landscapes of cities around the world; in so doing they raise important implications for professional planners. We focus on Green Pastures Church in Northern Ireland. The church has initiated a significant urban development project that represents something much more than just another new church; indeed, it has been described as a 'superchurch'. The main body of this article focuses on the three separate plans submitted to the local authority, and the attendant contentious local planning issues. Existing research exposes the problematic impact of planning decisions on religious sites for certain religious communities. Our contribution to knowledge reveals new insights concerning the more positive and supportive relationship between planning and religion. We end this article by offering insights into broader debates on the public presence of religion and how it is regulated in the contemporary city.

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The Geopolitics of the Chosen People's Apocalypse: The Los Angeles Jews for Jesus and the Judeo-Christian Tradition

Apocalyptica, 2022

Jews for Jesus (JFJ) is an aggressive American Christian Zionist missionary organization. Their p... more Jews for Jesus (JFJ) is an
aggressive American Christian Zionist missionary organization. Their particular worldview is both Jewish and Christian by faith whilst bridging American
and Israeli national identities. Through critical discourse analysis of a key text,
as well as a series of interviews, this article explores the apocalyptic geopolitics of members of the JFJ’s Los Angeles branch and compares these views
with a book on the apocalypse written by the JFJ Executive Director, David
Brickner. This article shows that discourse analysis of apocalyptic social
movements alone often misses the everyday and discordant discourses surrounding their theo-political imaginations. The three interviews examined
show vast deviations in understanding and motivation that are unaccounted
for in previous scholarship on religious geopolitics. This article concludes
that these everyday discourses have influence on the cultural conceptualizations of both Christian and Jewish apocalypses and on many text-based
academic findings concerning evangelicals and Messianic Jews.

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Hal Lindsey’s geopolitical future: towards a cartographic theory of anticipatory arrows

Journal of Maps

Hal Lindsey & Carlson's, 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth, was the best-selling non-fiction... more Hal Lindsey & Carlson's, 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth, was the best-selling non-fiction book of the 1970s. In it, using the eschatology of premillennial dispensationalism commonly believed by American evangelicals, he conflates biblical prophecy with current geopolitical conflicts. He exploits the uncertainty of the nuclear age, civil rights movement, and 'wars and rumours of wars' in Asia by giving readers a certain explanation: Christ will soon return. Within his book, Lindsey provides two maps depicting his narrative for the battle of Armageddon. The maps are devoid of borders, and only show troop movement via thick black arrows. This article focuses on these arrows and their geopolitical function. The article argues, beyond symbolizing mobility, that arrows on maps also symbolize future anticipatory cartographic temporalities. It is theorized that Lindsey's arrows potentiate and help actualize a narrow geopolitical future.

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Pedagogy and Workshop Public CoLab 2019: Tracing Belfast's water

Interventions in critical health geopolitics: Borders, rights, and conspiracies in the COVID-19 pandemic

Political Geography, 2021

Apocalyptic futures: morality, health and wellbeing at the end of the world

Anthropology & Medicine, 2021

In the context of Covid-19, anthropologists of medicine and religion alike may be tempted to join... more In the context of Covid-19, anthropologists of medicine and religion alike may be tempted to join with the media in declaring that humanity is facing the end of the world as we know it. Indeed, as the global pandemic rages on, and the dramatic restrictions of national lockdowns ease and then retighten with an anomic unevenness akin to cardiac arrhythmia, it would be easy to imagine that these ‘strange times we now live in’ are somehow utterly exceptional – an eschatological precipice like no other. Yet, as the papers in this Special Issue on ‘Apocalyptic futures: Morality, health and wellbeing at the end of the world’ amply demonstrate, while the health and social crisis of the coronavirus pandemic is replete with compelling end-times signs, it would be wrong to assume that this new disease – even in its most acutely challenging of moments – holds a monopoly over human imaginations and experiences of world endings. Put simply, popular fascinations with the end of the world did not begin with Covid-19, nor, in our view, will they end with it. Taken literally, rather than as a bad pun, this observation about the longue durée of apocalypticism provokes new and important questions which the authors contained within this Special Issue seek to answer. How do human imaginations of the biomedical and spiritual future alter life in the present? What happens, in this forward-looking temporality, to human reflections on the past – to ‘lessons learned’ about old diseases now eradicated, or past sins now atoned for? In the context of global disease, international conflict, national protests, and localized fears and anxieties, what does wellbeing look like, and how do humans continue to promote it – medically and morally – even as they face their own mortality, and that of those they love? In seeking to safeguard the ‘health’ of a nation, how might political and clinical interventions butt up against (or marry with) millenarian religious activism heralding an imminent apocalypse? If, according to some medical and religious commentators, the apocalypse is temporally soon, geographically here, and corporally near, then how might such convictions change the way humans experience their own bodies, as well as the world around them?

Imagining Apocalyptic Geopolitics: American Evangelical Citationality of Evil Others

... from the West preceded any biblical renditions (see Hartog 1988), In the twentieth and twenty... more

Tristan Sturm

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