The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

The College of Earth and Mineral Sciences

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME:

HOME, MOBILITY, AND U.S. MILITARY KIDS

A Dissertation in

Geography

by

C. M. Livecchi

© 2014 C. M. Livecchi

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

December 2014 The Dissertation of C. M. Livecchi was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Lorraine Dowler Associate Professor of Geography and Women's Studies Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee

Melissa W. Wright Professor of Geography and Women's Studies

Chris Fowler Assistant Professor of Geography

Donald E. Kunze Professor of Architecture and Integrative Arts, Emeritus

Jennifer Mittelstadt Associate Professor of History Special Member

Cynthia Brewer E. Willard Miller and Ruby S. Miller Professor of Geography Head of the Department of Geography

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School.

ii ABSTRACT

The United States is a society of deep connections to place. The common question “Where are you from?” is often used as a means of pinning an individual's history to a geographic location. Underlying this question is the assumption that people invest their identities in place – and that place is home. Yet the United States has also long been characterized as the most mobile society in the West. Few Americans are as mobile as active duty military personnel and their families, who engage in long- distance moves an average of once every three years. Youth raised in these circumstances (“military youth”) experience childhoods marked by constant uprooting and resettling. The mobility they know is thoroughly militarized and is rationalized by the state as an unavoidable consequence of the need for national security and readiness. This state-sanctioned mobility sets them apart from other highly mobile groups such as transnational migrants, refugees, homeless youth, and Travelers. This dissertation examines the experiences of military youth with regard to home, mobility, identity, and militarization. Using semi-structured in-depth interviews with 43 youth (ages 18 to 25) from active duty military families, survey data, mapping exercises, and primary documents, I analyze the ways that military youth construct home in light of their mobility, the strategies they use to settle into new places, and the ways that mobility and militarization impact their identities and prompt new formulations of place and home in the process. Their experiences reveal tensions between mobility and rootedness in American society, and suggest that militarization is a deep, fundamental force in their everyday lives.

iii CONTENTS

Abbreviations...... viii Maps...... ix Tables...... x Acknowledgments...... xi Chapter I. A Maze of Cardboard Boxes...... 1 Youth...... 3 A Unique Context...... 5 Military Youth...... 9 Challenges...... 11 Structure...... 12 Chapter II. An Empire of Bases...... 14 American Empire...... 14 Globalization, American hegemony, and the U.S. military...... 15 Overseas base siting, national security, and readiness...... 16 Resisting empire...... 19 On the Home Front...... 21 Base realignment and closure...... 21 Opposition to BRAC...... 23 “Mega-military communities”...... 24 Living the Uncanny Base...... 25 The spatial question mark...... 26 Everyplace, noplace, American space...... 27 Discussion...... 28 Chapter III. Home and Mobility...... 31 Home...... 31 Multiple disciplines, slippery definitions...... 31 Humanist roots...... 33 Environmental psychology and place identity...... 34 Critical approaches...... 36 Summary...... 38 Mobility...... 40 iv The most mobile society in the world?...... 40 Theorizing mobility: The new mobilities paradigm...... 41 Mobile subjects...... 43 Summary...... 44 Setting the Stage...... 46 Chapter IV. Militarization and Scale...... 48 Militarization...... 48 The reach of militarization...... 49 Civil-military relations...... 50 Intimate militarization...... 52 Summary...... 54 Scale...... 55 Theorizing and understanding scale...... 55 Feminist geopolitical approaches to scale...... 58 Intimately global...... 59 People, places, security, and scale...... 61 Summary...... 63 Interweaving and Rescaling...... 64 Chapter V. Methods and Methodology...... 65 Methods...... 65 A qualitative framework...... 65 Shared experiences and difference: Multiple methods...... 66 Participant selection ...... 67 Survey...... 68 Place mapping...... 70 Rationale: Critical and qualitative uses of GIS...... 73 Semi-structured in-depth interviews...... 74 Examination of primary sources...... 75 A question of identity and age...... 76 Methodology...... 77 Truth, intersubjectivity, and reflexivity...... 77 Insider research...... 78

v Positionality...... 79 Conclusion...... 81 Chapter VI. Roots: Identity, Place, and Home...... 82 Traditional Considerations...... 82 Place identity...... 83 Living rootlessness, imagining rootedness...... 89 Alternative Constructions...... 95 No place like home?...... 95 Discussion...... 107 Chapter VII. Routes: Contextualizing Home In Mobility...... 111 Mobility as Contextual...... 111 Normalized mobilities...... 112 Normalized mobilities...... 112 Formative mobilities...... 115 Responding to Mobility...... 118 Uprooting and resettling...... 118 Mobility and home...... 124 Discussion...... 129 Chapter VIII. Rescaling Home: Identity, Geopolitics, and Mobility...... 133 Militarization...... 134 Militarized mobilities...... 134 Militarized youth...... 139 Militarization, identity, and home...... 146 Rescaling...... 148 Geopolitical Youth...... 150 Discussion...... 153 Chapter IX. Conclusions: There's No Place Like Home...... 154 Findings...... 154 Further Implications...... 156 Limitations...... 158 References...... 159 Appendix A: Survey...... 179

vi Appendix B: Mapping Exercise Script...... 184 Appendix C: Survey Review Script...... 186 Appendix D: Interview Questions...... 188 Appendix E: Maps...... 190

vii ABBREVIATIONS

This list provides standard abbreviations used by the United States Department of Defense and branches of the United States military that appear in this dissertation.

APS Army Posture Statement BRAC Base Realignment and Closure CSL Cooperative Security Location DAHSUM Department of the Army Historical Summary DDESS Domestic Dependent Elementary and Secondary Schools DoD Department of Defense DoDDS Department of Defense Dependent Schools DoDEA Department of Defense Education Activity FOS Forward Operating Site IGPBS Integrated Global Presence and Basing Strategy MOB Main Operating Base MWR Morale, Welfare, and Recreation OBC Overseas Basing Commission PCS Permanent Change of Station ROTC Reserve Officer Training Corps SOFA Status of Force Agreement

viii MAPS

Map 1: KF's residential path...... 191 Map 2: CA's residential path ...... 192 Map 3: Ana's residential path ...... 193 Map 4: AF's residential path ...... 194 Map 5: Tim's residential path ...... 195

ix TABLES

Table 1: Age of participants...... 69 Table 2: Sex of participants...... 69 Table 3: Race of participants...... 69 Table 4: Sponsor's branch of service...... 69 Table 5: Sponsor's rank by track...... 69 Table 6: Sponsor's relationship to participant...... 69 Table 7: Categories of home, redefined...... 99 Table 8: Strategies of settling into new places...... 119

x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Research doesn't happen in a vacuum. This dissertation would not have happened without the support of a number of people who deserve my warmest thanks. My doctoral committee – Lorraine Dowler, Chris Fowler, Don Kunze, Jennifer Mittelstadt, and Melissa Wright – helped me navigate massive literatures, think through theoretical and methodological frameworks, and keep me on track. I am especially grateful to Lorraine for helping me develop and adapt my research program along the way. Don Kunze provided me with food for thought to last a lifetime. Vanessa Massaro read drafts of several chapters in progress; her critical eye and thorough knowledge were indispensable and made this work much stronger. Mark Kissling asked all the right questions about discourses and maps; our conversations helped me organize and flesh out my analytical chapters. Emma Mullaney let me talk through my analysis and read the results with an enthusiasm that kept me going. Destiny Aman, Raechel Bianchetti, Matt Branch, Ellen Braun, Elizabeth Crisfield, Katie Dietrich, Jeremy Fisher, Erica Frankenberg, Elaine Guidero, Steve Hathaway, Katie Himmelfarb, Becca Kreiger, John Pipkin, Laura Spess, Shannon Telenko, and Tim Vatovec all provided moral support, enthusiasm, and insights (theoretical, methodological, and empirical) throughout the process – Becca and Tim even before I arrived at Penn State. Andrea Gatzke has been a remarkably patient and supportive partner throughout the writing process, even while she was finishing her own dissertation. The Niners – Maria Jimena Guzman, Aparna Parikh, and Azita Ranjbar – provided a regular and supportive space for thinking through my ideas. The inimitable and irrepressible M. Güt Fieling provided guidance when I wasn't sure where else to turn. A number of people provided assistance at the earliest stages of my research. Although the shape of this project changed considerably over time, and I later abandoned the lines of thought with which they assisted me, their contributions were a valuable and integral part of this process. Former committee member Krzysztof Janowicz gave me very valuable guidance and technical assistance on the mapping aspect of my fieldwork. LTC Mark Read provided a number of key sources for this dissertation and helped me think through my research program. Pat O'Neill and Casey Silbaugh tested the waters in public high schools in Tacoma, Washington for me. Amy Ackerman, librarian extraordinaire, assisted me in researching the history of the National Association of Realtors and its role in real estate licensing in the United States. Special thanks go to the Penn State Department of Geography for an academic enrichment xi award that went toward compensating my participants for their time. The department staff – especially Graduate Staff Assistant Jessica Perks and Administrative Support Coordinator Marnie Diebler – provided patient and gracious assistance with my endless administrative and financial questions. Several people, many of them unknown to me, posted and reposted my calls for study participants. I am grateful for their willingness to spread the word. The encouragement of my mother Rosalie, my brother Gary, and my late sister Lisa were invaluable from start to finish. Without their willingness to talk about their own experiences of military life, I probably would not have thought to take this project on. We owe this all to my father, the late COL (Ret) Samuel G. Livecchi, whose 26 years of service in the U.S. Army and its impact on my life were the inspiration for this project. Most importantly, 43 young adults from military families were brave and generous enough to give me their time, to relive their childhoods, to share their thoughts and experiences, and to make me think. I am eternally grateful for their willingness to allow a total stranger into their worlds.

xii Dedication

For my siblings, Lisa and Gary; for my cousins, Kim and Tony; and for all the other military kids – yesterday, today, and tomorrow – who bear their service and sacrifice with grace, and who “know that PCS means pack your toys and say, 'See ya later.'”1

1 From the joke “You know you're a Military Brat if you...” I first saw this when my father emailed it to me in the late 1990s, but it has been collected online at http://www.crystal-reflections.com/jokes/300_399/joke_380.htm. xiii Chapter I A Maze of Cardboard Boxes

In November 2011, I was interviewed by a reporter during a protest. He asked me several questions relevant to the issue at hand, and when he finished we had the following exchange: Reporter: Where are you from? Me: I'm a military kid. I'm not really from anywhere. Reporter: Well, where do you call home? Me: I don't really call anyplace home. Reporter: Where were you born? Me: Troy, New York, but we moved away when I was a baby. Reporter: Do you live in town? Me: Yeah, I live in State College now. Reporter: Well, you're from State College. Over the course of our conversation the reporter grew increasingly frustrated. In asking this seemingly simple question, he had entered temporarily into militarized space. Failing to find what he was looking for, he assigned to my identity a place – and although I lived in State College at the time, it was neither where I was from nor my home. Conversations like these are commonplace for military youth, and the confusion they create is emblematic of the difficulty, for such highly mobile youth, of claiming any single place as home. Youth raised in active duty military families move an average of once every two or three years (more frequently if their sponsor2 is in the early stages of his or her military career, and less frequently toward the end), and they typically move long distances, crossing state or international boundaries. Their new residences take many forms: quarters, apartments, houses; on base or off. They begin as empty, anonymous spaces. It is not unusual for those living on base to find that their quarters still smell of of the regulation white paint that has glued their windows shut. In a few days, the movers will come, and their new abode will transform into an ever-changing maze of cardboard boxes until, eventually, everything is unpacked. Childhoods on the move put military youth in the position of being perpetual “new kids.” They regularly find themselves changing schools – adjusting to new curricula, learning to

2 In the military, “sponsor” is used to describe military personnel who are responsible for a spouse and/or dependent children. 1 navigate unfamiliar territory, and trying to build their own social networks among already established circles of friends. This is the public face of their adjustment. And in those first few days and weeks at school, they will invariably be asked that ostensibly simple question: Where are you from? Many struggle to answer. There is no single military childhood. Different branches of service, ranks, and specialties lead to very different paths for military youth. Some live overseas, others do not. Those who do live overseas are likely to find themselves in one of dozens of locations in Europe or Asia, though a few experience farther flung duty stations. Some leave each duty station for new places, others find themselves leaving and returning to the same base several times. Some live exclusively on base until their parents retire or they leave their parents' home, others find themselves primarily in suburbs with few if any other military youth around; most experience a combination of the two. In all this difference, the two factors that unite military youth are that they live within military culture, and that they move often. The aim of my research was to understand how military youth conceptualize home in light of their experiences of the residential mobility foisted onto them by the military. Having grown up in an Army family, it is a question that has interested me for much of my life – and, I found, a question that has plagued countless other military youth across generations. Over the course of this project, I realized that military youth's ideas about home and experiences of mobility are shaped by militarization. In completing my research I have consulted literature in a number of disciplines (environmental psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, and geography) and listened to the stories and reflections of dozens of young people from military families. Their responses reveal intricate relationships between militarization, mobility, place, and identity that demonstrate just how complex a phenomenon home can be. What I found was that their lived experiences unfold within a network of forces and discourses that place them in a unique cultural and political position, and this position is revealed by their reflections on mobility and home. Military youth stand at the center of this project, so it is important to consider what that designation – military youth – means. Over the next few pages I want to address the construction of military youth from three angles. First, my research is part of the broader body of literature that deals specifically with youth. As I discuss below, young people and adults are differently positioned in society. Second, my research deals with youth in a military context. While the

2 existing literature acknowledges the military as a structuring force in the lives of military youth, it generally overlooks its significance as a cultural system. Third, military youth have long been identified as a social group worthy of study; there is a body of scholarship that looks at issues specific to them.

Youth Current conventions in the literature on young people designate youth as people between the ages of 16 and 25; by contrast, children are considered those below the age of 16, and adults are those above the age of 25 (see, e.g., Hopkins 2010). Young people merit their own theoretical perspective because their position in society is different from that of adults, bearing a separate set of expectations and opportunities (Barker et al. 2009). They occupy a place within society that is transitional and often marginal (Sirriyeh 2010): they are still deemed as needing protection, are handled differently and separately from adults in the legal system, and they are assumed to be incapable of making certain life decisions (Aitken 2001). Despite their different legal and social standings, youth, like adults, negotiate meanings of home, identity, and belonging (Ní Laoire et al. 2010). Home is often key to such negotiations; Hopkins argues it “can be seen as an important site for the construction of their identities” (2010, 96). Yet with considerably less mobility and limited access to certain places relative to adults, young people typically have fewer pathways for constructing and negotiating identity and home. The existing literature on youth is small but rich in intersections of home and mobility. Studies of highly mobile youth such as children of transnational migrants, homeless youth, and Traveler youth reveal that many mobile young people are flexible in how they define home. Children of transnational may see multi-sited definitions of home as unproblematic, and may identify different places as home for a variety of reasons – the presence of extended family, the location of friend networks, or the site of daily practices such as chores (Mand 2010). Some mobile youth scale home simultaneously at the national (homeland) level as well as the local (community or house) level (e.g., Hopkins, Reicher, & Harrison 2006; den Besten 2010). Youth sometimes push home downward to scales finer than the house, to smaller spaces such as bedrooms (Hatfield 2010; Sirriyeh 2010). In addition, we know from the experiences of migrant, homeless, and other displaced youth that highly mobile young people are adept at finding and creating home in places

3 traditionally considered unhomely (e.g., Ursin 2011), often using practices that are localized but not tied to any particular location. Such practices may include decorating personal spaces to express identity (Hatfield 2010); using language to accommodate identities and affinities and to (re)order spaces in ways that make them more comfortable (Valentine, Sporton, & Nielsen 2008); or having a sense of belonging and being recognized by others as belonging (Sirriyeh 2010). While most (if not all) highly mobile youth confront issues of identity and belonging in the course of their travels, this experience is very different for U.S. military youth. What makes them unique in comparison to migrant, asylum-seeking, Traveler, homeless, and other mobile youth is the nature of their relationship to the state. Migrant youth from these backgrounds often have a complicated and troubled relationship with the state and society because they are perceived as culturally and politically external. While there are longstanding academic debates over whether it is better for immigrant youth to assimilate or to retain their original cultures (Seif 2011), many feel pressured to undergo a process of assimilation in order to “become” American (Stepick & Stepick 2002). Yet their identities with regard to the United States are complex: many of them adopt American cultural traits very quickly, building hybrid or hyphenated identities associated with existing minority groups (e.g., Mexican-American), but identify increasingly with their homelands as they age (Stepick & Stepick 2002). Further, some migrant youth (particularly, Muslim youth) find that their teachers and their peers challenge their cultural and civic belonging to the United States (Abu El-Haj 2007; Deaux 2011). In response to these political tensions and to experiences of social injustice related to their migrant status, some reject an American identity in favor of one that reflects their homeland even if they have U.S. citizenship, while others report that they feel forced to choose between identities in order to express their political and personal allegiances (Abu El-Haj 2007; Jahromi 2011). By contrast, US military youth are by and large perceived as culturally and civically American through and through. As my participants' experiences demonstrate, many military youth – especially those who spend time overseas – are well aware of their status as American citizens, and are aware to some degree that they are symbolic of the U.S. presence abroad. As I will discuss in my analysis, some of them find their “Americanness” questioned by more rooted civilian peers – yet it is uncommon for them to reject an American identity in favor of something

4 else, even if their families selectively adopt some of the cultural practices of foreign host countries. Rather, many of them reassert their sense of self in terms of their ties to the military, an institution they widely view as integral to the security and national identity of the United States. By asserting their identity with (or participation in) the U.S. military, some military youth implicitly claim a kind of “supercitizenship” that many other migrant youth, by virtue of their social and civic status, are unable (and often unwilling) to claim. Our understanding of highly mobile youth is in its infancy. There are some important gaps at the intersection of youth, home, and mobilities studies. First, scholars of youth mobilities have focused almost exclusively on the traumatic mobilities of the marginalized (e.g., asylum- seekers, homeless youth, etc.) and on mobilities of privilege (e.g., children of transnational businesspeople). Everyday residential mobilities are generally overlooked; this is surprising given that residential mobility is relatively common and has a long history in the United States. Second, much of this scholarship is localized, focusing on youth who are negotiating home, identity, and belonging in the context of a small number of moves in a short period of time. As a group that expects temporariness, moving at semi-regular intervals over long distances throughout their childhoods, military youth have very different experiences of mobility than those typically considered by youth geographers. Finally, youth geographers who study intersections of mobility and home often focus on people whose mobility is problematic for the state due to their status as non-citizens. By contrast, military youth present an opening for understanding a group whose mobility is considered a service to the state.

A Unique Context It is tempting to assume that the only factor differentiating military life from the civilian world is mobility. Yet the differences between military and civilian life are manifold and complex, and understanding these differences is imperative for two reasons. First, the military constitutes a unique subculture within the United States (Soeters, Winslow, & Weibull 2006), and this shapes the mobility that military youth experience as well as their understandings of the world around them. Second, there is a well-documented knowledge gap between the civilian and military worlds (Ender & Gibson 2005) – and yet there are very few comprehensive guides to military culture (Caforio 2006). It is important, therefore, to understand the military as an important contextualizing force that requires some explanation.

5 When I talk about “the military” I refer specifically to the four branches of the U.S. armed forces operating within the Department of Defense (DoD): the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps.3 Further, for the purposes of this research, I am writing about children of active duty military personnel – children whose parents' regular, full-time employment is with the military. While Reserve and National Guard components account for a considerable proportion of the total force, these part-time personnel and their families are not beholden to all of the demands (including geographic mobility) that impact active duty personnel and their families. The primary force driving the military is a combination of two powerful and cardinal discourses: national security and readiness. National security is “A collective term encompassing both national defense and foreign relations of the United States” (DoD 2010b, 182). It entails maintaining favorable foreign relations, the ability to resist “hostile or destructive action from within or without, overt or covert,” and “a military or defense advantage over any foreign nation or group of nations” (DoD 2010b, 182). Readiness, meanwhile, is “the ability of US military forces to fight and meet the demands of assigned missions” (DoD 2010b, 220). These two discourses provide a multiscaled foundation for American militarization. National security's emphasis on the integrity and superiority of the state serves as a rationale for broad-scale militarization. It is national security, for example, that is discursively summoned in discussions of long-term strategies and geopolitical concerns. At finer scales of operation, readiness provides justification for the defense policies that most directly impact active duty personnel and their families, including mobility (both strategic and residential) as well as the policies, programs, and institutions within the military that are designed to recruit and retain personnel. These twin discourses work behind the scenes to make the military a “greedy” institution that makes demands of its personnel and families that are either unique or unusual relative to other forms of employment (see Coser 1974; Segal 1986). Military personnel can be called into service at any moment, as this professional development manual demonstrates: Air Force members are subject to duty 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If so directed by a competent authority, they must report for duty at any hour, at any location, and must remain there as long as necessary to get the job done. The Air Force mission necessitates more restrictive rules

3 While the Coast Guard is considered part of the armed forces, two important factors separate it from the others: first, it is nominally managed by the Department of Homeland Security rather than DoD. Second, although it serves an ancillary military role during wartime, its nominal mission is largely oriented to maritime safety, security, and stewardship rather than national defense. 6 and standards than are normally found in civilian life. (AFPAM 36-2241, 10.5.3)4 Beyond this intense level of commitment, Segal (1986) identifies five “greedy” demands that the military makes of its personnel: risk of injury or death, separation from family, normative constraints on behavior, geographic mobility, and potential residence in foreign countries. Many of these demands extend to the spouses and children of military personnel. For example, wives of service members are traditionally expected to participate in social functions and to take on a level of responsibility relative to their husbands' ranks. The behavior of spouses and children is subject to close scrutiny by their sponsors' superiors; any “bad” behavior on their part reflects badly on a soldier's leadership and risks negative attention from a service member's commanding officer (Wertsch 1991). Two of these demands – geographic mobility and foreign residence – are of particular interest to my research aims. While many military families acknowledge benefits to moving, they com at the cost of limited career opportunities for spouses, disrupted educations for youth, and complicated relationships with the family and friends who are left behind (Segal 1986; Segal & Segal 2004). Foreign residence entails many of challenges brought about by residential mobility more generally, but with the added complication of adjusting to a new culture, new languages, currencies, architectures, practices, and social expectations. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that many military families regard foreign residence as both a hardship and a benefit (Segal 1986; Bowen et al 2003). I will turn my attention to these demands in greater detail in my analysis. When I argue that the military constitutes a subculture within the United States, I mean that in the literal sense. Military personnel share a specific and highly regulated set of values and practices, a language that describes them, and a rigid and hierarchical social structure. Enlisted personnel, the most numerous members of the military, stand at the base of the social structure, with the least authority; commissioned officers stand at the pinnacle of the social structure and are responsible for command and management. Warrant officers, the smallest proportion of personnel, occupy a middle space and are single-track specialists. Within each unit, there is a strict chain of command through which orders and policies are passed down through established channels of authority. The military's social order is reflected in symbols, values, practices, and ceremonies. Symbols such as rank insignia, awards, and qualification badges are worn on uniforms and

4 I cite this manual in text as AFPAM; the full citation is listed in the references as Department of the Air Force, 2013. 7 provide an instant, visible indication of a service member's service status within the hierarchy, occupational specialization, and service record. These often reflect collective values such as honor, courage, commitment to duty, excellence, and self-sacrifice – values that legitimize the military's greedy demands and that are drilled into personnel during basic training, at the military academies, and in ROTC programs. Etiquette-bound practices such as hand salutes and tightly- scripted formal ceremonies reflect and reinforce the hierarchy and commemorate achievements, changes in authority, troop movements, and even the passage of time. Military culture also produces its own material and spatial signatures. Camouflage uniforms, survival gear, communications equipment, specialized vehicles, and armaments are an everyday part of life for active duty military personnel, as well as for their families. Military youth often learn to identify military vehicles by sight or silhouette, and the lure of military gear stored at home is often irresistible: “military brats of both sexes tell of the joys of playing with the castoff military paraphernalia their fathers brought home, from helmets and C-rations to parachutes, empty ammo cans, holsters, old fatigue jackets, spent shells, and brightly colored uniform patches” (Wertsch 1991, 4). In military parlance, materiel also includes real estate. The US military owns over two billion square feet of real property, including medical, training, supply, maintenance, administrative, and community facilities. Family housing accounts for just over 17 percent of the total, making it the largest category of real estate owned by the Department of Defense (DoD 2013). As of 2007, about 10 percent of military families lived in on-base housing owned by the federal government, and the military holds about 134,000 housing units worldwide.5 This whirlwind tour through military culture is necessary. Military youth are bathed in military culture as personnel bring home gear, talk about work, impose military values on their families. They may not grow up wearing uniforms, they are embedded – accepted as part of the military structure and socialized accordingly. They grow up learning the customs and language of the military, reading its landscapes and uniforms, and seeing the world – whether they know it or not – through the filters of national security and readiness. For many military youth, military culture is not some foreign subculture: it is their first culture, the one into which they were born.

5 This information comes from the DoD Military Housing Privatization overview of military housing, which is available online at http://www.acq.osd.mil/housing/housing101.htm. 8 Military Youth And what of military youth themselves? For decades they have been a topic of interest to sociologists and psychologists studying the impacts of mobility on youth (for reviews see Rentz et al. 2004; Lincoln, Swift, & Shorteno-Fraser 2008). Some of this early research debated the existence of a “military family syndrome” in which the combination of authoritarian fathers, dependent mothers, scapegoating, and high residential mobility predispose military youth to mental health problems in greater numbers than their civilian peers (see LaGrone 1978; Morrison 1981; Jensen et al. 1991; Terr 1992). Others focused on psychosocial adjustment, resilience, and school performance of military youth in light of hardships like geographic mobility (e.g., Watanabe 1985; Jensen, Lewis, & Xenakis 1986; Palmer 2008; see also Park 2011). Many military youth find moving in general more difficult than living in a foreign country (Aisenstein 1988; Tyler 2002), and their parents and teachers report devoting considerable attention to meeting their emotional needs as they cope with disruptions to their social networks (Finkel, Kelley, & Ashby 2003). Further, military youth typically live at great distances from extended family and may lack deep or longstanding social supports when a parent deploys (Hoshmand & Hoshmand 2007; Mmari et al 2010). While many military youth agree that moving is challenging and stressful, many of them report that it has made them more resilient (Keegan, Hyle, & Sanders 2004; Bradshaw et al. 2010; Mmari et al. 2010), though others find that mobility may exacerbate already-existing problems (Weber & Weber 2005; Lyle 2006). Military families often compensate for the difficulties of geographic mobility by living on base, around other military families (Bowen 2003; Mmari et al. 2010). Some scholars argue the importance of understanding military families in terms of their broader (civilian) community contexts (Huebner et al. 2009). An important part of community contexts is civilian public schools, which accommodate the overwhelming majority of school- age military youth (Clever & Segal 2013). Yet because military youth are transient – moving, on average, six to nine times before graduating high school – school districts rarely include military communities in their reform and long-range planning efforts (De Pedro et al. 2011). In addition, the impacts of high mobility may be sidelined in response to more immediate problems associated with parental deployment (see Cozza, Chun, & Polo 2005; Chartrand et al. 2008; Flake et al. 2009; Chandra et al. 2010; Wong & Gerras 2010; De Pedro et al. 2011).

9 For all we know about military youth, they are still a poorly understood group. There is little question that military life has lasting impacts for military youth (see Ender 2002; Williams & Mariglia 2002). High geographic mobility is a major focal point of adult recollections of military childhoods; former “brats” talk plainly about their status as perpetual “new kids,” always on the move as children and restless as adults (see, e.g., Truscott 1989; Wertsch 1991). Beyond this, however, our understanding is limited. One of the biggest gaps in our knowledge has to do with the complexities of life for youth who grow up military. Much of the literature acknowledges the hardships that military service imposes on families, but often the discussion stops there. Issues such as the importance and complexity of home are overlooked by scholars, even as popular accounts by former “brats” (e.g., Truscott 1989; Wertsch 1991) underscore the confusion many military youth feel about how to define home, their feelings of rootlessness, and their senses of identity. When questions about home appear in the academic literature, they are typically anecdotal punchlines to discussions of mobility, for example: “One daughter of a military wife recalls longing out loud after one move that she wished she could go home. Her mother replied, 'You are home.' The family moved eleven times while this young woman was growing up. Her mother, a successful military wife, rehung a sign in each new kitchen: 'Home is where the army sends you'” (Enloe 2000, 168). Enloe's discussion of the story ends here. A second important gap in the academic literature concerns the militarization of military youth. While some recognize that military values filter down from service members to their children (e.g., Keegan, Hyle, & Sanders 2004), none of the literature addresses the ways that military youth are themselves militarized. For example, the authors of a recent study on the effects of multiple deployments on military youth express surprise at their discovery that the best predictor of military adolescents' ability to cope with multiple deployments was “their conviction that deployed soldiers are making a difference” (Wong & Gerras 2010). Even Enloe (1983) – who has spent a considerable part of her career contemplating the militarization of military wives – fails to conceptualize military youth as militarized. This is a remarkable and surprising oversight, given that many military youth identify culturally with, and express a sense of belonging to, the military (see Mmari et al. 2010). Finally, research on military youth tends to overlook the everyday aspects of military life in favor of the immediate and dramatic circumstances of of wartime, as evidenced by the current

10 focus on deployment. While certainly worthy of study, deployment is not a universal experience for military youth. Further, while some scholars have addressed more general issues such as geographic mobility, they tend to treat it as an independent variable rather than a lived, qualitative experience (see, e.g., Weber & Weber 2005; Lyle 2006). One explanation for these oversights is that the voices of military youth are largely absent from the research that most concerns them: “Few studies…deal with how the military child represents her self and her experiences while a military child” (Sinor 2003, 408-409; original emphasis). Instead, parents, teachers, and healthcare providers typically serve as mouthpieces for military youth in both academic and public scholarship. There is an inherent risk that this bias toward the concerns of parents and professionals imposes an adult perspective on military childhoods and in doing so robs military youth of their agency in determining what is important to them.

Challenges This project evolved in a number of ways from proposal to finished product in response to challenges, obstacles, and new theoretical insights. When I began this project, I had intended to conduct in-person interviews with 20 male and 20 female high school students (ages 14 to 18) from active duty Army families living on different posts in the United States and Europe. My hope was that by working with adolescents, I could gain an insight into their experiences while they were still living within military communities, and while they were still in the early stages of forming their identities. I had intended to work exclusively with Army families because I felt I had a better understanding of Army culture that I did of other branches of the military. Finally, I had intended for the project to hinge primarily on a more intricate and hand-coded version of the mapping exercise I describe in Chapter V. In the two years prior to writing, all of this changed. Practicalities related to access, funding, participant recruitment, and the limits of my technical abilities led me to rethink my approach at various points. As frustrating as these challenges were at the time, they led me to some important decisions. The mapping exercise became a methodological tool rather than a central focus; I chose to focus instead on young adults (ages 18 to 25); I expanded my recruiting to include participants from all branches of the military;6 and I decided to stay more or less in

6 Ultimately I interviewed 43 youth from active duty military families. See Tables 1 through 6 for descriptive statistics. 11 place and offer interviews remotely by phone or Skype. These were good decisions: the mapping exercise was interesting and useful but did not need to be a central focus; young adults proved easier to reach and even more reflexive about their identities and experiences as military youth than I had imagined; experiences of mobility turned out to transcend different branches of the military; and ironically, staying put allowed me to interview youth from a much greater geographic range than I would have had I traveled in person. Despite the changes, I accomplished what I had initially set out to do, and I think the results are far better than they might have been if I had stuck with the original plan.

Structure As I stated earlier, the aim of my research was to understand the ways that military youth conceptualize home in childhood defined in large measure by militarized mobility. One aspect of military life that is often overlooked in works like these is the importance of military basing, both stateside and overseas. Since I cannot assume that the reader is familiar with these topics, I present an overview of U.S. military basing in Chapter II, focusing on its role in American hegemony overseas, issues surrounding base closure within the United States, and the general uncanniness of U.S. military bases both stateside and abroad. A project like this necessarily touches on a wide array of interconnected topics; in the course of my research I found that the nature of these interconnections was less a collection of overlapping research areas than a complicated web of theoretically linked ideas. Because I reviewed such an array of literature, I chose to split them into two chapters based on how closely they are connected. The first of these (Chapter III) reviews the literatures on home and mobility. These terms, which are used casually in everyday language, take on new significance when seen through a geographic lens. Deeper interrogation of these terms reveals that the meanings we assign to them on an intuitive level are actually very complex. Furthermore, academic approaches to home often refer to issues of mobility, and vice versa. It is this strong connection that led me to combine my reviews of these two literatures into a single chapter. These literatures inform my analyses of home (Chapter VI) and mobility (Chapter VII) in the lives of military youth. The second of these (Chapter IV) reviews the literatures on militarization, scale, and feminist geopolitics. Research on military youth often avoids discussing militarization – a

12 mistake that I believe undermines our understanding of life for military youth. Although militarization seems to happen at a remove from their everyday lives, I argue that it is a major force that shapes and contextualizes their lived experiences. At first glance, my inclusion of the literatures on scale and feminist geopolitics may seem like a strange complement to militarization. Yet militarization is inherently scalar, operating across multiple scales in different ways with impacts that snake and stretch from the geopolitical to the everyday. The literature on feminist geopolitics makes critical links between militarization and scale, and forms the basis for arguments I make about connections between militarization, mobility, and military youth in Chapter VIII. In Chapter V I set out my methods and methodology. In many ways I found researching and writing about experiences that I shared a challenging task. Thus in this chapter I establish my positionality, discuss issues of subjectivity and insider research, and justify the various approaches that I took to my research. Chapters VI, VII, and VIII present my findings. In the first of these, I address the relationships between place, identity, the military, and home based on my participants' experiences and observations. In the second, I turn my attention to issues of mobility, discussing the structure of military youth's experiences of residential mobility, the ways they adapt to mobility, and the ways that mobility impacts how they think about home. In the third, I look at the relationship between militarization and military youth with regard to mobility and home, and discuss their political position within broader geopolitical terms. It is my hope that the research I present here will shed some light on the complexities of home, mobility, and militarization from the perspective of military youth. I see my work here as a starting point for other avenues of future research. I present my main findings, implications for future research, and the limitations of this study in Chapter IX.

13 Chapter II An Empire of Bases

Questions of home and identity are inherently spatial, and for military youth this spatiality is thoroughly militarized. The everyday practices of military life revolve around the space of military bases. This space, I will argue later, is a major component of the military's ability to take on qualities of place. Bearing this in mind, I think it is important to understand the work that military bases do – that is, their role in the geopolitical and economic positioning of the United States, as well as their more banal, everyday functions. For military youth, bases are a stable feature of everyday life in the military. While is rare for military youth to live exclusively on bases or in military housing, they are eternally tethered to them as the central spatial feature of the military community. Whether they live on base or not, they often depend on it not only as the site where a parent works, but also as a source of food and basic household provisions, the site of religious worship, and the locus of a community bound together by lived experiences of military discourses of readiness, honor, and sacrifice. In this chapter, I discuss military bases with regard to their role in geopolitics and the way they function as United States federal territory. I use a scalar framework to discuss US military bases, beginning with their international siting and the geopolitical considerations behind them, then turning to bases situated within the formal borders of the United States, and finally to lived experiences of military bases. US military bases – especially those located overseas – occupy a sort of gray area with regard to their status. Simultaneously American and foreign, they are uncanny spaces. This strange, dual designation is an essential feature of military bases; accordingly, this is a theme that will emerge throughout this chapter.

American Empire Although the United States military is administered by the Department of Defense, it is more than just a defense force. With a mission of deterring war and protecting the security of the United States,7 the Department of Defense spends as much energy looking outward as it does inward, regularly sending segments of the U.S. military abroad, at the behest of Congress and the President, for a variety of purposes. Chief among those purposes is the maintenance of what

7 See the DoD mission statement on its website (www.defense.gov/about/#mission). 14 many have described as American hegemony – and some have described as an empire. In this section, I discuss the American government's use of the military as an imperial force, touching on themes of the global economy, the siting of U.S. military installations overseas, and resistance to the U.S. presence by communities in host countries.

Globalization, American hegemony, and the U.S. military The United States has a long record of expanding and strengthening its military power for the purposes of maintaining global economic dominance in a rapidly globalizing context. Such expansion historically entails the establishment of a military presence on bases located outside U.S. borders. Lutz (2002, 2009) explicitly connects overseas U.S. military bases to an imperial drive, noting that permanent military bases on foreign soil are a hallmark of empire. Overseas bases, she argues, allow the United States to protect the resources extracted from imperial possessions, all the while chipping away at their sovereignty (Lutz 2009). Gerson draws a very clear and tangible connection between empire and military strength as it appears in U.S. policy: “'American imperial power,' former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski once wrote, derives 'in large measure from superior organization, from the ability to mobilize vast economic and technological resources promptly for military purposes'” (2009, 47). Gerson further argues that contemporary American imperial designs have their roots in the WWII-era vision of a “Grand Arena” – “a single global market economy that would be dominated by the United States” (2009, 57). The military's role in the global economy (and American hegemony) is two-fold, with both economic and discursive elements. Staples (2000) makes a four-pronged argument that economic globalization and its institutions are tied to changes in the military-industrial complex. That is, increasing inequality resulting from globalization generates conflict; agents of globalization (e.g., the WTO) promote military over civilian economies in developing countries, bolstering the arms trade; the importance of defense contracts overshadows the interests of the state, leading the military-industrial complex to give way to a military-corporate complex; and militaries are increasingly used to protect those corporations. Meanwhile, U.S. policy makers have discursively linked neoliberal economic policies to military action through concepts such as “risk” and “securitization,” casting parts of the world less connected to the global economy as “dangerous” and therefore in need of preemptive military force to propel them into

15 modernization (Roberts, Secour, & Sparke 2003). Indeed, the mission of the US military has shifted from strategic prepositioning for combat operations in “hot spots” to imperial policing and the securing of petroleum (Johnson 2004). This has played out, for example, in the Middle East, and specifically in the Persian Gulf, where since the 1980s the U.S. military has been used to police a region characterized by U.S. policy makers as “risky” and “volatile” (Morrissey 2011). In short, U.S. military action has been used to back up neoliberal economic interests in parts of the Global South through discourses of securitization. Since 9/11, terrorism has become an integral component of the relationship between empire and militarization. Post-9/11 scholarship in political geography emphasizes the roles that globalization, scale, identity, and governmentality play in the maintenance of the state, interstate relations, and terrorism (see Flint 2002, 2003a, 2003b). For example, Agnew (2003) argues that in the wake of 9/11 the United States has shifted its geopolitical and geoeconomic strategies away from the hegemonic approach based on market practices it adopted after World War II, and toward an imperial approach based on military action. In this context, the actual siting of U.S. military bases as a strategic move becomes more overtly tied to economic dominance through discourses of national security and readiness, as Roberts, Secour, and Sparke (2003) argue. It is to the practices of base siting and discourses surrounding them that I now turn my attention.

Overseas base siting, national security, and readiness As I alluded to in the introductory chapter, twin discourses of national security and readiness combine to form the driving force behind the military's operations – daily and long- term alike. This combination is used to justify the existence of the 206 military installations on United States soil8 as well as the locations of the 66 main operating bases and numerous forward operating sites the US military maintains overseas.9 The projected need for national security 8 The numbers here are based on my count of bases listed on the Department of Defense Military Installations website (www.militaryinstallations.dod.mil/), which provides basic information about US military installations throughout the world. They are categorized by service and location (by state within the United States, and by country overseas). 9 It is important here to distinguish between sites and installations in military parlance. According to DoD, a site is “a specific geographic location where the DoD owns or manages land, buildings, structures or linear structures. Sites are assigned to military installations. An installation is commonly referred to as a base, camp, post, station, yard, center, homeport facility for any ship or other activity under the jurisdiction, custody, or control of DoD” (Department of Defense 2010, DoD-2). Confusion between these two terms have led some scholars (e.g., vanden Heuvel 2011) to mistakenly argue that there are as many as 227 U.S. military bases in Germany. Yet sites (of which there are 227 in Germany) include housing areas schools, golf courses, hospitals, recreation areas, hospitals, and other banal, non-combat-oriented features that are part of larger installations. This logic would lead one to conclude that there are 138 military bases in California when there are in fact only 16 justifies maintaining a large standing military, while readiness prompts the strategic placement of bases to maximize mobility and speed of deployment. As part of the shift in global geopolitics from the Cold War to the War on Terror, the Bush administration argued for a parallel shift in the strategic geography of the U.S. military. In its proposed Integrated Global Presence and Basing Strategy (IGPBS)10 of 2004, the administration called for the removal of approximately 70,000 troops from Europe and East Asia, and the closure of several main operating bases (MOBs) tied to Cold War strategy, as well as the establishment of a number of forward operating sites (FOSs) and cooperative security locations (CSLs) in Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East.11 The rationale behind the new basing strategy was that it would provide quick access to current “hot-spots” (Klaus 2004; Critchlow 2005). The plan also called for a shift in the temporality of the U.S. military's overseas presence. Main operating bases are large, permanent installations located in relatively stable locations, are designed to accommodate personnel for tours lasting longer than a year, and typically have the infrastructure to support the presence of dependent spouses and children. By contrast, forward operating sites and cooperative security locations are small installations designed for short-term, unaccompanied, temporary deployments. As global geopolitical conditions change, it is possible that some of these bases will eventually become permanent, supporting dependent spouses and children, and enlarging or shifting the geographic range of potential sites of residence for military youth. The language of the IGPBS and responses to it illustrate the ways that American discourses of national security and readiness are connected to global geopolitics with material geographical implications. The initial DoD proposal specifically associates shifting geopolitical paradigms to national security and to readiness: 32. 10 President Bush initially revealed the plan during an address to a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Cincinnati, Ohio (see Buhmiller 2004; the full text of President Bush's speech to the VFW Convention is available online at http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/campaign/speeches/bush_aug16.html). The official document detailing the plan was a report to Congress from the Department of Defense made in September 2004, titled “Strengthening U.S. Global Defense Posture.” 11 Main operating bases (MOBs) have “permanently stationed combat forces and robust infrastructure… characterized by command and control structures, family support facilities, and strengthened force protection measures”; forward operating sites (FOSs) are “expandable 'warm facilities' maintained with a limited U.S. military support presence and possibly prepositioned equipment. FOSs will support rotational rather than permanently stationed forces and be a focus for bilateral and regional training”; and cooperative security locations (CSLs) are “facilities with little or no permanent U.S. presence” designed to “provide contingency access and be a focal point for security cooperation activities” (DoD 2004, 10-11). 17 The end of the Cold War, along with the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, dramatically altered the security landscape that had shaped our forward defense posture… Although dramatically reduced, forward-stationed U.S. military forces remained concentrated in Cold War theaters – western Europe and northeast Asia. Yet, our military forces were operating in very different locations: the Balkans, the Persian Gulf, and Central Asia, among others. These frequent and ongoing deployments underscored the fact that the United States can no longer expect our forward forces to fight in place; rather, for most forward-stationed U.S. forces, their purpose is to undertake operations on short notice by deploying rapidly into near or distant theaters. (DoD 2004, 5, italics in original) The idea here is that historical changes in geopolitics require reassessments of the spatial and temporal aspects of defense strategies – that is, military mobility – in order to promote readiness. Readiness was also a key element in critical responses to the IGPBS. For example, in its review of the IGPBS, the Overseas Basing Commission (OBC)12 argued that underestimating the cost of realigning the global defense posture would actually hamper readiness by creating shortfalls in operations and maintenance budges elsewhere in the military (DoD 2004, iv). Likewise, the OBC expressed concern about the impact on readiness of the movement of units, a failure to invest in facilities to house and support hose units, and the strain caused by running multiple simultaneous military operations alongside the strategic shift of the IGPBS and the 2005 round of base realignments and closures (DoD 2004). At this juncture, I want to underscore three important points. First, the siting of overseas U.S. military installations is not random. It is driven in large measure by U.S. strategic positions regarding global geopolitics. Given the relationship between military and economic policy (see Roberts, Secour, and Sparke 2003), these strategic decisions cannot be assumed as purely defensive in nature. Second, while national security and readiness are typically combined or intertwined to promote specific courses of action, issues of overseas base siting reveal tensions between them that may result in the two working at cross purposes. Third, while shifting basing strategies like those proposed by the IGPBS reflect the continually evolving role of the military in U.S. foreign and economic policies, they also have the power to change the qualitative everyday experiences of military youth and the potential places of residence of military families.

12 The Overseas Basing Commission is the short name of the Commission on Review of Overseas Military Facility Structure of the United States, an independent commission chartered by Congress to assess global basing needs. At the time of its response to the 2004 IGPBS, it was chaired by Al Cornella, a commercially and politically well-connected businessman from South Dakota, and consisted of four retired senior officers from the Army, Navy, and Air Force, as well as Dr. James Tomson of the RAND Corporation. 18 Resisting empire The IGPBS and other overseas basing strategies have major impacts on the states and overseas communities that host U.S. military bases. While the governments of host countries may agree to the long-term presence of the U.S. military within their borders, many of local communities that deal most directly with the day-to-day realities of these arrangements strongly oppose them. The issues that spark this resistance range from broad opposition to American imperialism to more localized concerns about social and environmental issues caused by the military's presence. Resistance to permanent U.S. military installations overseas is perhaps most pronounced in East Asia, where in contrast to conditions in Europe, host countries have historically had little bargaining power in the face of US military interests (Kirk & Francis 2000). Status of Force Agreements (SOFAs) regulating U.S. bases in places like South Korea, Okinawa, and the Philippines – many of them initially signed between the end of WWII and the 1960s – often fail to provide protection for host communities or clear guidelines for jurisdiction over crimes perpetrated by US military personnel and their dependents.13 Consequently, crimes perpetrated by U.S. service members such as the 1992 rape and murder of a South Korean woman by a soldier, or the brutal rape of a 12-year-old Japanese girl by a sailor and two marines in 1995 spark not only outrage and anger (Akibayashi & Takazato 2009; Choe 2011; Fackler 2012), but also consternation surrounding the difficulties of investigating and prosecuting them. High-profile cases like these are acute examples of a wide range of concerns host communities have about crime and social problems related to US military bases – including prostitution (and the solicitation of prostitutes), the abandonment of children fathered by service members, sexual violence against community women, and more general crimes by service members and their dependents (Kirk & Francis 2000; Davis 2011). Prostitution presents a very serious problem around U.S. military bases in parts of Asia, where the U.S. military has agreed to fight organized crime as part of their security arrangements with host countries. Ironically, military personnel who spend money on prostitutes often support the organized crime – including human trafficking – they are supposed to be preventing (Parsons 2006). Regardless of the specific concerns local to overseas bases – be they crime, economic dependence on prostitution, or the contamination of land and water – the greatest problem that

13 This stands in stark contrast to agreements with European host countries, which are more extensive and guarantee significantly greater measures of justice (Kirk & Francis 2000). 19 host communities face is a more general, shared problem: insecurity. That is, U.S. military bases are supposed to secure U.S. interests and the communities that host them – and yet the presence of U.S. bases makes these communities inherently less secure (Akibayashi & Takazato 2009). Whether that insecurity stems from the increased threat of attack by enemies of the United States, from the actions of the U.S. military and its personnel, from the concessions and policies made by host countries in their SOFAs, or a combination of these, the end result is the same: civilians forced to live alongside the U.S. military find themselves at increased risk of harm to their lands, economies, and integrity. The stakes are high at the frontiers of the American empire – and the frontier becomes a site of resistance. Opposition to U.S. military bases can be very effective. Resistance on the part of host communities to on-the-ground impacts that bases have on the local environment, economy, culture, and safety has led to the formation of several groups fighting for the rights of oppressed and marginal people (often led by women, as in Okinawa; see Akibayashi & Takazato 2009), international coalitions among such groups, and highly visible protests in host communities. These have met with success in Vieques (Puerto Rico), Greenham Common (England), and the Philippines, although each of these places continues to struggle against the long-term environmental and economic impacts of a U.S. presence (Heller & Lammerant 2009; Lindsay- Poland 2009; McCaffrey 2009; Simbulan 2009). Yet resistance can also be a long and difficult process. For example, on the island of Diego Garcia, decades of opposition by native Chagossians resulted in significant legal gains – only to have them overturned before those gains could be realized (Vine & Jeffrey 2009). Resistance to bases in places like Diego Garcia and Okinawa are further complicated by layers of geopolitical history as well as ethnic and political divisions existing prior to U.S. involvement. In these cases, U.S. bases are sited on lands belonging to people who are already marginalized within their own societies – and thus lack bargaining power not only with the United States, but also with their own governments. While the degree to which U.S. basing decisions deliberately exploit these conditions is unclear, what is clear is that they exacerbate the poor living conditions of already marginalized groups, generating multiple and interconnected layers of opposition and resistance.

20 On the Home Front As the previous section demonstrates, U.S. military bases located overseas are problematic for a number of reasons. Those located within the borders of the United States also raise a number of issues, but for very different reasons. While the presence or expansion of U.S. military bases on the “home front” sometimes engenders opposition on political or moral grounds, it is the closure of military bases that is often at the center of protest. The reasons for this have to do with the political and economic discourses of base siting within U.S. territory generally, and the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process in particular. The overall number of military bases on US soil has declined in the course the five rounds of BRAC since 1989. Yet this periodic realignment and closure of military bases has also resulted in the expansion of several key installations stateside. For example, Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland was expected to receive over 7,800 new personnel in the wake of the closure of Fort Monmouth, New Jersey and the realignments of key units from Fort Belvior (Virginia), Fort Huachuca (Arizona), Redstone Arsenal (Alabama), and several other bases and offices throughout the country (Miles 2011). The twinned expansion and contraction of military bases is one of the forces behind the mobility of military personnel and their families, and has material consequences for the economies and landscapes of military and civilian communities.

Base realignment and closure Since the end of WWII, the Department of Defense has periodically closed military bases that it deems strategically unnecessary. Theoretically, the closure of military bases also serves as a measure for controlling the defense budget by eliminating needless spending (Myers 2010).14 To understand how this plays out on the landscape, it is important to understand some of the history behind it. Until 1977, DoD had sole authority to decide on base closures. The previous year, President Carter had attempted to close over a hundred small military installations in the U.S., generating concern in Congress that DoD “did not sufficiently account for the surrounding communities' interests when developing its proposals” (Render 1997, 247). It was with this in mind that Congress passed Public Law 95-82 (the Military Construction Authorization Act of

14 I say “theoretically” here because the cost of base closure often significantly exceeds projections. For example, the closure of Fort Monmouth in 2011 was initially estimated to cost $782 million; later estimates put it at more than $2 billion (Considine 2011). Furthermore, it is difficult to determine the actual cost savings of base closure. 21 1978), which established section 2687 of title 10 of the United States Code (hereafter referred to as § 2687).15 Among other things, § 2687 required DoD to seek approval from Congress for all proposed base closures, realignments of bases that entail significant reductions of civilian personnel, and to provide “detailed justification for such decision, including statements of the estimated fiscal, local economic, budgetary, environmental, strategic, and operational consequences of the proposed closure or realignment” (PL 95-82). The process immediately became very politically charged; lobbied by constituents who wanted bases to remain open for economic reasons, Congress rejected all base closures until 1988 (Beaulier et al. 2011). The passage of the Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1988 – which established the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission – and the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Act of 1990 was intended to insulate the realignment and closure process from Congressional influence (Kushner 2001; Beaulier et al. 2011). Under current legislation, DoD submits a force-structure plan, a list of bases recommended for closure, criteria for closure, and a costs/savings report to Congress and the BRAC Commission. The commission reviews these and modifies the list based on site visits and studies, and Congress must accept or reject the recommendations on an all-or-nothing basis (Kushner 2001). Despite attempts to depoliticize the BRAC process, many recommended base closures are still hotly contested, underscoring the interplay between local and federal politics. Some scholars (e.g., Bernardi 1996) argue that BRAC decisions continue to be politically-motivated rather than strategic or rational. Certainly, the process is far from clean: local factionalism, federal slowness, and contradictions between federal, military, and state policies complicate BRAC decisions (Kushner 2001). BRAC decisions are not only complicated, but also uneven across the landscape (Warf 1997). For example, larger bases and bases in states with high unemployment rates are less likely to be nominated for closure, while those in counties with high unemployment rates are more likely to be nominated; on the ground, bases in areas of population increase, and Army and Army Reserve bases are less likely to actually be closed, while Air National Guard bases are more likely to be closed (Beaulier et al. 2011). Further, the effects of base closure are site-specific, as each base's social and economic relationships with the surrounding communities is unique; consequently, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for redeveloping closed bases (Cowan &

15 The full text of PL 95-82 is available online at http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-91/pdf/STATUTE-91- Pg358.pdf. 22 Webel 2005; Bernazzoli & Flint 2009).

Opposition to BRAC Both media and scholarly accounts suggest that public opposition to base closures tend to be economic in nature. This is unsurprising; case studies (e.g., Lutz 2001; Hicks & Raney 2003) suggest that the presence of a U.S. military base has drastic effects on the local economy. Within the scholarly literature, multiple studies (e.g., Poppert & Herzog 2003; Myers 2010) attempt to calculate the short- and long-term economic impacts of base closures in general, or to find models that economically optimize base closures (e.g., Dell 1998). Other studies demonstrate the unevenness of base closures: rural communities tend to be hit harder than urban and suburban communities due to a heavier economic reliance on military communities (Cowan & Webel 2005). Yet a few scholars have turned their attention to other factors and impacts of base closure. Frustrated by the econometric nature of most studies of base closures, Thanner and Segal (2008) present a case study of the closure of Fort Ritchie, Maryland. They found that the small civilian community around Fort Ritchie – which had largely positive (even affectionate) views of the base – reorganized itself around the closure, first rallying to save the base, then falling prey to internal social divisions when it came time to decide how to reuse the land after the base was closed. What this case study underscores that econometric studies ignore are the social and psychological impacts that base closures can have on those living in adjacent civilian communities: the residents around Fort Ritchie found themselves rethinking their own identities, as well as their senses of place and home as a result of its closure.16 It is crucial to note is that realignment and closure decisions are made at the national scale but have major repercussions at the local scale; consequently the conversation about a national phenomenon is discrete and fragmented, taking place primarily at the sites of (potential) closures rather than in broader public forums (Warf 1997). As with resistance to U.S. overseas bases, when we talk about public opposition, we are inherently talking about local opposition to decisions made at the national (or international) level. It is interesting to note that while those opposing the presence of the U.S. military have formed coalitions that span international 16 Just as militarization is uneven, so is demilitarization. It is impossible to provide a general picture of base closure from a single case study. Although base closures are generally met with resistance (often for economic reasons), Lutz's work (2001) makes it very clear that not all civilian communities have such strongly positive ties to their local bases. 23 boundaries, those opposing closures within the United States have made no such efforts to align themselves with other municipalities facing base closures.

“Mega-military communities” The realignment and closure of military installations does not necessarily reflect the dissolution of the functions carried out at those installations. Rather, BRAC often entails the expansion of existing bases and the consolidation of nearby bases belonging to different branches of the military into joint bases (e.g., after the 2005 round of BRAC, McGuire Air Force Base, Fort Dix, and Naval Air Engineering Station–Lakehurst, all located in central New Jersey, were merged to form Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst17). Bowen and colleagues (2001) argue that the consolidation of separate bases into joint bases is leading to the creation of “mega-military communities” that span wide geographic areas, which is changing the nature of military communities. Public response to base expansion again focuses on the economic impacts. By and large, base expansion is presented as an economic opportunity for civilian communities: initially, this is said to manifest in construction jobs as an installation prepares to receive the realigned units from other bases; long-term, this means the creation of a variety of jobs. Reproducing the typical arguments, one report argues: Military installations can benefit communities, especially posts that import the equivalent of a corporate headquarters, with highly paid jobs – engineers, scientists, professionals, and high-level managers. Those locales see more of a boost than ones with bases that only process and train troops… Growth inside military gates can mean growth outside the gates. Jobs may expand in construction, retail, health care, and hospitality. (Nash 2011) Indeed, one article in the popular media argues that the expansion of Fort Bliss, Texas, effectively mitigated the impact of the recession on neighboring El Paso in part because of the boom in construction that accompanied the arrival of realigned military personnel after the 2005 BRAC (Tseng 2010). On a related note, the military is increasingly relying on the civilian economy for day-to- day operations that it traditionally managed in-house (see Lutz 2002; Cooling 2010). One way in which this manifests is in the privatization of on-base housing. Established in 1996, the Military

17 See “87th Air Base Wing History” (online: http://www.jointbasemdl.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD- 110315-056.pdf). 24 Housing Privatization Initiative emerged out of then-Secretary of Defense William Perry's 1994 Quality of Life Initiative (Housing Revitalization Support Office 1996). The initiative was intended to remedy the deterioration of on-base family housing that had plagued the military for decades, and to provide new housing to accommodate the large proportion of enlisted personnel who could not afford adequate housing off-base and for whom on-base housing was rarely available. Today, the Department of Defense works with a number of civilian contractors to build, rehab, and maintain on-base housing, and contracts have been awarded or are pending at over a hundred different military installations within the United States.18 This increased reliance on civilian contractors by DoD is mirrored by similar practices by military personnel. For example, Bowen and colleagues (2001) argue that increasing numbers of military families rely on local civilian providers for services (e.g., medical care) that they traditionally received from the military. They further argue that this constitutes an erosion of the boundary between the civilian and military worlds stemming from the expansion of military communities.

Living the Uncanny Base Military materiel leaves distinctive marks on the landscape – not just the armaments emplaced for war, but also the everyday structures of military installations. To civilian observers, military installations are mysterious places: they are heavily secured question marks of architecture and activity on the landscape, places to which they have historically had little or no access – increasingly so since 9/11. To those who do have access, military installations are lived phenomena, seemingly self-sufficient little cities where people live, work, and play. The lived nature of military installations means that, unlike factories, office complexes, or industrial parks, they are designed to be experienced day and night by the people who work there. The combination of a military mission with a village-like design gives them an air of the uncanny – the discomfiting sense that they are spaces at once familiar and alien.19 Overseas military bases drive this spatial uncanniness even further: they are American spaces in foreign lands.

18 See the Military Housing Privatization website for more information (http://www.acq.osd.mil/housing/). Numbers are based on a count of awarded and pending contracts listed on the website. 19 Although the work of Sigmund Freud is most often cited with regard to the uncanny, I look instead to Jentsch's 1906 essay, which was since translated into English and published in 1997 in the journal Angelaki. 25 The spatial question mark Military installations are typically situated near civilian communities. Spatially, they are equally integrated with and separated from the civilian world. They are in some respects quite similar to their neighboring civilian communities – and in others very different. Four qualities typify the spatiality of military installations: segregation from civilian space, military-oriented features, municipal features, and stratified housing areas. Military installations are typically separated from the surrounding territory by chain-link fencing topped with barbed wire or razor wire. These fences mark territorial and juridical boundaries: outside them is the familiar, civilian world; inside is the federally-regulated world of the military. Here and there, the fences are broken by points of entry: gates with guard stations through which passage is monitored by military police (MPs). Vehicles are stopped, drivers are required to identify themselves; while military personnel are welcomed home, civilians are required to justify their presence and register as visitors.20 Most public experiences of military bases begin and end here, with the looming, guarded gates and fences designed to keep people out. Once inside, the landscape is almost familiar: office buildings are arranged in neat intervals, and the installation often offers a commissary (grocery store), exchange (a general store), barber shop, optical shop, gas station, credit union, chapel, class six (liquor) store, health and dental clinics, a library, a swimming pool, maybe even a bowling alley or movie theater. Yet these familiar features are skewed and made uncanny by their orderliness and uniformity; the landscape is clearly planned, with uniform landscaping and maintenance, lacking the organic feel of the village or small town it simulates. And there often are other, less familiar features: a parade field, helicopter landing pads, arsenals, training ranges, motor pools, clearly marked restricted zones. All at once, the similarities with civilian space vanish. While few military families live exclusively in military housing, most do at least once during the course of a service member's career. Military housing areas are among the most uncanny features of military landscapes. Here the uniformity that characterizes the spaces of labor on the base extends into the private sphere: residential streets are lined with rows of identical houses – some duplexes, others detached. On many installations, house numbers are accompanied by name plates with the rank and surname of the service member.

20 There is of course a third group of people in this mix: civilians employed by the government (either full-time or by contract) who have legitimized access to military spaces. For them, military bases are solely sites of labor. 26 As with civilian communities, housing on military bases is divided into neighborhoods, and these are arranged based on social class. While civilian residential neighborhoods are segregated by income in tacit ways, military housing areas make no attempt to hide their stratification. Here gentrification is a stark impossibility: quarters are deliberately constructed to reflect one's standing in the hierarchy; enlisted personnel and officers live in different neighborhoods, and junior personnel are housed separately from senior personnel. In most neighborhoods, the residents fall within two or three ranks of one another, so that higher-ranking personnel are removed from those who report to them. The unique combination of features, design, and landscaping make military bases at once remarkably similar and vastly different from the civilian communities around them. Features that are common in civilian landscapes – post offices, banks, recreation facilities, medical clinics, office buildings, housing – are all to be found here. Yet the presence of military-oriented features – the landing pads, parade fields, motor pools full of green or camouflage-painted vehicles barricaded behind barbed wire-topped fences and gates guarded by armed soldiers – makes them unfamiliar. The stark juxtaposition of military violence and everyday domesticity is disconcerting at best.

Everyplace, noplace, American space Two other factors add to the uncanniness of military bases. First, the shared features and architecture of bases within the United States lends them a strange interchangeability. Second, U.S. bases overseas constitute territory that is at the same time American and foreign. These factors combine to produce spaces that are not just uncanny, but legally problematic. Many military bases in the United States were built or expanded during the Second World War, when the number of military personnel was at its peak. With this in mind, it is unsurprising that many bases within the U.S. share a number of architectural and design elements. With similar building materials and architectural styles, generally shared features (e.g., offices, housing, commissary/exchange, etc.), and overall designs that seem to reflect a shared set of planning principles (in terms, e.g., of road sizes, speed limits, building setbacks, zoning, signage, etc.), military bases have a kind of characteristic design and appearance that makes them instantly recognizable. This uniformity of design exists regardless of location. The climate, flora, and fauna may

27 vary, but by and large, military bases remain consistent. Whether intended or not, such consistency makes any military base immediately familiar to personnel and their families. In spite of this, however, there is a strange disorientation that comes with moving from one base to another: the familiarity of the features is marred by the knowledge that the streets will have new names, the neighborhoods will be in different locations, one's quarters will be positioned differently with regard to the base's other features. And here is the source of the disorientation: there is just enough consistency to make any base feel familiar, but also just enough variation to blur that familiarity. In some instances this may seem qualitatively like looking into a funhouse mirror: all the pieces are there, they all have the right shapes, and they're all in the right places, but they are oddly distorted. This uncanny effect is mirrored further by the presence of U.S. military bases overseas. This time, however, its source lies not in the consistency of design, but in the nature of the territory. Overseas military bases are simultaneously foreign and American. On the one hand, the land is leased from foreign governments by the Department of Defense; it ultimately belongs to the host country. On the other, the land is both Americanized and militarized by the presence of U.S. military forces. Military bases overseas function as an extension of the United States into foreign spaces, and military personnel and their families carve out communities based on this arrangement. As I alluded to in an earlier section, overseas U.S. military bases are sometimes problematic because this strange dual layering – United States occupation of leased territory belonging to the governments of other states – creates a liminal legal zone in which jurisdiction is unstated or unclear. Furthermore, the gates and guard posts that separate military functions from civilian communities do not truly separate them. Military communities are deeply intertwined economically, socially, and politically with neighboring civilian communities. This is as true overseas as it is within the United States. The particulars of spillover, interaction, resistance, and exploitation vary from installation to installation – but ultimately they all emanate from this problematic and uncanny spatiality.

Discussion The points I raise in this chapter may seem far removed from the concerns of home and mobility for military youth. Yet I would argue that the fundamental aspects of military

28 installations that I discuss here are integral to the lived experiences of military youth, and they have implications for how they think about home and mobility. Military bases are first and foremost lived spaces for most military youth at at least one point in their childhoods. They function not just as bases for military training, administration, and deployment, but also as spaces of temporary habitation, usually with all the amenities of a civilian small town. This temporariness is the product of readiness-oriented mobility, and it is built into military housing: families are not allowed to paint their quarters; when they move out, the walls are quickly repainted stark white for the next family (there are countless anecdotes of the windows of quarters built in the 1940s being painted shut between occupants). Military youth are well aware of the temporary and “rented” nature of on-base housing; living in on base in spaces that were never meant to be owned by a single family is a reminder of both their participation in the military and their expectation of residential mobility. With regard to the specifics of this chapter, I provide three concluding points. First, the imperial global basing strategy that supports the presence of military spouses and children on overseas bases puts military youth in a tricky position. As youth, they generally have little or no say in whether or not they move overseas with their service members; often they are expected to simply abide by the decisions made by adult(s) in the family (which are limited by the options provided to them by the military). By the same token, military youth are quite visible as symbols of American hegemony: their presence overseas implies that the United States has established enough control over the region that it is safe for them to be there. While living overseas, American military youth thus have the potential to act in a dual role: first as symbols of American military dominance, and second as consumers of “foreign” cultures. In this regard, readiness and national security position military youth as geopolitical actors, if sometimes unwitting ones. I will return to these points in the analysis chapters. Second, many military youth are well aware of the implications of stateside BRAC decisions on civilian communities. Most military youth have significant ties to civilian communities (in particular through public and private school systems, sports teams, and youth- oriented community groups). In some cases they arguably have more direct and immediate contact with the civilian world than their parents – and in other cases, they provide the most immediate and direct contact that some civilians have with the military. To an extent, military youth are small-time ambassadors that mediate between these two worlds. In BRAC-related

29 situations, they might find themselves having to negotiate strong emotions (positive or negative) from civilians about the closure or expansion of a base while dealing with the fact that one of the places in their residential histories will eventually cease to be meaningful as a site of military life. Third, like military personnel and their spouses, military youth live the uncanny spatiality of military bases. Those who have visited or lived on more than one base cannot help but be aware of the distorted similarities between bases and the odd differences between bases and civilian towns. Indeed, this emerged in some of my interviews, where some participants reflected on the familiar order of military bases or suggested that civilian communities were chaotic or disorienting places. The uncanniness of the overseas base likewise seeps into personal experience: some participants admitted bemusement as they told me their families had adopted cultural practices from overseas – and they had to somehow reconcile these adopted practices with their identities as American.

30 Chapter III Home and Mobility

The lives of military youth are shaped by the interaction of two major cultural forces: mainstream American discourses of home and mobility, and military life. In this chapter, I review and discuss the literatures on home, mobility, and youth as they pertain to military youth's experiences. I begin this chapter by examining the literature on home, focusing specifically on the difficulties of defining the concept, tracing its disciplinary history from humanist geography through environmental psychology and on to critical geography. The assumption (implicit or explicit) that home is in some respect a stable place is often contrasted with the experiences of those who have lost or left their homes: refugees, the homeless, and others whose lives are marked by mobility. It is with this in mind that I turn my attention to the literatures on mobility, beginning with a discussion of demographic trends in the United States, then to recent theoretical developments in mobilities studies, and finally to the literature on mobile subjects.

Home Multiple disciplines, slippery definitions Home is a concept that appeals to scholars across the social sciences and humanities – in particular to psychologists, sociologists, architects, and geographers. Simultaneously commonplace and slippery, the fundamental significance of home is surpassed by its theoretical complexity. There is no standard definition of home within a given discipline, much less across disciplines; as Sixsmith (1986) points out, scholars typically emphasize the aspects of home most aligned with their disciplinary inclinations. For example, the psychological literature assumes that home is a house or dwelling space related to self or identity – but psychologists tend to favor its social and symbolic aspects over the physical and spatial (Moore 2000). By contrast, architect Witold Rybczynski's (1986) oft-cited book on the subject is a treatise on the material and conceptual evolution of comfortable living spaces. Hence, definitions of home range from the concrete to the abstract, with no single aspect taking precedence. The common element that ties home scholarship together across disciplines is an underlying assumption “that home is, first and foremost, a special kind of place” (Easthope 2004, 135), and that it holds emotional significance to people. Scholars differ in their estimation of

31 what distinguishes home from other significant places, but it is generally agreed that home is a site of residence or dwelling (see e.g., Feldman 1996; Constable 1999; Gorman-Murray 2007); where this is not stated directly, it is certainly implied (e.g., Winstanley, Thorns, & Perkins 2002; Parrott 2005; Atherton 2009). Beyond this, there is little consensus as to the nature of home, and most authors avoid defining the concept altogether relying instead on assumptions that are tacit and implied rather than explicitly stated. This tendency is true across disciplines and likely reflects home's conceptual slipperiness. Contemporary scholars typically conclude their discussions of home with statements like this: “Clearly the term home functions as a repository for complex, inter-related and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people's relationship with one another, especially family, and with places, spaces, and things” (Mallett 2004, 84). In the rare instance where defining home is the intended purpose of scholarship, the results are no more promising. For example, following the burst of interest on place and home by humanist geographers and environmental psychologists, Sixsmith set out to define and model home from a phenomenological standpoint. Her investigations led her to this observation: Home is a multidimensional phenomenon, neither unidimensional nor created from a set of standard qualities pertaining either to the person or the place. Rather, each home features a unique and dynamic combination of personal, social and physical properties and meanings. This provides one explanation for the wide range of different types of home and tends to support the finding that the sort of place that is a home for one person is not necessarily home for another. (Sixsmith 1986, 294) The more recent pronouncement by critical geographers that home is “a material and affective space, shaped by everyday practices, lived experiences, social relations, memories and emotions” (Blunt 2005, 506) may reflect theoretical orientations that differ widely from their predecessors, but the end result is much the same. Given home's conceptual slipperiness, it is tempting to follow Don Mitchell's (1995) legendary pronouncement about culture and argue that home is so difficult to pin down that it is useless as an analytical concept, that it is effectively and empty category, a non-entity, that there is no such thing as home. Yet I believe this would be a mistake. Home is a concept that people use every day to situate the past, qualify the present, and imagine the future. I argue that home's slipperiness does not make it a useless concept; on the contrary, as my research will demonstrate, this slipperiness may be home's most salient – and most redeeming – quality.

32 There is one key factor that persists despite the slipperiness. While scholars across disciplines and eras differ in their theoretical approaches to home, they share a fundamental assumption that home hinges on a special relationship between identity and place. Specifically – and almost universally – home is constructed as an investment of identity in place. As I will demonstrate in the following review, this fundamental assumption, combined with conceptual slipperiness and differences in disciplinary perspectives has given rise to a number of concepts related to home. Some of these concepts – particularly rootedness, place identity, homemaking, and relationality – continue to be relevant to studies of home. In the following sections I trace their development across three different but related strands of thought: humanist geography, environmental psychology, and critical scholarship.

Humanist roots In the humanist tradition, home hinges on rootedness and attachment to place. Writing from a phenomenological perspective, humanist geographers of the 1970s typically described home as a site of nurturing and positive emotional experiences. Tuan, for example, writes, …a person in the process of time invests bits of his emotional life in his home, and beyond the home in his neighborhood. To be forcibly evicted from one's home and neighborhood is to be stripped of a sheathing, which in its familiarity protects the human being from the bewilderments of the outside world. As some are reluctant to part with their shapeless old coat for a new one, so some people – especially older people – are reluctant to abandon their old neighborhood for the new housing development. (1974, 99) In Space and Place (1977), he describes home and hometown as intimate places made significant by familiar objects, sights, and routines. For Tuan, rootedness is a key component of home. Rootedness, he argues, was important to ancient Greeks and Romans alike, evident in religious practices (e.g., ancestor worship) that bound individuals and families to places, as well as in cultural values (e.g., the importance of autochthony among ancient Greeks). Furthermore, he writes, This profound attachment to the homeland appears to be a worldwide phenomenon. It is not limited to any particular culture and economy. It is well known to literate and nonliterate peoples, hunter-gatherers, and sedentary farmers, as well as city dwellers. The city or land is viewed as mother, and it nourishes; place is an archive of fond memories and splendid achievements that inspire the present; place is permanent and hence reassuring to man, who sees frailty in himself and chance and flux everywhere. (1977, 154)

33 Relph (1976) echoes these ideas, suggesting that people's experience of home constitutes an existential insideness – an unself-conscious and deep identity with a place that arises from living there for a long period of time. This view of home as a place to which people are supremely attached, a place of familiarity and belonging, is emblematic of traditional approaches to home. Although humanist geography has faded, the idea of home as site of rootedness is still relevant to some contemporary scholars. For example, it is the basis for Fullilove's (2004) concept of root shock – the profound sense of loss felt by residents whose neighborhoods have been disrupted or destroyed in the name of urban renewal. She characterizes root shock as “a profound emotional upheaval that destroys the working model of the world that had existed in the individual's head” (Fullilove 2004, 14). At greater scales, she argues, root shock “ruptures bonds, dispersing people to all the directions of the compass… The elegance of the neighborhood…is destroyed, and even if the neighborhood is rebuilt exactly as it was, it won't work” (Fullilove 2004, 14). The concept of root shock presupposes that people have emotional attachments to their neighborhoods, built in part on long-term ties that have emerged between people who live in them. As I will demonstrate later in this chapter, critical scholars have challenged the association between home and rootedness – but rootedness is still an important factor in how home is constructed, both academically and popularly.

Environmental psychology and place identity Humanist perspectives on home presuppose a relationship between place and identity that resonated with the concept of place identity popular among environmental psychologists in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The term first appeared in Proshansky's (1978) discussion of urban environments. As he first described it, place identity consists of “those dimensions of self that define the individual's personal identity in relation to the physical environment by means of a complex pattern of conscious and unconscious ideas, beliefs, preferences, feelings, values, goals, and behavioral tendencies and skills relevant to this environment” (Proshanksy 1978, 155). In its original formulation, he theorized place identity as reflecting both an individual's unique upbringing in relation to his or her physical environment as well as experiences generally shared by people raised in similar place settings (e.g., urban vs. rural settings), and comprising a combination cognitive, affective, and occupational relationships between person and setting. In a

34 later piece, Proshansky and company characterize place identity as a dynamic aspect of an individual's self-identity constituted by that person's “environmental past”: “a past consisting of places, spaces and their properties which are served instrumentally in the satisfaction of the person's biological, psychological, social, and cultural needs” (Proshansky, Fabian, & Kaminoff 1983, 59). Others have proposed that place contributes to identity via four avenues: it establishes a person's distinctiveness, serves as a referent for continuity in a person's identity, gives a person a sense of social value (i.e., pride in one's home), and fosters a sense of efficacy by providing a comfortable setting in which one can perform daily tasks (Twigger-Ross & Uzzell 1996). Environmental psychologists working with place identity often contextualize it with regard to humanist geographers. Proshansky, Fabian, and Kaminoff (1983) acknowledge some common ground with Relph, Buttimer, and Tuan, though they criticize the humanist geographers' emphasis on rootedness, attachment to place, a sense of belonging, and the centrality of home as too narrow. In her positivist inquiry into the meaning of home, Sixsmith makes a tighter link between place identity and the work of the human geographers, arguing that “the home, in terms of the kind of opportunities it affords people for personal and social action and how these enable self impression and expression is one profound center of significance contributing to a sense of place identity” (1986, 291). This link is typical of more recent work in this area, which equates place identity roughly with a “sense of home” or “feeling at home” (e.g., Cuba & Hummon 1993a; Cuba & Hummon 1993b). Contemporary authors have reformulated place identity as a parallel to self-identity more broadly: if self-identity answers the question “Who am I?” then place identity answers the question “Where do I belong?” (Cuba & Hummon 1993a, 112). Place identity thus serves a dual purpose, working as both an expression of self and as a means of placing home (Cuba & Hummon 1993a). Although place identity becomes increasingly nebulous as an independent concept, it is still popular, and environmental psychologists have paid it considerable attention as a dependent variable. Scale, locus of identity, length of residence, and mobility all present complicating factors for place identity. Extensive research demonstrates that people identify with, are attached to, and ascribe meaning to places at multiple scales, ranging from house or apartment at the most intimate to the city or region at the least (Cuba & Hummon 1993a; Gustafson 2001a; Hidalgo & Hernández 2001; Hernández et al. 2007; Lewicka 2010). Furthermore, although people express attachments to place at all scales, the strongest attachments happen at the extremes of scale

35 (Cuba & Hummon 1993a; Hidalgo & Hernández 2001; Lewicka 2010). The scale of place identity shifts with the locus of identity (Gustafson 2001a): when considering themselves, people ascribe significance to places at finer scales (e.g., city, village, or neighborhood) but when considering others, they ascribe significance at broader scales (e.g., region, nation, or continent). Length of residence can also change the scale of place identity. People who have lived their entire lives in a region are more likely to identify with the region (Hernández et al. 2007), while immigrants to an area are more likely to identify with their particular residence (Cuba & Hummon 1993a). Finally, contrary to conventional wisdom, mobility does not erode place identity, though younger migrants establish place identity through social connections while older migrants establish it through property ownership (Cuba & Hummon 1993b). The same can be said for seasonal residence: second home owners are no less attached to their seasonal residences than their year-round counterparts, though their attachments reside more in environment than in social networks (Stedman 2006).

Critical approaches Our understanding of home is not limited to the work of humanist geographers and studies of place identity. Scholars working from critical perspectives provide a third approach to the topic. Much of their work draws on the ideas of Doreen Massey, who, in her landmark essay “A Place Called Home,” (1994) pushes back against the humanist perspective that place is static, fixed, bounded, and comfortable. Instead, she argues, places are dynamic and porous, networked and interconnected. In her view, place is an articulation of a set of ever-shifting social and power relations, meanings, and activities operating at multiple scales as they interact and manifest in localized space and time. Following Massy, critical home scholars see home as relational, dialectic, socially constructed, or as a process. This perspective is best captured by the idea that home is “a spatial imaginary: a set of intersecting and variable ideas and feelings, which are related to context, and which construct places, extend across spaces and scales, and connect places” (Blunt & Dowling 2006, 2, original emphasis). Critical approaches to home challenge several assumptions implicit in traditional humanist and environmental psychological approaches. For example, Manzo injects a critical perspective into environmental psychology. In sharp contrast to the nostalgic inclinations of humanist geographers and earlier environmental psychologists, she argues that people's

36 emotional bonds to places (including home) are not always positive, but can also center on negative experiences of loss, trauma, and conflict. Nostalgia is not the sole or even primary reason why places are significant; rather, “significant places reflect people's evolving identity; provide opportunities for privacy, introspection and reflection; serve as transitional markers as well as bridges to the past; and reflect on the salience of safety, threat and belonging which are fundamentally connected to socially constructed identities” (Manzo 2005, 74). Writing from a sociological perspective, Mallett (2004) identifies several gaps and tensions within the home literature, including the conflation of home with house, conflicts between realist and idealist positions on home, and the tendency to posit – but leave unexamined – a relationship between home and identity. In their well-received volume Home, Blunt and Dowling (2006) continue this work from a geographical standpoint, examining the relationships between home and housing, nation (and empire), transnationalism, and diaspora. Highlighting contemporary research by other critical scholars of home, they challenge many of the assumptions traditionally embraced by humanist geographers and environmental psychologists: that home is stable and fixed, that it is a site of belonging or family, that it is permanent or secure. The connection between home and identity is alive and well among critical scholars, though it has taken on a different tone. Rather than presupposing a simple relationship by which one identifies with place out of a sense of nostalgic belonging, critical scholars examine the ways that people link their identities to home spaces through homemaking practices. Rivlin and Moore define homemaking as “a reflective, developing relationship between an individual and key domestic places. This process is shaped and heightened by developmental, personality, and demographic factors, as well as by the goals and purposes that influence human behavior and endeavor” (2005, 329). Homemaking practices give people a spatial-material means of inscribing and re-inscribing their identities in place. Chief among these practices are the accumulation and display of material goods, the formation and maintenance of social and emotional relationships, the physical construction of residences, and the development of social capital within a community (Parrott 2005; Blunt & Dowling 2006; Gallent 2007; Gorman-Murray 2007). People may use homemaking practices to resist cultural norms: for example, the gay men and lesbians Gorman-Murray (2007) interviewed displayed queer-themed art, books, and symbols in their residences, and used their residences as

37 safe spaces for social gatherings with gay and lesbian friends. In some cases, people refuse to engage in homemaking practices in order to reject a place as home; this was the case for some of the inpatients in Parrott's (2005) study of material culture in a medium-security psychiatric unit who did not want to think of the unit as their “home from home.” As Parrott's work suggests, in addition to homemaking practices, the critical scholarship has paid increasing attention to nontraditional and temporary residence, and to homely experiences in unhomely places. The literatures on migrant workers and transnational residence abound with examples (e.g., Constable 1999; Wiles 2008), but these are not the only possibilities. Military barracks, summer camps, vacation spots, hospitals, jails, squatter settlements, refugee camps, and schools all function as temporary if unhomely residences that often generate homely experiences (Blunt & Dowling 2006). Some reject these temporary residences as home (e.g., Parrott 2005; Atherton 2009) while others map their temporary residence onto the word “home” in a casual (and sometimes troubled) way (e.g., Kenyon 1999; Samuels 2009). In some cases, what was intended to be a temporary residence can become permanent. This was the case for some of the residents of a Connecticut housing project: their interviews revealed complex longings to leave a place they considered “ghetto” and that they associated with life failures – but it was also the place where they had grown up and the site of their entire social network (Blokland 2008).

Summary While home is difficult to pin down conceptually, scholars across disciplines work from a shared assumption that home is fundamentally an investment of identity in place. They disagree on the particulars of what makes home important and how it operates for people: some talk about home as a static site while others emphasize its dynamic qualities; some see home as a site of comfort or belonging while others argue that it can be a site of violence or resistance; some portray home as part of one's identity while others see home as a space for expressing identity. From these conflicting perspectives arise concepts such as rootedness, place identity, relationality, and homemaking – each of which either underscores or reveals some facet of the assumed home–place–identity relationship. I divide the scholarship into two rough theoretical camps: traditional and critical. Traditional humanist geographic and environmental psychological approaches to home hinge on

38 rootedness and place identity. From this perspective, the relationship between home, place, and identity is relatively simple: home is a place where one resides for a long period of time, forming meaningful connections with others (people, institutions, organizations, etc.), and by virtue of this feels a sense of belonging to the degree that the place becomes a component of one's self- identity. Critical perspectives, by contrast, hinge on relationality and homemaking. From a critical standpoint, the relationship between home, place, and identity is a little more complex: home is a spatial manifestation of relationships – both a place where social connections are negotiated and renegotiated in a context of potentially changing power dynamics, and a domestic site where one negotiates and expresses one's self-identity through spatial practices and material objects. Although I adopt a critical perspective, my fieldwork forced me to confront traditional ideas. While critical scholars have overtly abandoned rootedness and place identity in their work, these concepts are integral to conversations about home in the United States because they are pervasive in popular discourses of home. As my analysis will demonstrate, asking people how they think about or define home often prompts casual reference to place identity (e.g, “…if someone asks me where I'm from…”) and to rootedness (e.g., “…they've lived there their entire lives, and I haven't…”). These concepts are so deeply ingrained in popular discourses that no amount of critical introspection erases them from people's reflections on home. On the contrary, even those who reject these concepts as meaningful rely on them as a means of distinguishing their ideas from the mainstream; I thus found it unreasonable to jettison traditional perspectives altogether in my research. One of the most important aspects of the project at hand is that it offers a new avenue for theoretical critiques of home. Critical scholars have so far challenged home for its traditional connotations of stability, safety, and singularity. By approaching home from the perspective of military youth, I extend the critique much further, to that central assumption underlying even the critical work to date: that home is somehow an investment of one's identity in place. Using their reflections and experiences, I question the locus of military youth identities, and I challenge the idea that home necessarily manifests as a place.

39 Mobility The most mobile society in the world? The United States has long been regarded as one of the world's most mobile21 industrial societies (Mehana & Reynolds 2004; Clark & Davies Withers 2007). Indeed, U.S. Americans have historically been – and continue to be – more mobile than Europeans (Fischer 2002; Clark & Davies Withers 2007). Yet the reality of American mobility is complex: as a society, the United States is both highly mobile and strongly rooted. The common perception that Americans have grown less connected to one another as a result of increasing mobility is in fact a myth: historically, the picture is one of decreasing mobility and increasing residential stability throughout the last century (Fischer 2002). This is especially true since the late 1940s, when the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting mobility and migration data (Fischer 2002). In the second half of the 20th century, a consistently low proportion of Americans moved long distances, but there was a steady decrease in local moves for all but the most economically marginal people. Cooke (2012) argues that the overall decline in mobility is linked to the rise of dual-income households, increased debt loads, and the increased use of information and communication technologies. This is not to argue that Americans are completely sedentary. On the contrary, recent research finds that about two-thirds of adult Americans have moved to a new community at least once in their lives (Cohn & Morin 2008). Yet frequent, long-distance movers are quite rare – they account for only about 15 percent of adult Americans, and tend to be older, affluent, and highly educated (Cohn & Morin 2008). More important than the frequency of moves, however, is their distance: most moves are short-distance, intracounty moves, and most Americans (about 50 percent) live in the state where they were born (see Ihrke, Faber, & Koerber 2011; Ren 2011; Stoll 2013). The picture of contemporary American mobility revealed by recent research is one of occasional local moves that peak in frequency during young adulthood and are related to (i.e., sometimes prompted by and sometimes preceding) life-course events such as marriage, childbirth, and changes in employment (Metcalfe 2006; Clark & Davies Withers 2007; Geist &

21 Sociologists and demographers differentiate between mobility and migration. Mobility is used to describe residential relocation within a jurisdiction, while migration is used to describe residential relocation that crosses jurisdictional boundaries. Generally, jurisdiction is assumed to be at the county level; see Schachter (2004). Geographers depart from this distinction, using mobility as a general term and migration to refer to long-term, long-distance and transnational movement. For example: “Mobility includes all types of territorial movements, including but not limited to migration” (Hyndman 2012, 248). 40 McManus 2008). In short, rather than individualistic and freewheeling, American residential mobility in the 20th and 21st centuries is generally tethered to the familiar, both socially and geographically speaking.

Theorizing mobility: The new mobilities paradigm Demographic and sociological studies like those I reviewed above often present data without regard to the cultural and political contexts that produce them. A rapidly growing body of literature addresses – and problematizes – this gap (Cresswell 2010b). Dubbed the “new mobilities paradigm” (Sheller & Urry 2006), this line of thought “not only encompasses mobility across a wide range of forms, practices, scales, locations and technologies, but also interrogates the politics of mobility and immobility, the material contexts within which they are embedded, and their representational and non-representational dynamics” (Blunt 2007). This research concerns the movements not only of people, but also of information and ideas; consequently, places themselves are often characterized as mobile (Sheller & Urry 2006). Much like the critical literature on home, this critical turn in mobility draws on Massey, and in particular on her concept of power-geometry – the idea that the access that individuals and groups have to mobility is relative to their power. Moreover, mobility has the potential to create and reinforce power differentials between groups: “the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken other people. Differential mobility can weaken the leverage of the already weak. The space-time compression of some groups can undermine the power of others” (Massey 1993, 63). This critical consideration of mobility thus contextualizes it in matrices of power and politics, recognizing that mobility is often regulated by the state and therefore highly differentiated across social groups (Adey 2006; Cresswell 2006; Cresswell 2010a). Thus mobility is not a singular phenomenon, but a set of phenomena: this research speaks of plural mobilities rather than a single mobility (Adey 2010). Massey's argument suggests a direct correspondence between power and mobility: i.e., mobility is empowering and those with the most power have the most mobility (or the most access to mobility). This is a point of departure for the new mobilities paradigm, which argues that mobilities are socially constructed, laden with meanings, and differentiated in terms of power and morality. Some mobilities (e.g., tourism) are constructed as acceptable and perceived as liberating, while others (e.g., vagrancy, certain kinds of dance, etc.) are cast as threatening to

41 morality or social order (Winstanley et al. 2002; Cresswell 2006). To that end, legislation and regulation discursively construct mobilities, guaranteeing or protecting some forms as rights of citizenship. This simultaneously produces non-citizens and other outlaws whose mobility is often proscribed or prohibited: mobilities tend to be more tightly regulated for “bodies that are criminalized, displaced, and/or constructed as a security threat to state and its citizenry” (Hyndman 2012, 248). The collection of mobilities that emerge from political and ideological discourses are not arbitrary; rather they are intimately related to one another. Historically and culturally contingent, such collections can be thought of as “constellations of mobility” (Cresswell 2010a). Legality, social significance, and morality are not the only factors that differentiate forms of mobility within any given constellation. They also have their own rhythms: flows of traffic, resources, retail, labor, bodies, commodities, leisure, and information have their own patterns and paces. Rhythms are varied and multiscalar; they might be “linear or cyclical and operate at circadian, weekly, monthly, seasonal, annual, lifetime, millennial and geological scales. They can be regular or irregular and vary according to the time and space between events, tempo and intensity, degrees of predictability and disruption, and the coinciding effects that produce polyrhythmicality, synchronicity or dissonance” (Edensor 2011, 189). Rhythms of mobilities can overlap, converge, diverge, or disrupt one another. It is often in instances of rhythmic dissonance that mobilities reveal their scope and scale: “A breakdown of rhythm highlights mobilities that haven't quite coincided” (Adey 2010, 29). Mobility is often contrasted with stillness, stability, or immobility. While they are often cast in opposition to one another (e.g., routes vs. roots), contemporary theorists argue that the two are intertwined rather than contradictory or mutually exclusive (Gustafson 2001b). Many argue that mobility and stillness are balanced in complex ways or have a dialectical relationship (Adey 2006; Cresswell 2012). The two are most visibly intertwined in the infrastructures that support flows of people and information. Sheller and Urry (2006) refer to such support structures (e.g., cell towers, garages, airports, etc.) as moorings. Moorings are essential to enabling mobility but also require the mobilities of the people who maintain them (Adey 2010). It is possible to map moorings conceptually onto home. From this perspective, home can be thought of as a (relatively) stable reference point or regular pause in an individual's movement. At broader scales home-as-mooring works as a repository of stillness. It is crucial to

42 acknowledge the importance of stillness and stability in light of the new mobilities paradigm's optimism about mobility. Ralph and Staeheli argue that emphases on the mobilities of migrants have led to “a concomitant tendency to underplay the resilience of [home's] stable, bounded and fixed interpretations” (2011, 517). That is, culturally-held ideas of home as a fixed point persist even among highly mobile people.

Mobile subjects One of the strongest areas of mobilities research addresses the experiences of mobile subjects. This research often focuses on the extremes: people whose mobility is heavily regulated or constrained, or people whose mobility expresses power. Thus, refugees, asylum seekers, transnational and migrant workers, tourists, Gypsies, commuters, and the homeless have received a lot of scholarly attention. This body of work has challenged essentialist narratives by emphasizing experiences of hybridity and in-betweenness (Mitchell 1997). The literature on mobile subjects provides a number of other important insights, three of which have particular relevance here. First, just as people are mobile, so are identities (Adey 2010). For example, Ralph and Staeheli (2011) argue that migrants living in hostile environments often cultivate strong attachments to their places of origin and (re)create senses of identity, belonging, or home through familiar material objects, practices, or living arrangements. These identities, often hybrid in nature, “need not be enacted in the place of origin, but instead may be recreated in the places to which they have moved” (Ralph & Staeheli 2011, 522). Identities are therefore not just relational, but also portable – reflecting attachments to multiple places – and performed via mobile objects and cultural practices. Likewise, Nowicka's (2006) suggests that home itself is mobile. She argues that home does not have to be connected to (a singular) place: the transnational professionals she interviewed often recast home as a stable relation between family and objects, set in a larger network of residential history. Second, materialities can reflect or mitigate mobilities. For example, Basu and Coleman (2008) argue that understanding how materiality maps onto mobility enhances our understanding of migration. Objects that people bring with them can symbolically evoke their places of origin; objects they acquire from their new surroundings may signal growing comfort, acceptance of new places, or even a shift or expansion in identity (Basu & Coleman 2008). Furthermore, highly mobile groups such as Gypsies and other Travelers often moor their histories to material

43 practices by collecting objects (e.g., photographs) rather than ascribing their histories to a place or places to which they are rooted (Adey 2010). Third, the literature on mobile subjects reveals a dialectical connection between mobility and home. This is often evident in discussions of transnationals, whose mobility sometimes causes them to rescale home (Wiles 2008), or to link migrants to distant homelands while squeezing homemaking practices into new environments (Ralph & Staeheli 2011). This is most visible in the literature on homelessness, in which mobility collides with the ambiguities of home. Like home, homelessness is difficult to define; it exists along a continuum from rooflessness to homefulness, from sleeping on the streets or in shelters to having informal (and often unstable) arrangements with friends or extended family (Rivlin & Moore 2001; Kingsley, Smith, & Price 2009). This literature demonstrates how the loss of home (e.g., through domestic violence, war, disaster, foreclosure, urban renewal, coming out as a sexual minority, etc.) produces a wide range of mobilities that reflect an ambiguous social status. For example, street homeless are often policed away from public spaces and fall into placelessness (May 2000) or spaces of perpetual not-belonging, as was the case when the Olympic stadium in Sydney was built (Robinson 2002). These ambiguities effectively reinforce conventional ideas about home as a permanent site of safety, security, comfort, ownership, and belonging. While scholars have written extensively about mobile subjects since the 1990s, their research is far from exhaustive. Transnationals, refugees, tourists, homeless, and other groups typically identified by the literature are not the only highly mobile people, and accounts of their experiences do not always apply to other groups. For example, D'Andrea (2006) examines the mobilities of neo-nomads – relatively well-positioned European and American expatriates who leave their countries of origin in search of the exotic. He argues that the common scholarly accounts of transnationalism and diaspora do not reflect neo-nomadic experiences of hypermobility.

Summary Following D'Andrea (2006), I argue that military youth constitute a little-recognized and poorly-understood category of mobile subjects. It is true that their experiences overlap to some degree with those of transnationals as well as some more marginal mobile subjects: like any other uprooted group of people, their identities are often scrutinized and they must (re)establish

44 themselves with every move, (re)creating their identities and navigating lines of inclusion and exclusion. Yet unlike other mobile subjects, who may find themselves settling permanently or semi-permanently in their new surroundings, military youth are unsettled and resettled multiple times throughout their lives. Thus, a major experience that marks military youth is not just one of displacement, but one of expected transience. In contrast, however, to other transient groups such as Travelers and the homeless, military youths' citizenship and participation in the state are unquestioned: they are a sanctioned product of the state's imperial and defensive machineries. They are not an already-mobile group whose movement threatens the state, but rather a group made mobile by the state's drive for supremacy. Thus, while military youth may share some experiences with other highly mobile people, there are important differences between them and the other mobile subjects currently considered in the academic literature. One such difference is that military youth are subject to the temporal and spatial structures of the U.S. military. On the one hand, the rhythms of their residential mobility follow the military's cycles of promotion and transfers. Junior personnel and personnel going through training programs are transferred more frequently than senior personnel; consequently, military youth typically move more frequently when they are younger. On the other hand, military families are moored to the infrastructures that support the military's mission. Thus, military youth usually live on or near military installations. In cases where they live off-base, they often live in civilian communities that are aware of the military presence and its mobility cycles. Such proximity sometimes fosters mutual understanding but just as often breeds misunderstanding between the military and their civilian neighbors. Finally, the mobility of military youth puts them in an unusual cultural position. On the one hand, mobility is an integral part of the national ethos of the United States: “it is here [in the United States] that mobility as a right – as a geographical indicator of freedom – has been most forcefully intertwined with the very notion of what it is to be a national citizen – to be American” (Cresswell 2006, 151). Yet as I pointed out earlier, we live in an increasingly sedentary society. This is less paradoxical than it sounds: while the facts (and myths) of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny have certainly left their mark on American culture, the mobility we most prize is less the ability to move house than the ability to travel and return home afterward. As a society, we may find freedom in fast cars or cheap airfares, and we may use travel to find ourselves – but at the end of these optimistic narratives is an equally optimistic homecoming

45 story. We may welcome the leisure mobilities of the socioeconomically privileged, but – as the experiences of military youth suggest – in the end we expect people to have ties to some fixed place, and that fixed place is home.

Setting the Stage The literatures I reviewed here demonstrate that ideas like home and mobility are quite complex and are often intertwined. The literatures on these topics provide a number of interrelated propositions that serve as the starting point for my research. Foremost among these is that home is culturally constructed. In the United States, it is generally constructed as a (singular) place that acts as a site of childhood, belonging, family, ownership, and identity. It is often defined in opposition to certain types of mobility (e.g., homelessness), but can also act as a mooring for more socially acceptable forms of mobility such as tourism. It is also important to note that although the United States has some of the highest rates of residential mobility in the industrial West, it is still relatively sedentary. Young people's interactions with home and mobility add another level of complexity. Although they generally have limited agency in (re)constructing home, they do have access to – and regularly engage in – a particular set of spatial home-making practices. Decorating walls, and displaying and storing objects that are familiar and personally significant are often means for expressing their identities and creating spaces of belonging. This is particularly important in light of the fact that youth is a time of identity formation in which home often plays an integral role. Yet identity formation and home-making are not isolated processes: youth (military youth included) are just as subject to cultural discourses as adults; thus, the home-making practices they use and the ways that they construct home are shaped by broader currents of thought and belief. My research challenges some of these starting points. In particular, it questions the relationship between home and place. Within the scholarly literature, home is constructed as a particular investment of identity in place. The critical literature is not immune to this assumption: even studies that posit home as multi-sited rely on it. Given that all of this literature was produced by cultures that embrace rootedness, it is an assumption that is difficult to avoid. Yet it is possible to see resistance to this idea in studies of highly mobile youth that reveal spatial but non-localized practices of homemaking. The high residential mobility among military youth also

46 challenges this assumption: military youth are cut off from traditional discourses of home, and yet no one would argue that they are refugees, homeless, nomads, or exiles. Thus, my research offers a new critiques of home and mobility by investigating the experiences of a group of young people who have been completely ignored in the literature. Before we get to this, however, it is critical to understand something about military life and culture, militarization, and military youth.

47 Chapter IV Militarization and Scale

The strands of militarization thread their way through economic, social, and political processes. These extend from the military outward into civilian space and contextualize the experiences of military youth with regard to mobility and home. The same processes also turn inward into the intimate spaces of military families, integrating them more deeply within the machinery of the military. I devote the first half of this chapter to examining the impacts of militarization in the United States broadly and within military families specifically, providing further context for understanding the structures within which military youth interact with the world. As my review will demonstrate, it is impossible to discuss militarization without a deeper consideration of its effects across multiple scales. Over the last two decades, and especially during the last five years, scale has garnered a great deal of critical attention within geography. Military youth occupy a socio-political position within U.S. society that is made even more complex because of its inter- and multiscalar implications. With this in mind, I dedicate the second half of this chapter to a review of the literature regarding scale, and particularly feminist geopolitical interventions that have significant implications regarding militarization, identity, and home.

Militarization Cynthia Enloe defines militarization as “a step-by-step process by which a person or a thing gradually comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being on militaristic ideas” (2000, 3). Catherine Lutz relies on Michael Geyer's definition: “the contradictory and tense social process in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence” (Geyer 1989, 79, quoted in Lutz 2002, 723). She further refines this position, characterizing militarization as discursive, pervasive, and insidious, extending even into “the less visible deformation of human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality” (Lutz 2002, 723). Rachel Woodward, making no distinction between militarism and militarization,22 follows Marek Thee, who defines it as “an extension of military influence to

22 Many authors distinguish between militarism as an ideology and militarization as a set of processes. See, for example, Enloe 1988. 48 civilian spheres, including economic and socio-political life” (Thee 1980, 15, quoted in Woodward 2004, 3). In Woodward's thinking, militarization is inherently specific to time and place. For the purposes of my research, I define militarization as the processes undertaken in the pursuit of discourses of national security, and the ideologies that support and justify those processes. Understanding militarization is crucial to understanding military youth because they inhabit spaces of militarization. The links between militarization and military youth are not always obvious; as a contextualizing force, militarization often operates in subtle and indirect ways. Yet it is important to trace these linkages – in part because because militarization shapes the everyday experiences of military youth both directly and indirectly, and in part because the existing scholarship more often than not fails to account for this fact. In this section, I examine the literature on militarization with regard to its manifestations at different scales, civil-military relations, and intimacy. The combination of these factors constitutes a secondary sociopolitical context that encompasses the more immediate cultural context of daily life within the military.

The reach of militarization Militarization takes place at a range of scales. Scholars have considered its impacts at global, local, family, and even bodily levels. Many argue that it is both a driver and a support for American imperialism in the global economy (Kirk & Okazawa-Rey 2000; Staples 2000; Lutz 2002; Agnew 2003; Gerson 2009; Lutz 2009). For example, American military action is linked to neoliberal economic policies through discourses of “risk” and “securitization” that characterize parts of the world less connected to the global economy as “dangerous” and in need of preemptive military force to propel them into modernization (Roberts, Secour, & Sparke 2003; Morrissey 2011). Within our own borders, the economy has become thoroughly militarized since the end of World War II and the development of the military-industrial complex and the anxiety- fueled “national security state” (Lutz 2001; Cooling 2010; Farish & Vitale 2011; Vitale 2011). This relationship has become so complicated as the military has grown more reliant civilian contractors for day-to-day operations that it is increasingly difficult to trace the military's presence in the U.S. economy (Lutz 2002; Cooling 2010). Despite the pervasiveness of state-military-industry relationships, their impacts on the ground are uneven. As Woodward points out, “Militarism as the extension of military influence

49 into economic, social and political life is culturally, locationally and temporally specific” (2004, 3). Building on this premise of spatial specificity, Bernazzoli and Flint (2009) characterize militarization as uneven both economically and culturally, arguing first, “the economic facts of militarization do not benefit all places equally,” (399) and second, “the overarching process of militarization can be expected to unfold differently in different localities due to the ways in which these processes are mediated by unique local contexts” (404). They propose that two factors are responsible for this unevenness: “the nature of the military presence (or lack thereof) and the characteristics of the civilian community” (Bernazzoli & Flint 2009, 404). That is, for all that we can talk about the history and economics of defense contracting in general, it is crucial to bear in mind that military-industry partnerships benefit some, harm others, and take on different forms in different parts of the country.

Civil-military relations The growing economic interdependence between military and civilian spheres is mirrored by a widening social gap between them.23 Two important historical factors have contributed to this divide: first, ROTC programs were removed from many Ivy League colleges in the 1960s as a symbol of opposition to the Vietnam War (see Downs 2011); second, Congress abolished the draft in1973 and the military transitioned to an all-volunteer force. The removal of ROTC programs from the Ivy League effectively removed the military as an option for the educated elite, while dissolving the draft diminished the likelihood that people would ever serve in the military and reduced civilians from stakeholders to “spectators” when it comes to the military (Lutz 2002, 730). As a result, relatively few Americans today have immediate family members who have served in the military: 33 percent of people ages 18 to 29 have a direct tie to the military, compared to 79 percent of those ages 50 to 64 – and those young people who do have direct ties are more likely to be veterans themselves (Parker 2011). The civil-military gap is equally strong among legislators: in 2007 only 24 percent of Congresspeople had served in the military compared to 72 percent in 1975 (Gorman 2009). This drop prompted Gorman to observe that “at no time in history has the governing public understood the military less than it does today” (2009, 3). He argues that the widening civil- military gap may lead to failure among legislators to understand the function, operations, and

23 The literature on the civil-military gap is vast and politically charged. For more thorough reviews, see Cohn (1999) and Feaver (1999). 50 culture of the military; this in turn may result in bad military policy, misuse of military resources, and inept management of the military. Dunlop (1992/1993) explored these potentials in a famous thought experiment, concluding that the civil-military gap might prompt civilian overuse of the military for operations other than war. He warned that the civil government's tendency to apply the term “war” to noncombat situations (e.g., the “War on Drugs”) might justify co-opting the military for civilian ends, with disastrous results. Another aspect of the civil-military gap is that the military is generally thought to stand farther to the right politically than civil society. This has been evident among officers since the 1970s – and this ideological gap grew between 1976 and 1996 (Hostli 1998/1999). Others argue that while the military (specifically the Army) is a conservative institution, the political positions held by general officers are more nuanced: while few Army generals identify as liberal or as Democrats, the majority identify as moderate, and a large proportion identify politically as Independent (Dowd 2011). Dowd noticed an increase in moderate ideological stances with an increase in rank, noting that most of his respondents tended to have mixed political stances – the most common being the “fiscally conservative but socially liberal” position. Nevertheless, the U.S. military is still more ideologically conservative than civil society: a significantly greater proportion of post-9/11 veterans identify with the Republican party than their civilian peers (36 percent versus 23 percent, respectively), and significantly fewer of them identify with the Democratic party (21 percent of veterans versus 34 percent of civilians) (Pew Research Center 2011). Relations between the military and civil society unfold geographically through the placement of military installations near civilian communities. This interplay is uneven across the landscape and is shaped in part by proximity, economic conditions, the installation's mission, and local politics (Warf 1997; Bernazzoli & Flint 2009; Beaulier et al. 2011). For example, large installations with training missions are often situated in economically depressed areas, and the resulting high numbers of young enlisted personnel are often associated with thriving pawn shops, prostitution, and violent crime, prompting tense relations between the longer-term civilian community and the revolving military community (see, e.g., Lutz 2001 on the relationship between Fort Bragg and Fayetteville, NC). Yet smaller military installations oriented toward communications, intelligence, or high technology may also offer high-paying jobs (see, e.g., Hicks & Rainey 2003).

51 The flip side of base siting in terms of civil-military relations is base closure. Historically, base closure is strong source of tension for communities in which the local economy benefits from a military presence.24 Base closure is often hotly contested and politically-motivated, underscoring the interplay between local and federal politics as state and Congressional representatives lobby to keep military bases from leaving – or to receive the benefits of their realignment (see, e.g., Bernardi 1996; Kushner 2001; Cowan & Webel 2005; Bernazzoli & Flint 2009).

Intimate militarization Economic and sociopolitical considerations of militarization tend to frame things at the global, national, and local levels. Yet militarization does not stop there; in fact, the literature I review above hints that it extends to narrower scales, though it does not address what that means or how it manifests. A handful of scholars, writing from feminist and critical perspectives, have begun to examine how processes traditionally thought to operate at broader scales play out across multiple and narrower scales. This work underscores the interconnections between things as conceptually disparate as globalization and the body, or domesticity and militarization (Sharp 2007). Processes of militarization are normalized to the degree that their militarization is nearly invisible; further, they reside insidiously in the embodied everyday practices of the citizenry, including those who are traditionally disenfranchised or marginal (Dowler 2012). Militarization can be quite intimate. The disciplining of bodies and families, and the construction of home are just as subject to militarization as the displaying of flags or the representation of first responders as heroes in the wake of 9/11. For example, Vitale (2011) points to the ways that the bodies of workers were militarized during WWII through discourses that linked food, health, nutrition, and labor to the war effort. Likewise, militarization acts on bodies through targeted portrayals of gender: women's bodies produce sons who can be sent to war and are therefore property requiring protection (Enloe 1983); they provide sexual recreation that reinforces soldiers' masculinity (Enloe 1983; Gagen 2009); they may be taken as plunder or systematically raped as acts of ethnic cleansing (Brownmiller 1993; Sells 1996); and they are often used to legitimize acts of war, as with the Bush Administration's use of the image of the Afghan woman in a burqua to symbolize Taliban oppression and justify American “assistance”

24 For a review of domestic base closure and realignment, see Goren 2011. 52 (Riley 2008). Yet not all forms of militarization are so drastic; as Dowler points out: “militarization takes root in the banal processes of daily life” (2012, 497, in reference to sovereignty). Intimacy and banality converge in the militarization of military wives. Contemporary military policy holds that allowing soldiers to marry is crucial to retaining personnel: wives are thought to provide stability for soldiers, improving morale during deployments. Yet marriage brings with it the risk that soldiers' loyalties will be divided between military and family; to conceal this, wives are systematically militarized through policies that incorporate their roles into military culture and discursively reconstruct the military as family (Enloe 2000). Military wives are effectively funneled into an informal rank system that parallels that of their husbands, with wives of senior personnel responsible for setting a “good example” for wives of lower-ranking personnel. The integration of wives into the military machinery is nearly total: they are both invested in and reliant upon the military to provide for their basic needs; made to “feel special and separate” (Enloe 2000, xiii) by the military, military wives are meant to embody many of the values discursively associated with the military: duty, honor, and self-sacrifice. Home and homemaking are also militarized. This was evident during Cold War-era political campaigns that symbolically used the image of the fallout shelter to underscore the threat of nuclear war (Lutz 2007). Since the ascendancy of the military-industrial complex it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between home front and combat zone because militarization has moved into the banal, leading to “militarized domesticities,” which Loyd defines as “the symbolic use of the home and home front as the places that national security states claim to work to protect” (2011, 847). In the masculinity of the military-industrial complex, home – assumed to be white and suburban – is feminized. This continues to be true in the Global War on Terror, where terror attacks are not the only threat to the safety and sanctity of home: now inner-city crime is increasingly constructed, discussed, and handled in ways that parallel the language and tactics used by the Department of Homeland Security with regard to terrorism (Ruben & Maskovsky 2008). At its heart, the American military is a fundamentally patriarchal institution. Reardon points out striking parallels between traditional patriarchal family structures and military hierarchies: The military chain of command, while more complex, is conceptually close to the patriarchal

53 family, both being essentially hierarchical organizations. Small wonder the famous generals often became “father figures” to their countries and are frequently called upon to save their nations from “childish” civil disorder. The nation, like the troops, like wives and children, submits more readily to the dominance of a military patriarchy, that is, “the masculine,” than to a weaker civil state, that is, “the feminine.” Acceptance of conditions of dominance and submission as the price tag of “security” are characteristics of both patriarchy (sexist society) and of military dictatorship. (Reardon 1996, 150). The literature I review here demonstrates how the military embodies and reproduces authoritarian, patriarchal structures within intimate and domestic spheres. And while this is true within American society broadly with regard to the socialization of American school-aged children (see Reardon 1996), it is driven home even further within military families. Military families exhibit a kind of fractal patriarchy: the family is treated as an extension of the military itself and replicates the chain of command, with the (male) breadwinner acting as commanding officer, and “dependent” spouses (i.e., wives; arguably, even male spouses can be considered feminized within the military system) and children acting as executive officers and junior-level enlisted troops, respectively. The degree to which military youth are militarized and embedded within this system became apparent in my interviews. I will return to the militarization of military youth in my analysis.

Summary Militarization's tangled economic, social, and political web has immediate impacts on military families. The drive toward American economic imperialism often entails deploying troops for operations intended to back up neoliberal policies while reinforcing the increasingly diffuse military-industrial complex at home, with uneven effects across the civilian landscape. Further, the contrary motion of the military's growing economic interconnectedness and shrinking social connectedness has led some to view the military as the “third rail” of American politics. The threat of appearing unpatriotic has made an electorate with little experience afraid to cut defense spending – while some senior military personnel see ballooning national debt as a national security risk (O'Connell 2012). Yet militarization is not just an economic or political force; it extends in banal ways into the intimate spheres of family and home. Extensive research has demonstrated how soldiers' wives have been incorporated into the machinery of the military. Likewise, home has been

54 militarized both symbolically in political campaigns that rely on the image of a feminized home under siege, and literally by domestic policies that increasingly treat neighborhoods as combat zones. It is within these spaces of militarization that military youth are situated.

Scale As I point out in the preceding section, the military's relationship with the American economy and the civil sphere is one that unfolds across a range of scales. Processes that happen at one scale have effects across other scales: decisions made at the national level result in policies and responses to them at the state and community levels; incidents that happen at specific sites prompt sweeping state and federal action. Yet descriptions like these suggest a simple bipolar interaction, a kind of zero-sum mechanical reaction where a lever is pulled here and a curtain rises over there. In reality, scalar interactions are far more complex than this, often involving multiple iterations across scales. Furthermore, as I note in my discussion of intimate militarization, recent work by feminist and critical geographers reveals that militarization happens at scales that have traditionally been ignored by earlier scholarship. Scale is integral not only to militarization, but also to mobility, identity construction, and even home itself. The complexity and importance of scale warrants a deeper discussion of its theoretical underpinnings. In this section I present some of the theoretical literature on scale. I begin by discussing more general issues of scale in human geography, and then move on to feminist geopolitical approaches to scale. Given their breadth and importance, I break down my review of feminist geopolitical interventions into a more general overview, followed by brief discussions of the “intimately global” and issues of scale and identity. This does not constitute an exhaustive summary of the literature by any means; I have chosen here to focus on aspects of these topics that are of direct relevance to my research.

Theorizing and understanding scale Although human geographers rely extensively on scale as an analytical tool, few have carefully theorized the concept. Those who do provide some valuable insights into its nature and how it is deployed. Three particular theoretical points have bearing here: the ontology of scale, the metaphors we use to describe and deploy it, and its habitual reduction to a global/local binary.

55 Herod and Wright (2002) identify two distinct ontological positions with respect to scale. The first of these is that scales are natural, pre-existing spatial divisions; the second is that scale is socially constructed based on material, political, and ideological interactions. Few if any scholars take the naturalist position very seriously; in effect it is a baseline assumption against which they position themselves. For example, Marston uses the naturalist stance to situate the social constructionist perspective: “In…recent social theoretical studies, the fundamental point being made is that scale is not necessarily a preordained hierarchical framework for ordering the world – local, regional, national and global. It is instead a contingent outcome of the tensions that exist between structural forces and the practices of human agents” (2000, 220). The social constructionist perspective is further split between those who take a materialist stance and those who take an idealist stance. Materialist approaches to scale conceptualize scale as a contingent outcome of events and interactions happening in the world. For example, the nation emerged as a viable scale with the Treaty of Westphalia (see Herod & Wright 2002); likewise, in the United States, the scale of the household emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a result of patriarchal spatial ordering combined with new forms of consumption (Marston 2000). From this perspective, the construction of scale is a political-economic process that has both real and ideological impacts on the world. That said, the scales that emerge are not necessarily stable as political, analytical, or rhetorical units (Marston 2000). Hence, while “international” and “world” economies have been recognized for decades, the idea of a “globalized” economy is a more recent construction that gained popular traction only after the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization (Herod & Wright 2002). Thus a materialist perspective holds that scales “correspond to real material processes, events and spatial formations” (Moore 2008, 204). The materialist position stands in tension with the idealist position that scale is a convenient fiction for thinking about and ordering the world. The idealist stance holds that scale is determined by whomever wields it (Herod & Wright 2002, citing John Fraser Hart) and does not necessarily reflect real social, political, economic, or physical phenomena, though the deployment of scalar representations can have material impacts (Moore 2008). As with the naturalist perspective, the idealist perspective has little traction in the current literature (Moore 2008). If contemporary scholars generally agree that scale is socially produced, they are less

56 united on how to talk about it and how it operates. The most commonly identified scales – global, national, regional, local – are arranged in different metaphors that suggest very different spatial-political relationships between places. Typical metaphors include ladders, concentric circles or nesting dolls, and networks (Herod & Wright 2002; Moore 2008). Ladders suggest that scales are hierarchical and discrete – one can move up or down the ladder in scale, but each scale operates independently of all others. The metaphor of concentric circles or matryoshka dolls suggests that scale acts as a container, with coarser scales encompassing finer scales. In this line of thought, phenomena happening at the local scale are enveloped by those at the national, regional, and global scales. In both of these metaphors, phenomena fall within a single scale – e.g., something is global or local – though events at one scale can prompt responses at other scales. The network metaphor allows scholars to present phenomena that operate at multiple scales simultaneously, relying on horizontal rather than vertical connections between actors. Although these metaphors are commonly used, they do not account for all potential spatial relationships, nor do they reflect popular conceptualizations of scale. For example, Kirby (2002) points out the technology-inspired popular idea of “front” and “back” regions as an alternative to more traditional metaphors. The point to be taken here is that the complexities of spatial relationships sometimes defy standard metaphors of scale. As I will discuss in my analysis, military complicates the links between identity and home for military youth in ways that cannot be captured by simplistic metaphors of scale. The experiences of my participants suggest that home and identity are scaled in ways that are neither singularly vertical nor horizontal in orientation, neither fully contained nor freestanding. The over-simplification of the common metaphors is echoed by the tendency, on the part of academics as well as activists, to reduce scale to a global/local binary. This tendency is problematic because it works on the assumption that power increases as scale increases – that is, most of the power rests at global-scale actors, while local-scale actors are assumed to be relatively weak or ineffectual (Herod & Wright 2002; Moore 2008). This assumption has a polarizing effect in political deployments of scale so that the global and local (through rhetorical practices of scale jumping – “going global” or “going local”) are perceived as the only meaningful levels of resolution, while intermediate scales are left out of the discussion. Yet it is important to bear in mind that for all that coarser scales are presumed to be more powerful, practices of scale jumping are “not always unidirectional, as groups move back and forth through

57 a constant negotiation of the scales of vision, action, and solidarity” (Herod & Wright 2002, 218- 219).

Feminist geopolitical approaches to scale Recent scholarship in feminist geopolitics addresses some of these theoretical issues, expanding the range of scales that are considered worthy of interest and revealing complex scalar interactions in a wide array of situations that move away from false global/local dualisms. This body of literature builds off the work of the critical geopolitics of the 1990s, in which scholars recognized the potential value that feminist approaches could bring to political geography (e.g., Dalby 1994), and recognized that geopolitical processes such as nation-building are reproduced in civil spheres and everyday experiences (e.g., Dodds 2001). The creation of a feminist position within and alongside critical geopolitics emerges with Hyndman (2001). Driven by the question “security for whom?”, she advocates an approach that de-emphasizes the nation-state and the global in favor of analyses at scales finer and coarser than these. In addition she calls for a reconsideration of what counts as public and private at the transnational scale. This expanded sense of scale and the interrogation of the public/private divide are defining features of feminist approaches to geopolitics (see, e.g., Dowler & Sharp 2001; England 2003; Staeheli & Kofman 2004; Sharp 2007). While there are other aspects to this perspective, it is the combination of these two features in particular that makes it powerful, providing a framework for understanding how national ideologies and identities are reproduced in everyday practices (cf Dodds 2001; Dowler & Sharp 2001), and for revealing ways that some individuals and groups are marginalized, Othered, or excluded in the process (Dowler & Sharp 2001; Hyndman 2001). One of the most important aspects of feminist geopolitics is its emphasis on the body as a viable (and powerful) resolution for geopolitical analyses (see, e.g., England 2003; Hyndman 2007). In her work on religion, marriage, and reproduction in a contested district of Ladakh, India, Smith (2012) argues that bodies both are and create territory: in this case, both Buddhist and Muslim organizations in Ladakh have embarked on campaigns to discourage family planning, reflecting their competition for political control through body counts. Cutting to the heart of the issue, she argues: The intimate space of the body cannot be completely extracted from the territory of the district, as

58 the potential of the fertile body to extend itself into territory makes it a target. It is not that the body is a microscale embedded within or shaped by geopolitical forces from above: The body is the site where the geopolitical is produced and known. (Smith 2012, 1518) Likewise, women's bodies constituted territory to be controlled during the Bosnian War (Mayer 2004). The theoretical thrust here is twofold: the grandeur of the geopolitical relies on bodies, and bodies themselves are geopolitical. In attending to the body as a geopolitical entity, this scholarship has also revealed scalar interactions that are far more complex than polarized local/global scale jumping. Actors, actions, organizations, and ideologies do more than “go global.” Rather, experiences and politics unfold within and across multiple scales, sometimes prompting narratives that intertwine with, rebound off, or transcend discourses at different resolutions. For example, the experiences of individual Filipina domestic workers highlight links between them and the global economy, Canadian immigration law, local employment companies, and specific households (England 2003); likewise, everyday life in an Istanbul neighborhood is caught up in religious and political discourses that ricochet off and reproduce national ideologies which are themselves positioned with respect to globalized discourses of Western/secular statehood (Secour 2001). Such fine-scale analyses also reveal some of the mechanism through which scale jumping and other scalar interactions operate. Events, movements, and ideologies can collapse scales. This was the case with Another Mother for Peace (AMP), an antiwar organization that protested (albeit problematically) the Vietnam war by universalizing the experience of motherhood across the United States and Vietnam (Loyd 2009). Likewise, it is possible to upscale and downscale phenomena by creating material-rhetorical links between them. For example, AMP crossed the public/private divide by appealing to motherhood (private) through public campaigns of protest. In addition, their rhetoric bounced between international, national, urban, and household levels as they broadened their interests beyond the immediacies of war in Vietnam, connecting the war effort to corporate enterprise, pollution, and weapons testing within U.S. borders.

Intimately global In its emphasis on the body as a scale of analysis, feminist geopolitics challenges the idea that fine-scale actors are merely receptacles for the impacts of all-powerful broad-scale phenomena. Rather, a feminist geopolitical perspective recognizes fine-scale agency: on the one hand, it seeks fine-scale resistance to broad-scale discourses; on the other hand, it acknowledges 59 the roles that individuals and communities have in co-constructing the world around them. In the process, broad-scale and fine-scale forces intertwine in deep and significant ways: “Global forces penetrate and haunt the intimate spaces of our psyches and bodies in ways that we can only intimate, and there is no territorial defense of privacy or domesticity that protects the intimate from the global” (Pratt & Rosner 2006, 18). This intertwining, the intimately global, “reveals the kinship binding the intimate and the global within the daily practice and global imagining of activism” (Wright 2008, 383), thus reflecting and pointing to the embodiment of geopolitics (see Dowler & Sharp 2001). The hope of joining the global (visual, removed) with the intimate (tactile, immediate) realms is that it “populates the map seen as an abstraction from far away and undoes the distinction between viewer and viewed” (Pratt & Rosner 2006, 17). As the interactions and enmeshment of phenomena at different scales are revealed, such distinctions evaporate. Cindi Katz's (2001) countertopography of the effects of globalization in rural Sudan illustrates this: she links broad-scale economic restructuring to the very immediate and embodied experiences of changing labor, marriage, and educational practices and intensified patriarchal power structures in a rural village. These effects were not predetermined at the international scale, but were locally-produced social adaptations to new and ultimately destructive economic conditions; her countertopography reveals “a local that is constitutively global but whose engagements with various global imperatives are the material forms and practices of situated knowledge” (Katz 2001, 1214; original emphasis) and demonstrates the ways that processes at different scales intersect and impact places. The idea of scalar interactions often conjures a kind of raincloud image in which powerful broad-scale forces rain their effects down evenly across the fine-scale landscape, which receives them passively. In their work on fear, Pain and Smith (2008; see also Smith & Pain 2008; Pain 2009; Pain et al. 2010) challenge this hierarchical model, arguing, “Fear does not pop out of the heavens and hover in the ether before blanketing itself across huge segments of cities and societies; it has to be lived and made” (Pain & Smith 2008, 2). They propose a double-helix model of fear in which global and local are strands are connected by “events, encounters, movements, dialogues, actions, affects and things: the materials that connect and conjoin geopolitics and everyday life” (Pain & Smith 2008, 7). In this model, the connections are iterative and particular to communities, households, and individuals; events at one scale are

60 filtered through events at other scales, the geopolitical is lived in particular and everyday contexts, and individuals constantly negotiate and resist fear (Pain et al. 2010).

People, places, security, and scale One important thread revealed by the feminist geopolitics literature is that the nation- state, family, home, and even self are not locked in terms of scale. These entities are often the subjects of discursive rescaling: the state and the nation can be pushed downward and tightened; the individual, family, and home can be pushed upward and broadened; and new political and economic structures are pushing certain identity categories into scales with which they are not traditionally associated. Such rescaling is often (and very visibly) the discursive work of militarization and securitization. It is fairly common in the literature to see examples of the nation being rescaled to the body. This was precisely the case during the Bosnian War of the 1990s. In the course of brutal organized rape campaigns perpetrated by Serbian forces against Bosniak women, not only was war scaled down to individual bodies, but so was nationhood: through their actions soldier- rapists created a national masculinity, and soldiers who refused to participate were considered a threat to the nation; by the same token, women's bodies were a site of nationhood to be taken and controlled through rape (Mayer 2004). Embodiment doesn't stop with the informal belonging of nationhood; the state is also implicated. Individual agents of governments who make decisions daily that impact others are in effect embodiments of the state itself. Yet their positions are not universal by any means: for example, when faced with a wave of immigrants from China, some agents of the Canadian government made decisions in the name of the state based on personal experience with the immigrants, while those at a greater remove from the situation responded instead to local and national discussions (Mountz 2003). Such rescalings are not necessarily violent or life-altering, but also run to the banal: in his review of critical geopolitics, Dodds points out that “nations as 'imagined communities' are reproduced in the context of everyday life” through everyday bodily practices such as domestic hygiene (2001, 473). Just as the state and nation can be made intimate and embodied, so can the intimacies of identity and family be expanded beyond the body and scaled upward. States and activists alike rely on homogenized identities, taking very specific intersections of identity and thrusting them upward to represent the nation or the organization. This was the case in Turkey as both the

61 Turkish government and the PKK elided differences among Turkish and Kurdish citizens, respectively, in their efforts to construct national and ethnic identities (Rygiel 1998). Cowen and Gilbert (2008b) link the nation to the family in the post-9/11 United States, where what they refer to as the “familialization of politics” entails a kind of contrary motion: the US government has pushed the family-scaled grief and individual traumas of 9/11 upward and mapped them onto the nation as a whole; simultaneously this rescaled nation-as-family has been used to push government-level responsibilities for security downward to the family. Of particular relevance to my research is the upscaling of home from an intimate, domestic space to a national one through the idea of the homeland. As Kaplan (2003) points out, homeland is a recent addition to the American lexicon, but in the years since 9/11 it has become an important part of contemporary political (and by extension, military) rhetoric. Two important factors emerge in this rescaling of home to homeland: first, it reframes both home and the nation – traditionally conceptualized as “boundless and mobile” – as having a “spatial fixedness and rootedness” (Kaplan 2003, 86). Second, if home is an intimate space of refuge, its upscaling to homeland reframes it as an idealized, nostalgic site of tragedy and longing – forever situated in the past or future and therefore eternally desired but entirely unattainable (Kaplan 2003; Cowen & Gilbert 2008b; Cowen & Gilbert 2008c; Farish 2008). In this fixed and idealized imagining, homeland becomes vulnerable: the idea of the homeland works by generating a profound sense of insecurity, not only because of the threat of terrorism, but because the homeland, too, proves a fundamentally uncanny place, haunted by prior and future losses, invasions, abandonment… The homeland is haunted by all the unfamiliar yet strangely familiar foreign specters that threaten to turn it into its opposite. (Kaplan 2003, 89) Thus in its rescaling more contrary motion emerges: home becomes vulnerable as it is scaled upward to homeland, destroying the sense of refuge associated with home and pushing the fear generated by that vulnerability downward into intimate spaces (Cowen & Gilbert 2008c). This places the homeland in what Kaplan refers to as a state of “radical insecurity” that acknowledges danger on all sides and necessitates its protection: “Although homeland security may strive to cordon off the nation as a domestic space from external foreign threats, it is actually about breaking down the boundaries between inside and outside, about seeing the homeland in a state of constant emergency from threats within and without” (2003, 90). Following Kaplan, Farish (2008) argues that while scaled to the national, homeland is suggestive of domestic space – and

62 this vague, slippery terminology enables the Department of Homeland Security to engage in equally vague and slippery missions. The process of rescaling home to homeland encompasses additional rescalings of identity and family similar to those I discuss earlier. An identifiable homeland requires an identifiable nation; an identifiable nation yearns for a clear-cut template – in this case, the (white, heterosexual, middle class) nuclear family (Cowen & Gilbert 2008c). The rescaling of home to homeland thus becomes a homogenizing and exclusionary force, bearing “a sense of racial purity and ethnic homogeneity, which even naturalization and citizenship cannot erase” (Kaplan 2003, 88). In fact, citizenship is ideologically rewritten to include only those who match this exclusive imagined community: “The nuclear family, not 'race' or religion, becomes the unifying principle of citizenship” (Cowen & Gilbert 2008c, 57). Yet while the idealized and homogenized homeland-nation rests on an exclusive imaginary of citizenship in the United States, boundaries between home/overseas and inside/outside the state are diminishing. For example, Flint (2008) points out that the boundary between foreign and domestic territory was erased during the Korean War as the “soldiercitizen” was instructed to carry out extraterritorial military actions in defense of a nonterritorial homeland redefined in terms of values and institutions. And the nature of citizenship itself is being challenged as the superiority of the nation-state wanes and new forms of citizenship emerge at finer scales within states and at supranational and global levels (Cowen & Gilbert 2008a). Suddenly, the question becomes both citizenship for whom? and citizenship granted by whom?

Summary Claims pertaining to scale – both with regard to militarization and more broadly – cannot be taken for granted. In my research, I assume a social constructivist position with regard to scale: specific scales are not naturally preordained entities, but emerge from discourses specific to time and place. While it is tempting to default to one of the metaphors standard in geographic thought, I conceptualize scale in terms of permeable and overlapping circles: it is impossible to discuss a singular “national” scale with regard the U.S. military when its tentacles reach across state boundaries to operate at many national scales, and to describe (for example) the situation of overseas military bases as an international concern risks unfairly universalizing a phenomenon that is at once mulitscalar, complex, and particular.

63 Adopting a feminist geopolitical perspective is instructive here. In challenging static notions of scale and approaching geopolitical issues from scales broader and finer than the state, feminist geopolitics makes it possible to consider military youth as geopolitical entities. As I will demonstrate in later chapters, military youth frequently confront and construct rescaled ideas of home and identity as a consequence of militarization.

Interweaving and Rescaling Although the two bodies of literature I review here are ostensibly vastly different, they are deeply intertwined. As is evident from the militarization literature, militarization operates across a wide range of scales – yet the literatures on scale and feminist geopolitics underscore a need for broadening analyses of militarization beyond traditionally considered scales. This is especially important for military youth, who know militarization in intimate settings and through everyday lived experiences. I will argue in my analysis that military youth live the geopolitical through creative rescalings that are driven by militarization. The literatures I have presented here provide the foundation for this argument and allow me to further theorize the ways that scalar phenomena interact.

64 Chapter V Methods and Methodology

Over the previous chapters I examined a number of complex factors that impact the lives of military youth. I reviewed critical approaches to home, mobility, and militarization; offered a glimpse into the everyday experiences of military life; and hinted at how these factors are interwoven in a discussion of what we do and do not know (from an academic standpoint) about children and youth who grow up in military families. When I initially set out to do my research, my goal was to write about the difficulty of defining and living home in a cultural context of militarized mobility. Over the course of my preliminary research it became increasingly clear that the issues here are more complicated than I had expected – even as someone who has experienced them firsthand. The number of factors to consider, the many ways the interactions of those factors play out in people's everyday lives, the implications for the military and military families (and especially youth in these families), and what it all means in terms of militarization: these are all moving targets. The question was how to approach them. By this, I don't mean that I wanted to find some normative description of the experiences of the “typical military kid.” In spite of their shared experiences and the ostensible (and primarily visual) uniformity of military life, I really cannot claim that there is such a definitive, essential thing. But there are patterns of experiences, and patterns in the ways military youth respond to them. The means of identifying and understanding these patterns became a central concern of my work. In this chapter I discuss the approach that I developed to undertake my fieldwork and analysis, why I took the approach that I did, the obstacles that emerged along the way, and a reflection on my personal position with respect to the research.

Methods A qualitative framework My research questions are most concerned with patterns of first-person experiences: of home, mobility, military life, and identity. Given that my intent is to examine a range of responses (all of which I accept as legitimate) rather than to construct a single, essentialist profile, I adopted a qualitative framework for this research (see Winchester 2005). Two factors

65 played into this decision: first, the subject of my research lends itself toward qualitative methods of inquiry. Second, geography as a discipline has a well-established history of using qualitative methods in research on children and adolescents. Creswell advocates the use of qualitative methods for research meant to provide a detailed exploration of a topic – research that asks how or what instead of why (1998, 17). As indicated by the questions I laid out in the previous section, the purpose of my research is to understand how military youth reconcile their experiences with various cultural discourses, with the ultimate goal of arriving at a deeper understanding of a complex and nuanced topic (home). In light of this, a qualitative framework provides the best and most logical approach for this research.

Shared experiences and difference: Multiple methods Rather than choose a single methodological paradigm (e.g., ethnography, phenomenology, etc.), I rely on a collection of qualitative methods informed by the work of critical and feminist geographers. These included the collection of survey data, a participatory place mapping exercise, semi-structured in-depth interviews, and an examination of primary sources. These methods allowed me to collect and analyze data across two domains: military discourses of mobility and firsthand accounts of military youth's lived experiences. Although my research questions were simple, I expected that any attempt to answer them would have to be flexible and robust enough to take into account not only first-person experiences, but also the layers of context in which those experiences take place. Accordingly, I thought this collection of methods was the best approach to accommodate the complexity of this project. I also chose this combination of methods as a means of embracing the variety of perspectives and experiences reported by my participants, and as a way to avoid creating a normative image of a “typical military kid.” Third wave feminist theorists have long argued against essentialism, emphasizing instead the importance of multivocality and partial knowledges (see, e.g., McDowell 1992; England 1994; Rose 1997; Siegel 1997). Complementing the idea of multivocality is Iris Marion Young's (1990) reminder that individuals simultaneously hold membership in multiple groups – and that among groups of people who share some affinity or identity there are still important differences that have implications for their needs and their political stances.

66 Despite the military's discipline- and fashion-based attempts to erase difference, military youth – like any other group that can be identified and spoken of in a collective sense – are multivocal: they are heterogeneous with regard to a number of other social relations and vary in how they perceive and respond to their collective experiences. Their shared identity may unify them in some ways but it does not guarantee that their needs are all the same relative to the world or to one another. Furthermore, like any other person, any particular military youth's identity rests at the intersection of a number of social relations, bearing its own combination of positions, attitudes, and beliefs about the world. In studying the interactions of home, place, and identity among military youth, I cannot assume an essential set of experiences or beliefs. That would not accommodate difference and would instead simply reinforce normative pronouncements about military youth that potentially further marginalize them or that ascribe a particular pathology to their lives (e.g., “military family syndrome”). Thus, my goal is to identify patterns and themes that reflect both their shared experiences and their different positions.

Participant selection To understand how military youth experience and define home, and to examine the relationships between mobility, militarization, and identity, I conducted fieldwork with 43 young adults from active duty military families. Participants were between the ages of 18 and 25 and had spent significant parts of their childhoods as the dependents of active duty military personnel. They came from the four DoD branches of the military (Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines), and they all self-identified as military youth (or, commonly, as “military brats”). I recruited participants using emails to ROTC listservs at the Pennsylvania State University, a print advertisement in the Daily Collegian (the student newspaper of the Pennsylvania State University), announcements in large lecture halls at Penn State, postings to Facebook, and word of mouth. As it became clear that recruiting participants was going to be difficult, I began asking those who had completed interviews with me to identify any friends their age from military families who might be interested in participating. Although I initially concentrated on soliciting participants from the Penn State community, I quickly expanded the search beyond Pennsylvania, and drew in military youth from across the United States and abroad. Participants were asked to complete a survey and sit for a semi-structured interview. A subset of participants also engaged in a place mapping exercise. In the following sections I detail

67 each of these methods, as well as the methods I devised for working with participants at a distance.

Survey All of my participants completed a survey detailing background information on their relationship to the military (see Appendix A). Surveys are commonly used to capture complex information (both quantitative and qualitative) about people, and can be used very effectively to inform in-dept interviews (McGuirk & O'Neill 2005). I designed my surveys to collect basic demographic data, as well as data on their parents' service and the participants' residential histories. Demographic data included the participant's name, a pseudonym of their choice (though not all participants chose one), age, race, sex, and place of birth. I left race as an open- ended question so that participants could identify themselves using their own racial categories. Key demographic data regarding age, sex, and race appear in Tables 1-3. With regard their parents' service, I asked the participants to identify which parent(s) served (or were currently serving) in the military, their rank at time of interview (or, if applicable, at retirement), and their length of service. To get a sense of parental background, I asked participants to identify the hometown of their service member-parent(s). Because some military youth come from long lines of military families, I also asked whether the service member(s) was raised in a military family. I thought this might provide some insight as to how their families conceptualized and talked about home across generations. Several participants came from families where divorce and remarriage impacted their family structures and relationships with the military. To ensure that I understood their circumstances, I went over their responses with them prior to their interviews and gave them the opportunity them to expand on the information they provided on their surveys. Data regarding the participants' sponsors appear in Tables 4–6, highlighting their branch of service, rank, and relationship to the participant. Note that the sponsors were career military and by this point were overwhelmingly senior personnel. I collected information about my participants' residential histories through a series of questions that were repeated for each place of residence. Starting with place of birth and moving forward chronologically, I asked participants to offer as much information as they could regarding where they had lived. For each place of residence, I asked them to provide a street

68

4.7 7.0 9.3 79.1 4.7 9.3 Total 100.0 86.0 Total 100.0 articipant. Percent of of Percent Percent of Percent p 2 4 37 43 2 3 4 34 43 elationship to Number of Number r Participants Number of of Number Participants articipants. For those identifying For those as articipants. p Islander, respectively). Islander, Sponsor's : 6 Total Race of of Race : Sponsor 3 Total Table Table category (Asian, Gypsy, Hispanic, and Pacific and Hispanic, Gypsy, (Asian, category Identified) Race (Self- Race biracial, all identified as white plus one other racial other plus white one all as identified biracial, Table Table Biracial Step-Father or Father Mother Both White Black Hispanic

4.7 2.3 34.9 58.1 32.6 67.4 Total Total 100.0 100.0 Percent of Percent Percent of of Percent articipants. rack. One participant's One rack. t p 2 1 15 25 43 14 29 43 Sex of Sex of ank by ank Number of Number r Number of of Number : : Participants Participants 2 Table Table Sponsor's : 5 Sex Male Total Total Rank Female enlisted and the other was a warrant officer. warrant a was other the enlisted and Category father and step-father were both military; was one were step-father and father Enlisted Officer Warrant Officer Other Table Table

4.7 7.0 7.0 7.0 2.3 2.3 48.8 25.6 14.0 16.3 20.9 14.0 30.2 Total Total 100.0 100.0 Percent of of Percent Percent of of Percent ervice. Note that Note ervice. s articipants. p 2 2 6 7 3 8 6 3 1 1 11 43 21 43 13 ranch of of ranch b Number of Number Age of of Age Number of of Number Participants Participants : 1 an Army/Marine Corps pair. Army/Marine an Table Table Sponsor's : 4 24 25 18 19 20 21 22 23 Total Total Years Age inAge Service Branch of Table Table two participants had dual-career parents. One of One parents. dual-career had two participants them was an Air Force/Army pair; the other was other the pair; Force/Army Air an them was Army Force Air Navy Corps Marine Dual-Branch 52 address; whether they lived on- or off-base; whether they attended a DoDDS or DDESS school, a (civilian) public school, a private school, or were home schooled; and how long they lived in the location. In addition, I asked them to identify places that were significant to them while they lived at each point of residence. These places of personal significance could range from a space within a building to an entire country; participants did not have to be living near them to consider them significant. For those participants located in State College, Pennsylvania or on the Penn State campus, all surveys were completed on paper. In most cases, participants filled out the survey during our initial meeting, after providing verbal consent. In a small number of cases, participants took the survey home and filled it out before we met for their interviews. Participants who were not living in the area filled out an online version of the same survey via Adobe FormsCentral. The online version was as close to the paper version as possible, with one exception. In the residential history section, I omitted the question about length of time the participant lived at each address. Instead, I collected this information during our interviews, using that question as a means of reviewing their histories.

Place mapping For a subset (n = 15) of participants, I used their background surveys to construct base maps, which we used in a place mapping exercise. This exercise was intended to provide a means of annotating the participants' residential histories, prompting their stories of place and mobility, and helping to uncover relationships between place, identity, mobility, militarization, and home for the participants. Several studies involving children and adolescents have used mapping as an open-ended means of prompting discussion or documenting their use of neighborhood, public, and private spaces (see, e.g., Morrow 2001; Darbyshire, MacDougall, & Schiller 2005; Spilsbury, Korbin, & Coulton 2009). The vast majority of these studies have the participants draw cognitive maps. This technique is useful when dealing with issues concentrated in a single neighborhood or city, especially when working with focus groups; it is arguably less effective for accommodating the high mobility of military youth. Asking participants to recollect and draw and annotate five or ten geographically discrete places might have been an interesting exercise, but it would have left considerably less time for interviewing. Furthermore, in the kind of place mapping used in

70 previous studies, participants all hailed from one or two locations – and research facilitators were either already familiar with those locations or were able to familiarize themselves with them without much effort. Among military youth, each residential history is unique and consists of three or more (usually more) discrete locations; while there is likelihood of some overlap in their histories, that likelihood is rather small. The main considerations involved in my place mapping exercise were to accommodate the wide variation in geographic ranges and scales across participants' residential histories, to find a way to focus on identifying significant places without having to worry about geographic accuracy, and to be able to tag places or record information about them. To accommodate these, I designed an exercise inspired by Travlou and colleagues (2008). Their study of teenagers' use of public space pioneered a place mapping method where, rather than drawing cognitive maps, participants marked their three most and least favorite places on a conventional paper street map of their city. Their map data was used as the basis for focus group discussions in which participants explained their reasons for liking and disliking the places they marked on the map. In my place mapping exercise, participants were asked to discuss and annotate a digital map displaying their residential histories. Prior to the mapping exercise, I used the data from the surveys to construct a unique map for each participant, displaying their points of residence and as many of their places of personal significance as I could find. The points were represented by color-coded placemarks; blue placemarks indicated points of residence and green ones indicated places of personal significance. On each map I added a path (in purple) tracing the chronological order of the participants' residential history. All maps were created using Google Maps, and were saved privately under a single account. The place mapping exercises were carried out as a preface to the semi-structured interviews. They were administered in-person on an individual basis in a quiet office in the Geography Department at The Pennsylvania State University. Only participants who were living in the State College area completed this exercise. During the exercise, participants were asked a series of questions for each place of residence and each move they experienced, beginning with their place of residence at birth and moving forward chronologically (see Appendix B). For each place, participants were asked what they remembered about living there, what places were most important when they were living there and why, and what kinds of experiences they had in those places. For each move, participants were asked what it was like to move that time, what they

71 remembered about moving, and how they felt about moving at the time. In addition to their maps, I documented the place mapping exercises by making audio recordings of our conversations and making notes during and after our meetings. Participants viewed their maps throughout the exercise and made annotations on them using the edit function on Google Maps. Annotations generally took the form of tags or phrases, and occasionally full sentences. I encouraged the participants to take the lead and navigate, recognizing that this would give them symbolic and physical control over their stories – and many participants were eager to do so. As they navigated, I asked the questions described above; as a result the place mapping exercises quickly settled into animated conversations over their maps, in which they told me about the places they had lived, their experiences there, and what each place meant to them. I also encouraged participants to offer details, even when they felt those details might be silly or inconsequential. When participants seemed hesitant or unsure of their answers, I reassured them by sharing experiences (of my own or, anonymously, of my friends or family, or other participants) that reinforced or paralleled their own. This technique was an effective means of making participants more comfortable with the exercise and for verifying that I understood what they were getting at with their narratives (see Reinharz 1992 on self-disclosure). For this research, I thought it made more sense to use a geographic information system (GIS) rather than paper maps for three reasons. First, the exercise conducted by Travlou and colleagues was designed for focus groups of participants living in the same city; because my participants lived in several different places, I interviewed each one individually. Second, using paper maps would have required me to procure maps for a number of cities, states, and countries – which would have added considerable monetary and temporal costs to the project. Third, a paper map exists at a single, static scale. That meant that there was no guarantee that I could have found maps at appropriate scales for each location for each participant. It also meant that participants would not have been able to identify or discuss places beyond the boundaries of those paper maps. Rather than using a standard GIS package, I chose to use Google Maps for my mapping exercise. As a simple GIS, Google Maps offered an alternative to paper maps that addressed all of these concerns: it has coverage throughout the world, it is available for free, it is scalable from the global level down to the street level, and it allows the user to pinpoint places with a high

72 degree of accuracy. I was able to create a single map for each participant and to save all of the maps electronically in a single, private space. The interface is designed for use by the nonspecialist and is relatively intuitive (especially when compared to high-end GIS software like ArcGIS or MapInfo), which allowed the participants to “drive” the annotation process – and many of them did, taking control of the mouse and using the map to both guide and reinforce their stories. Finally, Google Maps offered two additional benefits: it accommodated both spatial and textual data, and it had an option to display aerial imagery. Many participants found the imagery useful for identifying places, and in some cases this prompted reflection on how a place had changed since a participant lived there.

Rationale: Critical and qualitative uses of GIS It is important to note that the use of GIS software for capturing qualitative data is not new. Recent work in critical GIS has begun to address the limitations of using paper maps and the benefits of using GIS in qualitative and mixed-methods research (see, e.g., Knigge & Cope 2006; Cope & Elwood 2009). The use of GIS among communities for managing natural resources, identifying crime “hot spots,” and resolving differences between groups when planning new uses for spaces is well documented (see, e.g., McCall & Minang 2005; Liebermann & Coulson 2004; Hawthorne, Krygier, & Kwan 2008). This use of GIS falls broadly under the heading of “participatory GIS” (PGIS) or “public participation GIS” (PPGIS). Much of this work is motivated by political or social concerns rather than inquiry into lived experience. That is, rather than examining first-person experiences or individual narratives, PGIS is often used to examine the impact of events and conditions at the scale of the community (Elwood 2009). While geographers are well aware of the importance of lived experience (see, e.g., Cresswell 2003), few if any studies using PGIS have made individual narratives the focus of their inquiry. Individual narratives are critical to understanding how structural forces impact people's lives (Connelly & Clandinin 1990; Clandinin 2006). When properly contextualized, they mediate between the general and the particular, demonstrating the ways that social, cultural, political, and other broad-scale factors play out “on the ground.” The combination of individual narratives and mapping technologies allows one to create what Giaccardi and Fogli (2008) call “affective geographies,” which grants users the ability to “give meaning to the place by providing a

73 personal reading of the mapped territory” (Giaccardi & Fogli 2008, 175). They propose the development of online geospatial tools (e.g., web-based mapping services) to facilitate documenting affective geographies. The benefit of using tools like Google Maps is that they are intuitive enough for a general user to learn them with minimal preparation – and yet also sophisticated enough to accommodate qualitative data such as narratives or notes recorded in text or audio files, as well as hyperlinks to web content that support those narratives (e.g., photo albums, official websites for businesses, blogs, etc.). Professional-grade GIS software packages can handle most of these requirements, but they require a significant amount of training and background knowledge in order to use them efficiently and effectively. Popular Web 2.0 interfaces like Google Maps are familiar to a popular audience and are designed for ease of use. Some are already designed to accommodate text and hyperlink data in addition to standard vector and raster data. The scalability and broad coverage of Google Maps make it possible to collect data from individuals whose experiences exist at multiple scales or transcend scales in a user-friendly environment.

Semi-structured in-depth interviews The final part of the fieldwork component consisted of semi-structured in-depth interviews. Dunn (2005) argues that one strength of interviewing is its ability to collect a wide range of experiences and opinions. Less formal and more conversational than structured interviews, semi-structured interviews are based around an ordered list of questions but offer the researcher the flexibility to ask additional questions throughout the interview based on the interviewee's responses (Dunn 2005; Longhurst 2003). One major advantage of interviewing is that it allows the participants to describe their experiences in their own terms, rather than pigeonholing them with static or limited survey responses. In addition, interviews allow participants to identify the factors that are most important to them without the researcher superimposing too strong or narrow a framework on them (Reinharz 1992). This was crucial to building my understanding of the interplay of place, identity, mobility, militarization, and home. Two sets of questions guided the interviews. The first set (see Appendix C) acted as a means of transitioning away from the mapping exercise (for those who completed it) or reviewing their residential histories (for those who did not) to more general issues about moving, military life, and home. This transitional set of questions asked participants whether any of the

74 places they had discussed were especially significant to them, whether they felt that any of the places they had lived said something about their identities, and whether any of the moves they had experienced were particularly noteworthy. In all cases, I asked the participants to elaborate on their answers. A note on the wording: these questions were worded slightly differently for the two groups of participants. For those who completed the mapping exercise, the questions referred back to the place mapping exercise; for those who did not, the questions referred to the review of their residential histories. The content and intent of the questions was the same, however, and the wording was otherwise identical between the two. The second set of questions (see Appendix D) was more conceptual in nature. This consisted of six questions that asked for the participants' reflections on moving repeatedly, settling in, mobility and identity, how they defined “home,” whether they thought moving so often affected their ideas about home, and what they consider their ideal home to be. 25 The last question was meant to provide a lighthearted end to the interview – one that allowed participants to project their desires for their futures onto the concept of home – and initially I thought it would not add much to their interviews. On the contrary, this question turned out to be a great way to triangulate what they said about their definitions of home with their actual, practical beliefs about its meaning. Participants living in the State College area sat for their interviews in person, immediately following the place mapping exercise. Those living outside the area completed their interviews by phone or by Skype. I recorded all interviews using the same digital voice recorder as I used for the mapping exercises. The interview questions provided the foundation for an in-depth exploration of the interplay between mobility, identity, and home among my participants; the interviews constitute the core of this project. In my analysis, I supplement these first-person accounts of military mobility with biographical evidence collected by other scholars (e.g., Truscott 1989; Wertsch 1991) to provide a greater historical depth.

Examination of primary sources Primary sources provided the basis for exposing and analyzing mobility with respect to militarization and its twin discourses of readiness and national security. I use documents from the

25 I was very deliberate in using the word “what” rather than “where” in asking the final question, as I wanted participants to be able to discuss their ideal homes in terms of how they defined home. 75 Department of Defense, including annual Department of the Army Historical Summaries, annual Army Posture Statements, as well as personnel manuals, official regulations, and professional development directives from various branches of the military. In addition, I use documentation from the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) to provide statistical and qualitative information about military youth and their educational environments overseas. Although these documents inform my entire analysis to some extent, I rely on them especially in Chapter VIII, in my discussion of geopolitics, mobility, and military youth.

A question of identity and age In the course of my fieldwork, I came across a problem that surprised me. First, although I shifted and expanded the age range in the hope of attracting a larger sample, I still found it difficult to recruit participants. Repeated posts in Facebook groups for military “brats” of all ages attracted a number of people who ultimately participated in my research, but not as many as I had hoped. I was quite surprised by this, but one possible explanation became clear in the responses to my recruitment posts by people outside the age range – people in their 30s and 40s – who wanted to participate but were barred because of the limitation I had set. Some of them seemed disappointed, while others seemed offended – but regardless of which, a common refrain appeared again and again: “Once a brat, always a brat.” As I sifted through the responses, it seemed that for many of the members of these groups, the “military brat” identity became stronger with age. It is impossible to know the ages of all the members on these Facebook groups, but based on many of the discussions I encountered, it seemed that the more active ones tended to be older than my proposed age range. Based on my observations in the groups, I suspect that for many military youth, their identity as “brats” becomes more important later in life – perhaps as they begin to settle down and spend more of their time in workplaces outside the military community and with people who have led far less mobile lives. My intent had been to document the experiences of people who were still in the thick of their military upbringings – in large measure because most of what we know about military childhoods comes from the recollections of from people far removed from those experiences. But perhaps there are reasons for this, and perhaps one of those reasons is that many military youth don't think of themselves as having a shared sense of identity until well after the fact.

76 Methodology Having described the technical aspects of my research, I want to step back and consider some important contextualizing factors before moving on to analysis. In this section, I will discuss intersubjectivity, insider research, and my positionality. I place this discussion here rather than at the beginning of this chapter in the hope that it will serve as a frame for my analysis and interpretations, and to lay out my own assumptions, biases, and concerns about interpreting the data that I gathered right up front and as clearly as possible.

Truth, intersubjectivity, and reflexivity Qualitative researchers have long struggled to find a balance between presenting factual evidence and recognizing the subjective nature of their work. Traditionally, the act of research establishes the researcher as the ultimate authority (Pile 1991), but “truth” is slippery in the context of human experience. Likewise, the notion of “objectivity” has been under fire since Haraway famously decried scientific attempts at objectivity as a masculinist “god trick” (Haraway 1988). Such questions about truth have prompted some to question the unity of long- established categories such as “woman” (see, e.g., McDowell 1992; Gilbert 1994; Katz 1994), especially given that people simultaneously hold positions within a number of other social categories (England 1994), as I noted above. Theorists have proposed a number of ways around the problem of truth/objectivity: acknowledging that the relationship between the researcher and researched is laden with the subjectivity of both parties (Pile 1991); positing situated and partial knowledges (Haraway 1988; McDowell 1992); or accepting that some questions about power dynamics in research are simply unanswerable (Rose 1997). Despite their differences, there is some agreement among theorists of qualitative research that researchers should be aware – insofar as we are able – of ourselves as “different positioned subjects with different biographies” (England 1994). By explicitly acknowledging our own positionalities, researchers can practice a critical reflexivity in which we “recognize and take account of our own position, as well as that of our research participants and write this into our research practice rather than continue to hanker after some idealized equality between us (McDowell 1992, 409, original emphasis). There is little agreement, however, on how best to do this; I offer my own attempt at the end of this chapter.

77 Insider research Before providing a statement of my positionality, I want to address the issue of insider research. As an undergraduate anthropology major, I often heard my professors caution against insider research, arguing that much of culture is so taken for granted as to be invisible to (and unquestioned by) the insider. While there is some merit to the concern, there are still many drawbacks to outsider research – not least of which is the possibility that the researcher will impose the values of her own group membership onto the people she is investigating. Cultural relativism may mitigate this tendency to a degree, but it does not diminish the power dynamics of research. Even relatively sensitive studies of “the Other” often bear the assumption that the researcher is in a better position to speak on behalf of the people being studied (see, e.g., Liebermann & Coulson 2004; McCall & Minang 2005). For example, although participatory mapping “is becoming a tool of empowerment for indigenous peoples” (Herlihy & Knapp 2003, 303), it is still the white, Western researcher who brings that empowerment to the disenfranchised, which may in fact reinforce categories of self and other in counterproductive ways. Some offer insider research as an antidote to this (e.g., Alvesson 2003; Brannick & Coghlan 2007). Alvesson, for example, promotes self-ethnography as a means of avoiding “the problem of the Other, i.e. constructing the natives as somebody clearly different from Oneself” in cultural analysis (2003, 189). Brannick and Coghlan (2007) argue that insider research is effective not in spite of the researcher's closeness to the subject, but because of it. They argue that insiders already have access to the group being studied, they already know the language, and they already have an understanding of which subjects are acceptable and which subjects are taboo among the members of the group. This understanding makes it easier for insider researchers to navigate the social structures of the group as well as the ways that group members interact within those structures. Yet insider research has its own potential pitfalls. Doing insider research can complicate the politics of research (Alvesson 2003); insider researchers must avoid the extremes of uncritical self-flattery and overcritical condemnation of the group. Likewise, insider researchers may assume too much understanding and fail to ask participants to elaborate on their answers the way an outsider might (Brannick & Coghlan 2007). Conversely, in cases where an insider researcher is reflexive and careful about the limits of her knowledge, participants may assume

78 that the researcher-as-insider fully understands their positions and is anticipating their responses – and thus might not provide complete answers to questions or find it unnecessary to expand on their answers (DeLyser 2001). In my fieldwork, I found myself straddling the line between insider and outsider. I was an insider because of my status as an “Army brat”; at the same time I was also an outsider because I am nearly twenty years removed from the military community. This dual insider-outsider position is not unusual – in fact, it is an implicit outcome of doing fieldwork: outsider researchers do their best to become insiders, while researchers taken to be insiders may end up being viewed as outsiders (DeLyser 2001). I did my best to balance my insider-outsider status through reflexive practices. During interviews, I paid attention to participants' intonation and silences, and to moments where they seemed to assume that I understood them. In these cases, I asked participants to elaborate on their responses by asking them how they might explain their answers to someone who has little or no experience with the military or with military residential mobility. I was also careful to monitor my own internal responses to the participants, doing my best to avoid making assumptions by asking for clarification or by restating a participant's answer and asking for his or her comments on it. These techniques proved very useful – and I often found myself grateful for having used them.

Positionality When I began doing this research, I knew that my unique position relative to the project was going to be difficult. Looking back, I think there were times when I knew how difficult it would be – but that knowledge didn't really resonate until I began interviewing my informants and reading the militarization literature. I quickly found myself caught between the perspectives of the academic scholarship – some of which carries a strong antimilitary bias, and my informants – many of whom have strong positive associations with the military. On the one hand, I often found myself frustrated with the way certain scholars present facts about the military or overlook the civilian control and use of the military to its own political ends. On the other hand, I sometimes felt uncomfortable in interviews when informants made assertions borne out of a conservative political mindset and assumed that I shared their politics. Consequently in the course of this research I often worried that I would be viewed as an apologist for the military by

79 the academic world, or as an antimilitary liberal by some of my informants.26 Further complicating all of this was my position with regard to the military and its influence on my family. I have already revealed that my father was a career Army officer – but he is not my only familial tie to the U.S. military. His father had served in the Navy during WWII; and on my mother's side, two of my uncles (Navy and Air Force) as well as two male cousins (Marines and Air Force) either enlisted or served as officers. One uncle, like my father, had a career lasting over 20 years. With such a huge presence in my family's history, the military has always felt to me like something more than an organization that people join or a job that they do. For me, the military has been like part of my ethnicity – complete with its own folklore, traditions, and expectations. In light of this, it is difficult not to feel some loyalty to the military. And it has done good for my family – it provided a stable career for my father, reliable health care, and the chance to see the world; these were very real and positive aspects of my childhood. Yet these positives were offset against experiences I found troublesome: feeling on occasion like an outsider among civilian peers who had known one another since childhood, a pervading sense of rootlessness, and the development of a critical mindset that began to question both capitalism and rampant Cold War nationalism even while it embraced the tradition and precision of military ceremony. These were things I had struggled with for years before beginning my research, and things that remain unresolved. Through the course of my work, I have had to engage directly with the confusion and complexity of having grown up within a segment of the population that can, ironically, be thought of simultaneously as a politically hegemonic force within the United States and as a poorly-understood statistical minority. I don't know that I have resolved my own feelings toward this confusion, and I don't know that I ever will. I often worried during interviews and as I read the literature on militarization that I would portray my informants as brainwashed by militarism – or worse, as complicit in the neoliberal agenda of the United States and other countries of the Global North. I labored over how not to portray them as innocent victims – of military culture, of economically expansionist policies – while also avoiding portraying them as necessarily willing (or knowing) participants in the neoliberal state. During interviews, I did my best to avoid revealing my own political orientation 26 This was a very real concern that emerged occasionally in interviews, but primarily in the recruiting process. One informant, commenting on a recruitment post I had made to a military brats' group on Facebook, was quick to point out to potential informants that the interviews were low-pressure and non-confrontational – language I that incorporated in later recruiting posts. 80 (which is in itself complicated) to my informants, but I also didn't want to misrepresent myself to them. And while I often felt protective of them – many of them spoke of their experiences of feeling misunderstood or alienated due to their status as military youth – at times I also felt frustrated, wanting more of them to express more critical viewpoints. The position of military youth in today's United States is a complicated one; the position of a former military kid doing research on today's military youth is doubly complicated. With all of this in mind, I have done my best to recognize the inherent complexities of doing this research. To that end, I try to identify my biases where they lay, to portray my informants respectfully as the complex individuals they are, and above all, to stop caring whether I am seen as an apologist for one side or the other. The goal of this research is neither to condemn nor promote the military itself; my aim is to examine one aspect of military life with the implicit assumptions that 1) we have a military, 2) it isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and 3) I am not interested – in this particular forum – in engaging in the debates over whether or not the military should exist, or whether it is a politically or socially predatory institution.

Conclusion Having made both methods and methodology explicit, I would now like to turn to my analysis of the data. In the following three chapters, I present my analyses of the survey, map, and interview data with regard to home and mobility.

81 Chapter VI Roots: Identity, Place, and Home

The experiences of military youth present a number of challenges to traditional formulations that present home as an investment of identity in place. These challenges extend from questions of identity, belonging, and rootedness emerging from childhoods spent living for short periods of time in several places throughout the United States and abroad. Military youth experience periods of residence punctuated by moments of uprooting and resettlement, typically in locations that are in different states or countries from their previous sites of residence. The ways they conceptualize home are infused with their experiences of this “residential hopscotch,” troubling the traditionally accepted relationship between identity, place, and home. In this chapter I present the results of my fieldwork with military youth with regard to identity, place, and home. Drawing on interviews in which they reflected on their mobile childhoods and discussed their thoughts on home, I argue that many military youth successfully develop functional models of home that directly challenge the idea of home as place. My argument revolves around three main points, which I address in detail throughout the chapter: First, place identity is complex and tenuous when contextualized in a highly mobile childhood. Second, a sense of rootedness is not necessary to one's concept of home. Third, home can be defined as something other than place or place identity. I conclude by critically revisiting the idea that home is an investment of identity in place. In this chapter I will use the literatures on home and mobility to illuminate the complex and dynamic portrait of home that emerges in the experiences of military youth. It is my contention that the nontraditional imaginaries of home produced by military youth hold the potential for reproducing or resisting militarization. For the duration of this chapter I bracket this argument and return to it in Chapter VIII.

Traditional Considerations Military youth are just as subject to broad American cultural discourses as anyone else. Their everyday experiences collide with traditional ideas about home, place identity, and rootedness. In this section I present the ways that military youth interact with mainstream conceptualizations.

82 Place identity To return momentarily to the environmental psychology literature, one's place identity includes the collection of places that have served a formative purpose in a person's life (Proshansky, Fabian, & Kaminoff 1983). This collection of places establishes an individual's distinctiveness and serves as a referent for continuity in identity (Twigger-Ross & Uzzell 1996). In short, place identity centers around the question “Where are you from?” – and the answer serves in part as a signpost for others, operating on the assumption that the place a person is “from” says something about who they are, what they believe, and the attitudes they hold about the world. During interviews, I asked participants how they responded when people ask them where they are from. It is a question that military youth are asked repeatedly every time they move. One particular exchange illustrates the pervasiveness of this question in their lives: Interviewer: When you move to a new place and people ask you where you're from – EA: [laughing] Here we go! Interviewer: – how do you answer them? EA's laughter and interjection suggest that being asked about her place identity has been a common experience in her past – one that she continues to anticipate for her future. In answering this question as often as they do, military youth find themselves confronting and renegotiating their identities with every move, and with every new encounter. The circumstances under which they are asked and the ways they respond offer insight into the ways that place identity is constructed and used in the United States. In this section, I will demonstrate that place identity is neither a stable construct nor an accurate indicator of one's sense of self; rather, it is a complex and sometimes ephemeral statement that is co-constructed by military youth, the people who interrogate them, and culturally-mediated assumptions about place and identity. Some military youth respond quickly and assuredly to questions of place identity with answers that pinpoint their identities to cities, states, or regions. Many base their responses on where they've lived the longest, the long-term residences of extended family, where they feel they belong, or places where they came of age or had strong or memorable formative experiences. Yet the question is much more complicated for others. For these youth, responding to the question Where are you from? provokes a sense of unease, requiring them to negotiate their identities in uncomfortable ways. Despite the prevalence of this question, many participants expressed difficulty answering it because of their complex residential histories. While most had a 83 stock answer (or, more commonly, a number of stock answers), many reported that they often struggled with this question, even though they had been asked countless times. For some the difficulty comes from internal confusion about their own place identities: “I don't know how to answer, to be honest with you, 'cause…I don't think of myself as being from any[where] – sometimes I tell them…I'm an Air Force brat and they let the answer go there, though sometimes they ask where I've lived and then…someone asks you a question, it means you're telling them your entire biography. I've said 'everywhere' before, I've said 'nowhere' before, which gets strange looks from people.” (EmyB) For others, the difficulty stems from confusion about what people want to know when they ask. They wrestle to understand what the “from” in the question actually refers to. The reflections of two participants neatly capture this confusion: “I don't know. I feel sometimes I come off kind of like an asshole because I'm like, 'What do you mean, where am I from?' You know what I mean? Then I tell – I usually just say, like, 'I'm a military brat,' or sometimes I do come up with an asshole, 'Where do my parents live?' or, like, 'What do you mean – I'm not really from anywhere, like what do you mean?' I don't really know how to answer to be honest, I'm just like, I'm a military brat.” (Troy)

“When people ask you where you're from, you like – you think about, what are they asking me, where I was born, where did I spend the most time, where did I feel most at home, where did I – I don't know – like grow up the most. […] I sat down to really think about it one day and I realized there's the place that I was born, there's the place that I lived the most, like chronologically, there's the place that I lived the most times consecutively, there's the place that I felt the most connected to, and the place that I kind of grew up the most. And then the place that I always could come back to, the place that I live now. That's six different places that I can call home and – but I wouldn't be me without all of them.” (KF) Some address the confusion by defining “from” as something that is accessible to the asker, but might not necessarily reflect the experiences (or preferences) of the person being asked. For example, one participant made a distinction between being from a place and being currently from a place: “…when people say where are you from – if I say Europe or Germany, I'm not German. You know, I'm not French. But I also grew up there for eight years. I'm not from D.C. I'm currently from D.C. I honestly, when people ask me that question…I'm like, I have no idea where I'm from. I just say I grew up in Europe and now I'm from D.C….” (Lydia) Lydia has claimed Washington, D.C. as her place identity when confronted by others, but throughout her interview she placed considerable emphasis on her childhood in Europe, which

84 she felt was more formative to her identity than her time in the United States. Another participant distinguished between being from and coming from: “…anywhere I moved, [people] would ask me where I came from. Like, oh you're new here, where are you from, I would tell them the last place that I was. But I would also inform them that my father was military, he was active duty, this is his duty station now, it's gonna change in three years, so my answer will change. So if you really want to know where I'm from, I'm from America.” (KP) In this case, coming from reflects mobility while being from reflects a long-term association indicating identity. In contrast to participants who identified specific places at the scale of the city or state, this participant scales her identity upward to the national in order to accommodate the breadth of her residential history. This kind of upward scaling allows her to maintain a consistent place identity in response to people's questions without compromising the mobility of her past. I will return to this point in a later chapter. The kinds of responses I describe above underscore the importance of place identity not as self-expression, but as a shorthand that others use to identify or understand them. Some are well aware of this function of place identity; one participant actively tailors her general response to questions of place identity based on what she thinks the asker wants to know about her: “I normally say either where I'm born or the place I just recently moved from. Those tend to be the two answers they're looking for the most. I used to ask them what they meant, but that just kind of became a question that I was getting tired of asking, 'cause normally, if you're not talking to someone that's military, they just kind of look at you like 'I don't know why you would ask that question.' So it's easier just to say one answer, and they say, 'Oh!'” (EC) What is hidden in her response is the problem of compromise: by choosing a single, specific place on which to cast their identity based on the assumption that birth or last place of residence are the primary or only legitimate answers, some military youth cut other important places out of their expressed identities. The importance of sites of growth or belonging – which often do not coincide with birthplace, previous residence, or sites of extended family – is erased in such moments, potentially clouding or diminishing other aspects of their identities. EC's place of birth and the place she most recently lived are certainly part of her history, but she has few lasting ties to either these places: she was born while her father was stationed at Fort Hood and her family moved away before she was two. In addition, she joined the Navy and continues to be highly mobile, so with each move, her previous place of residence is short-term and reflects her career, and is not necessarily a place with which she identifies beyond having lived there. In simplifying 85 her answer to accommodate a normative expectation that a person has a single place identity, EC collapses the entirety of her experience into a single place to which she may or may not be emotionally attached. Some avoid this problem by refusing to claim any particular place at all. Those who rely on this tactic typically respond with flip-sides of the same nonspecific coin: “everywhere” or “nowhere.” Many who choose not to identify with anywhere do so because they feel they are unable to because of their mobility, or the number or geographic range of places they've lived: “Sometimes I say I'm not really from anywhere because I moved around a lot…” (DL)

“I usually tell them that I'm an Army brat and I moved every three years. 'Cause I don't really feel like I have a hometown. There's never been a single location that I have claimed.” (AF)

“…whenever someone asks me like where I'm from, I just say I'm from everywhere because I've lived on either end of the US, I lived in Germany, like, it's just something that, I don't know…I just lived in all these different places and they all just kind of combine into one place.” (VC) This approach is often problematic; refusing to identify with any particular place can raise suspicion, as Sydney's experience suggests: “[laughs] I actually say, 'Nowhere in particular,' and then I follow that up by saying, 'That's actually not a line. I've lived across three continents and I never stay too long in one place…' I'm not really from anywhere. People always think – especially when a guy asks you where you're from and then you say that, they think you're just trying to brush them off.” (Sydney) To rely on a nonspecific place identity requires a willingness to explain oneself with regard to a position that may be received as defiant, flippant, or contrary to normative expectations of identity. It is unsurprising, then, that some military youth rely on a nonspecific place identity for part of their lives but shift tactics as specific places become significant to them: “Before I went to Florida I used to say that I was an Army brat and I didn't have anywhere, but now I think of my home as Florida. 'Cause like I grew up the most there.” (Micky) Identifying with a specific place was initially impossible for Micky because he did not feel attached enough to any one place that he had lived. He moved to Florida in his early teens and it became significant to him as a site of formative experiences, coming of age, growth, and increasing responsibilities as his father deployed. Having moved away from Florida just before he started college, he still refers to it as home and hopes to return there. Those who do choose a single, specific place identity face additional problems in how

86 they relate to others. Many of the youth I interviewed expressed concern that people might have expectations or make assumptions about them based on their choice of a specific place identity. This was the case for these three participants: “…I don't like picking one place, you know? I was born in Fairbanks…but if someone were to ask me…who the mayor of Fairbanks was, I wouldn't be able to tell them; I don't think I – I haven't been there since I was two. I think people, they ask you and then they – with any answer you give – they begin to form a set of expectations…I wouldn't be able to meet any of those expectations.” (EmyB)

“…if you – so if I say I'm from Maryland then people automatically get this idea that I knew everything about Maryland, which is not true. So sometimes if I'm worried that somebody is going to start like asking me questions about where I'm from, then I'll just say I'm an Army brat so I don't have to be like, 'Oh, well I only lived there for like a couple of years…'” (Tim)

“I always say, 'Well, it's a long story. I am from Bethesda, Maryland, but my family lives in Hershey, Pennsylvania…I feel like – 'cause if I say I'm from Bethesda, Maryland, they're like, 'Oh, well, you know, I know someone from there, do you do this on break?' And I'm like, 'Well I don't live there anymore,' 'cause when someone says 'from' they assume currently residing, so I've learned to just precedent it with this speech so that they know that even though it's home, I'm from there, I don't live there anymore.” (EA) In these cases, they find it easier to talk around their place identities by providing some additional information, often appending some variant of the phrase “military brat” as an explanation. Others make a conscious effort to avoid identifying with particular places, as with Andrew: “I tell them that I lived in Pennsylvania, and if they press any further, I tell them that I'm from Oxford, Mississippi, but…I moved all around. I never identify as being from Pennsylvania.” (Andrew) Andrew lived in Oxford as a toddler and is strongly attached to Oxford and to the South in general, but has lived in Pennsylvania for several years and now attends university in the state. In making the distinction between living in a place and being from a place, he rejects Pennsylvania as part of his place identity but accepts it (perhaps grudgingly) as part of his residential history. Many military youth avoid choosing a single place by responding with some version of “it's complicated” or offering a set of multiple places. A common approach is to provide a combination of places that reflect formative or recent residences (e.g., of the form, “I was born in

87 x but grew up in y”). One example combines current residence, place of birth, and the last place lived, bracketed in a military context: “…I'll start off with saying, 'Well my dad's in the Navy, so you know, I live in Spain now, but I moved here from Colorado, but I was born in Oklahoma,' and then I just have to fill in the rest for them.” (CK) This provides them the flexibility to address the complexity of their experiences while allowing them to select some portion of their residential history to share with others. While such a compromise gives those military youth who wish to express their place identities a means of doing so, it does not necessarily prevent them from further questioning or from being singled out as different. Just as place identity serves as a signpost for others, it can serve simultaneously as a means of self-expression. Military youth are aware that expressing place identities that are atypical for where they reside can make them stand out among their peers. Some of them manipulate their place identities in order to mark themselves as unusual in new social situations where they find it advantageous to be read as unique or unusual, as with these two participants: “I go through phases. When I first came to Penn State I found out that being from Panama was considered exotic, so it was really fun at parties to say, 'Hey, I'm from Panama.' Most of the time it's just like, I've been everywhere.” (Marie)

“Sometimes, like if we're going around in a circle or something and saying where we're from, if I want to stand out I will say, 'Oh well, I lived in Hawaii, well I lived in Germany.' Or if I don't want to stand out I'll just be like, 'Oh I moved.' It's kind of – you can portray it in different ways, I think.” (KF) For both Marie and KF, this manipulation of place identity is conscious and intentional. Neither one relies solely on an atypical place identity all the time; they choose to identify themselves as coming from “exotic” places in situations where they feel that being different may pose them some social advantage. Not all military youth struggle to define their place identities – but many do. Given their complicated and sometimes messy residential histories, many military youth reinvent their place identities with every move or with every new encounter. As they move, grow up, and develop new kinds of social relations, the role of place often changes relative to their identities. For some, places that were important to them as young children become less so as their residential histories grow; for others, places of birth, places they've spent long periods of time, places where extended

88 family live, or places where they spent their formative years take on new or additional significance. The passage of time and the accumulation of experiences and memories in new places is often reflected in the collections of answers they use over the course of their lives. In short, as military youth move to new places and have different experiences within them the places with which they identify – if they choose to identify with any at all – often change, reflecting their changing senses of self. Some of those who do choose place identities find the process fraught: in trying to express complex or nuanced place identities, they may face scrutiny from their askers, who may expect a simpler or more clearly defined answer; thus military youth may truncate or tailor their place identities to match what they believe others expect of them. If place identity is meant to serve as a signpost for others, it is for some a signpost that reduces their identities to a fragment of their complex histories; if place identity is meant to be a means of self-expression, it is for some an expression that reflects constant change – which may also inaccurately represent them as lost or placeless. For military youth, place identity is neither simple nor stable; it is a complex and ever-changing negotiation of self and world that may be difficult to package and express to others in a meaningful way.

Living rootlessness, imagining rootedness At one point in her interview, HB, the daughter of a retired Army officer, stated, “I think that you become a lot more detached from places, kind of like I mentioned earlier, I don't think that the sort of roots the way that most people refer to like, 'Oh these are my roots,' I don't think that applies to you in the same way.” (HB) The idea that most (i.e., nonmilitary) people have roots was common among the youth I interviewed. When my participants talked about rootedness, they generally referred to a combination of things: living in one place for a long period of time (this typically meant growing up in one place), having longstanding social networks of friends and extended family in the area, having longstanding relationships to organizations such as schools or sports teams, owning property, and feeling a sense of belonging in that place. In short, my participants often equated rootedness with a civilian life. Many of the military youth I interviewed were puzzled by rootedness; most had confronted it among friends and acquaintances and found it difficult to understand in contrast with their own experiences. Their reflections point to a significant finding: military youth often perceive most (nonmilitary) people as having access to a traditionally defined home in which 89 rootedness is a key factor – something many of them feel is out of reach because of their own senses of rootlessness. For many of my participants, rootedness and rootlessness stand in tension with one another: normative imaginaries of rootedness underlie their experiences of rootlessness. In this section I examine the ways that military youth portray their own rootlessness and others' rootedness. Like HB, above, some of the youth I interviewed expressed feelings of rootlessness – a sense that they have not (or will not be) in one place long enough to establish themselves: “…usually you don't stay in one place long enough to make it home-home. You stay long enough to make it a place you've lived. […] Well, a lot of us are expected to leave every three or four years. So, to have to uproot every three to four years, you know, until you either move out the house or your family member retires, it's – you don't put down roots. The roots is what makes home. So if, you know, you've moved all your life, you – I probably wouldn't have called home until I left and went to school. You know, and I decided that I was going to stay in that particular area. But I don't know if it's more time or just the feeling of putting down roots.” (Ana) For these participants, rootlessness is not just a consequence of mobility, but of repeated and expected mobility. As one participant, KB, put it, “I can't make roots because I'm just waiting for the next move.” Yet as Ana suggests, rootlessness is not just about mobility, but about the ability to make deep and lasting connections in place. Like Ana, many participants implicitly saw rootedness as the dominant cultural mode, and rootlessness as endemic to military life. While rootlessness came up as an independent topic during a few interviews, it was generally something my participants raised in a comparative sense. They often saw civilians as rooted and contrasted their own experiences against those of their rooted peers. Typically, discussions of rootedness hinged on observations of their civilian peers' friendships, the positives and negatives of rootedness, and rootedness as a normative ideal. Hints of rootlessness emerged as my participants tried to understand their own circumstances in light of those of more rooted peers. Among the military youth I interviewed, a common observation was that many of their civilian peers had longstanding friendships. Most often, these relationships were characterized as existing “since kindergarten,” and they provided a source of puzzlement for many of my participants: “…the thing about going from military bases and military families and into a place like Malvern is that everyone has known everyone since kindergarten. Everyone has been best friends since kindergarten.” (Sydney) 90 “…I was fortunate, because I lived in the same place since like the end of my fourth grade year. But my friends, they have friends that they've known since like kindergarten. You know? It's weird.” (Troy) For some of my participants, these longstanding relationships were more than just a strange artifact of rootedness – they were also a source of exclusion from peer groups. This exclusion was not necessarily actively produced; rather, these military youth found that longstanding relationships sometimes produced an insularity that made it difficult for them to break into friend circles. In other words, it was rare that rooted civilian peers actively discouraged building friendships with mobile military youth – it was more often the case that longstanding relationships among rooted peers served as a barrier to crossing the divide between military and civilian youth: “…I felt a little bit of a disconnection because of this like, they were in, you know, first and second grade together and then they had a different teacher for third grade or whatever, and, I don't know, they just had little background stories about each other and I didn't – I wasn't able to experience all those things, so I just felt a certain like disconnection between everyone in there because, I don't know, they all had like little relations and then I was just kind of there.” (VC)

“I'll tell you this, though: the schools were different. […] I went to a private school for two years. Um, which was also a new experience and very different from any school I'd ever been to because the vast majority of those kids had been at the school since kindergarten, which was – I mean to this day I can't even fathom being someplace for you know, for so long. […] The first school I went to – the public off-base school was called Greenwood, and the high school was Saint Mary's. At Greenwood I was the new kid for like three weeks, okay? And I am friends to this day with the person who replaced me as the new kid, you know. 'Cause there were always people coming and going because all the base kids went to Greenwood even though the school wasn't on base…where at Saint Mary's I was the new kid for two years.” (EmyB) These participants ultimately made friendships among people in these peer groups, but they found it quite challenging to cultivate a sense of belonging within them. They often felt a sense of disconnection between themselves and their rooted peers, sometimes finding themselves cast as the “new kid” longer than they did among groups with more mobile members. One participant made a direct connection between feeling excluded by insular groups of rooted friends and mobility more generally: “…it would have been nicer if people were a little less judgmental about people who move, 'cause

91 it seems like you go to these groups and people have known each other since kindergarten.” (EA) This same participant did establish herself in a rooted peer group in Bethesda, where she lived multiple times and for several years, and which she thinks of as home. Yet she also noted the relative ease with which she was able to make friends with other military youth at West Point, where she lived for only a year: “I don't know, that was a very good year of my life. My dad, he went to West Point, which is why we lived up there, and I made good friends – it was the first time that I was with people who were very like me and had my same background, so it was very easy to fit in. And um, like whereas before I felt like I had to try to make friends, they were so used to people coming and going that I just kind of got absorbed into their network.” (EA) What we can take from this is that military youth face a dual obstacle to making friends with rooted peers: first, the (often accidental) insularity of rooted peer groups can make it difficult for them difficult to break into groups in which members have long-established relationships; second, their mobility marks them as different or other, which may make it difficult for them to feel a sense of belonging. Consequently, some military youth may dismiss civilian peers as cliquish, or may eventually give up on forming friendships with nonmilitary youth. The youth I interviewed variably perceived rootedness as negative and positive – though more often than not they characterized it in negative ways. A number of them equated rootedness with being “stuck” in a place. Likewise, they sometimes saw rooted people as naïve or unsophisticated because of their rootedness: some of my participants saw people who had never moved as not having been exposed to the world or to other cultures. By contrast, they saw themselves as more worldly as a result of having lived in many places: “It's like civilian kids don't get a worldly view as military kids. It's like we learn so much more than civilian kids in so many different ways.” (AM)

“I think I'm less ignorant than a lot of people because of the places I've lived. More accepting of different cultures. […] And, I don't know I just – it seems kind of ignorant when other people start talking about where they're from because then, we're like – they seem to think that where they're from is like the world for them, whereas like, when I was growing up, like how I grew up, I've experienced so many places, so I mean it's – the world is a lot bigger to me, rather than just one state.” (AF) Nonetheless, a few saw rootedness as something desirable and were envious of rooted peers for the very same longstanding relationships and connections that many of my participants saw as insular: 92 “…I kinda like get sad sometimes to know some people live in the same house their entire lives. Like, when they go home – like, I get jealous of my girlfriend ‘cause all of her friends, like she has a lot of friends there, where she lives, and I kinda wish I had that. Like, I have family, yeah, but like I wish…if it wasn’t for my family I wouldn’t know anybody there. […] I wish I had more of a relation to my friends now than I do back then.” (Micky)

“Well, like, you know, sometimes I feel jealous of people who have lived in one place their entire lives, like they've gotten to know people, you know like – they, they go to elementary school with them and they, they pretty much know them for their entire lives, and like with us, we move like every three, four years and we don't exactly get to know people as well as you know people that stay in one place in the States.” (YM) These participants saw in rootedness the ability to cultivate deep relationships with groups of friends – an ability they felt was hampered or cut off by their mobility and their rootlessness. Rootedness was often presented as a normative ideal – even by those who looked on rootedness as negative. While many of them did not see themselves settling down and becoming rooted in their immediate futures, a truncated version of rootedness figured prominently in their images of ideal homes. For some, a rooted future meant long-term residence near immediate or extended families, or among close friends; for others it meant living in a specific climate, landscape, or region. For a few, owning a house or property was essential to their ideal homes. This was often the case among youth who spent a lot of time in military housing, where they are not allowed to modify the walls or structures: “…I look forward to…having my own house, saying that it's mine, and if I want to punch the wall and put a hole in it, I can, and I'm not going to get in trouble because it's my house, and I don't have to fix it if I don't want to because it's my house.” (AM) Though property ownership was often just one part of a more complex and nuanced vision: “To me, the ideal home involves everyone being able to go home and be safe at night, that way my family doesn't have to go out and defend the world from all the boogeymen in their closets. I would say, you know…something that someone hasn't lived in before, because the military houses are always getting recycled, so something that's actually ours, something that's owned. Outside of that I really have no idea, just someplace safe, my family can come together and hang out and not have to worry about them getting called away to go off and fight the bad guys in some area that I can't pronounce. Yeah, that's pretty much my ideal home, just someplace safe, not owned by the government.” (LE) For some participants, the image of a rooted ideal future home suggests that traditional notions of home are deeply ingrained to the degree that even some military youth who cannot 93 imagine being rooted still envision it for themselves. One example of this comes from Andrew, who lived in seven places (mostly along the Eastern seaboard and the South, but also overseas) before his father, an Army officer, was stationed in Pennsylvania, where Andrew attended high school and entered college. He expresses surprise at how long he has lived in the state and his preference for moving: “I feel comfortable moving. I don't feel comfortable being stagnant in one place. It's still – it's still weird that I can look back and see that I have lived in this state for seven and a half years, and that, um I've been in college in the same place for four years. I have this itchy feeling like damn, I need to move, I need to get out of here.” Yet Andrew's ideal home involves elements of rootedness: “It would be a place where my grandparents – both sides – are there, my parents are there, and… somewhere I can get some fried okra.” Throughout his interview, he expressed a strong connection to the South and to a town in Mississippi in particular. His preference for residential mobility is at odds with his image of having family together in one place, demonstrating that for some military youth a desire for rootedness is a powerful undercurrent to their mobility. One example of just how powerful this undercurrent is comes from KP, who stated that she gets restless if she stays in one place too long and prefers moving: “I love [moving]. I actually get antsy come the two-and-a-half year mark of any place I've ever been… I love moving now I don't know – I would have married my husband either way, whether he was in the military or not, but him being in the military makes it better because we're not stuck in one place. So I look at it, if I don't like somewhere, I only have to endure it two to three years and then I can pack up and leave without any thought about it. [laughs] Whereas you hear the civilian side of life: 'I hate my job, I hate my house, I hate this town.' I don't ever really have to worry about that.” In addition to feeling restless, KP does not have a strong place identity at the local scale; when asked where she is from, she generally respond, “I'm a military brat, so I'm from America.” Her experiences and attitudes represent the rootlessness that many military youth feel. Yet the ideal home she describes is iconic in its rootedness: “…it would be in Maine, on the beach, surrounded by mountains. Like a big Victorian style house with the wraparound staircases and porches and – pretty much the house out of The Notebook. With a white picket fence and in the middle of nowhere. [laughs]” When I asked KP where she thought that image came from, her answer rang with startling insight: 94 “Probably…the fact that that's never the kind of houses that we've had. Even with my dad being an officer, we still always tried to stay on the lower end of our BAH, so our houses were usually smaller. We've never had a white picket fence. [laughs] We've never had any of the older style homes because those are usually taken by people that have lived in them since they were built, and then just seen it on movies that that's where grandparents live, and the grandkids come up to 'em and running in the yard, so pretty much what Hollywood and authors and any kind of media have planted in my head is where that comes from.” The contrast between KP's attitudes about rootedness and mobility and the vision she has for an ideal home is an extreme example of a common theme among my participants' interviews. The importance of this example is how clearly it demonstrates that despite childhoods spent on the move – and in spite of expressed preferences for mobility – some military youth continue to rely on traditional constructions of home as rooted. That, for many of them, traditional constructions figure in the ideal homes they imagine for themselves but not in their working definitions or day- to-day concepts of home suggests that traditional constructions of home operate on an unconscious level.

Alternative Constructions That some military youth still envision a rooted ideal home should not be understood to mean that home is inherently about rootedness. Rather, home-as-rooted is not natural, but a normative cultural construct – and while it is deeply ingrained, it can be resisted. In fact, many of the youth I interviewed actively rejected the idea that home is rooted, proposing alternate constructions of home that jettisoned both rootedness and place as essential components. These alternatives often conflicted with their images of ideal homes but aligned with their experiences of residential mobility, operating as constructions that they relied upon on a day-to-day basis. In this section I present evidence of military youth who actively resist the idea of home as place; I provide examples of alternate conceptualizations of home that challenge the associations between home, rootedness, and place; and I analyze the qualities of non-rooted, non-place homes described by my participants.

No place like home? When military youth talk about their own residential histories, they often contrast them with the experiences of civilian peers. Their descriptions of civilian childhoods often feature a

95 traditional and idealized concept of home that is both place-oriented and rooted; typically this is an image of a house with extended family nearby, with the implication of a childhood spent in one place: “…most of my friends now, they've lived in the same house since they were born, it's a whole different idea – if I had maybe moved once or twice, like would I actually have someplace to refer to as home. Like when I hear the word home, would I automatically like picture the house, the white picket fence, like my mom standing outside or something like that. So I think moving so much has definitely affected as far as like what is home to me.” (LE)

“I think [moving] really affects where you're at because civilian kids, their home is the house that they've lived in their whole entire life that even, in some places, houses that their parents grew up in. And their family's all around them, and, you know, it's just so – they rely on their parents, but also they rely on their grandparents and their cousins and their aunts and uncles, 'cause they usually all live around them.” (AM) Participants offered these reflections in response to a question about whether they felt that moving impacted how they think about home – thus they were already primed to compare their experiences to those of rooted friends. While I expected their answers to reflect cultural norms of a rooted home, I was not anticipating just how idealized their representations of civilian/rooted homes would be. In their constructions of civilian/rooted homes, military youth rely heavily on the idea of home-as-house. Regardless whether this idea originates in their observations of civilian peers or media representations of home, the image of the house looms large in military youth's imaginaries of rooted homes. It is an image that some military youth actively resist. Recalling CK's assertion that she does not “get sentimental about houses,” consider the ways that Troy and AL both construct and resist house-as-home: “Like home, like they're houses – that's a crazy thing. When I go home with my friends, they actually have a legitimate home that they've had since they were a kid. You know what I mean, like I don't have that.” (Troy)

“Living in a primarily civilian environment, a lot of people have their homes and then the apartment they're living in, and home is where they're from and their parents' house, and I'll slip and ask them when are you going to your home, or something like that, and they're like, 'What?' I'm like, 'Oh your apartment.' [sighs] I think it's clear – a little more obvious to me – that my version of home is a little different than other people's since so many here have that house that

96 they've lived in their entire lives.” (AL) In the first example, Troy begins by dismissing the idea of house-as-home as “crazy” but immediately follows this up by reiterating that same image as one that not only exists, but is accessible to people – that is, to other people, specifically those who had civilian childhoods. The source of her resistance becomes clear in the core of her next statement: “I don't have that.” For Troy, growing up in an environment where a house signified neither long-term residence nor emotional attachment, home-as-house is an unintelligible concept that she rejects outright. In the second example, AL constructs civilian homes as comprising some of the most fundamental elements of rootedness: place identity, the presence of family, a parental homestead, and long- term residence. To AL, a civilian home is rooted in a house, and particularly one's house from childhood. Like Troy, she dismisses this idea, resisting it through her casual use of “home” to refer to a site of residence – and expressing annoyance when people who do hold a traditional concept of home are confused by her use of the term. This resistance is not limited to strict conflations of home and house. Some military youth push their resistance even further, into more liberal versions of traditional constructions that assert that home, if not a house, is at least a special kind of place. The ubiquity and ambiguity of “place” in everyday language sometimes became a stumbling block when my participants talked about this, but in the following examples the message is clear: home is not necessarily a place: “…most people think of home as a place, and I think of it – it's just a place where, you know, I feel safe with my family. It's not, you know, it's that together feeling to me, it's not a place.” (BS)

“I think of where we are. I think home to me is always gonna be where my parents are, because I don't have an idea of home as a place, but as an idea of home being, you know – when you get there, the people you live with are there…” (EmyB) These participants use “place” in two different ways, making fine distinctions between them. The first is the loaded version familiar to cultural geographers (place as the intersection of location and socially constructed meaning); the second is a more casual version that corresponds better to “site.” Both BS and EmyB propose that home is not a place – to both of them home is a site of family; for BS it is also a site of feeling safe. Another participant, HB, rejects the idea of home as both house and place even more directly: “When I think of home, I think about being surrounded by the people that make up your home. I don't think of like a place or a house or kind of a anything, I sort of think of if I've got, well, one of my parents and all of my siblings are in the room at the same time, or if I'm with my extended 97 family and all of their cousins. And my family actually lived in a pretty sprawling throughout the country anyway, so when we do get together it tends to not be the same place very often. And so I just consider it when I'm around everyone I love.” (HB) She avoids the linguistic confusion by using “when” instead of “where” – simultaneously deemphasizing the importance of location and emphasizing the temporally ephemeral nature of her experience of home. These last few examples underscore an important point: home is neither necessarily a house nor a place, but this does not preclude home from being sited. Despite resisting traditional constructions of home, many of the youth I interviewed talked about home as sited, albeit in place-nonspecific ways. This generally took the form “home is wherever my family is, regardless of the location,” as in these examples: “Where my family is. I mean, obviously the location thing is very transient to me…if you were to say like where's your childhood home, I'd be like 'Uh, I don't know, wherever my family is.' Right now, home is like southern Maryland, you know, where my family is now, but they may move, and even though I've probably never lived in that house before, I'll probably still kind of call that home, 'cause that's what I'm used to.” (Tim)

“I think of everyone in my family being present, or my immediate family being present. My mom, my dad, me and my sister, in a place to where we share a bunch of times together, the family, and that we all feel safe. And if that's on a military base, that's fine; if it's some house out in the boonies, that's fine too, but somewhere that we're all around and present.” (TC)

“Home is where your family is. Um…to me, home is where – like I'll always, anytime I go home to my parents, that will be considered home, but my personal residence wherever I'm at with my husband and our children will be home for me. No matter what country, state, city, continent we're in, wherever we're at is home.” (KP) These three participants come from very different perspectives. Tim, the son of an Army officer, has lived throughout the United States as well as in South Korea and Egypt. TC is the son of a senior enlisted soldier who served in the Marines until TC was three, relocated the family to Texas (where his extended family lives), and enlisted in the Army ten years later; TC spent much of his childhood in Texas (which forms the core of his place identity) but has lived throughout the southern United States. KP is the daughter of an Army officer and the wife of a young enlisted Airman stationed at the time of writing in Japan. For all three of them, home is a site of family. In these examples, the location of family is important only insofar as it provides a

98 reference point or a gathering place; all three participants are aware that those reference points are subject to change. For them, home is sited – but its siting is tangential to its emphasis on family. That is, home is not a site of family, it is a site of family. This emphasis on what is sited rather than on the siting itself is crucial to military youth not only as a means of resisting traditional constructions of home, but also of redefining home. This was a common tactic among the youth I interviewed: rather than imagine themselves as homeless in light of their limited access to traditional constructions of home, many military youth adapt to residential mobility by redefining home in nontraditional ways in which place is secondary, irrelevant, or altogether absent. The youth I interviewed overwhelmingly adopted this strategy: of 43 children of active duty military, only four of them referred to a specific place when asked how they define home – and for only one of them was the place his sole answer; the other three named places in conjunction with non-place homes. There are many ways to redefine home. During interviews, my participants identified over two dozen alternatives to place-specific homes. These break down into five categories: people, emotional states, practices, states of being, and possessions. In addition, three participants identified sites that were not place-specific, and one defined home in a unique way as an object. I list the categories with the number of responses that fall into each in order of popularity in Table 7 below:

Category Responses People 26 Emotional State 9 Practice 9 Possession 4 State of Being 3

Table 7: Categories of home, redefined.27 My participants defined and redefined home throughout their interviews. What I categorize and present here is an analysis of their responses to a specific question asking them how they define home and what they think of when they think of home. Categorizing these responses was a messy process – as with any categorization scheme, there is a degree of arbitrariness here. These categories represent my best attempt to make sense of the data while honoring the semantic

27 The total number of responses exceeds 43 because nine of the participants gave answers that fell into multiple categories. In addition, three participants phrased their answers as “being around family”; I counted these responses as both people and states of being. 99 content of my participants' responses; I present them here solely as a means of organizing the data. As some of the passages I quote above have already indicated, many of the youth I interviewed redefined home in terms of people – this was in fact the most common way they redefined home. Typically this meant immediate family, though some participants included friends and extended family in their definitions of home. All but one of those who redefined home in this way referred to home as a site of family – that is, location was implicit but secondary in their definitions. This generally took the form “home is wherever my family is” as in KP's definition above. A few participants referred to family without the implicit “where,” as in this example: “I think of my family, I don't think of a place. I think of somebody that's there to support me.” (BS) Her response is one of two in this category (and one of very few across all categories) that does not imply that home is emplaced. The other comes from CE, who says: “…not necessarily a physical place, but I really love my dog. So I just think about, like, my mom and my dog and my brother kind of thing, and my dad… You know, just all having like a good funny conversation. 'Cause my family's very different, as in everyone's pretty – everyone jokes around a lot in my family, so. Just laughing a lot, I guess. And being around them like that is, I would say, is the definition of home.” For CE, home is not where her family is, but being around them in particular ways. That only CE's and BS's responses were not “located” underscores the strength of the place element in traditional constructions of home – but their responses also act as a reminder that in redefining home as family, place is secondary or tangential for many military youth. Several participants referred to emotional states when redefining home, supporting Blunt and Dowling's (2006) observation that home often has an emotional component to it. For those who talked about emotions, home was a site of comfort, security, safety, feeling good, enjoyment, belonging, and happiness. Many of these responses related emotional states to the presence of people, as in AE's response: “…home is either my bed or where my family is. I mean, my parents, I guess. But I don't think it really can be defined, home, as a place – it's more a feeling, if that makes sense. It's not a place, it's – when my family's together, I feel home, I just feel everything's secure and good.” It is perhaps ironic that the emotional states typically associated with traditional constructions of home are the ones that emerge in such a nontraditional context. Yet there is a subversive element to this emotional content: rather than deriving a sense of security, comfort, or belonging from 100 home, home was something that emerged from these feelings. That is, my participants refer to emotions they feel not because they are in a specific place, but because they are in the presence of specific people – and home is thus not a setting for those feelings, but rather a byproduct of them. As one response indicates, the emotional content of home does not require a spatial container: “Home is more of a feeling of like comfort and safety and security.” (Troy) For Troy, neither place nor space are integral to home – home is the feeling itself, not the site of the feeling. Troy's response here is consistent with her rejection of home as house. Her ability to completely de-place home in opposition to strong cultural trends is especially important in light of the fact that she intends to stay mobile by serving as a career Army officer. In redefining home as emotion, home is unmoored from place and made circumstantial – this is a powerful and potentially empowering strategy. Another common set of responses to this question was to redefine home in the context of practices. Most participants who talked about practices referred specifically to practices of living and sleeping – that is, home is a site of residence and a site of sleep for these participants. Generally, these participants used “home” more casually than others – to refer to dorm rooms, apartments, hotels, etc. One answer gets at the heart of this casual use: “Home is where you can set the shower to the right temperature without thinking about it. […] Like, on the first time with your eyes closed.” (Sydney) For Sydney and others who redefine home as practice, home is both banal and habituated: there is nothing special about its location, no emotional tie, no people or memories that load it with significance. Home is the site of simple daily practices, a container for the ways they interact with the world. Four participants talked about home as a site of possession. This came across in two ways: home was seen as either a repository for one's possessions, or as something that was itself owned. Three participants talked about home as a location where they kept their things, as did BL: “Home, I think of my bed…my animals…my food in the fridge… I don't necessarily think of family because like a lot of people think of home as their family, but I don't really think of family as home because I didn't have like Christmases or Thanksgiving with, like big family events because my whole entire family lives in California… So and then like I've lived on my own, so home is like what I make it… [N]ow I don't live with my parents, like that's not my home anymore, I've never lived with them in Texas. I actually – I visited for 17 days this summer or this 101 Christmas and it was really cool, like I got to visit, uh, it was like I saw their homes. They're like, 'You know this is your home too.' They're like, 'Yeah this is your home, like you can always come here.' Like, yeah, it's not my home, like this is your home but like I can always come here, but home was what I make – like my bed, my food, my animals, like, my stuff.” In locating home in his possessions, he rejects the idea of home as family that so many other participants embrace. As with AE (quoted previously), possessions are part of JV's definition of home: “I usually think of just where all my stuff is, where I sleep at night, and then where the people – kind of where the people that matter to me are, but if they're not there, then it's still home, it's just, it'd be more of a complete home if like all my friends lived near me.” For BL, AE, and JV, possessions are integral to their definitions of home, but in different ways. BL locates his home solely in the site of his possessions, while for AE and JV, the site of possessions is one of many concurrent definitions of home. For a fourth participant, Micky, home is not the site of possessions so much as something that, in and of itself, he possesses: “I'd say like somewhere that you can really like say that's yours. I don't know. Somewhere like… when I think of home, I think of you know, like, being able to go somewhere, like you can call your own, like it's yours, like nobody can take it away from you. And…then I guess somewhere like you can get away to. 'Cause I remember, like my house was about 40 minutes away from the high school, so if I wanted to get…away from high school, like home was…my own little personal sanctum, or something like that.” If home as a site of possessions (i.e., a repository of one's things) has relatively casual implications, home as a site of possession (i.e., something that is itself possessed) seems to be loaded with more emotional significance. In referring to possessions, BL, AE, and JV all talk about things that can be replaced; Micky, by contrast, seems to be talking about something less tangible, something with an existential quality: home is not just a house that he (or his family) owns, but also a site of refuge. Perhaps it is this quality of refuge that he refers to when he says home is something that “nobody can take…away from you.” For three participants, home is a state of being: home emerges in the context of a condition or set of circumstances. Two participants – EA and Lydia – relate home to moments or sites of autonomy and coming of age: “I just, I think of…I mean, Bethesda for me, but…what makes it home is the memories, good times, like I can just think about it and always feel happy. Um…and that, I guess that's like rose- colored glasses type thing, 'cause obviously I wasn't happy all the time I was there, but just something about it feels right. And it really, I think it has to do with like coming of age there. Um,

102 and you know, like just learning to drive, being my own person, making my own decisions… [Bethesda] is the first time that the geography, the physical location, became my world, not my family.” (EA)

“I mean, my home now, right outside D.C., just 'cause that's where my strongest memories are and where I really grew up and developed.” (Lydia) That is, EA identifies Bethesda as home – not because she is rooted there, but in part because she came of age there. It is the combination of the place “feeling right” and her sense of autonomy, not the presence of family or a sense of rootedness that makes Bethesda home. Lydia also associates home with the site of her coming of age, despite the fact that she identifies strongly with her childhood experiences in Europe, and that her family appropriated several European customs into their daily habits. For a third participant, VC, home is another state of being: “…right now I think of my dorm room…once I'm settled in and really happy with the place that I'm at, it just kind of becomes home for me.” Rather than autonomy, the important state for VC is that of being settled. Her response is similar to those who talk about practices – her use of home is more casual than it is for those who load it with the gravitas borne by coming of age – but her phrasing suggests more that home emerges from the state of being settled rather than engaging in specific practices. Finally, one response was unique. This participant, KB, was the daughter of an enlisted Airman who, when asked, stated simply: “Home is a good book.” Prompted to expand on her answer, she explained: “I guess, like, home should be a place that's safe, and books make me feel safe.” One could arguably classify her response as a possession, a practice, or an emotional state. Yet home for KB may be a more subtle combination arising from the act of reading itself. Until high school (when she became involved in her school band), she had few social connections; she was often ostracized as a child: “I got picked on a lot during high school – not, not high school so much, but like when I was younger. So it was like, my family in New Mexico was like the band, so I was a nerd. I was a band nerd. And those were the people I talked to.” When asked what moving was like for her, she argued that it made her “very socially awkward”: “I've never like – you know you're going to move in two years, why are you going to make any real close friends? Because they're just going to be gone in two years. So for the most part, that's what I did for a long time until New Mexico. And I – not until I moved here have I really been able to shake that. But that's what the moving did for me, was like it made me very socially awkward.” 103 For KB, books provide a space of safety (books are reliable and enduring when people are transient) and a connection to something outside herself (stories are welcoming when people are cruel or distant). The act of reading is thus a potential pathway to home in that the combination of object and practice evoke the feeling of safety. I belabor this interpretation in part because it highlights the difficulty of categorizing the responses – but, more importantly, because it also demonstrates that individuals construct home in ways that potentially supersede its normative cultural constructions. Three important qualities of home emerge in light of the non-rooted, non-place alternatives my participants identified: home is complex, mutable, and emotionally ambivalent. These qualities are very visible in a military youth context, but they have the potential applications in other cultural contexts. In the rest of this section, I discuss each of these qualities, focusing on the theoretical implications of each. First, as Blunt and Dowling (2006) establish, home is complex. As some of the quotes I include above indicate, home does not always have a single, simple definition. In line with existing research demonstrating that youth are flexible in defining home (e.g., Mand 2010), a number of the youth I interviewed held multiple concurrent definitions of home. This was the case for JV, for whom home is simultaneously a site of possessions (“where all my stuff is”), practice (“where I sleep at night”), and people (“where the people that matter to me are”) – not all of which coincide spatially. Roughly 20 percent of the youth I interviewed provided complex or multiple definitions when asked directly, and several more participants offered complex definitions indirectly over the courses of their interviews. The complexity of home is important because it underscores the inadequacies of conflating home and house, and home and place: these conflations reduce home to a single, rooted location – essentializing home as something that is as likely to be inaccurate as it is out of reach for many military youth. Complex constructions in which home has several aspects that do necessarily coincide spatially address these inadequacies head-on, effectively liberating home by making it multiple and portable. Second, home is mutable. The way a person defines home may change over time based on the circumstances in which she finds herself. For example, Lynn found that her definition of home changed when her family moved to Jamestown, Rhode Island for a ten-month assignment: “…Jamestown was the shortest I've ever lived in one space – or one area. And one thing I just

104 remembered that I don't think I put on the survey was, because we were only living there for ten months, we didn't even unpack our stuff. Most of our stuff went into storage and we didn't see it for like four years because we moved to Japan after that. So it was interesting because it was the first time that I went somewhere and it kind of felt like home, because I knew that we were living there for a little bit of time, but it didn't quite feel like home at the same time because we were in a pre-furnished place, we had none of our – very little of our own stuff, and uh, it was definitely just really interesting, a different experience from what I'd gotten used to.” These circumstances made her rethink what home meant to her: “…it was a different mindset of home because I was realizing that home – like there have been definitions of home like, oh it's just where you live, or home is where your stuff is, but in that case I kind of lived there for ten months, but I didn't have any of my stuff there, so it was mostly just kinda that's where my family was. So I had to redefine home for myself for a while. It became interesting.” Similarly, KF found herself rethinking home when her father retired: “I feel like it changed for me when my parents – when my dad retired and settled down in one place. Like, just know[ing] that that's a place I'll be able to go back to for the rest of my life and see my family. Like I used to feel like – I guess I used to feel like home was – I didn't know what home was. But when they settled down, I felt like that was home.” When asked what home means to her, she anticipates that her definition will change again once she gets married: “Probably I think of my parents' house. Just because I know that that's actually going to be a permanent thing, because my dad's retired. I think it's really, like, good for me to know that that is a place I'll always be able to go back to… And I think that now, like, in a few months, when I get married, I think home will probably be wherever he is.” For KF, the concept of home did not crystallize until her father retired, at which point she began to think of home in terms of place. Yet after her wedding, her definition may change from a place to a person, and place will take on a secondary role in the way she constructs home. That home is mutable is important because it further challenges traditional constructions that assert that home is not just singular but singular and lasting. Third, home is emotionally ambivalent for the youth I interviewed. In the traditional constructions of home that many of my participants resisted, home is presented as emotionally loaded: references to white picket fences, childhood friends, and big family holidays suggest an idyllic and enchanted ideal in which home is associated with happiness, connection, and belonging. In these images of rooted contentment, the emotional impact comes from the fact that

105 home is not just a place but part of one's identity. Yet the links between place and identity are often broken apart in a military childhood, allowing military youth to disinvest their emotional energy from places and invest it into other aspects of their identities. The result, for some, is that the very word “home” lacks emotional power: “I don't think home is that powerful of a word…I guess I moved so much, I had so many different homes. I don't think – I think it's just a roof over your head.” (HC) “Home” is a term he uses casually: “I think kids that live in New York probably call home, like, New York, or where they've lived the longest, or where their family's at, or something like that. I just call home where I sleep. I call my dorm home.” To HC, home is a practical matter, not an emotional one. Other participants, however, argue that as a concept, home is inherently powerful: “I think about it every now and then, you know, what – my apartment mates will text me, 'Hey, when you coming home?' I'm not coming home. I'll be back at the apartment tonight, but I'm not coming home tonight. […] And then, you know, for me, just being with people that you find close to you is what's important in terms of calling something home or not. You know. It's not that I dislike my roommates or anything like that, but no apartment, no dorm room that I've lived in, has it ever been home. Just 'cause, you know, there's nobody there that, you know, I love or whatever.” (SB) For SB, home involves loved ones; consequently, it is impossible to speak of home without it being emotionally loaded. Another participant, JV, recognizes that “home” can be a powerful word, but he does not always use it that way: “…I agree that it's powerful, but at the same time…I don't use it as powerfully as I know other people do. I kinda, it's interchangeable for me, is – it can either be where my parents are, where my friends are, where my stuff is, where I happen to be going to sleep if I'm stuck on base for four weeks then home might be the barracks or something, but. Yeah, I think it can be powerful in certain contexts, but for me it's interchangeable, whether or not I want to use it powerfully.” JV's perspective constitutes a third and very important position on the debate over the power of “home” that mediates between the other two. These widely differing perspectives suggest an emotional ambivalence from which I draw four conclusions. First, home is not universal in its emotional loading. Critical constructions of home that posit it as a site laden with “longing and belonging” as Blunt and Dowling (2006) risk reinforcing the emotional content of more traditional constructions. From the perspective of some of the youth I interviewed, home is not emotionally loaded; the casual idea of home that

106 HC advocates does not make him homeless, nor does it make his constructions of home any less valid than that of SB, for whom home can never be casual. Second, where home is used in a casual sense, it is often by those who use it to refer to daily practices. For them, home inheres in the routines they use to make sense of the world rather than in a specific place or people. While actions are ephemeral, practices are recurring and malleable; a home constructed around practice is equally enduring and deeply personal – and while it may not be loaded with emotional connections to the external world, it is still personally meaningful. In a sense, then, casual homes are the most enduring: they are not disposable, but rather self-reliant, personal, and portable. Third, for many military youth, when home is emotionally loaded, that emotion is invested not in places, but in people. As one participant put it: “I think for people that have lived in one place – or maybe only two places in their life – when they think of home, can envision that place, and also the people in it. But they can – they have both, like they have a place that they consider home that they populate people with, and I have people that are home that I populate places with.” (CA) Homes that center on people may thus inhere accidentally across multiple places. If the people who comprise a person's home move, part of her home moves with them. Immediate family, close friends, and extended family members were most often cited in my participants' constructions of people-based homes. Fourth, this emotional ambivalence opens home to be a receptacle for, rather than an arbitrator of, power. That is, rather than being enslaved to home as emotionally laden (as in both traditional and critical constructions), youth like JV can determine what it is that makes home powerful. Thus ambivalence is empowering: not only can one develop an alternative construction of home, but she can also determine how much emotional energy she wants to invest in it. In a world where home is mutable, ambivalence is an empowering and adaptive strategy.

Discussion Throughout this chapter I have presented the experiences and perspectives of several of the youth I interviewed with regard to place, identity, and home. Their reflections challenge the idea that home is an investment of identity in place and demonstrate the potential for developing alternative constructions of home that are better suited to the “residential hopscotch” of military life. I conclude here by situating my findings amid the theoretical considerations I introduced in 107 Chapter III with regard to three points. First, I will revisit the argument that both traditional and critical constructions of home rely on the idea that home is an investment of identity in place. Second, I will review the difficulties military youth have in accommodating traditional models of home. Third, I will argue that current critical models of home do not go far enough in their critiques of traditional models. I have argued throughout this study that both traditional and critical perspectives construct home as an investment of identity in place. What differentiates these two perspectives is a systematic difference in how they rely on place and identity in their respective constructions. Traditional models link home to rootedness; critical approaches problematize rootedness, demonstrating for example that home is not always associated with the places where people have roots (e.g, Constable 1999). Yet for both, place is an integral aspect of home. Likewise, these two approaches relate home to identity differently: in traditional models, home aligns with place identity; in critical approaches the relationship between the two is unstable or complicated. Traditional models very clearly articulate that home is an investment of identity in place. It is true that critical approaches challenge certain assumptions of traditional models – namely that home is stable, safe, secure, or permanent. Yet while critical approaches effectively complicate traditional models of home, they continue to operate on the very same principle: that home is an investment of identity (which is evolving, intersectional, relational, etc.) in place (which is itself evolving and relational). The pivotal difference between these two approaches lies in the ways they characterize identity and place: traditionally these are static entities, while from a critical perspective they are complex and unstable. Ultimately rather than reject place– identity–home relationships, critical approaches inject instability, and nuance into them. Bearing all this in mind, I wish to turn to the experiences of military youth and how they relate to both traditional and critical approaches to home. First, it is important to note that traditional models rely on a rootedness to which military youth rarely have access. Their parents may have come from rooted homes and may have deeply rooted extended families, and some military youth spend major holidays or summer vacations with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, returning year after year to the same house. Yet even those who spend significant amounts of time around rooted extended families often express a sense of rootlessness; their interactions with extended family are often ephemeral and event-based rather than ongoing. Even if they find themselves “at home” among family that is deeply rooted in a specific place, “home”

108 in this sense is a fleeting experience. In addition, the alignment of home and place identity on which traditional models rely does not fit the reality for many military youth. As my interviews demonstrate, place identity for many military youth is ambiguous or reflects their complex residential histories. Many military youth express place identities that are unrelated to their definitions of home – it was a common practice among my participants, for example, to refer to the last place one lived in response to questions of place identity, but to define home as a site of family. Furthermore, for some military youth, place identity becomes attenuated as a result of their complex residential histories. Traditional models that rely on rootedness and place identity as markers of home would thus cast military youth as without-home, contradicting their own assertions of having homes. Critical approaches provide somewhat more flexibility than traditional approaches do in constructing home, but I argue they do not go far enough to accommodate the ways military youth think about home. At the heart of this issue is that critical theorists continue to rely on the tacit assumption that place is the primary mediator of home. Military youth challenge the role of place in home by developing alternate constructions of home that, while potentially spatial, do not rely on place. By “locating” home in people, emotional states, practices, possessions, and states of being – none of which are necessarily embedded in place, and all of which are already mobile and portable – military youth uncouple home and place, making it possible to establish an enduring sense of home across many temporary residences; in some cases this uncoupling constitutes an active resistance to the idea that home is an investment of identity in place. Finally, while critical approaches to home have successfully demonstrated the weaknesses of traditional models, the qualities of homes constructed by military youth suggest that these critiques can go significantly further. The experiences and reflections of my participants reveal that home is not just a spatial imaginary, but that home is complex, mutable, and emotionally ambiguous. In addition, while I agree with Blunt and Dowling (2006) and others that home has spatial qualities, my findings suggest that home is spatial insofar as humans are spatial: just as we rely on spatial metaphors to describe even things that are not inherently spatial (e.g., political “positions”), my participants still conceptualize home in spatial ways even when they emphasize its nonmaterial aspects. This does not imply place as much as it implies proximity or intimacy. For many of my participants, home occupies a private or “back” region rather than a public or “front” region. Most importantly, however, the combination of complexity

109 and mutability suggest that home is less a place than an emergent and iterative process that can originate in place(s), but also in people, emotional states, practices, possessions, and states of being. As I will demonstrate in the next chapter, this process can play out spatially. In this chapter I demonstrated that military youth may hold images of rooted ideal homes in the backs of their minds, but many of them rely first and foremost on alternative constructions that more closely resemble the realities of their experiences. Neither rootedness nor place are major factors in these constructions: for many military youth, home is simply not a place. It may have spatial aspects (e.g., the proximity of certain people), or it may have a casual association with a (temporary) location (e.g., as a site of sleep or the site of one's possessions), but these constructions hinge neither on rootedness nor the specificity of place.

110 Chapter VII Routes: Contextualizing Home In Mobility

In the previous chapter, I presented my participants' reflections on home in light of their complex residential histories. Yet having a complex residential history is only part of the story for military youth: it is a direct consequence of the mobility they experience. Residential mobility directly impacts the ways that military youth conceptualize home, and thus is integral to my conceptual critique of home. In this chapter I examine the ways that military youth conceptualize and respond to their mobility. My analysis hinges on four main points: First, military youth experience residential mobility as a normalized experience. Second, mobility is a formative force in their lives. Third, military youth develop a number of adaptive strategies in response to their mobility. Fourth, this peculiar kind of mobility impacts the ways that military youth conceptualize and construct home. While mobility has emerged as an important theme within geography and other disciplines over the last decade, our current theoretical scope does not readily account for the particular kind of mobility that military youth experience. It is with this gap in mind that I present my findings. I conclude this chapter with a discussion of how military youth constitute a poorly-understood type of mobile subject that provides new avenues for mobilities research. Once again, the analysis I present in this chapter is founded on the mobility and home literatures. This analysis will provide a culturally-based perspective that will inform my discussion of militarized residential mobility in Chapter VIII. To that end, I bracket geopolitical concerns in this chapter.

Mobility as Contextual To say that military youth typically have complex residential histories suggests a static image, a stratigraphic layering of places over time. This is only half the story, however. Military families do not disappear from one place and appear at another; their experiences of places are linked by episodes of movement. When new orders arrive, military youth are aware that they will be going somewhere new – and that they may have a lengthy journey ahead of them. Thus mobility is an integral part of a military childhood. In this section I examine the ways that mobility is normalized for military youth and its importance as a formative force in their lives.

111 Normalized mobilities In my review of the mobilities literature, I pointed out that most moves in the United States (roughly 67 percent) take place within the same county – and most (roughly 84 percent) take place within the same state. Military residential mobility is antithetical to this norm. Military personnel are periodically transferred to new duty stations in permanent change of station (PCS) moves (Hix et al. 1998). PCS moves are driven in part by the need to fill spaces in the wake of separation or retirement of active duty personnel, but also in part by the rotation of personnel to and from bases, both overseas and within the United States (Warner & Horowitz 1991; Hix et al. 1998). The frequency of moves depends in part on the branch of service and in part on seniority, but there are some general trends: typically about one-third of military families move annually, and most families move an average of once every two to three years (Segal 1986; Segal & Segal 2004; Burrell et al. 2006; Bradhsaw et al. 2010). In contrast to civilian patterns of mobility and migration, PCS moves are generally long-distance, interstate or international moves. And while the proportion of military personnel stationed overseas has declined by more than half since the 1950s,28 it is still likely that a military family will serve at least one overseas tour during a 20- year career. The experiences of the youth I interviewed reflect these vast differences between civilian and military residential mobilities: they reported an average of eight residences 29 since birth, three of them on military installations. They moved an average of once every 33 months (2.7 years), and spent a total of about 90 months (7.5 years) living on base. Even more telling is the scale at which their moves occurred: of their average seven moves, four of them crossed state boundaries, two crossed international boundaries, and only one was within state boundaries. When they lived overseas, it was overwhelmingly in Germany (17 participants), South Korea (6 participants), and Japan (5 participants), though they also lived in Belgium, Chile, Ecuador, Egypt, England, France, Guam, Panama, Portugal, and Spain. It is hard to imagine a residential mobility more different from the American norm than this.

28 In 1959, 28.4 percent of personnel were stationed overseas; by 2009 this had declined to 13.5 percent. These numbers are based on annual military personnel data published by the Department of Defense and are available on the Personnel and Procurement Statistics website (https://www.dmdc.osd.mil/appj/dwp/reports.do? category=reports&subCat=milActDutReg) and from DoD (2009a). 29 Some participants included moves that occurred after their sponsor(s) retired, after a divorce, or during college. Others ended their surveys at the point where they left their sponsor's place of residence. It was not always possible to tease out the point of departure from military life, so I calculated these statistics based on what the participants provided rather than some arbitrary cutoff point. 112 When asked what it is like to move so much, a number of the youth I interviewed presented moving as a normal aspect of their lives. These participants had moved often and regularly enough that they had come to see moving as a routine and expected part of life: “I've thought about that before, like what I think of all the moves and they kind just [feel]…like my life to me, like it's so normal because I'd moved like, you know, four times by kindergarten, so that was just like something that happened. It wasn't something that was sudden, like and now we're moving after this many years, it's like we had always done that. I'm just like kinda used to it, so it just kinda seems normal to me.” (CK)

“Normal? [laughing]…it's just an everyday part of life. You just expect to move.” (AE) These participants spoke with an underlying understanding that although moving seemed expected and inevitable in their experience, rootedness is discursively normal in the United States more broadly. One participant's remarks underscore the difference: “…moving so much, it kind of made moving seem like a natural thing to do. Like most people live in their same houses for most of their lives. But it makes it hard to live in one place for more than four years, 'cause you're like, okay, where am I gonna go next?” (BC) Their expectations of mobility reflect the rhythms of military life: they generally expected to move every two to three years – a frequency that is in line with military personnel cycling – though they were aware that their time in residence could range anywhere from six months to four or five years. One consequence of such regular mobility, as BC's comment suggests, is a sense of restlessness. Several of the youth I interviewed stated that they had moved often enough that not only had they come to expect it after two or three years, they were ready for it. In this way, restlessness is a companion to the rootlessness that military youth often report. The youth I interviewed often expressed restlessness in terms of feeling “antsy” or having an “itch to move”: “…as I moved it got progressively harder…after a while I started getting kind of antsy, like okay, like, I'm used to moving, I'm kind of like ready for something else…I definitely feel like if I end up in a place for a long period of time I get kind of, start getting antsy and just kind of start thinking about okay, like, if I were to move here, wouldn't it be cool if I were here, so I think moving kind of set that um I guess that like quality where I just like kind like get bored with an area after a while. Or at least, you know, I'm so conditioned to be ready to pick up and move every couple of years that I'm like ready to do it every couple years anyway…” (Tim)

“I guess, every two – two-and-a-half to three years, I get like this itch to move. Like right now,

113 living in Williamsburg I'm starting to get that itch to move – like I gotta go somewhere. And it's funny because I was supposed to move in August and that's when I got sick, and now I'm stuck here. But I just get this itch to move. In West Point I wanted to finish out high school there, because I started with them as freshmen and I just wanted to finish. But I always have an itch to move, and – I mean, my mom gets it because she comes from a military family too, so I think you will always have this itch to go somewhere, and like, oh it's two-and-a-half to three – or however long, three years – I gotta go somewhere. So I don't know if I'll ever actually settle down. That's a hard thing for me to see in the future.” (Jessica) Tim connects his sense of restlessness in part to conditioning and in part to feeling bored with places after two or three years. By contrast, Jessica talks about her sense of restlessness as a deep-seated, inescapable drive – the phrase “itch to move” appears five times in her response, both a description of her experience and an explanation for it, powerfully irreducible. For both Tim and Jessica, restlessness borne of regular mobility frames their experience of place: they arrive at a place, become habituated within it, see what it has to offer, and are whisked away to some other place whether or not they want to leave. It is a repeating pattern in their lives that has an almost seasonal quality. To these youth, mobility it is natural and eternal; it existed before them, it carries them in its currents, and when it does not happen at the right moment, it is disconcerting: “Staying in one place kind of makes me feel weird, being in – I mean, I've been in Manhattan for six – six years, and that is really odd to me. I'm itching to get out of the town 'cause I feel like I've been here too long. It just doesn't feel normal to stay in one place too long.” (AE) Some military youth find ways to respond to their restlessness. For example, one participant creates spatial changes between moves: “I love it. I actually get antsy come the two-and-a-half year mark of any place I've ever been. Not so much when I was little because I didn't understand it as much, but as I get older and understand that I'm getting to see parts of the world that other kids my age haven't even left their state, I've got – I get antsy in anything. I find myself rearranging my house every couple of months just because I like the change.” (KP) Others handled restlessness by creating and taking opportunities to move short distances, especially during college: “I moved every year while I was in college to a different house because I – I don't know, I grew tired with it, with the house, and so I was like, let's move. Get a new experience.” (AE)

“Even in college, I've never lived in the same place for more than a year, just living university, I've

114 changed dorms and I've lived in two apartments and I even told people it just feels weird for me not to – like if I can move, why not move? And for me it's more fun, get to pack up everything and then unpack it. I think the worst part is actually like getting everything out of the truck and the rest of it's just – it's just the same, you're just changing, I guess, the environment, but everything else is staying pretty much the same to me. I'm still living, I still have all my stuff, I just – different grocery store, different street, different windows in different places.” (JV) While these strategies may work to assuage restlessness in an immediate way, however, they do not eliminate it. As existing research (e.g., Ender 2002; Williams & Mariglia 2002) points out, previous generations of former military youth continue to feel restless well into adulthood – something that youth like Jessica anticipate for themselves.

Formative mobilities Consistent with the experiences of other mobile subjects, moving is often difficult for military youth. The uncertainties of when they will leave and where they will go, and the knowledge that they will leave friends behind are hardships they face with every new assignment. For the military youth I interviewed, however, mobility was more than just something they endured at semi-regular intervals: many of them saw it as a formative force in their lives. It is tempting to assume that regular residential mobility and the restlessness that emerges from it are wholly negative experiences for military youth. Yet while many of the military youth I interviewed stated that leaving friends behind with each move is difficult – especially as they aged and their social relationships became deeper – they often followed up such observations with reasons why they would not change their experiences of mobility. Their reflections cast mobility not just as a formative force in their lives, but as a positive formative force that made them adaptable or stronger people and exposed them to new cultures. Many of the youth I interviewed argued that their mobility had made them more adaptable people, able to respond to new places and new situations with relative ease: “I guess [moving] makes me more adaptable. I can easily put myself in a situation and figure things out, so, when I moved away to college, it was a brand new place and I didn't know anybody, but I had no problem at all learning…my way around and meeting new people and everything, and it wasn't hard on me emotionally because I've done it so many times.” (LW) That is not to argue that moving was always easy for them; in a society that prizes rootedness, military youth are aware that their mobility marks them as unusual, and that they will leave 115 rooted friends behind. Yet some saw the difficulty of moving and leaving people behind as something that made them stronger. One participant's reflections neatly demonstrate how the hardship of mobility can be a strengthening force: “…from the perspective of me at the time it was happening, it was difficult, I was very like woe is me, this sucks, no one has to deal with this, I'm going to, you know, settle down in one place, my kids are going to live in the same house for their entire lives, all of that, so like a lot of um, I guess self-pity really [laughing], which is hard to admit, but looking back on it now…I think that it made me a much better person. Um, I think that I have a very unique experience from having done that, and um, I don't know, I think people could really use more of that in their lives. […] At the time it was really hard to uproot and transition, but now I think that it makes me better at those things, um, more willing to put myself out there and try to meet people, and try and get comfortable in a place when I do move because, um, you know, you don't have a choice.” (EA) For some, this strengthening is a double-edged sword. Mobility may make them more adaptable, stronger, or self-reliant – but in some cases, those benefits go too far, as NJ found: “…on the one hand [moving is] good because I feel like I could go anywhere and – basically at a moment's notice if I had to and be able to handle it better than other people, but at the same time I feel it, especially when I was younger, it really hampered me making connections to other people, 'cause after a while I decided: you know what, if I'm going to be moving in a year, why bother making friends, I'm going to have to say goodbye anyway.” (NJ) For NJ, the self-reliance that came with mobility made it easier to adapt to new places – but it also allowed him to disinvest himself from making friends in those new places. Like many of the other youth I spoke with, NJ generally saw his mobility as something that made him a better person, though for him it came at a price. For many, adaptability and strength stems in part repeated cycle of uprooting, moving, and resettling – and in part from the exposure to distant, unfamiliar places and cultures that accompanies this cycle. A number of the youth I spoke with regarded their exposure to other cultures as an invaluable part of their development, as ML says: “…in some ways…it's been hard, like I realize, you know, it's hard saying goodbye to friends, and it's hard, you know, not being so consistently – and not having – sometimes it felt like I couldn't really claim a place as my home, which was kinda weird and kinda rough because not a lot of people know what that's like. But on the other hand, it's part of what made me who I am – like I'm really strong, and I'm very outgoing, so it's easy for me to talk to people, and for some people who lived with the same, you know, company their whole life, and they don't really need to talk to other people kind of a thing. So it definitely exposed me to a lot of different people and different cultures it exposed me to, and you learn a lot about people, different people, and different cultures, and the 116 way people live, and how they think kind of thing.” (ML) Her comments reflect both the hardships and benefits of mobility, ultimately emphasizing the benefits of a mobile childhood. Her insistence that mobility played an integral part in shaping her identity by making her stronger and exposing her to new cultures is exemplary of the way that many of the youth I interviewed spoke about their experiences. From the preceding comments, it may seem like the positives of mobility are tempered by its hardships. Yet a few participants chose to see their experiences of mobility in a wholly or primarily positive light, casting each move as an adventure: “I actually really enjoyed it. I liked the adventure of it, going to new places, experiencing new things. It became so natural, that when we lived in Maryland for four years, that last year I was actually getting rather twitchy and going a little insane, 'cause I had moved on the third year so often that I was expecting it, and then I didn't get it. [chuckles] Just – I didn't know anything better, so I didn't know anything else…I didn't know what it was like to live in one spot, and I absolutely loved the change and new locations, so it's definitely impacted me now.” (AL)

“…honestly, I wouldn't change it for the world. Like, yes it was a hard life to grow up around, but I loved each and every move and I think the best part about it was that my family – or my parents – tended to…go into every move telling us that it was our next adventure, and so that's how I always thought of it was, I'm going on another adventure, you know. I might see you guys in again in the future, I might not – see ya! And then I'd hop on a plane or in a car and go to our next spot. And it was definitely hard, but I learned so much and I feel like because of how much I embraced all the moving, it – it will set me apart from a lot of other people in today's world.” (Lynn) Both AL and Lynn talk about their experiences of mobility fondly. For them, the urge to move again is tinged not just with the agitated expectation that comes with moving every few years, but also with great excitement. The restlessness AL felt after living in Maryland for four years is as much an impatience to move, to be mobile again, as it is a sense of boredom with the place. Likewise, Lynn depicts her mobility with an open, forward-looking, energetic acceptance. Of all the youth I interviewed, she was most enthusiastic about moving. That Lynn embraces mobility is less surprising given that she grew up in a family that actively downplayed the normativity of rootedness and the hardships of moving, portraying mobility instead as an adventure. Lynn's experiences suggest that it is easier to accept and welcome mobility in an environment in which it is perceived as fun, exciting, or empowering.

117 Responding to Mobility In the previous section I explored some of the ways that mobility contextualizes the daily experiences of military youth as a normalizing and formative force. Yet its continual presence does not necessarily make mobility easy, as military youth frequently interact with peers who present more rooted experiences. In light of this it is worth examining the array of ways that military youth respond to their mobility through practices of settling and homemaking.

Uprooting and resettling It is possible to see a military childhood as one of gradual migration punctuated by moments of rest. This transition from movement to rest happens several times for military youth, and it entails a period of adjustment and resettling in new accommodations. The adjustment often takes place in a completely unfamiliar environment: not just a new town or neighborhood, but a new climate, a new landscape, even a new part of the world, distant from friends and family. In response to the frequency with which they move, the distances between moves, and the limited social networks they have on arrival, military youth develop a number of adaptive strategies to settle in to their new surroundings. During their interviews, I asked my participants what helped them settle in to new places. The strategies they used were consistent from one place to the next, but reflected their individual approaches to the world. I identified six broad categories of responses among my participants: practices, social engagement, organizations and activities, possessions, inner qualities, and time. I list each category with the number of responses in order of popularity in Table 8, below. As with my classification of definitions of home, there is inevitably an element of arbitrariness in these categories and how responses were assigned to them. Regardless, I have done my best to respect the content of my participants' responses and to categorize them as consistently as possible.

118 Category Responses Practices 35 Organizations and Activities 18 Social Support 17 Possessions 2 Inner Qualities 2 Time 1

Table 8: Strategies of settling into new places.30 The most common strategies that my participants used to settle in to new places were specific practices: exploring the new living space or area, creating or finding personal space, keeping up daily routines, and unpacking. The settling-in practices my participants reported are spatial in nature and serve two purposes. First, settling-in practices enable many of my participants to become accustomed to being in a new place. This is particularly true of the 11 participants who stated that they like to explore their new surroundings: “I like to go out and explore. I'll go walk around like the entire place. Listening to music, and… That's what – I want to know, I want to be able to navigate where I'm going. So that's how I, like, settle in, is I go and I learn the new place.” (KB) Second, in addition to becoming familiar with new places, my participants used settling-in practices to actively claim or create meaningful personal spaces. Of the youth I interviewed, 11 talked about finding or creating spaces as an end in and of itself: “…I have a ritual that I do. Whenever we move, the first thing that I do is I will unload my clothes and then me and my dog, we get in the truck or my Jeep – whichever one that I have at the time – and we drive around. And we try to find our – I try to find my one spot that I can go to that's not too crowded for whenever it gets overwhelmed…And we just stay out there for a little bit and we'll come back and we'll get that done, but that's what normally helps me, is being able to go and immediately find that one place to where it's, you know, hey this is my territory, you know, no one knows where I'm going, it's my spot.” (TC) For others, the key to finding or creating personal space is unpacking and decorating: “Unpacking, like, decorating my room with – not painting, 'cause we can't, but just taking everything out of the boxes. […] It makes it feel like it's my own individual space, so, I mean it's a new place, but my room still feels and looks similar to what it did before…” (AF) For these participants, settling in entails creating familiar and comfortable environments: creating and shaping specific kind of places out of new spaces. For seven of my participants,

30 The total number of responses exceeds 43 because several participants relied on multiple strategies. I discuss this in more detail at the end of this section. 119 settling in meant engaging in familiar routines: “Just sticking to like routine stuff that you usually do. Like, I like to run and other stuff; I just keep doing them and then eventually you get settled in.” (NR) For youth like NR, the process of settling in is no less spatial than it is for those like AF; it is just a less overt spatial ordering. For NR and youth like him, settling in entails inscribing one's daily patterns onto new spaces until they become habitual or unconscious. In contrast to the place- making practices I described above, in which the youth explore or claim new space for themselves, the emphasis for the routine-oriented youth I interviewed is on adapting one's existing habits to a new space. While spatial practices were by far the most common strategies my participants reported, they were not the only ones. Strategies based on organizations and activities were also popular. School, sports teams, churches, hobbies, and jobs all provide a structured means for embedding oneself in the rhythms of a new place: “…we would get involved in all these different sports as well as different organizations, so like we would really get involved with our youth group or different clubs…in our school or something, just to get involved and start meeting new people and growing accustomed to the new life.” (ML)

“…a lot of the times the local churches, they tend to have a lot of activities for the youth, and a lot of like get-to-know-you sort of activities. And so that way you're able to meet people within your age group. For me, academics and sports also help because no matter where you move to, algebra's still going to be algebra, so it gave me something familiar to work with…” (LE) Organizations and activities enables these participants to settle in a few different ways: first, they provide structure to one's environment. For example, school offers a strict temporal structure on daily, weekly, and annual cycles; it also gives youth a well-defined and obligatory set of subject matter with which to engage. Second, these structures are familiar to youth. As LE points out, the relative consistency of academics makes it familiar even in new places. Likewise, sports and hobbies create familiar and structured environments in which youth can spend considerable amounts of time. Third, organizations and activities provide ready-made social networks. While youth generally build social connections outside organizations or activities, having a position to play on a team, an academic subject at which one excels (be it math, music, or history), or an active role in an extra-curricular or church group may help speed up the process by giving new arrivals a visible and defined role in an already existing structure. Thus, unlike spatial practices, which military youth use to familiarize themselves with new places, participation in 120 organizations and activities enable military youth to establish themselves within new communities. Some of the youth I interviewed identified social support as an important means of settling in to new places. I categorize this as a standalone category because my participants seemed to distinguish between loose, informal social support from more formal involvement in organizations and activities. These participants' responses demonstrate the importance of social support to settling in: “…I think my family definitely does. I mean, like I said, that's always kind of been like – I feel like I'm really close to my family…I feel like I'm probably closer to them than maybe most people, because no matter where I moved, like my family was always kind of common, that was like a common thread throughout everything.” (Tim)

“I guess family support, just kind of reminding me that I can do it. And it's just a new experience, it's nothing bad, it's just I'm gonna get to experience more.” (LW)

“…meeting people in that place, because I'm a very social person, so having a lot of friends is something that is pretty key to who I am, so once I have some pretty solid friends, I feel like I'm pretty settled into a certain place.” (VC) The youth I interviewed relied on social support in two distinct ways: some, like Tim and LW, turned to immediate family, while others, such as VC, sought new friends. As Tim points out, immediate family act as a constant for many military youth; their presence may provide a sense of consistency and familiarity from place to place. In addition just being there, family members sometimes provide active support by listening to and encouraging military youth when they are unsure of themselves in a new place, as LW's response suggests. More extraverted military youth, like VC, find that friendships help them settle in. Importantly, of the eight participants who said that friendships help them settle in, all of them were referring to making new friendships rather than turning to existing friends (via social media, etc.) for moral support. For them, having familiar, sympathetic people around may be less important than making connections to people whose presence may eventually become familiar and sympathetic. A few participants identified other important strategies they used for settling in, hinging on possessions, inner qualities, and time. Two responded that they felt settled in when they had access to their possessions: “I guess what helps me get settled, believe it or not, the first part of helping me get settled was

121 seeing the moving truck. I would get so excited. I don't know if it was different for you, but when I saw the moving truck, I would literally jump up and down with joy 'cause I saw my stuff. When I got that, it was like, okay, I got my stuff, life is easier. Let's do this.” (AM)

“…you always have, you know, that one picture, or those – my grandparents were missionaries down in South America and Central America, so they had random stuff, like a huge fork, a wooden carved fork. A huge spoon went with it. So they were ugly and weird, but whenever they went up on the wall, they were just familiar things, so you know, it was – and you know we rented every house that we had, so it was never our house in terms of being able to paint it or do any work on it. So yeah, I guess those familiar items being around were what basically made it, okay, this is where we're living now.” (SB) For AM, the excitement that comes with the arrival of the moving truck is the starting point for settling in, signifying the presence of her possessions and the comfort that comes with it. For SB, having specific familiar objects on the walls marks the new space as his family's living space. In both cases, having one's possessions is less constitutive of settling in than it is symbolic of the settling-in process; for AM and SB, having familiar possessions around them is a reminder that they are allowed to feel comfortable in a new space. I was initially surprised that more of the youth I interviewed did not talk about relying on familiar objects in this way – but two factors mitigated this. First, while the military pays to relocate personnel and their families, those payments are limited based on weight allowances. Consequently, many military youth are expected to purge their belongings before moving to avoid exceeding those weight allowances. Second, possessions are sometimes lost, stolen, or broken during moves. One of my participants reflected on her experiences of losing prized possessions: “…while it's easier to not worry so much about moving from place to place, I think that in a way things can become important because things do get lost in a move. And so I can remember being sad about things being destroyed or lost in a move. Because in a way that was the only stuff I felt like I was carrying with me, and so it was sad when that was the story. […] I lost every single one of my horse show ribbons. I'd been riding for like 15 years, so it was a giant box of my entire hobby. That stunk. [laughs] But you know, it's okay, like at the same time now you learn to move on from these things.” (HB) As a result of voluntarily (or semi-voluntarily) giving up possessions or losing them during moves, some military youth become less attached to objects, and thus may not find them useful for the setting-in process. For those who do find possessions useful, they may act as signaling agents as they are for AM and SB, or perhaps incorporated into place-making practices through

122 arranging and decorating, as AF's comments above suggest. When asked what helps them settle in to new places, two participants referred to inner qualities, or aspects of their personalities: “My ability to make friends quickly. I think we develop that as military kids, a sense of like having to speedily make friends and being a people person. A lot of us are people-people. I make friends really easily and I can make them fast, so that really has helped me out with transitioning anywhere I move.” (Andrew)

“…it was probably high school that I finally, what I started to do was I just learned to be myself and that helped me settle down, because while most of the people around me, especially at the military bases…these people would come being, you know, their own personality, their own individual, and then they felt like they had to mold themselves to fit in with this new community. While I feel what makes me get settled is the exact opposite. I stay myself, I find my niche, and I become happy that way.” (Lynn) For Andrew, it is not the actual process of making friends, but his ability to make friends that helps him settle in to new places. This is not just a semantic difference: for some military youth, making friends may be important to settling somewhere new, but they may find the process difficult. Andrew's response suggests a subtle confidence in himself that may facilitate making friends. Lynn argues that being herself – as opposed to assimilating to a particular peer group – is what helps her settle in to new places. For her, knowing and performing her sense of self is what allows her to adjust to new places. In both cases, settling in hinges on the consistency of inner qualities that drive the process of making friends rather than the act itself. The optimism and self-confidence inherent in both Lynn's and Andrew's responses may be crucial to settling in to new places. Finally, one participant's response took me by surprise: “…I guess it just takes time, really. I mean, it really – time, it just takes time.” (Jessica) What is surprising about Jessica's response here is that none of the other youth I interviewed made explicit mention of time, given that it is one of the central components of becoming rooted in place. Nevertheless, it is integral to many of the strategies I have discussed in this section: exploring, unpacking, inscribing daily routines onto new spaces; establishing oneself at school, on teams, or within churches; and creating friendships and support structures all take time.

123 Mobility and home During my interviews, I asked the participants whether they felt that moving affects how they think about home. It was one of the very last questions of each interview, loaded with the weight of everything that came before it: stories of places they had lived, reflections on place identity and moving, musings on settling down, observations of the differences between military and civilian life, the occasional appeal for people to better understand the military. The responses to this question were overwhelming: only six participants said that moving did not affect how they think about home. Half of them had spent considerably longer in a single place than the other youth in the study; two others argued that they would always think of home as family. Of the other 37 participants, 31 responded that moving does affect how they think about home. An additional two offered a mixed “yes-and-no” response, and four others said they were unsure but the content of their responses suggested that moving has a similar impact for them as for the majority of participants. More important than the numbers here are the ways that participants said moving affected their ideas of home. As I discussed extensively in the previous chapter, many of the youth I interviewed redefined home as a response to the mobility of military life. Yet this is not the only way that moving potentially affects how military youth think about home. Four additional themes emerged in this part of the interviews. First, it prompted comparisons between military and civilian life. Second, their responses revealed that some military youth accept (at least in part) traditional ideas of home. Third, some felt they had a more complicated understanding of home because of their mobility. Fourth, for some, mobility is a catalyst for reflexivity. In this section I discuss these themes. In addition, I address why some participants said that moving did not affect how they think about home. For some of the youth I interviewed, my question about whether they thought moving affected how they think about home prompted them to draw comparisons between their experiences and the experiences of rooted civilian friends. In these moments, the differences between their lives are made stark: “I do. 'Cause I definitely have noticed people that have lived in one place for a long time, when they finally get up to move, like if they leave for college or something, they consider home back in their town where they grew up, you know, that's – for them, that's everything they know, and. So for me, it's just, I move all the time, I don't really have a hometown, so I think of home as just wherever I'm most comfortable, and that's with my family.” (EC)

124 “I think it does…There's a lot of people I know that don't move. For example, my girlfriend – and she can't go two weeks away from home, and I'm like 'but you are home, you live here, your stuff's here, then why isn't this home?' Then she's like 'it's not home, I don't have anything here, all my stuff's at home,' and she gets depressed after two weeks and I get depressed if I'm at home – my parents' home – for more than two weeks. So I think it has affected my concept of home. And it's more of – I think that's what makes it a weaker term for me, is that home is something that's – I can move around and just wherever you happen to decide it is.” (JV) For EC, moving made having a hometown a foreign concept. She contrasts this with her observations of rooted peers: from her perspective, growing up in one place gave them not only a childhood hometown, but a sense that home will always be that childhood hometown, even when they move away. She redefines home for herself, but the comparison between rootedness and mobility is implicit in how she redefines it. For JV, the comparison is more pointed: his girlfriend is from a small town in Pennsylvania, where her family has lived for four generations. During his interview, he remarked: “I don't even know my second cousin, she knows her like fourth cousins and they all live in [the same small town] or somewhere nearby. And that's just like – blows my mind. I can't even imagine it.” (JV) He explained that his girlfriend intends to return to this town and live there indefinitely after graduating from college, which is unfathomable to him; at the time of interview, he was in ROTC and planned on going active duty after graduation. JV sees his girlfriend as being deeply attached to her hometown, but his experiences of moving have unmoored his sense of home from any particular place. His response underscores intense differences on a fundamental aspect of everyday life. Both EC and JV reject traditional discursive constructions of home in favor of something that matches their experiences, but this is not true for all military youth. Some accept traditional ideas of home – and feel a sense of loss because of it: “I think when most people think of a home or their home, they think of maybe the house that they grew up in, or the town that they grew up in. And not having that, you have the abstract feel– like the thought, the feeling of what home is, not an actual building. I can go to my fiance's, you know, what he thinks home is, his parents' house – but I can't take him there, I can try to show him how I feel when I'm with my family, and this is what home means. Home means all of us being together and sharing a meal.” (AE)

125 “Look, I know what the concept of home is, I know what home feels like in the sense of – I guess I really don’t because I never really had a home. But I had houses, you know, and I think that it was beneficial to me to have that because I don’t... I don’t really associate things or materials or anything with, you know, stability. If that makes sense. I don’t know if that made any sense.” (Troy) AE and Troy alike have a sense of home. Both of them know what home feels like – but they are also aware that their senses of home, by traditional standards, are missing something: they are unemplaced. By this, I do not just mean that their senses of home are placeless, which suggests a sense of aimlessness (not to mention connotations of attenuation, as in Relph), but that they are intentionally without place. Both AE and Troy consciously choose not to embed their sense of home in any given place, and this is perhaps unsurprising, as neither of them expressed strong attachments to place. What is crucial here is that they are in the peculiar position of accepting, to some degree, traditional ideas of home (and thus see themselves as lacking something) while simultaneously redefining home and refusing to emplace it (and thus not portraying themselves as homeless). As the difficulties they both had expressing this position attest, it is a fine and sometimes troubling line of thought – made more so because it does not fall easily within the prevailing cultural discourses of home. Some sidestep the awkwardness of this position by facing it directly and claiming a complicated sense of home. For example, when I asked Lynn whether moving affected how she thinks about home, she replied: “...it definitely does, just because, I don't know. To me, my home is temporary. Especially with what I want to do with my life, it's a temporary home. While a lot of people, it's like this is where my stuff is, or this is where I'm moving, so this is my home. Like this is my home. And I'm just like, it is kind of my home. [laughs] Like, that's uh – especially since being in college and moving around all the time, I'm just like, this is home for the moment. It's not going to stay that way. And that's a way that I find most of my friends don't tend to think.” (Lynn) The daughter of a high-ranking officer in the Marine Corps, Lynn hopes to do public relations for the military – with the understanding (and hope) that this would require her to stay mobile. She talks about home as a partial, temporary phenomenon: by emphasizing a place as “kind of” her home, she acknowledges the complexity of thinking of a place as home when she knows that her residence in that place is short-term, and that home is traditionally constructed as long-term. Rather than seeing herself as being entirely without a traditional home, she takes a middle ground in which she claims some aspects of home or claims them to a degree. This effectively

126 enables her to think of anywhere as a partial, temporary, or complicated home that shares some similarities with her rooted/civilian peers' ideas of home, but still resonates with her lived experiences. For some of the youth I interviewed, the impact of mobility was that it made them more reflexive. For example, DL states that his mobility has made it harder to respond to questions about home: “Because I cannot be – it’s not as easily defined for me now. I cannot, you know, answer people’s questions that easily, and I guess I just have to think more about it, and... I think that’s okay.” (DL) For DL, like many of the youth I interviewed, mobility has forced him to confront and consider his unusual position among more rooted peers. What stands out is his awareness of this fact, and the implication of an underlying normativity regarding the interplay of mobility and home: if his experiences were more typical or more closely aligned with normative expectations, he would not have to think about it. EA's reflections echo DL's, neatly capturing the difficulties many military youth face when trying to define home for themselves: “Yeah. Because it's made me think about how I think about home. I think most people, home is where they've always lived, maybe not the same house, but always the same town or county, and, you know, when you've moved, you have to kind of sit back and contemplate, well, where is home, because people ask you, and because it's important to know. Um, I guess it really like introduces a certain amount of like introspection in general.” (EA) Almost everyone I interviewed had, at one point or another, thought about their mobility and how it shaped their ideas of home; this kind of reflexivity is arguably the most pervasive impact that mobility has had on my participants' thoughts about home. There were, however, a small number of participants who argued that their mobility had no impact on how they think about home. Among them were TC and Jessica, who offer contrasting responses to this question. For TC, home is Texas, regardless of where he is living at the time: “No, it wouldn't. I don't think it would. You know, I can always say that my home-home, you know, my home is in Texas, you know that's my home state. But as far as does it affect my home? No, my home is always wherever my family is. And, if my parents were, you know, in North Carolina, I will always refer to that as home, because that's where my mom and dad are. You know, and they're the, they're the head of households, so. I don't think moving has a whole lot to do with it, it's just wherever they're at is kinda home.” (TC) As I mentioned in the previous chapter, TC's father left the Marine Corps when TC was three and

127 moved the family to his hometown in Texas, where they lived for the next ten years. As a result, TC spent a substantial part of his childhood near extended family and only began to experience residential mobility again when he was 13 and his father enlisted in the Army; he expressed strong feelings about Texas and his identity as a Texan throughout his interview. His experiences are somewhat atypical of the youth in this study: he spent a decade in one place among extended family during a part of his childhood when most of the other youth I interviewed were moving once every two or three years, and was considerably more attached to places than most. Jessica also stated that she felt that moving had no effect on how she thinks about home, but for a very different reason: “No, because I think that, I mean, my family doesn't – it's my family, so it doesn't really matter. I guess, even if you lived in the same place for like your whole entire life, you'll always have your family. So I don't think it affects it.” (Jessica) I followed up by asking her whether she thought she would think about home the same way if she had grown up in one place. She replied, “Yup. Yeah, because I'm just that type of person.” Her experiences of mobility do not impact her ideas about home because she defines home as family. My follow-up question was probably unfair, but her response is nonetheless enlightening: it reveals that she does not associate her residential mobility with her definition of home. Overall, my participants' experiences and reflections suggest that lived experiences of residential mobility are deeply intertwined with personal constructions of home. This importance of this is threefold: first, it stands as a reminder that military youth are just as subject to military discourses about mobility as they are to broader American discourses of home. In reflecting on experiences of mobility and how they define home, military youth must negotiate two very different sets of cultural discourses, which may appeal equally to them. Second, it demonstrates the pervasiveness of traditional constructions of home, even in a highly mobile subculture. While many military youth successfully redefine home in ways that resonate more comfortably with their experiences, they often do so with the awareness that traditional constructions may be out of reach for them, and thus their constructions take on a reactionary tone. Finally, it demonstrates the potential for mobility to be a formative force in people's lives. For many of the youth I interviewed, mobility was the defining factor of military life; its impact was pervasive in that it often shaped how they think about home – and how they think about their own identities.

128 Discussion The reflections and observations of my participants reveal several significant points about mobility, military life, and home that are relevant to the new mobilities paradigm. First, the residential mobility of the U.S. military is very different from the residential mobility that typifies civil society. This difference lies partly in the frequency and scale of mobility: military youth move both farther and more frequently than their civilian peers. Consequently, the mobility experienced by military youth falls between the categories recognized in the literature. Second, although military youth share some similarities to other mobile subjects, their experiences of mobility bear some differences that sharply distinguish them. Like other mobile youth, they often experience mobility as a hardship: my participants often spoke of the difficulties leaving friends behind, feelings of isolation or exclusion among rooted/civilian peers, and a sense of loss at living far away from extended family. What makes military youth unusual is that their mobility is normalized, formative, and – as I will demonstrate in the next chapter – militarized. This combination makes them unique among mobile subjects: they expect to move often because of their connection to the military, and they see their mobility as a force that has shaped their development. This is a combination that has been ignored in the mobilities literature. Most of the military youth I interviewed generally accepted and expected their mobility, and many of them stated that they preferred moving over staying in place. While the literature on young people's geographies addresses some aspects of mobility, very few authors have considered the experiences of youth for whom residential mobility is expected on a semi-regular basis. Despite considerable focus on street life and homeless youth (e.g., Ursin 2011), Travelers (e.g., Vanderbeck 2005), and asylum-seekers (e.g., Sirriyeh 2010), more banal forms of residential mobility have been widely overlooked. Qualitative analyses of normalized residential mobilities are absent almost entirely, and where it exists (Hatfield 2010), it focuses on a very short-term kind of mobility. The experiences Hatfield describe are the equivalent of a single tour of duty; by contrast, military youth expect to experience roughly seven to ten tours in their childhoods. In short, when it comes to frequency and expectation, military youth experience a level of residential mobility that is unequaled to that of other mobile subjects. In light of the emphasis on homelessness, diaspora, and transnationalism, it is little surprise that geographers have paid little attention to the role of restlessness in mobile

129 childhoods. Yet far from being fleeting or inconsequential, restlessness is a key aspect of a military childhood: the reflections of the youth I interviewed were saturated with expressions of restlessness, of waiting for the next move, of feeling antsy, stuck, anxious, or ready to move somewhere new. This restlessness sets military youth apart not only from other mobile subjects, but also from their civilian peers, and is a potentially marginalizing force for military youth that operates over and above their lack of longstanding relationships within a given community. While residential mobility was often disruptive for the military youth I interviewed, they emphasized its formative power. They overwhelmingly saw themselves as flexible and adaptable because of their mobility, even if they resented specific moves. The idea of mobility as formative is powerful and deserves more attention from mobilities scholars. By focusing on the immediate hardships of building community in new places or of maintaining one's identity in turbulent circumstances, we risk reproducing the sedentarist mindset (Malkki 1992; Cresswell 2006) that favors the negotiation of place-based identities and overlooks the deeply internalized and long- term impacts of mobility on one's sense of self. That mobility is formative has been established in the recollections of adults who grew up in military families (e.g., Truscott 1989; Wertsch 199; Ender 2002; Williams & Mariglia 2002), but little work has addressed this from the perspective of military youth directly, and even less has considered it from the more critical perspectives of youth geographies or the new mobilities paradigm. Third, the experiences of military youth demonstrate the importance among mobile youth of alternatives to material homemaking practices. Homemaking practices built on the accumulation and display of material goods are well documented among adults (e.g., Blunt & Dowling 2006; Gallent 2007; Gorman-Murray 2007), including cases of temporary residence and transnational migration (Parrott 2005; Basu & Coleman 2008; Ralph & Staeheli 2011). Hatfield (2010) finds that this is also true of mobile youth, for whom decorating walls may signal the acceptance of a place as home – while leaving them blank may indicate both an acknowledgment that one's residence is temporary and a rejection of that temporary residence as home. The practices of the youth I interviewed provide an interesting counterpoint to these findings. In light of their highly mobile nature, the need to stay below military weight allowances for PCS moves, and the potential for favorite objects to get lost in transit, many military youth find ways of settling in to new places that rely less on material objects and more on social and spatial practices. All of the youth I interviewed relied on one or two key strategies that they used

130 to adjust to new places. Social practices were among the most commonly cited means of settling in. Getting involved in organizations and activities, and making new friends were popular strategies of settling in. That practices like these facilitate settling in is conventional wisdom within the military community – yet it is missing from academic considerations of mobile subjects, and of mobile youth in particular. Typically, the youth I interviewed combined social practices with spatial practices when settling in to new places. There is a material component to this: unpacking and arranging their personal effects is part of this process, and in some cases my participants' reflections echo those of Hatfield's. Choosing, decorating, and arranging their rooms was an important way of claiming personal space. Yet my participants relied heavily on exploration and other spatial practices as a means of settling in: they often relied on adapting, habituating, and inscribing established daily routines and practices on new spaces; exploring their surroundings to familiarize themselves with the area; and seeking out and claiming “secret” spaces of autonomy, privacy, contemplation, or comfort. My research suggests that the process of actively searching for and establishing personal spaces may provide a sense of stability as a reliable and effective adjustment strategy for military youth that is overlooked by their parents and other structuring forces. Finally, the experiences of these military youth shed light on the relationship between home and mobility in the United States. That mobility and home are theoretical linked is already well established, especially in the literatures on transnational migrants (consider, e.g., Wiles 2008; Ralph & Staeheli 2011) and homelessness (e.g., May 2000). The reflections of my participants support this connection and provide some insight into the nature of that connection. For many of the youth I interviewed, mobility and home were co-constructions. Yet this co- construction operated in differently in each direction: it was impossible for military youth to discuss home without acknowledging their mobility, but their reflections on mobility more often prompted comments about rootedness than they did about home. This points to a culturally-mediated perceptual difference in how military youth think about home. In constructing home within a highly mobile context, many of them simultaneously buy into and work against what they perceive to be the norm for their civilian peers: home as rooted in place, surrounded by extended family and buttressed by longstanding relationships with peers and localized organizations. When they situate themselves as mobile, they often compare themselves to civilians and reconstruct home in opposition to the idyllic and static image they

131 have of civilian life – and in doing so, military youth reify traditional constructions of home before using their mobility to subvert them.

132 Chapter VIII Rescaling Home: Identity, Geopolitics, and Mobility

In the previous two chapters, I discussed the ways that military youth think about home in light of their mobility, and how they accommodate their mobility into their lived experiences. Yet there is an additional layer of complexity: issues of home and mobility for military youth cannot be decontextualized from the military itself. I have argued from the beginning that the position of military youth with respect to the military places them in a unique social context relative to their peers, and that this relationship is pervasive in ways that many scholars overlook. Threads of national security and readiness interweave with everyday lived experience in ways that militarize mobility, identity, and home, and that ultimately place military youth on the geopolitical stage. While I have always conceptualized military youth as militarized, examining their status as geopolitical entities was not originally part of my research plan. Yet it quickly became apparent that just as militarization is integral to their identities and their lived experiences of home and mobility, so is their position within the geopolitical sphere equally integral to expanding our broader political understandings of home. It is with this in mind, in this chapter I combine the cultural perspective of the previous two chapters with a geopolitical perspective. The path to understanding military youth as geopolitical entities is sinuous. In tracing the contour line of militarization, this chapter by necessity wends and spirals through several topics. My aim is to reveal and elucidate the links between these topics, and in doing so provide a foundation for understanding the geopolitical position of military youth. In brief, I argue that they are made geopolitical in part by the militarization of mobility, identity, and home; and in part by rescalings of home and identity. I also argue that processes of militarization recast the military itself as a kind of place. Where it is possible, I support my argument by placing my interview data in conversation with some primary source data in the form of military regulations, policies, and reports. The structure of this chapter follows the argument. In the first section, I discuss militarization as a cultural force that plays out across mobility, identity, and home. In the second section, I discuss the political rescaling of home and identity. In the third section, I synthesize the preceding material and theorize military youth and home in terms of the geopolitical.

133 Militarization I went into this research with the suspicion that militarization is an important factor in the lives of military youth. My interview data bore out this suspicion: military youth are embedded in military structures, and they internalize military culture. This was clear not only from my participants' words, but also from military policies and reports. What I gleaned from the data is that militarization operates in two ways in the lives of military youth. First, militarization works on the cultural and political contexts that shape their everyday, lived experiences. Second, militarization works directly and indirectly on military youth themselves through cultural systems. In this section, I examine how these two pathways of militarization operate across mobility, identity, and home, balancing military regulations and data against the experiences of my participants.

Militarized mobilities Military youth enter a world in which mobility is always-already militarized; discourses of national security and readiness ensure this. The standard line is that defending national security interests (broadly defined) is predicated upon readiness, and readiness requires mobility. Statements about readiness appear frequently in publications such as the annual Department of the Army Historical Summary (DAHSUM) and the annual Army Posture Statement (APS). For example: “Readiness to meet any threat to the nation's security is the primary mission of the U.S. Army in peacetime. The single most important factor in readiness, often overlooked or taken for granted in discussions of sophisticated equipment and weapons systems, is people. Ultimately the readiness of the entire force depends on the individual soldier” (Cocke et al., 1980, 46). The individual soldier's responsibility to readiness means accepting reassignment based on the military's needs; reassignment puts “the right Solider in the right job at the right time” (AR 600- 8-11). The implication is that readiness requires the ability not only to mobilize and deploy soldiers at a moment's notice, but also to rotate them through various assignments in the United States and overseas. At its heart, readiness is a nomadic proposition. Having established the militarization of mobility in general, I now want to turn to three specific factors that direct the ways that military youth experience militarized mobility: global geopolitics, military structures, and military personnel. These three factors combine to determine the residential paths along which military youth travel. I discuss each of these in turn, using my

134 participants' experiences to illustrate my argument. Finally, I consider how the military handles mobility with respect to dependent youth. The position of the United States in global geopolitics determines the locations of U.S. military bases throughout the world. This sets a kind of upper limit on the potential geographic range of residential mobility for military personnel. For military families (including youth), the range is further refined by the state of international relations: the US military will allow families of military personnel to live on US military bases located in areas of the world considered stable and friendly – but not in areas with real potential for conflict. Furthermore, global geopolitics and the strategic decisions that arise from them determine where personnel are most needed, and thus determine the bases where personnel are most likely to be stationed. In this sense, militarization at the global scale becomes intimate as geopolitics threads its way into individual families and creates potential paths of movement. Yet not all personnel are equally likely to be stationed on a given installation. Military structures play an equally important role: branch, occupational specialty, rank, and personnel needs typically dictate where personnel are stationed at any point in time. For example, one of my participants (KF) lived at Fort Rucker, Alabama on three separate occasions because her father is a helicopter pilot and the installation is a major center for Army aviation. This repeated stationing shows up on her map with a kind of star-shaped pattern as her family moved away and back again (see Map 1).31 Likewise, another participant's residential history is marked by her father's changing specialties as an Army doctor: “…his job has a little bit to do with how the map looks, because we lived – we kept moving from and back to Maryland, and all the towns I lived in in Maryland are actually in the same county, and he worked at the same hospital. So what happened was, he was there for a while and then we moved to Texas, and I think when we were in Texas he changed specialties from radiology to nuclear medicine, and so then they needed him back at Walter Reed. They sent us away for a year and then they realized that they needed him again. So it was nice in that sense, 'cause I kept on getting to go back – not to exactly the same place, but pretty much the same place. So I don't know how much choice he had in that aspect, but he definitely made himself valued at one place so that we could stay relatively stable.” (CA) It is difficult to know the extent to which her father's decision to switch specialties was intended to keep the family returning to Maryland, but this was its ultimate effect (see Map 2). Regardless of whether CA's father's choice was deliberate, decision-making is an

31 All maps can be found in Appendix E. 135 important factor for many military families. As they gain seniority, military personnel are often given the ability to choose between specific assignments. This grants them, to a limited extent, the ability to determine how far they are willing to move. Theoretically, this breaks down into three potential approaches to mobility: in the first, personnel accept assignments that would keep them relatively close to family or within a specific region. In the second, personnel are more adventurous, accepting multiple overseas assignments or positions at bases as far away from one another as possible. In the third, personnel accept unaccompanied tours in order to keep their families in place. In addition, military personnel may choose to house their families off base (often referred to as living “on the economy”), and sometimes buy property. I saw instances of some of these approaches in my interviews. One participant's experiences provide a clear example of how these factors often combine for military families. Prior to retirement, Ana's parents had both reached E-6 – her mother in the Army, and her father in the Marine Corps. At the time of interview, she had been living in El Paso, Texas for ten years; her mother had retired there while stationed at Fort Bliss (see Map 3). The way Ana explains it, her parents had been given orders to Hawaii but had requested Fort Bliss – in part because her father had a chronic medical condition and Fort Bliss was “one of the bases that was prepared to take him,” and in part because it would be closer to her mother's family, who lived about five hours away in Tuscon, Arizona. They negotiated this with the understanding that after this assignment, they would be stationed overseas. The situation changed, however, as Ana explains: “...we've been living here for over ten years. Because – I kinda made my mom get stuck here…My mom left after six years and took an overseas assignment, so that I could stay here and finish school, 'cause I had joined a magnet program…” (Ana) Ana explained that shortly after she had been accepted to this program, her mother had received new orders that would have taken them from El Paso to Fort Huachuca, Arizona – closer to her mother's family in Tuscon: “…I was like, 'Mom, I don't want to leave.' She's like, 'Well, you kinda have no choice. I get orders, we're gone.' And I'm like, 'But, Mom!' So she chose – she's turned down Fort Huachuca school to go teach, and she came back here…then deployed my whole high school year. So she kinda gave up her dream of getting out of El Paso, and getting back near home, which is Tuscon for her, and going and teaching which not many people are asked to do. To this day, I'm like, 'Why did you do it?' She's like, 'Well, you loved your school…' So she got stuck here, which is uncommon because this is a two to three year post for military intelligence…she got stuck in one unit for six years. And then she requested two years overseas in Qatar, which is also uncommon

136 because usually if you request it, it's one year. So she extended for two, which was great for me, I mean I got to go to high school…but looking back I'm like, 'Mom, you were nuts.'” (Ana) This situation demonstrates the ways that personnel choices influence residential paths: Ana's parents turned down one assignment (at Hawaii) in favor of another (at Fort Bliss) in part because it would keep them closer to family. In addition, her mother requested unaccompanied overseas tours so that Ana could finish high school in this particular program. For Ana, that meant being relatively immobile – something that she felt made her unusual within the military brat community: “…I've lived here for ten years. But it's been interesting and it's been a growing experience. 'Cause unlike most military kids, I didn't leave. I stayed here, and I watched everybody else leave, everybody else come in, which not most military brats can claim they got to do.” (Ana) Ana's residential history begins in Germany and has her moving to Kentucky, Arizona, and Louisiana, and ends in Texas, reflecting her parents' desire to stay close to extended family. By contrast, other participants' residential histories show a substantially broader geographic range than is typical of the youth I interviewed, with multiple overseas tours. Among my participants, 29 reported living overseas as a result of their parents' military service. Of those, only nine lived overseas more than once: seven reported two overseas residences and two – AF and Tim – lived in three. AF was born in Kansas and lived in South Dakota before her family accepted three consecutive overseas tours in Germany, Japan, and Guam (see Map 4). Tim was born in Germany and lived in Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, South Korea, Kansas, Texas, Egypt, and Maryland before graduating high school (see Map 5). It is impossible to know whether AF's or Tim's families chose to move these long distances, or whether they requested so many overseas assignments. Although it sometimes came up during interviews, I did not ask my participants explicitly about their parents' attitudes toward moving. Yet the number of places they lived overseas and the amount of time they spent there, and the fact that so few of the youth I interviewed were abroad more than once suggest that AF's and Tim's parents took a more adventurous approach to moving. Decisions made by personnel may mitigate militarization to a degree, but the combination of occupational specialty, military structures, and the United States' position within global geopolitics all effectively militarize the residential mobility that military youth experience. Moreover, by and large, military youth are aware of this fact. They recognize that their parents' military service necessitates moving, differentiating themselves from civilians on the basis of not

137 just mobility, but militarized mobility: “I mean, I definitely think that I guess, especially mobility, 'cause I feel like that's probably the most potent thing of being a military kid, um, is – and I know it varies from case to case and I'm probably on the upper spectrum of how many times people moved and how many places I've lived – because I've had military friends who've moved twice or something maybe, or never went overseas, so maybe their definition of what being a military kid is is different, but I would say that for me at least mobility is probably the most important and most interesting.” (Tim) Thus Tim identifies mobility as the defining characteristic of military youth while acknowledging that the experience of mobility is uneven across military families. Some military youth recognize that civilians also move, but argue that their experiences of mobility are very different: “I've had a lot of people try to talk to me as if they understand the military life, but they have no idea where I'm – or they may think that they've moved a lot, but it's like, a different neighborhood or just into a different school into the same city. That's not the same at all.” (LW) Here, LW emphasizes the long-distance nature of military residential mobility. Her observations echo the Census Bureau findings that the vast majority of civilian moves are short distance and suggest that the long-distance moves of military life constitutes a vastly different experience. Yet the distance of moves is only one factor that differentiates military and civilian mobility; as LE points out, the mobility of military life is suffused with a very heavy sense of military service: “There will be four year olds that can explain to you that, Yeah their dad might die in the war in Afghanistan, but that's his duty and that's his job, it's part of protecting the country. And we all totally believe that, 'cause if we didn't believe it, your dad or mom will die for nothing. And that, it all [stems] back like to moving, like, yeah it sucks when you have to move again, but at the same time, like, there's that duty to…sense of pride that like that you're able to sacrifice it for your country.” (LE) Thus moving is not only a direct consequence of military life, but also a militarized responsibility: national security and readiness require mobility of military families. Some military youth may thus see it as their duty to go willingly, knowing that their mobility is a cost of their parents' military service. The military recognizes that there are culturally-mediated limits to the mobility it can impose on personnel and their families, and so it actively negotiates and renegotiates this demand, producing a constant tension between the dictates of readiness and the desire for some stability on the part of personnel and their families. Official documentation has long acknowledged the impact that mobility can have on morale. For example, a DAHSUM report 138 published shortly before the transition to an all-volunteer force observed: “It is Army policy that permanent-change-of-station travel for military personnel is based upon necessity. Excessive movement of personnel is expensive, disruptive to readiness, and detrimental to morale. Efforts are being made to reduce both the number and frequency of moves in order to achieve greater continuity, assignment stability, and monetary savings” (Bell 1973, 48). Despite efforts to reduce the frequency of moves, constant residential relocation has been a persistent factor in retaining service members. For example, the Air Force's 1999 annual report (prepared by RAND) included residential mobility among the major factors contributing to the loss of experienced pilots (Larson & Heller 2000, 49). In acknowledging that frequent relocation is challenging for personnel and their families, the military has enacted programming designed to alleviate some of the hardships. This holds true not only for spouses – for whom the military already has well-established career support initiatives – but also for dependent youth. New technologies have enabled DoD-wide initiatives offered by Military OneSource, such as the Youth Sponsorship Program (through which youth who are preparing for a PCS move can connect with other military youth already living in their new location), and the website Military Youth On the Move (which acts as a youth-oriented repository of advice for PCS moves).32 There are also branch-specific programs that address some of the issues with moving that are specific to youth. For example, in recent years, both the Army and the Air Force have implemented high school senior stabilization programs that allow personnel to extend tours in order to avoid uprooting dependent children who are seniors in high school (for Army regulations, refer to AR 614-100 and AR 614-200; for Air Force regulations, refer to AFI 36-2110).

Militarized youth The spouses and children of military personnel are considered civilians by the Department of Defense. As Enloe (1983; 2000) has established, military spouses (particularly wives) are militarized, enmeshed in the social hierarchies of the military and accommodated by the military as a means of retaining personnel. Functioning as extensions of their husbands'

32 Military OneSource (www.militaryonesource.mil) is a DoD-funded website that provides “comprehensive information on every aspect of military life at no cost to active duty, National Guard, and reserve members, and their families” (emphasis in original). More information about the Youth Sponsorship Program is available at http://www.militaryonesource.mil/cyt/family-relocation?content_id=268620; and the Youth On the Move website is at http://apps.militaryonesource.mil/MOS/f?p=MYOM:HOME2:0. 139 ranks, they are expected to perform various forms of community service. I argue here that military youth are also militarized, but in different ways. Attending to the needs of military youth has become increasingly important to retaining personnel. With nearly as many school-age children as there are service members, today's military has no choice in the matter – and their documentation proves they are well aware of this. A passage from the 1982 DAHSUM presents a typical admission: “The physical and emotional well-being of a soldier depends upon the support services offered the soldier and his or her family members. These services form the keystone of an army's morale and play an important role in maintaining an alert and highly motivated force” (Cocke et al. 1988a, 81). In short, the needs of military spouses and children impact retention and readiness: if families are content with military life, personnel are more willing to continue serving. In turn, these policies demonstrate the role of family in reproducing the military and maintaining U.S. geopolitical interests. Yet accommodating the needs of children and youth presents a very different challenge than accommodating the needs of spouses. While the military has successfully integrated spouses by drawing on them as a labor source, the needs of military children have been more difficult to identify and address, though they revolve largely around issues of schooling. A survey of the DAHSUM from 1969 through 200733 provides a historical account of the difficulty the Army has had in this realm. While military children are mentioned in almost all of the DAHSUM reports, their significance varies from year to year. Interest in the needs of Army children exploded in the early 1980s, prompted by a steep reduction in the federal impact aid granted to civilian school districts that serve military communities,34 and directives by then-Army Chief of Staff Edward Meyer to address Army quality of life issues (see Cocke et al. 1988b). These directives resulted in the establishment of the Family Liaison Office (FLO) in 1981, three Army Family Symposia (in 1980, 1981, and 1982), and the publication of the Army Family White Paper (1983). In addition, Secretary of Defense Weinberger established April 1983 as the “Month of the Military Child” in recognition of “the essential role that military child care services and youth activities play in fostering readiness and enhancing the quality of life of military families” (quoted from Condon-Rall 1990, 88). 33 Available online through the U.A. Army Center of Military History website at http://www.history.army.mil/html/bookshelves/collect/dahsum.html. 34 Then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger opposed calls for military personnel to pay tuition for their children in response to the cut (Cocke et al. 1988b) 140 The 1983 Army Family White Paper serves as an example that underscores the military's obligation to provide for its families, declaring that “the unique nature of military service lends an urgency to the need to develop a coherent philosophy for the Army family,” and adding, “the nature of the commitment of the servicemember dictates to the Army a moral obligation to support their families” (U.S. Army Chief of Staff 1983, 1). A few interesting points emerge in the White Paper. First, it identifies as a part of military culture the sense of self-worth deriving from feelings that personnel and their families are needed by the Army, the community, and the nation (U.S. Army Chief of Staff 1983, 12). Second, it acknowledges the desire of military families to “own a home.” Third, it explicitly recognizes the importance of family satisfaction to military success: Soldiers and their families gain through the Army institution a sense of common identity – a shared purpose and commitment to the overall mission. They come to view the Army as providing for their total basic needs in exchange for total commitment – their acceptance of the unrestricted liability contract. Total individual commitment through satisfaction of the family needs translates into readiness of the Total Army (U.S. Army Chief of Staff 1983, 13). Fourth, it recognizes the delicate balance it must maintain between readiness and retention that I alluded to earlier. This translates to a demand that the Army grant their families some measure of stability – or at least benefits that mitigate the instabilities of military life – in order to retain personnel, while still maintaining the mobility and other demands required by the Army's mission. Most importantly, the White Paper specifically identifies changes in residence and changes in schools as stressful events that, while not unique to military families, are especially significant in light of “the unique lifestyle of the military” (U.S. Army Chief of Staff 1983, 15). In response to these, the White Paper advocates the idea of a partnership between the Army, its personnel (both military and civilian), and its families – a partnership reaffirming the idea that “the Army takes care of its own” by supporting one another and working together as a community. Although the Army accounts for the bulk of military spouses and youth,35 other branches of the military have also struggled with how to bolster family satisfaction as a means of strengthening personnel commitment. For example, the Air Force designated the 2009 to 2010 year as the Year of the Air Force Family (Woodward et al. 2010). Along with spousal employment and the need for better deployment services for families, Air Force noted that personnel and their spouses reported emotional and behavioral problems among their children.

35 As of the 2011 Demographics Report, the Army accounted for about 43 percent of military spouses (315,559 of 726,500) and about 46 percent of military children (577,287 of 1,247,607) (DoD 2012). 141 Permanent changes of station, spousal work schedules, and the limited availability of child care and other Air Force programs for children were all cited as contributing factors (Woodward et al. 2010). In short, military youth present a complicating factor for retention and readiness across all branches of the military. Unlike spouses, who can be integrated into the daily fabric of military life through labor and social responsibilities, military youth must be cared for. This is reflected in the programs and directives the military has set in place for military youth, which center on healthcare, education, and extracurricular activities (e.g., leadership and sports programs). The question is, does this work? Do the policies and programs the military implements for military youth successfully integrate them into military culture? It is not clear whether the programs themselves have worked to militarize military youth, but there is no question that they are in fact militarized. It may not be these programs specifically that accomplish this, but rather a more general exposure to military culture. To be clear, my research did not directly address military youth programs, but in a number of my interviews it was clear that my participants had carefully integrated the military into their own sense of identity. This was clearest in our discussions of place identity. When asked where they were from, many participants referred to their status as military youth as part of their explanations. A common thread among interviews was the presence of the military in the participants' lives: the military was both the cause and the primary arbiter of their residential mobility, and for many of them it was significant not only as the source of their complex residential histories, but also as an aspect of their identities. Although my study was designed to address questions of mobility and home among military youth, I asked participants very little about the role of the military in their lives – and yet it emerged time and time again in the earliest interviews as an important and, for some, omnipresent force. In later interviews, I invited participants to add anything they wanted to add to their interviews concerning home, mobility, or military life. This provided an open-ended platform for participants to address the concerns they felt most important to them; one major theme was the subject of military life and its impact on them. For many, it was not just that their families moved due to a parent's obligations to the military; rather, they saw themselves as living within a military context. In living within that context, they saw themselves as part of it to some degree. Several participants referred to

142 themselves as military kids or “brats” – a common epithet among the military for dependent children of military personnel – reflecting their membership in the military community. As one participant remarked: “…I'm a military brat – that's kind of who I am.” (LB) This is a practice that is already well documented by sociologists, psychologists, and the popular literature (e.g., Truscott 1989; Wertsch 1991; Ender 2002), so I will not belabor it here. Yet some participants went further than to refer to themselves as brats: several used language that suggests a deeper militarization of identity. In one example, the participant claims his membership in the military when explaining his typical responses to the question Where are you from?: “…sometimes I'll explain that I was in the Navy so I don't really have a home.” (DL) In another, the participant was reflecting on the project in general: “…now at 22 years old if you asked me what I thought of mobility, what I thought of being in the Army…” (Tim) Neither one of these participants has served as active duty military to date, nor have they served in the reserves or National Guard. In both cases the phrasing is likely unconscious, but it is a direct indicator of how deeply embedded the military is in their lives and senses of self. The comments of another participant, who was an ROTC student at the time of interview, indicate just how ingrained a military identity can be in a more direct sense: “…people talk about it being second nature to know something. Well it's not really second nature for me to understand the military, because it's the only thing I've ever known. It's my first nature.” (SB) Other examples arise in conscious reflections on military life and how it affects the participants. Some discussed how important it is for them to maintain good behavior in public because they are aware that their actions reflect back on their service member parents. One participant addressed this problem at length: “…it's difficult for me and my sister to be ourselves outside the house. And the reason that it's so difficult for us to be ourselves is because everything that we do…especially on a government installation – everything that we do is looked back on as my dad… [M]ost people don't realize that, you know, military kids, the reason that they act so politically correct out in public is because everything that we do comes back on our service member. You know, I am – not only am I held accountable for my actions, so is my father. And if I mess up, then they're gonna go back to him, 'cause they're gonna look at it, you know, if you can't take care of what's going on at home, how can we trust you to take care of, you know, thirty, forty soldiers. So…you gotta be able to be on your feet, because anywhere you go, whatever you're doing, it's held to a higher standard whenever 143 you're a military brat.” (TC) Here, a military identity extends beyond a label and into daily life in a direct and consequential way. In this example, being a military kid means not only being the passive recipient of orders to move, but also being an active representative of a parent's leadership capabilities. Such an active role bears consequences that go beyond damage to the parent's reputation: there is an implicit belief that one's behavior can impact the parent's career prospects. In this regard, a military youth identity means that one's behavior is monitored as a reflection of his or her parent's abilities; thus military youth are required to be aware of and responsible for their public actions as active participants in their parents' careers. Some of my participants see their position as military youth as a kind of auxiliary military service; their positions are reminiscent of the wives Cynthia Enloe (1983, 2000) discusses in her work. Just as volunteer and social obligations mark military wives as part of the military, some military youth feel that the expectations and demands on their behavior mark them equally as part of the military. As one participant put it: “…when we finally moved off base, and I was introduced to civilians 24/7, they would often time remind me that I wasn't in the military myself, and I would explain to them that, yes I was – if I had to live on military bases and not leave my toys out in the front yard because of house inspections, then I was in the military, I just didn't get the paycheck.” (LE) Another participant, born into an Air Force family and now married to an Airman, comments on her status as both a brat and a spouse: “…I don't let people walk all over me just because I'm an E-4's wife. [laughs] 'Cause I was an O- 4's daughter before I was an E-4's wife.” (KP) Later in the interview, the extent to which she identified with the military became clear: “I've had people come up to me and tell me, 'Oh you don't know what's going on.' I'm like, 'Oh I do because I've been in the military for 19 years. And I can probably school your ass in a lot of military knowledge.' [laughs]” (KP) She herself is not active duty, but she sees herself as having served throughout her childhood as well as into her adulthood as the spouse of an active duty Airman. Her position is not merely that of someone who as grown up around the institution, but of someone who knows the institution, who can navigate it, and who is acutely aware of her role within it. This was not an uncommon position among those I interviewed. For some, a sense of having served arises from demands even greater than mobility and monitored behavior. These participants face major sacrifices – the potential or actual deployments of parents who may be 144 wounded or killed in the course of their service. These participants see their status as military youth as both a point of pride and a heavy burden; they see themselves as serving alongside their parents: “…the military kids and the families, those are…some of the toughest jobs in the military because they are letting a family member go and not knowing if they're ever going to return.” (BS) Another participant, who organized a peer support group in her high school for students from military families, articulated the connection between sacrifice and service among military youth: “We don't live the glamor life. We don't get everything. You know, we may travel to different countries. But the flip side of that is having a parent gone, constantly having them be deployed as the past couple years, the PCSing overseas where we can't follow… Which only recently the community has started to recognize. It was always 'the soldier serves,' where now it's 'the kids serve too,' you know, it was a slogan that we used all the way through high school. We serve too, you need to notice us, and we need things as well…” (Ana) Ana's appeal for support for herself and other military youth in her high school reflects simultaneously a sense of community among military youth and a sense that their position with regard to the military and society is poorly understood. That it is a peer support group suggests that awareness of military youth is lacking, that military youth have specific social needs, and that those needs are best met by the only people who really understand them – other military youth. The group that Ana and her peers ran is not unique; another participant, established a similar group on her college campus: “In fact, something I don't think I mentioned is I actually started a group on my campus for military family members, and that's the biggest thing, is trying to spread that awareness that, you know, we're just like – what's the bank, Wells Fargo or something, where it's like, 'We're just like you, but a little different.' And that pretty much explains my thought process really well about it. Like yeah, well, we're just like everybody else, but we…just have a little bit of a different history than everybody else. So just kind of be respectful and understanding in a way.” (Lynn) Whether through policing their behavior, knowing the institutions, or organizing support groups, the experiences and reflections of my participants demonstrate not just that military youth share an identity, but that their identities are militarized to greater or lesser extents. Military youth belong to an extended network of military personnel and are the bearers of a specific set of militarized responsibilities.

145 Militarization, identity, and home When I initially thought about militarization with regard to my research, I thought it might emerge in my participants' discussions of home. It did – but not in a way that I had expected. Interviews revealed that for many of them, their identities as military youth operated alongside or instead of place identity. In some ways this is unsurprising: the hand of the military is often a greater constant in the lives of military youth than are specific places. Yet in other ways it is very surprising: academic discourses of place identity leave little or no room for substitutions – in my readings on place identity, I never once came across literature addressing the operation of other aspects of identity in relation to place identity. In this section, I demonstrate how my participants identities as military youth intertwined with and sometimes overshadowed place identity. Given that many of my participants had a strong sense of the military as part of their personal identities, it makes sense that they referred to their identities as military youth when asked about their place identities. Several of them often (if not always) mention their connection to the military when people ask them where they are from. Other participants take their military identities a step further and front-load their answers about place identity with their military identities, as in these examples: “…I usually just like, honestly start off with the fact that I'm a military kid, so I moved every few years, and then just say kind of everywhere because it kind of ends up being like that.” (VC)

“The majority of the time I kind of give them that blank look and tell them that I'm from the Air Force.” (LE) Some participants further explained that the reason they front-load their responses with their military identities is because they equate having a place identity with having a hometown – something they feel they do not have: “I usually tell them that I'm an Army brat and I moved every three years. 'Cause I don't really feel like I have a hometown.” (AL)

“I say I'm an Army brat. 'Cause people ask me that all the time, and my dad – I mean my mom could say she's from Daytona, but she's an Army brat too. I just tell them straight up, I'm like, I'm an Army brat, and they're all like, 'What is that?' And I'm like, I've just moved everywhere. I'm not gonna say I'm from Daytona Beach where my dad is from, because that's not my home. Like, I mean, my family – I have a lot of family who live there, I could call it my home, but it doesn't feel

146 like home when I go there, so I just say I'm an Army brat.” (Jessica) These participants claim no place identity. Rather than choose a place from their residential histories to serve as a shorthand, they reject place as a meaningful indicator of identity and offer their identities as military youth in its stead. A strong military identity was not universal, however. One participant – HB – stands out as someone who adamantly refuses to allow her military identity to override her place identity. During her time in college (in Virginia), when people asked where she was from, she would reply Kansas City – the major city nearest to Leavenworth, Kansas, where both of her parents lived at the time of interview. She went on to say: “And it's interesting, I actually find myself frustrated at people that are like, 'I'm military so I move around a lot.' I'm like, there's no big deal to make a stink of it, you live somewhere right now, where's your address, do you like it or not? And I don't know why I resent that but I do.” Some participants interweave military and place identities into a composite whole. For example, SB often refers to his military identity when answering questions about place identity – but he also responds with Virginia Beach because he has spent six or seven years of his life there. A number of participants shared this strategy, intertwining their residential histories with their military identities. For some, like NJ and Tim, the decision to mention their status as military youth depends on how deep an answer they want to provide, or how their audiences will respond: “Well, a lot of times it depends on my mood. Like, if I'm feeling like talking to people, I'll be like, 'Ah, I'm an Air Force brat, so everywhere.' If I'm not feeling like talking to peop1le I'll just say New Orleans and hope they'll leave me alone.” (NJ)

“It depends. Um, if it's a very surficial [sic] conversation with somebody that I don't suspect I'll have a lot of interaction with in the future, usually I'll just say like Maryland, near D.C. But if it's kind of more relevant to the conversation then I'll say that I'm an Army brat, I'll just say that I moved around a lot.” (Tim) Tim goes on to justify his choice to rely on his military identity in response to questions about place identity: “…one, I don't want it to be weird whenever I start referencing these places that I've lived. Two, I think that's actually a very important part of my identity…” My interviews with military youth suggest above all that interactions between military identity and place identity are complicated. Three important points emerge from this

147 examination: first, military identities can operate alongside place identities. It is possible for someone to claim with equal strength a military youth identity and a place identity, or to think of the two as intertwined. Second, military identities can override place identities. Some military youth use their military identities as a stand-in for place identity when asked. Third, and most importantly, people choose which aspects of their identities to forefront when interacting with others. Some of the military youth I interviewed carefully considered whether they wanted to mention their military identities when talking to new acquaintances, weighing the relevance and the potential advantages and disadvantages of revealing this aspect of their identities to others. An interesting theoretical implication here is that military identities work in lieu of place identity in part because the military itself functions as a place. In identity statements such as LE's “I'm from the Air Force,” the military is written into the role of place. While those unfamiliar with military culture may find statements like these flippant or confusing, in the minds of LE and some military youth, they make perfect sense: the military is not just an organization; it is an amalgam of institution and culture that is set within particular landscapes and particular territories. To say “military” conjures not just hierarchies, salutes, and tanks, but also the sites in which these things are emplaced. In that sense, referring to the military in one's place identity is similar to referring to one's ethnicity: it carries implications of place – implications that are immediately recognizable to military youth, if not to the civilian public.

Rescaling In some cases, my participants' reflections on place identity revealed creative rescalings of home and the military. Militarization drives both rescalings: on the one hand, militarization pushes home upward and outward; simultaneously, it pushes the military downward and inward. On their own, these creative rescalings may be innocent, but I argue here that the two can reinforce one another by their simultaneous operation. That home has been upscaled to homeland in American politics via the discourse of national security is already well established. Some have reviewed and theorized the implications of this rescaling in terms of American hegemony (Flint 2008), the safety of civilians (Farish 2008), the marginalization of nontraditional families (Cowen & Gilbert 2008a), and the devolution of federal responsibility down to the family (Cowan & Gilbert 2008b). Yet few have considered the everyday implications of an upscaled homeland for individuals. Given their

148 unique position relative to the military, military youth experience this rescaling on an everyday basis. This emerged in a few interviews as my participants talked about home in terms of “America,” avoiding the particularity of a traditional place identity by upscaling it. This was the case for Lydia, who spent her formative years in France and Germany before her family settled in Washington, D.C.: “…I have no idea where I'm from. I just say I grew up in Europe and now I'm from D.C.… And then everyone's like, 'Oh my God, where?' And like I always just say I'm American. [laughs] …I hate it when people are like, 'Yeah, I'm you know one-quarter Italian and three-fourths German.' I'm like, I'm American, I don't even know.” By scaling one's identity upward to the national, it is possible to accommodate the breadth of one's residential history – even if that residential history includes places outside the United States. It also enables military youth to maintain a consistent place identity in response to people's questions without compromising their past (and potential future) mobility. As militarization pushes home upward and outward to homeland, it also pushes the military downward and inward to identity. This is most visible in the previous section, where I discussed in detail the ways that many of the youth I interviewed internalized and incorporated the military into their identities. What is most interesting about this downward/inward scaling is that it sometimes coincides with the upward rescaling of home, producing a kind of contrary motion through which military youth simultaneously hold a strong military identity and claim place identity in the broad, national sense. This was the case for KP, who expressed an identification with the military and scaled her place identity upward to the nation. As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, KP's involvement with the military is twofold: she grew up the daughter of an Army officer and eventually married an Airman. She has a very strong sense of belonging within a military environment, of knowing and understanding the culture and her position within it. She is also confident and unafraid to express a sense of seniority, claiming that she has “been in the military for 19 years.” Having adopted the military as part of her identity, she scales it downward and pulls it inward. When I asked KP how she responds to questions about where she is from, she replied: “I'm an Army brat, so I'm from America.” I prompted her to expand on her answer and she replied: 149 “…anywhere I moved, [people] would ask me where I came from. Like, oh you're new here, where are you from, I would tell them the last place that I was. But I would also inform them that my father was military, he was active duty, this is his duty station now, it's gonna change in three years, so my answer will change. So if you really want to know where I'm from, I'm from America.” Here she scales her place identity upward to the national. This decision is tied into her sense of belonging to the military: she pushes her place identity upward and outward because of her identity as a military spouse (and former dependent child), which flows from her father's status as military personnel. Implicit in KP's explanation is the understanding that the military, a national institution, could send them anywhere, and that consequently she cannot afford to pin her identity to any single place at the local scale. To say that she's “from America” carries the further weight of a military life: as the discursive defender of national security, the military exists in a synecdochic role as a symbol of the nation-state. KP's simple statement is thus heavily loaded, reflecting an intense citizenship in which belonging is coupled with duty. The outward scaling of place identity combines with the inward scaling of the military in such a way that the two reinforce one another, making KP a tightly positioned and militarized subject.

Geopolitical Youth Researching the connections between militarization, mobility, and home among military youth revealed an indication of their position within overlapping social, cultural, and political spheres: military youth are geopolitical beings. As Dowler and Sharp point out: “Lives are constructed and reconstructed around political and patriarchal boundaries through discourses which apparently operate at the global and national scales (2001, 174). This is clearly true of military youth, whose position arguably arises from a combination of external and internal factors: on the one hand they are recognized by the military and the media alike as “military youth,” and on the other, many of them internalize aspects of the military and incorporate it into their identities. Processes of enculturation and identification, and the rescalings that result from them work together to produce subjects who embody the nation-state. Their mobility enhances and reinforces this position. As a result of the residential hopscotch of military life, many of my participants deemphasized localized place identities, pushing back on this idea as too limiting. Yet the broad, culturally-imposed need to express a

150 some meaningful attachment to a place led some of them to upscale and nationalize their place identities. For those with strong military identities, this effectively aligned their place identities with political-military discourses of home as homeland. In short: mobility and militarization converged in a rescaling of place identity coupled with an embodiment of the nation-state. During our interviews, some youth described situations in which they were forced to confront this embodiment. This is perhaps clearest in the experiences of military youth who have lived overseas. For example, AF recalled: “…living in Germany…I went through three bomb threats, so I guess I personally want people to realize that it's not as easy as I'm making it sound, living overseas, because you do have to deal with the hate towards America from certain countries and certain people.” While I was unable to find any official statistics documenting bomb threats against schools attended by military youth, they are common enough that DoDEA includes a bomb threat reporting form in its 2007 Crisis Management Guide,36 and anecdotal evidence from current and former military youth bear out the need for this form. Bomb threats against overseas DoDEA and international schools target not only the schools but also the bodies of the children within them. In doing so, they use military youth to symbolize the American military, reaffirming their embodiment of the nation-state and thrusting them further into the geopolitical. One possible explanation for this ties back to bodies as national territory. As I pointed out in an earlier chapter, others have argued that bodies both are and create territory that are scaled to the nation (e.g., Mayer 2004; Smith 2012). I argue here that military youth present another example of bodies as territory: overseas bases that accommodate military youth represent a penetration of the American landscape into otherwise foreign territories, marking the extension of U.S. territory in to “safe” European and Asian spaces. There is a paradox here, too. Some military youth, having lived overseas, bring their experiences back with them. For example, Lydia talked about how her years spent in France and Germany have become incorporated into her everyday life: “…even now…a lot of our things we picked up in Europe we definitely have in our everyday life. Like, um, my friends always make fun of me 'cause I always eat my salad after my dinner. Always. Our family has salad on the table and we eat it when we're finished, and then we always have an assortment of cheeses and breads. Instead of like chocolate cake, we'll bring out brie and Camembert, and like all these really good foods, and our house, of course, all the furniture is like

36 This publication is available online through the DoDEA website at http://www.dodea.edu/crisis/upload/DoDEA_Crisis_Manag_Guide_07.pdf. 151 European, and just little things that I picked up that I don't even realize I've picked up from the way I grew up.” (Lydia) As her reflection suggests, some military youth find that their Americanness is challenged because of their time overseas. For Lydia it meant friendly teasing, but for NJ it was a different matter altogether. As he explains, he would often avoid mentioning his residential history when asked where he is from because of the assumptions other people make: “…a lot of times I'll just want to say like New Orleans and stuff because I've found so – it's mainly younger people – they will, as soon as they hear you lived overseas, it's automatically, 'Oh well, you were on vacation for five years, you know, you just must be some rich bastard…'” (NJ) Later in his interview, he continued this line of thought: “…my biggest problem with it is, especially when you first start college…everyone's frame of reference is their high school lives. And they talk about high school and they tell stories from high school. But when it came time – when they asked me about high school, if I was honest they wanted me to shut up because it would make them feel, they would get jealous. 'Oh, you were in Korea – oh it must be so nice to be overseas,' and then they would be like, 'Oh you're just a snob who's international…he thinks he's better than all us Americans,' you know, like. Okay. Okay wow… I'm like okay, uh, you're gonna go tell the military – basically tell a military brat he's not patriotic. [chuckling]” (NJ) For NJ, a military identity and an international residential history are intertwined: he lived in Belgium and South Korea because of his father's service in the Air Force. Yet some of his peers see his time overseas as entirely un-American. His final statement – “you're gonna…tell a military brat he's not patriotic” – is a wry response to what he perceives as an irony of military life. The experiences of AF, Lydia, and NJ provide some interesting insights into the geopolitical position of military youth. In reflecting on mobility, military life, and home, they reveal a web of connections between their everyday lived experiences and national and geopolitical forces. In short, their experiences demonstrate how military youth embody the nation-state through militarization-driven rescalings of home and nation. When overseas, their bodies constitute American territory, and are vulnerable to symbolic and real anti-American sentiment – and yet they often interweave their experiences of the foreign with their everyday selves and lives, which leaves their identities as Americans open to ridicule or challenge by civilian peers.

152 Discussion When I began this research I was aware that militarization would be a factor in the lives of military youth. What I was not counting on was the ways that their experiences of mobility and reflections on home would reveal them to be geopolitical beings. In their interviews, I often saw hints of how they embody the nation-state and the military, and how they come to symbolize the military and the nation-state to others. There are a couple of important points I want to reiterate here. First: the militarization of military youth emerges from two directions. On the one hand they are discursively constructed as a group by the military itself through policies and programs that target them. On the other, they internalize aspects of military culture and interweave it into their identities. Second, in the process of militarization, military youth are exposed to a contrary motion of rescaling as the prevailing military-political discourses push home upward and outward to homeland and as they adopt a downward and inward scaling of nation to body. Militarized residential mobility is integral to these points. The residential hopscotch of military life is partly reinforces a military identity for many military youth: the knowledge that they move because of the military, and the ways they are socially marked because of it are constant reminders of their status as military youth. Further, for some military youth, the scale of their mobility drives up the scale of their place identities from local to national. In the next chapter, I discuss the implications of this in conjunction with home.

153 Chapter IX Conclusions: There's No Place Like Home

Over the last three chapters I have presented my analysis of survey, interview, and map data collected from 43 military youth, with additional support from an analysis of primary sources produced by the U.S. military. In the process I have explored links between mobility, identity, militarization, and home in discrete segments. In this chapter, I want to connect these links into a broader web, highlighting my major findings. In addition I will tease out some of their theoretical implications, identify the limitations of this project, and suggest directions for future research.

Findings Each of my analysis chapters presents a specific argument, which I want to encapsulate very briefly here: • First, I argue that contrary to both traditional and critical modes of thought, home is not necessarily an investment of identity in place. The experiences of military youth revealed a wide array of viable alternative constructions of home that, while spatial in nature, are not tied to place. • Second, I argue that mobility is a malleable force which, through discursive practices, can be militarized, normalized, and made formative. The youth I interviewed invariably saw residential mobility as part of their everyday lives, associating it with the needs of the military and often presenting their willingness to move as a reflection of their participation in (and identification with) the military. • Third, I argue that militarization and its attendant residential mobility are capable of prompting creative rescalings of national and intimate phenomena. In particular, I found that militarization pushes home upward and outward to homeland while simultaneously pushing both the nation-state and the military itself downward and inward to the bodies of military youth. I want to demonstrate now how these observations fits together collectively by tying in some of the finer points I made throughout the analyses. My research suggests that for military youth, constructions of home begin with

154 militarization. Through discourses of national security and readiness, militarization constructs residential mobility as necessary to its operations. Residential mobility thus works as a pathway toward militarizing the identities of military youth: it is a tangible means of injecting militarization into their everyday experiences. For military youth, accepting their mobility often means embracing the military as a structuring force in their lives – and for some, it means seeing themselves as part of that structure, internalizing and identifying with it, ultimately embodying both the military and the nation-state. Living in this context of militarized residential mobility generally makes traditional investments of identity in place difficult or impossible for military youth. Because they expect to move once every two or three years, many military youth find it hard to set down roots in any given place; consequently, some choose not to while others find the concept unimaginable. The experiences of other highly mobile youth demonstrate that youth in general are flexible in how they conceptualize home – and military youth are no exception. Yet unlike other mobile youth who find homes in unhomely places, military youth create alternate constructions of home that, because of their expected transience, remain unemplaced. The militarization of their identities facilitate these alternate constructions by obviating the need for place identity. That is not to say that place identity is entirely absent for military youth. Their interviews demonstrate that many of them do claim some kind of place identity, but it is often loosely constructed and – more importantly – divorced from their ideas of home. In some cases, militarization pushes place identity upward and outward to the national level and tying the every day experiences of military youth to the geopolitical. Further, for many military youth, military identity stands in for place identity, demonstrating the ability of the military itself to act as a place. What is most interesting here is that the military may be a place, but for the youth I interviewed, that place is not home. For many of them, no matter how deeply they had incorporated the military into their sense of identity, home was something more intimate still. The irony here is that it was militarization – a project that ostensibly reinforces traditional conceptualizations of home by presenting them as vulnerable – that led many of them to resist those traditional ideas and find home instead in kernels of non-place states of being that, in their deep intimacy, are somehow less vulnerable to attack. In short, the militarization of self combined with the “residential hopscotch” of military

155 life provides military youth a pathway for constructing their identities around the military in addition to – or instead of – place(s), and to resist traditional constructions of home. And although they resist traditional, rooted constructions of home, many military youth also reify those very constructions. The result for many is that creating and embracing alternate constructions of home that befit their lived experience does not entirely mitigate the tension they feel between themselves and civilians. They continue to contrast their experiences of mobility with the rootedness they perceive among their civilian peers, potentially magnifying the differences among these distinct social groups.

Further Implications The peculiar configuration of militarization, mobility, and home that I describe here is unique to U.S. military youth, but it may find echoes in the experiences of other mobile subjects. Critical geographers of home and new mobilities scholars working with mobile subjects may find it useful to theorize home and mobility not only as co-constructions and sources of agency, but also as structuring forces that interact to produce novel social and psychological landscapes. Furthermore, my work suggests a number of specific issues that can be decontextualized from this particular research project that may be useful to other scholars, as well as to officials working in nonacademic contexts. First, this study provides several striking examples of military demands that operate during both wartime and peacetime, and that have incredible impacts on military youth. The ultimate effect of these demands is to militarize the identities of military youth. Psychologists and sociologists who work with military youth should take this into consideration when designing studies that decontextualize their mobility from the military. Studies of the effects of parental deployment on military youth would also benefit from acknowledging that some military youth see themselves as participants in the military, and that this may impact their responses to deployment and how they report them to authority figures. A second and related point is that the civil-military gap is one that operates at multiple levels. Academic approaches to the civil-military gap concentrate on its implications for political relationships between the military and civil society. My study demonstrates, however, that the civil-military gap is not only important at the institutional or organizational level, but also in terms of the everyday lived experiences of military youth. This is particularly visible with regard to mobility: for the military, mobility is perceived as necessary to maintaining the integrity of the

156 state – and yet military youth often feel marginalized or misunderstood within that state because of that very same mobility. The irony in this for many military youth is that their residential mobility ostensibly exists in order to protect and preserve the rootedness and place-based identities of their civilian peers while it opens up social gulfs between them. Recognizing that the civil-military gap operates at levels beyond policy opens new avenues of research for sociologists and others interested in the relationship between the military and civil society. Third, my work demonstrates that mobility can be configured in paradoxical ways. New mobilities theorists have identified forms of mobility that are socially acceptable (e.g., leisure travel) or threatening (e.g., vagrancy); likewise, they have argued that mobilities can be contested along lines of power. Yet my research reveals a mobility that embodies cultural tensions between rooted ideals of home and militarized discourses of defense. Militarized residential mobility is a cultural paradox because it is a governmentally supported mobility that inverts civilian expectations of stability with regard to home – a mobility that is discursively constructed as necessary to maintaining the integrity of the state. Furthermore, this paradoxical form of mobility is made stable because of its instrumental role in American imperialism. Identifying this and other paradoxical mobilities is important for understanding the work that mobility and its related forces do at cultural and political levels. Fourth, my work demonstrates that a cultural perspective can reveal geopolitical phenomena. While there is ample evidence to suggest that military youth are militarized, the idea that they embody the nation-state and the military became apparent in their reflections on home and mobility. Their everyday experiences and spatial practices – typically the fodder of cultural geography – illuminated their position within the geopolitical. Finally, the identity-place relationship that my work denaturalizes undergirds not only academic constructions of home, as I mentioned above, but also popular constructions of home. Home in its traditional humanist form resonates with certain segments of the popular imaginary in the United States (arguably, especially among military youth). While critical geographers of home are quick to problematize traditional academic constructions of home – and to use the experiences of marginalized people to do so – they pay considerably less attention to these traditional popular constructions. My research demonstrates that traditional humanist constructions of home exist within the popular imaginary and also that alternative popular constructions of home can challenge or destabilize traditional ones – but there is considerably

157 more work to be done on this topic.

Limitations While my research opens some promising avenues of research, it is far from exhaustive. I made a number of decisions regarding who I invited to participate that limit my analysis. In particular, I want to highlight three important limitations on this project. First, I chose to focus my analysis on youth in active duty military families and to exclude youth whose sponsors were in the Reserves or National Guard. During the last decade, Reserve and Guard families have seen considerable media attention that underscore the sacrifices they have made as “suddenly military” families. Projects like the Army MWR's Operation: Military Kids youth from Reserve and Guard families as “everyday heroes” and welcome them into the fold. My choice to exclude youth from these families is not meant to downplay the impacts of deployment on their lives or to suggest that they are somehow “not military enough.” Rather, I excluded them because militarized residential mobility is not a regular feature of their experiences as military youth. In terms of residential mobility, youth from Reserve and Guard families are more like civilians than active duty military. Consequently, the research presented here does not apply to all military youth, but to a limited portion of them. Second I chose to focus on the experiences of military youth rather than personnel or their spouses. My aim here was to examine militarized residential mobility for those who grow up and develop their sense of home within that context; I worked from a basic assumption that experiences of residential mobility may be different for youth than for adults. Personnel and their spouses may enter into military service with well-developed place identities or constructions of home that they hold onto – or not. My decision to limit the study to military youth thus prevented any in-depth comparisons of constructions of home between highly mobile youth and their equally highly mobile parents. This is an area of research that deserves more attention than I could have paid it here. Finally, in working with a military population I chose to limit my research to a very specific form of residential mobility. While my research has many broad implications, some of my findings may not hold across nonmilitary groups. Experiences of mobility among military youth are vastly different from those of homeless, refugee, and nonmilitary transnational youth, and my research makes no claims to explain them.

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178 Appendix A: Survey

179 PRE-INTERVIEW SURVEY Please provide the following information to help the researcher understand you and your experiences.

Questions about You Where it says “Pseudonym,” please indicate a name (not your real name) that you would like the researcher to use when writing about your experiences. If you leave it blank, the researcher will use your initials. Your real name will not be used in any reports using this data. Name Pseudonym Age Sex (check one): o M o F Race Place of birth (City, State, Country if outside US)

Questions about the Service Member in your family Relationship to you Rank Years Active Duty Hometown (City, State, Country if outside US) Was the service member also a military kid (check one)? o Yes o No

Your Residential History In the spaces below, please list the places where you have lived, starting with the place where you were born and ending with the place where you live now. If you know the street address, please include it (you do not need to include apartment numbers). This information will be used to generate a digital map that you will use during your interview session. For each place you have lived, please indicate whether you lived on or off post, and what kind of school(s) you attended while you were there. This form continues on the back of this page. If you need more space, please attach another sheet of paper.

Street Address City, State Country Duration: Years Months You attended (check all that apply)... You lived (check all that apply)... o a public school o a DoDDS or DDESS school o on post o a private school o were homeschooled o off post In the space below, please list at least three places that were important to you while you lived here. If possible, please use place names (e.g., Central Park) or provide addresses.

180 Street Address City, State Country Duration: Years Months You attended (check all that apply)... You lived (check all that apply)... o a public school o a DoDDS or DDESS school o on post o a private school o were homeschooled o off post In the space below, please list at least three places that were important to you while you lived here. If possible, please use place names (e.g., Central Park) or provide addresses.

Street Address City, State Country Duration: Years Months You attended (check all that apply)... You lived (check all that apply)... o a public school o a DoDDS or DDESS school o on post o a private school o were homeschooled o off post In the space below, please list at least three places that were important to you while you lived here. If possible, please use place names (e.g., Central Park) or provide addresses.

Street Address City, State Country Duration: Years Months You attended (check all that apply)... You lived (check all that apply)... o a public school o a DoDDS or DDESS school o on post o a private school o were homeschooled o off post In the space below, please list at least three places that were important to you while you lived here. If possible, please use place names (e.g., Central Park) or provide addresses.

181 Street Address City, State Country Duration: Years Months You attended (check all that apply)... You lived (check all that apply)... o a public school o a DoDDS or DDESS school o on post o a private school o were homeschooled o off post In the space below, please list at least three places that were important to you while you lived here. If possible, please use place names (e.g., Central Park) or provide addresses.

Street Address City, State Country Duration: Years Months You attended (check all that apply)... You lived (check all that apply)... o a public school o a DoDDS or DDESS school o on post o a private school o were homeschooled o off post In the space below, please list at least three places that were important to you while you lived here. If possible, please use place names (e.g., Central Park) or provide addresses.

Street Address City, State Country Duration: Years Months You attended (check all that apply)... You lived (check all that apply)... o a public school o a DoDDS or DDESS school o on post o a private school o were homeschooled o off post In the space below, please list at least three places that were important to you while you lived here. If possible, please use place names (e.g., Central Park) or provide addresses.

182 Street Address City, State Country Duration: Years Months You attended (check all that apply)... You lived (check all that apply)... o a public school o a DoDDS or DDESS school o on post o a private school o were homeschooled o off post In the space below, please list at least three places that were important to you while you lived here. If possible, please use place names (e.g., Central Park) or provide addresses.

Street Address City, State Country Duration: Years Months You attended (check all that apply)... You lived (check all that apply)... o a public school o a DoDDS or DDESS school o on post o a private school o were homeschooled o off post In the space below, please list at least three places that were important to you while you lived here. If possible, please use place names (e.g., Central Park) or provide addresses.

Street Address City, State Country Duration: Years Months You attended (check all that apply)... You lived (check all that apply)... o a public school o a DoDDS or DDESS school o on post o a private school o were homeschooled o off post In the space below, please list at least three places that were important to you while you lived here. If possible, please use place names (e.g., Central Park) or provide addresses.

183 Appendix B: Mapping Exercise Script

184 Mapping Exercise

[The investigator will present the participant with a digital map created using his or her survey data. Beginning with the chronologically earliest point, the investigator will ask the participant the following questions. Together, the investigator and participant will annotate the map.]

• What do you remember most about living here? [Referring to the place of residence.]

[The interviewer will direct the participant to his/her paper survey.]

• In your survey, you listed a number of places that were significant to you while you were living here. Of these, which three are the most significant to you?

[For each place of significance, the interviewer will focus the map on the relevant placemark and ask the following.]

• Why was this place important to you? • What kinds of experiences did you have in this place? • How do you feel about this place?

[Once the interviewer and participant have finished annotating the placemarks, the interviewer will zoom out and ask direct the participant’s attention to the line connecting this place of residence to the next.]

• You moved from here to [next place of residence]. Think back on what it was like to move this time. • What do you remember about this move? • How did you feel about this move at the time? • How do you feel about this move now?

[The investigator and participant will repeat the entire exercise for each place of residence. Once this is completed for all places of residence and moves, the investigator will prompt the participant as follows.]

• Take a moment to review what we recorded here. Would you like to add anything to the descriptions we recorded on your map?

[The participant will be allowed to amend the map and add further content.]

185 Appendix C: Survey Review Script

186 Survey Review

For participants completing the mapping exercise:

• In the mapping exercise you just completed, you talked about a lot of places that are important to you. Would you say that any of them is the most important to you? [If so, probe for details.]

• Would you say that any of these places – not just the ones you’ve lived, but the ones that are important to you – says something about you, or about who you are? [If so, probe for details.]

• Of all of the moves you talked about, is there any one that stands out for any reason? [If so, probe for details.]

For participants who did not do the mapping exercise:

• On your survey, you listed a number of places that are important to you. Would you say that any of them is the most important to you? [If so, probe for details.]

• Would you say that any of these places – not just the ones you’ve lived, but the ones that are important to you – says something about you, or about who you are? [If so, probe for details.]

• Of all of the moves you have experienced, is there any one that stands out for any reason? [If so, probe for details.]

187 Appendix D: Interview Questions

188 Interview Questions [On completing the mapping exercise, the interviewer will conduct a semi-structured interview with the participant. The interviewer may use follow-up questions to the participants’ responses to elicit further information.]

1. Think back on all the times you’ve moved. What is it like for you to move so much? 2. When you move, what helps you get settled into a new place? [Probe for details if necessary.] 3. When you move to a new place and people ask you where you’re from, how do you answer them? 4. What does the word “home” mean to you? That is, when I say “home,” what do you think of? 5. Do you think that moving so often affects how you think about home? If so, how? 6. If you had to describe your ideal home, what would it be?

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195 CURRICULUM VITA C. M. Livecchi EDUCATION Ph.D. Geography, The Pennsylvania State University, defended August 22, 2014 M.A. Geography, University at Albany – SUNY, 2008 M.S. Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, 2006 B.A. Anthropology, Rutgers University, 1997

TEACHING Courses Taught (State University of New York at New Paltz) World Geography (Fall 2014) Environment and Culture (Spring 2014)

Courses Taught (The Pennsylvania State University) Introduction to Human Geography (Spring 2012, Summer 2009)

Courses Assisted (The Pennsylvania State University) Geographic Information Systems (Spring 2013) Mapping Our Changing World (Spring 2013 online, Fall 2012, Fall 2010) Introduction to Human Geography (Fall 2011) Elements of Cultural Geography (Spring 2010) Urban Geography: A Global Perspective (Fall 2009)

PUBLICATIONS Livecchi, C. M. 2014. A picture is worth 1,000 words: Piazza Caracciolo, Palermo, Sicily. Focus on Geography, 57(3): 137-138.

Turner, M. G., Livecchi, C. M., Beaver, K. M., and Booth, J. 2011. Moving beyond the socialization hypothesis: The effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy on the development of self-control. Journal of Criminal Justice, 39(2): 120-127.

Livecchi, C. M. 2006. Cyberspace through thick and thin: Virtual places and the locational world. Middle States Geographer, 39: 126-133.

AWARDS, HONORS, AND FELLOWSHIPS 2011 Qualitative Research Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers, Student Research Enhancement Grant, Honorable Mention.

2012 Gladys Snyder Education Grant (with Lorraine Dowler): Fostering Emotional Intelligence in Geography 124, Introduction to Cultural Geography. College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University.

2011 Miller Graduate Student Fellowship. Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University (Spring)

2008 University Graduate Fellowship. The Pennsylvania State University.

2008 Anne C. Wilson Graduate Research Award, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University.