This book brings together diverse perspectives from a range of geographic settings and feature contributions from some of the key thinkers in the field. It explores various facets of the relationship between verticality and visibility, offering insights that deepen the understanding of this dynamic dyad.

The volume brings the sky and air into the view of visual sociology and argues that there is more to the sky than phenomenological and geopolitical dimensions. The chapters use the common thread of aerial visibilities to emphasise the need to rethink the aerial in terms of complex relations between humans, technological artefacts and devices, vertical superstructures, and non-human others. This rethinking helps unsettle notions of aerial biopolitics. The chapters in this book foreground the visual to ask to what end the image of – or efforts to create images through – vertical registers shape our understanding of the vertical world, the communities and users this vertical world engages or impacts upon.

This book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of visual sociology, geography, urban studies, media studies, anthropology, and cultural studies, as well as those exploring the intersection of technology, politics, and spatial theory.

The chapters in this book were originally published in Visual Studies.