Researching the DMZ: Q&A with Maddie Joyce, Area Prize-winner

The 2025 Area Prize for the best paper published in the journal by an early career researcher has been awarded to Madelaine Joyce for her paper 'Sensing the sky's edge: Atmospheric insights into the Korean demilitarised zone’. We talked to Madelaine to find out more about her research.

What drew you to the Korean Demilitarized Zone as a research site?

I became interested in borders during my undergraduate degree through a second-year political geography course. Royal Holloway offered a fieldtrip to Cyprus, and I went back there over the summer for my undergraduate dissertation and worked with the UN forces in Sector 2 in the buffer zone.

I got interested in the idea of buffer zones and no man’s lands, and how areas of supposed territorial vacuity produce certain affects. I wanted to start studying the Korean DMZ when doing my Master’s, but it was during Covid, so I had to do all my research online.

Then, when I was proposing my PhD project, I was lucky enough to get the funding to study the DMZ in person.

Why should Geographers be interested in the DMZ?

In lots of ways. It’s one of the most militarised borders in the world, and it divides what was once one nation into two countries which share a culture, language, and ethnicity, but which are now divided along entrenched ideological lines.

It is also a space of potential reconciliation, and if reunification were to happen, then that space itself becomes incredibly important. It’s also a very ecologically rich space. There is lots of discussion amongst ecologists over whether the space should be preserved as a transboundary frontier zone or through some other mechanism.

So, there are lots of different aspects which would be of interest to geographers, from a political, cultural, and ecological point of view.

For readers coming to the paper for the first time, how would you describe the research or summarise the paper?

This paper came from one very specific aspect of my fieldwork, which is that when I was finally able to get to Korea, I found it very hard to actually access and research the DMZ because there are so many restrictions.

One of the ways I circumvented those difficulties was by thinking about the skies above the DMZ, the flows which are happening above the border, and, more specifically, thinking about atmospheres, which I was approaching both from an affective point of view – how the border is felt by people in an embodied way – and from a meteorological one, in terms of fog and other weather phenomena.

The paper discusses the challenges of carrying out research at the DMZ. What was the hardest part of carrying out this research?

This paper came from a place of frustration, where I felt quite stymied in my research and was trying to figure out how to approach the space. But from that frustration came experimentation and trying to access the space in more creative ways.

There were a lot of difficulties. Taking a big antenna around can be a little anxiety-inducing for people worrying about what you’re doing. It was hard to find spaces where I had permission to carry out satellite recordings to image the weather systems above, and to reassure the people around that it was research that I had permission to do, and that there was nothing nefarious about it.

Lots of people approached me asking whether the antenna was a drone, as there was a lot of anxiety around drones in the DMZ because around that time both North and South Korea had been flying drones across the border.

Trying to get close to the border was also very difficult, particularly as a tourist.