Search

This paper explores cognitive place associations; conceptualised as a place‐based mental model that derives subconscious links between geographic locations. Utilising a large corpus of online discussion data from the social media website Reddit, we experiment on the extraction of such geographic knowledge from unstructured text. First we construct a system to identify place names found in Reddit comments, disambiguating each to a set of coordinates where possible. Following this, we build a collective picture of cognitive place associations in the United Kingdom, linking locations that co‐occur in user comments and evaluating the effect of distance on the strength of these associations. Exploring these geographies nationally, associations were shown to be typically weaker over greater distances. This distance decay is also highly regional, rural areas typically have greater levels of distance decay, particularly in Wales and Scotland. When comparing major cities across the UK, we observe distinct distance decay patterns, influenced primarily by proximity to other cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores 'near‐peer' gender and sexuality workshops taking place in UK secondary schools in support of the nationally required relationships and sex education curriculum. In line with UK law, these workshops promote respect, kindness and communication in a framework that explicitly validates LGBTQI+ identities, relationships and family structures. Based on interviews with 24 gender workshop facilitators, we explore the kind of practices that are needed to create spaces in which young people can openly reflect on their views about gender and sexuality, and advance the above‐noted goals of promoting respect, kindness and empathy for people of all genders and sexualities. We argue that gender workshops constitute an important and under‐explored space of 'everyday' activism. We further argue that through practices of atmosphere curation and the near‐peer relational dynamic between facilitators and participants, these workshops create valuable spaces for young people to critically reflect on their views and attitudes about gender and sexuality in a way that does not exist elsewhere. This work extends understanding about the kinds of spatial practices that might be needed to bring forth more positive gender cultures, and deepens our understanding about the experiences and functioning of 'everyday' work for social change that takes place outside of 'high profile' activist sites such as marches, demonstrations and protests. This paper explores gender and sexuality workshops given in secondary schools in the UK as spaces of everyday gender activism. We argue that through atmosphere curation and the near‐peer relation these workshops create space for young people to explore and examine their views on sex and gender that do not exist elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how young trans people come to be positioned as, and subsequently feel, 'out‐of‐place' in certain everyday spaces, particularly in the socio‐political context of the contemporary UK. Through the stories of young trans people aged 14–25 collected via participatory research, I question what it feels like to be young and trans and to experience and embody such dislocating feelings as 'out‐of‐placeness' and socio‐bodily dysphoria, and what toll repeatedly experiencing such embodied emotions exacts on young trans people, their bodies, and life trajectories. To do so, the experience of misgendering and deadnaming, others' hostile gazes, and what I refer to as socio‐bodily dysphoria, are introduced as examples of common modes of cisnormativity and 'out‐of‐placeness' experienced by participants. I build on Sara Ahmed's work on the socio‐spatial positioning and experience of non‐conforming or disruptive bodies to examine how trans youth and marginalised folk more generally become 'out‐of‐place' and experience 'out‐of‐placeness' in everyday space‐times that are not affectively, socially, or materially structured to expect their bodily presence, facilitate their participation, or enable their active agency, particularly on gendered terms. Importantly, a central contribution of the article involves articulating a spatial conceptualisation of socio‐bodily dysphoria. In sum, I develop geographical analyses of young trans people's everyday encounters and crucially build geographical understandings of the emergence and fixity of socio‐bodily dysphoria and everyday marginality through the voices and stories of trans youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The veterinary profession has been relatively understudied in social science, though recent work has highlighted the geographic dimensions of veterinary expertise. This paper draws on in‐depth qualitative interviews with Named Veterinary Surgeons (NVSs) working in UK animal research to demonstrate how and why they distinguish between ethical aspects of veterinary work in the spaces of the laboratory and general clinical practice. The paper mobilises the sociological concept of ethical boundary‐work to help understand how animal research – often assumed to represent a contentious ethical space – is constructed positively as a space for veterinary work. Findings suggest first, that NVSs differentiate between laboratory veterinary‐work and clinical work based on the scale at which veterinary expertise functions in the provision of healthcare to animals. Second, NVSs highlight a geography of veterinary authority in which veterinary expertise is felt to be more successfully applied in the laboratory compared with the clinic, where professional expertise competes with other sources of information and clients' finances and behaviours. Third, NVSs articulate a geography of consistency in which veterinary care in the laboratory is claimed to be more consistent between animals, as opposed to in the clinic, where animal experience may be influenced by individual owner characteristics. Overall, we show how through engaging in this kind of ethical boundary‐work NVSs are not only presenting a form of scientific practice as 'ethical', they are also constructing a professional topology of veterinary practice and expertise. Finally, the paper argues for greater attentiveness to veterinary geographies beyond the more routine spaces of veterinary practice. This article mobilises the sociological concept of ethical boundary‐work to help understand how animal research – often assumed to represent a contentious ethical space – is constructed positively by Named Veterinary Surgeons as a space for veterinary work. We identify three aspects through which this boundary‐work is performed: an understanding of the scale at which veterinary expertise functions, a geography of veterinary authority in different spaces, and finally a consistency of veterinary care that is more applicable in the laboratory than the clinic. Overall we show how through engaging in this kind of ethical boundary‐work, NVSs are not only presenting a form of scientific practice as 'ethical', they are also constructing a professional topology of veterinary practice and expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents population‐wide inequalities of outcome in Great Britain amongst and between long‐established and more recently arrived family groups. 'Establishment' is defined using family group presence in the 1851 Census of Population as a benchmark, and the ethnicity or nationality of more recent migrants is determined through classification of given and family names. Inequalities of outcome are measured using a harmonised indicator of neighbourhood deprivation (hardship). White British individuals tend to live in the best neighbourhoods, but within‐group inequalities reflect regional locations in which different family names were first coined 700 or more years ago. The living circumstances of White Irish and Chinese migrants are observed to be in line with long‐established White British family lines, but other conventionally defined ethnic groups fare worse, some very markedly so. Disaggregation of conventional ethnic groups used by the Office for National Statistics such as White Other and Other Asian reveals stark within‐group inequalities. These findings suggest: (a) regional origins of inter‐generational inequalities amongst the White British; (b) comparable neighbourhood environments experienced by the White Irish, Chinese and some White Other groups and (c) significantly worse neighbourhood circumstances within and between other more recently arrived immigrant groups. This work has several implications for understanding economic assimilation of migrants and the existence of inequalities amongst and between populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between performance and diplomacy during the 1990 Cambodian National Dance Company Tour to the UK. The tour stemmed from Oxfam UK's Kampuchea Campaign, which attempted to restore bilateral aid to the State of Cambodia by pushing for international recognition and a brokered peace settlement. Contributing to geographical work on diplomacy, the paper examines the different agents involved in the tour and their response to the dancers as diplomatic actors, examining the different types of performance in operation and their relationship to diplomacy. Dance was often oriented towards geopolitical ends, but there were also moments when dancers used their artistic performances to open up new modes of subjectivity and identity. The paper attends to these experiences and to how the dancers' actions extend existing conceptions of diplomatic subjectivity by considering vulnerability. In examining these dynamics, the paper also contributes to existing work on art and geopolitics, both through its diplomatic focus and its analysis of how diplomatic and creative practices were intertwined through an aesthetic of quietness. It thus attends to how geopolitical aesthetics matter, and how, in this instance, quiet aesthetics were a mark of international disempowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a detailed empirical account of how human–environment relations were reconfigured in the UK and Ireland during the 2020–2021 COVID‐19 lockdowns, a period which natural scientists defined as the COVID‐19 Anthropause. Bringing this scientific concept into conversation with geographical work, we consider anthropause as both a lived condition and an historical moment of space–time decompression. Our expanded conceptualisation of anthropause, centred on lived experience and everyday life, develops a more hopeful politics than those offered by the 'Great Acceleration' narrative, which suggests digital media and urbanisation separate humans from nature. In contrast, we identify affirmative and inclusive modes of 'anthropause environmentalism' and explore their potential for fostering convivial human–nature relations in a world that is increasingly urban, digital, and powered by vernacular expertise. To make this argument, we turn to the Self‐Isolating Bird Club, an online birdwatching community operating across several social media platforms which, at the pandemic's height, reached over 50,000 members. We trace three key changes to human–nature relations illustrated by this group which we use to structure our paper: connection, community and cultivation. The COVID‐19 Anthropause recalibrated the fabric and rhythms of everyday life, changing what counts as a meaningful human–nature relationship. This paper will be of interest to geographers exploring environmental change at the interface of more‐than‐human and digital geographies, as well as environmentalists and conservationists. To conclude, we offer suggestions as to how scholars and practitioners might harness the lessons of anthropause to respond to the 'anthropulse'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a material semiotic approach to explore how the ontological multiplicity of climate affects the communication of seasonal climate outlooks (SCO). The analysis is based on an ethnography of the UK Meteorological Office's (Met Office) 3‐month outlook, which predicts seasonal climate variability for the whole of the UK over the next 3 months. I advance geographical knowledge by critiquing a tendency among SCO providers to assume that stakeholders only treat the climate as a descriptive index of weather trends. Instead, I propose that the idea of a normal climate, which is central to this mode of communication, is an effect of materially diverse professional practices, such as running seasonal climate models, making contingency plans, or writing and publishing newspaper articles. These socio‐material practices enact multiple understandings, or ontologies, of what the climate is, which then shape how SCO are understood and used. The analysis identifies moments where ontologies of climate converge and diverge and discusses the effect that these moments have on the communication of the Met Office's 3‐month outlook. The paper concludes by assessing the theoretical significance of material semiotic approaches for geographical research into the multiplicity of climate, as well as the practical significance of this work for scientists who are involved in communicating climate information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how performances of care are a critical feature within the international student recruitment process through an investigation of three distinctive geographical encounters: caring for students; supporting third‐party recruiters; and acting collegially. Caring and the recognition of students as emotional beings is often cited as overlooked within internationalisation agendas brought about by the neoliberalised higher education system. This paper shows how performances of caring are mobilised as part of this as an attempt to secure international student enrolments. International students are a critical income stream in the university sector and, within the UK, higher education is a major export industry. However, growing competition from new markets, limited longer‐term migration prospects, and evidence that international students are primarily viewed as cash cows, means that it is ever more difficult to recruit these students. This paper uses qualitative interviews with international office staff based at 10 UK higher education institutions together with observational research at recruitment events in Hong Kong in 2017 to offer critical and as yet unresearched insights into this aspect of the student recruitment process. It questions the validity of these caring practices and whether the university can ever be a "caring" entity if wider policy agendas are focused on the marketised and the neoliberal. This paper uses three encounters to show how performances of caring are mobilised as an attempt to secure international student enrolments within the neoliberal university. It uses information from a series of interviews with international student recruitment recruitment staff and observational research to offer critical and as yet unresearched insights into this aspect of the student recruitment process. The paper questions whether the university can truly be a 'caring' entity if wider policy agendas are focused on the neoliberalisation of the higher education system. This paper uses three encounters to show how performances of caring are mobilised as an attempt to secure international student enrolments within the neoliberal university. It uses information from a series of interviews with international student recruitment staff and observational research to offer critical and as yet unresearched insights into this aspect of the student recruitment process. The paper questions whether the university can truly be a "caring" entity if wider policy agendas are focused on the neoliberalisation of the higher education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the UK, discussion of good citizenship during the COVID‐19 pandemic largely focused on compliance and non‐compliance with government rules. In this paper, we offer an alternative point of focus. Pandemic governance proceeded not only through rules/morality, but also through freedom/ethics. Good citizenship, therefore, involved practical reasoning in response to situations. We demonstrate this using diaries and other forms of writing collected by Mass Observation during the first six months of the pandemic. Responses to government rules and guidance varied by situation. Many people found governance through freedom/ethics confusing and burdensome. Faced with ethical dilemmas, they managed risks and responsibilities by deliberating, weighing justifications, and sometimes falling back on rules of thumb or heuristics. Discussion of good citizenship during future emergencies would benefit from a greater focus on situations, dilemmas, and justifications. Good citizenship during the COVID‐19 pandemic involved not only compliance with rules but also practical reasoning in response to situations. We demonstrate this using diaries and other forms of writing collected by Mass Observation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Positionality has long been a preoccupation for qualitative researchers within and beyond geography. Reflexive assessments of positionality typically examine the ways in which a researcher's sociodemographic identifiers such as gender, age, ethnicity, dis/ability, sexuality, and/or the intersections between these affect research encounters, processes, and outcomes. Religion rarely features in such interrogations, and then usually only in relation to participants' ethnic or racial affiliations. Drawing on experiences conducting a study exploring the role of faith‐based organisations in welfare provision for homeless people in the UK, this paper focuses on the related (but not synonymous) issue of metaphysical stance, that is, belief or non‐belief in the existence of God(s). It argues that metaphysical stance should be regarded as a sui generis aspect of positionality, which fits into none of the identity categories typically considered but is deserving of separate analysis with respect to its ethical and practical implications. Further to this, it contends that extreme diplomacy and discretion are required when exploring issues as inherently value‐laden as the moral frameworks underpinning welfare approaches. This is especially true when participants' views divide in part along theist/atheist lines, such that religious and policy "literacy" are valuable attributes for researchers negotiating these sensitive terrains in the field. Building on and critiquing existing scholarship on researcher reflexivity within and beyond geography, this paper argues that metaphysical stance should be regarded as a sui generis aspect of positionality that fits into none of the sociodemographic identity categories typically considered but is deserving of separate analysis with respect to its ethical and practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU Referendum of 2016 was one of the most significant events in recent British political history. It is widely recognised that citizens engaged with the referendum through understandings of Britain, the EU, the world, and their place in it. This study complements existing research where such understandings have been inferred from citizens' demographic characteristics, the characteristics of their localities/regions, or elite discourses. It builds on existing research where a more direct engagement with citizens' understandings has been achieved through interviews or focus groups, allowing the content of understandings to be thickly described. To these latter studies, this paper makes three main contributions. First, it focuses on popular imaginative geographies, which are conceptualised drawing on literatures in Geography and Political Science as fast‐thinking heuristics. Second, it brings new evidence to the conversation in the form of volunteer writing for Mass Observation. Third, the focus is on the content of popular imaginative geographies, but also how and why such geographies were used by voters in the referendum. The main findings include that many Leave supporters imagined Britain as an island – either a once great military and imperial power, an island separate from Europe, needing freedom from Europe to engage in the wider world; or a small island, a full container, close to the rest of Europe and vulnerable to mobilities across Europe's borders. By contrast, many Remain supporters imagined Britain as post‐imperial, small, vulnerable, and under threat of isolation from Europe and exposure to a chaotic, uncertain, dangerous world. Both groups engaged with the referendum through such popular imaginative geographies because the referendum presented voters with a difficult task, the campaigns provided few trustworthy facts, and voters therefore had to rely on cognitive shortcuts, including popular imaginative geographies. It is widely recognised that citizens engaged with the EU Referendum of 2016 through understandings of Britain, the EU, the world, and their place in it. This paper conceptualises popular imaginative geographies as fast‐thinking heuristics, draws on new evidence in the form of volunteer writing for Mass Observation, and focuses on the content of popular imaginative geographies, but also how and why such geographies were used by voters in the referendum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an account of the camouflaging of austerity as an institutional strategy. In doing so it brings together and advances geographical literatures on mental health, waiting, and austerity. Where geographers have tended to focus on moments when austerity surfaces in everyday life, this paper addresses those moments where austerity is made to recede. Presenting evidence from interviews with mental health service users/survivors, I argue that stasis is a central feature of encounters with the austere state. Such periods of durative waiting can make austerity apparent, so institutions are incentivised to camouflage them, in order to legitimate their claims of providing care. I advance the concept of the "holding pattern" to capture the mobile cycles of waiting that service users/survivors endure, arguing that these circulations inculcate cruelly optimistic affects by exploiting the immanent potentiality of waiting. These affects engender a belief that the time of care and of progress is imminent. For those held within it, the holding pattern is experienced as a form of stasis disguised as motion. The paper then analyses how people endure this travel without a destination. I demonstrate that, like the holding pattern, these practices of endurance make use of potentiality. Some cast themselves as responsibilised neoliberal subjects, to blame for the lack of meaningful care they receive; others reclaim the potentiality that fuels the holding pattern, engaging in ongoing practices that are sustaining despite their seeming uneventfulness. The paper highlights the centrality of austerity to contemporary mental health geographies; develops a critical account of the politics of stasis and waiting; and argues that the camouflaging of austerity will prove increasingly important to the legitimation of beleaguered "universalist" social services. I conclude with some reflections on the potentiality of a grinding politics of resistance to austerity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between pandemic, or chronic infectious diseases, and the carceral, meaning set‐apart spaces of enforced confinement for 'wrong‐doers,' has a long, tangled history. It features in Foucault's inquiries into disciplinary power and its associated spatial formations, not least in the shape of the modern prison. Drawing lightly from Foucault's claims about disciplinary and biopolitical power, as well as on his anti‐prison activism, this paper explores three possibilities for penal transformation arising during the early months of COVID‐19 in UK prisons (circa March to August 2020). Consulting primary source material, these possibilities are respectively identified as 'retrenching,' 'reworking' or 'reducing' the carceral. A chief finding is that under the press of pandemic 'emergency,' the tilt of emphasis has been towards a retrenched or reworked 'carceral state,' disappointing any promise of abolition, let alone more humble reduction in carceral conditions. The 'biological sub‐citizens' of prisons are hence being left especially vulnerable to the press of pandemic, in part precisely because of how carceral spatialities are being intensified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anxieties around the relationship between livestock agriculture and the environmental crisis are driving sustained discussions about the place of beef and dairy farming in a sustainable food system. Proposed solutions range from 'clean‐cow' sustainable intensification to 'no‐cow', animal free futures, both of which encourage a disruptive break with past practice. This paper reviews the alternative proposition of regenerative agriculture that naturalises beef and dairy production by invoking the past to justify future, nature‐based solutions. Drawing on fieldwork in the UK, it first introduces two of the most prominent strands to this green rebranding of cattle: the naturalisation of ruminant methane emissions and the optimisation of soil carbon sequestration via the use of ruminant grazing animals. Subsequent thematic analysis outlines the three political strategies of post‐pastoral storytelling, political ecological baselining and a probiotic model of bovine biopolitics that perform this naturalisation. The conclusion assesses the potential and the risks of this approach to grounding the geographies and the temporalities of agricultural transition in the Anthropocene: an epoch in which time is out of joint and natures are multiple and non‐analogue, such that they provide slippery and contested grounds for political solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a novel longitudinal qualitative approach of revisiting older men across an elongated period, this paper addresses the lack of geographical attention given to older age masculinities specifically, and the limited exploration of the temporal aspects of masculinity more generally. Situated within debates around intersectional and relational approaches to masculinity and the critical geographies of ageing, the paper utilises insights from Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis to examine how older men (re)produce, organise, and improvise rhythms in using and experiencing places as they age. The paper shows how the notion of masculinities as relational is given fresh insight when considered through the lens of rhythms, offering a less dualistic framing of men than those centred on bodily capacity and that automatically present older men as subordinate, redundant, or inferior. The paper draws on in‐depth, repeat, qualitative interviews across four phases in an 18‐year period with 32 older men (over 65) in the UK. The analysis points to how changing rhythms as men age may be accommodated through, and subsumed within, wider rhythms of continued work, periods of busyness, and eurhythmia (accordance of rhythms) with those around them. Conversely, aspects of arrhythmia (dissonance or conflict of rhythms) that have previously been pointed to as marginalising may also offer older men a level of distinction – allowing, for example, a distancing from age‐graded spaces and prevalent discourses of older age as well as enabling socially dominant masculine positions compared to others at the local level. The paper also points to how masculinities are not only relational to other people and places but also to natural and non‐human rhythms and daily and seasonal contingencies as well as across time. This paper takes a qualitative approach of revisiting older men across an elongated period to attend to the lack of geographical attention given to older age masculinities specifically, and the limited exploration of the temporal aspects of masculinity more generally. The analysis points to how changing rhythms as men age may be accommodated through, and subsumed within, wider rhythms of continued work, periods of busyness, and eurhythmia (accordance of rhythms) with those around them. Conversely, aspects of arrhythmia (dissonance or conflict of rhythms) that have previously been pointed to as marginalising may also offer older men a level of distinction – allowing, for example, a distancing from age‐graded spaces and prevalent discourses of older age as well as enabling socially dominant masculine positions compared to others at the local level. The paper also points to how masculinities are not only relational to other people and places but also to natural and non‐human rhythms and daily and seasonal contingencies as well as across time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper combines the political economy of financialisation with feminist care ethics and sociocultural geographies of home. Together, these perspectives explain why and how real estate is converted into liquid financial assets, and expose the implications for embedded relationships. The argument is developed through a case study of UK care homes, with particular attention to the role of real estate investment trusts. Investors in care companies have sought to render their real estate assets more calculable and profitable, by standardising the assets themselves into hotel‐like spaces. In effect, the work of translating between liquid finance and particular homes is transferred – from investors to those creating relationships in hotel‐like spaces. Yet the fundamental illiquidity of residents, relationships, and "home" constrain and destabilise financialisation. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of "liquid home" for economic, urban, and welfare geographies, and recommends that policy pay more attention to the financing of spaces for care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on smart cities and platform urbanism has explored the very wide range of data harvested from urban environments by digital devices of many kinds, analysing how not only efficiencies but also profits are sought through the extraction, circulation, transformation, commodification, integration, and re‐use of data. Much of that data is generated by smartphone applications. This paper looks at the design of a group of eight smartphone apps by a range of different actors in Milton Keynes, a small UK city with a large number of smart city initiatives. The apps are understood as a co‐constitutive interface between data circulations and embodied users. The paper focuses specifically on the data that the apps generated and shared and on how the app designers anticipated that the data would create different kinds of value for embodied app users. While some data circulations were understood as ways of generating financial value, the paper argues that a number of other forms of value were assumed in the app design. The paper identifies two of these, which it terms normative values and interactive values. It examines how the data mobilised by the smart city apps enacts particular versions of these values, and how those values co‐constitute specific kinds of bodies, agencies, and geographies in digitally mediated cities. This paper looks at the design of a group of eight smartphone apps by a range of different actors in a small UK city with a large number of smart city initiatives. The apps are understood as a co‐constitutive interface between data circulations and embodied users. The paper focuses specifically on the data that the apps generated and shared, on how the app designers anticipated that the data would create different kinds of value for embodied app users, and on how those values co‐constituted specific forms of embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genealogies of life assurance have tended to focus on the governmental possibilities of actuarial calculations of mortality, but the case of foreign residence assurance draws attention to other ways in which British companies calculated climate risk between 1840 and 1940. Drawing on archival research, this paper demonstrates that the extra charges imposed on life assurance policies for foreign residence invited conversations about the risks of climate and mortality in countries beyond Britain, drawing on both contemporary climate science and other arguments about climate pathology. Climate risks, however, had to be made to work for both life assurers and policyholders through far‐reaching social‐material networks, and firms frequently tinkered with arrangements of people, ideas, and artefacts in ways that enabled a mapping and governing of such risks. Whether ideas of climate circulating in life assurance were believed or not, they had effects and policyholders submitted to them. Drawing on archival material from several British life assurance companies, including some detailed cases of assured migrant lives, the paper explores how companies made risk calculations in ways that had consequences for ordinary decisions and practices. In so doing, the paper contributes to debates about life assurance and governmentality, showing that foreign residence policies enabled businesses to secure their risks in an era of imperial expansion. But this is no simple story of power and imperialism. Businesses constantly tinkered with their policies, drawing on climate science and medical understandings, but only as part of an always messy, changing assemblage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea and practice of going "into the field" to conduct research and gather data is a deeply rooted aspect of Geography as a discipline. For global North Development Geographers, among others, this usually entails travelling to, and spending periods of time in, often far‐flung parts of the global South. Forging a successful academic career as a Development Geographer in the UK is therefore to some extent predicated on mobility. This paper aims to critically engage with the gendered aspects of this expected mobility, focusing on the challenges and time constraints that are apparent when conducting overseas fieldwork as a mother, unaccompanied by her children. The paper emphasises the emotion work that is entailed in balancing the competing demands of overseas fieldwork and mothering, and begins to think through the implications of these challenges in terms of the types of knowledge we produce, as well as in relation to gender equality within the academy. This paper critically engages with the gendered aspects of fieldwork mobility, focusing on the challenges and time constraints of conducting overseas fieldwork as a mother. The paper emphasises the emotion work of balancing the competing demands of overseas fieldwork and mothering, and thinks through the implications of these challenges in terms of the types of knowledge we produce, as well as in relation to gender equality within the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysing the affective geographies of digitally mediated payday loans in the UK, this paper advocates and exemplifies an approach to cultural economy that focuses on how economic worlds are affectively animated and lived. Supplementing the two versions of "culture" that cultural economy approaches have to date been organised around – culture as signifying system or culture as assembled effect – we propose a cultural economy of everyday space‐times which is attuned to the affective composition of forms of living. Drawing on empirical work with 40 users of digitally mediated payday loans, we employ this approach to trace how their loans become part of three intersecting forms of living: relief, as a pressing concern is deferred to the immediate future; separation, as private spaces are created within ordinary life and obligations are felt as individual responsibilities; and pressure, as demands to pay intensify the sense that debt is spiralling out of control and already‐ongoing precarity cannot be sustained. In conclusion, we pose further questions for a cultural economy approach orientated to the analysis of forms of living. Analysing the affective geographies of digitally mediated payday loans in the UK, this paper advocates and exemplifies an approach to cultural economy which focuses on the "forms of living" through which economic worlds are affectively animated and lived. Drawing on empirical work with 40 users of payday loans, it shows how they are lived through three forms: relief, separation, and pressure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is increasingly recognised both that belonging divides hierarchically and that people have different capacities to be seen as belonging. However, while the existence of hierarchies of belonging is well documented from the perspective of ethnically minoritised and migrant groups, what characterises, produces, and underpins these hierarchies is largely unaddressed, as is a geographically informed analysis of their reproduction. This paper, based on interviews with white British people in the suburbs of London, takes a novel approach, examining the reproduction of national belonging among people for whom such belonging is relatively privileged. The paper identifies three constructions of national belonging within white British narratives – "belonging in Britain," "belonging to Britain," and "being of Britain" – and argues that, although not always recognised as such, the three constructions are hierarchical in their differing temporalities and connections to whiteness. The elucidation of these different belongings and, crucially, the recognition of their hierarchisation and scalar reproduction, represent major contributions to research on belonging, and also help to explain the exclusion from a full sense of national belonging articulated by British people of colour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2013, Portland Stone, a creamy white limestone from the Isle of Portland in Dorset, was named the world's first "Global Heritage Stone Resource" (GSHR) by the Heritage Stone Task Group, a sub‐commission of the International Union of Geological Sciences. The criteria for GSHR designation are ambiguous, with the Task Group championing Portland Stone's "cultural value" and "heritage," neither of which are critically interrogated. In this paper we undertake a detailed critical discourse analysis of Hansard entries mentioning Portland Stone between 1803 and 2020. We reveal that the use of Portland Stone is intertwined with colonial oppression, class subjugation, empire politics, structural racism, and a mythologised, England‐centric vision of British national identity. In celebrating the use of Portland Stone as part of Britain's "heritage", we are condoning a narrative of Britishness that is exclusionary and whitewashed, and that supports an elite rewriting of national and international history. Drawing on critical heritage literature, we argue that the Heritage Stone Task Group must urgently reconsider their uncritical appraisal of "heritage" and "culture" and consult with social science colleagues to ensure that all voices are heard. Our study shows that through the history and nature of their usage, the rocks beneath our feet, our natural foundation, can become imbued with notions of regional and national identity, belonging and exclusion, memory and loss – they can become a powerful manifestation of symbolic and unequal power structures. While British society's attention is turned to the imprint of colonialism, empire, and race on our geographies, we urge further consideration of the built environment: the very stones that construct our towns and cities, the plinths on which statues are erected, tell stories of oppression and domination that are an important part of British history, culture, and heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smartphone pregnancy apps, which enable their users to track a pregnancy week by week and offer advice to coincide with each stage, have transformed the spaces and times in which pregnancy information can be accessed. In this paper we draw on recent geographical work on the family, relatedness, and digitally mediated forms of intimacy, to explore how these apps figure in the embodied, emotional, and relational geographies of pregnancy. We present an analysis of visual material from pregnancy apps and interviews with women in the UK who have used them, to examine how these apps are marketed as a means to facilitate the "bonding work" of forming a close relationship with the future baby through visual images of foetal development, and related to this, how they mobilise ideas of biologically naturalised and socially normative maternal bonding. For users, however, existing and future relationships with prospective fathers and grandparents, as well as the expected baby, are practised in the spaces of everyday life through the strategic and selective sharing of pregnancy information. Our attention to the spatialities and practices of making intergenerational and parental relationships shows how users of apps respond to ideas of physical closeness in pregnancy and how this intersects with ideas of relational closeness and connection as both natural and achieved through bonding work. Women's engagements with pregnancy apps can therefore provide important insights both into the contemporary making of intimate relationships through digital technologies and geographies of parenting and pregnancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the varieties of smart urbanism to be found in the contemporary urban landscape in the UK. In so doing, it builds on and extends two currently dominant sets of critiques of the smart city: those that call into question its technocratic and top‐down modes of governance, and those that describe the smart city as an empty signifier. The paper makes sense of the UK's variegated local smart urban practices by tracing the emergence of a national, state‐led cultural economy of smart urbanism. Based on an analysis of smart‐city programmes in 34 UK cities, we identify two broad discursive logics through which varieties of smart urbanism are produced and performed. First, the invocation of crisis forms a discursive foundation on which place‐specific logics are based. Second, sets of what we term variegated logics are differently combined to build on the "foundational story" of crisis in the construction of local smart agendas. We discuss three of these variegated logics: the city portrayed as technological simulacrum; the focus on specific sectoral activities; and a chameleonic tendency to envelop previous eco‐urban agendas into smart urbanism. By making these logics visible, the paper opens up a new critical space for debate about alternative future pathways that smart cities might take. The paper analyses the varieties of smart urbanism in UK cities. The paper makes sense of the UK's variegated local smart urban practices by tracing the emergence of a national, state‐led cultural economy of smart urbanism based on specific discursive logics. By making these logics visible, the paper opens up a new critical space for debate about alternative future pathways that smart cities might take. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances a theory of "cohortness" for understanding the experience and articulation of identities. Using a case study focusing on higher education students, we argue that thinking in terms of cohorts enables an alternative way to examine how people perform, feel, and express their subjectivities collectively, especially within institutional spaces. Our analysis is based on an ongoing research‐education project, which ran over five years and involved over 250 undergraduate students at a post‐1992 UK university. The project involved large groups of students engaging in an exercise on "mis/fitting," which encouraged them to articulate (as individuals and groups) which identities it was "easy" to perform/hold/display as students, and which it was not. The project also involved a range of subsequent reflective discussions with each group. Our data provide striking insights into how year groups produce "cohortness" in different ways and across intersecting scales. In this paper, we focus on three key themes, which are underpinned by an often ambivalent articulation of contemporary neoliberal ideals: mixtures of deliberation and chance in the production of in‐class, micro‐spatial, intertextual dialogues; the intersection of norms and commonalities in the naming of some identity groups (such as sporting interests) and hiding of others (such as fandom); and the significance of personality, performative, and/or bodily traits compared with other aspects of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper places a critical spotlight on the ways in which governance and social responsibility concerning labour standards work in the context of public sector procurement. Supply chains provisioning the public sector, incorporating a vast array of materials used in public services such as education, health, social housing and transportation, have been under‐researched and under‐theorised in the geographical and wider social science literature on Global Production Networks, Global Value Chains and consumption ethics. Against this backdrop, the paper evaluates the emergence of ethical trading programmes involving labour standards in UK public sector sourcing, drawing on examples from the health, higher education, construction and transportation sectors and a methodology combining interviews with participant observation. Findings show that ethical public procurement is shaped, and often constrained, by: the relatively low profile of many materials used in public services, which challenge effective campaigning and advocacy work; the consequent limits to reputational risk for state departments and first‐tier suppliers if labour issues are encountered in their supply chains; and the significant role of EU and UK procurement law, which until 2014 rendered social responsibility in public sector sourcing a legal risk to specify. Through a practice‐orientated approach and adopting the notion of responsibilisation inspired by governmentality perspectives, the paper grasps how these challenges for ethical public procurement are encountered and negotiated by procurement managers and those influencing them in a neoliberal environment. It is shown that ethical sourcing is significantly less advanced in the UK public sector than it is in consumer goods sectors, with implications for social justice in a whole realm of under‐researched global supply chains. This paper places a critical spotlight on the ways in which governance and social responsibility concerning labour standards work in the context of public sector procurement. Through a practice‐orientated approach and adopting the notion of responsibilisation inspired by governmentality perspectives, the paper grasps how challenges of ethical public procurement are encountered and negotiated by procurement managers and those influencing them in a neoliberal environment. It is shown that ethical sourcing is significantly less advanced in the UK public sector than it is in consumer goods sectors, with implications for social justice in a whole realm of under‐researched global supply chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of citizen science methodologies by environmental organisations and ecologists entrusts the task of collecting ecological data to non‐experts operating at a local scale. This presents individuals and communities with opportunities to monitor ecological change and contribute to local environmental management. Little is known about why volunteers choose to participate in burgeoning contemporary citizen science research initiatives. The aim of this paper is thus to explore volunteer motivation for involvement in two environmental citizen science initiatives, based in the United Kingdom. It contributes to understandings of the socio‐geographical influences that act on participation in environmental citizen science. It is proposed within this paper that affective connections with local geographies provide a conceptual framework for understanding citizen science motivations. The paper discusses the main themes emerging from site‐based, in‐depth interviews with 22 citizen science participants in various UK locations. The study revealed that early affective bonds formed with ecological spaces endured throughout life courses, while citizen science participation offered a way of remaining connected to local environments. The paper reflects on the endurance of affective environmental bonds and their manifestation within the expressed motivations for citizen science participation, which emerged as fulfilling a compulsion to observe ecological surroundings, a desire to participate in environmental research and a commitment to protecting local environments. The paper proposes that citizen science participation offers a framework to connect to and protect local and global affinity spaces, while assisting in monitoring global environmental change. Little is known about why volunteers choose to participate in burgeoning contemporary citizen science research initiatives, this paper's aim is to explore volunteer motivation for involvement in two environmental citizen science initiatives, based in the United Kingdom. It is proposed that affective connections with local geographies provide a conceptual framework for understanding citizen science motivations. The paper reflects on the endurance of affective environmental bonds and their manifestation within the expressed motivations for citizen science participation, which emerged as fulfilling a compulsion to observe ecological surroundings; a desire to participate in environmental research and a commitment to protecting local environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper frames a critical evaluation of the progressive aspirations of localism partnerships by conceptualising them as informal associations. I show how the selective limitations and affordances of the Localism Act and its related policies necessitated and enabled direct, deliberative encounters, and pragmatic working between the Rural Urban Synthesis Society and its local authority, Lewisham Council. These practices allowed them to co‐produce a precedent for community‐led affordable housing development in London, as well as contribute to the growth of the sector. Informal associations are thus both means and end. They enable innovative articulations of localism and underpin a broader, ongoing project of progressive localism. They also form the conceptual basis for future research to delve more deeply and widely into analyses of localism partnerships and their relationalities to the institutions in which they are embedded. Within the vagarious and incoherent institutional landscape of austerity, informal associations invoke a local politics which embraces collaborative, direct experimentation between state agents and societal actors, working with uncertainty in planning to achieve progressive developmental and governance outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that conditions for asylum seekers in countries that have signed the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (hereafter “Convention”) are increasingly paralleling those in non‐signatory countries. The similar deterioration of treatment of asylum seekers is symptomatic of the disintegration of the existing refugee protection system established by the Convention. This paper focuses on the case of Thailand, a non‐signatory country that has been widely criticised for its treatment of refugees, and compares three significant trends in refugee protection with those in the UK. In Thailand as well as the UK, protection takes shape as ad hoc, arbitrary and differentially applied across space, leading to extreme precariousness. Two concepts frame my comparison of the Thai and UK contexts: the landscapes of protection that encompass the range of practices engaged in refugee governance, from signed treaties to soft laws, subcontracted service providers and substandard media coverage; and the graduated levels of protection that rely on spatial logics to manage access to protection and shape both refugees’ imagined futures as well as their present status. This comparison challenges the implicit distinctions between developed and developing countries, as well as signatories and non‐signatories to the Convention, that have predominated in refugee scholarship, and extends recent scholarship that deconstructs the coherence and authority of the nation state. I conclude that these presumed divisions are not only inaccurate, but mask the precarious and dangerous realities that asylum seekers and refugees face in both locations. Increasingly, the protections offered by the Convention have become a façade for arbitrary and harmful treatment of refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the use of supply chain mapping by actors in the UK food system to anticipate problematic futures. Supply chain mapping as an anticipatory practice is a response to a recent food scare that has reinforced concerns about the safety, quality, and authenticity of foodstuffs circulating within supply chains. Our analysis of this novel set of mapping practices is based around the visibility of the supply chain that they offer and the ways in which this is generated or made to relate to future problems as both objects and processes. Supply chain maps as objects can induce surprise and uncertainty over the future, but they can also demonstrate responsibility for risk or be a means of allocating and assuring accountability for future problems. Looking at mapping as a process highlights both the difficulty of mapping supply chains and what is actually involved in using supply chain maps to give form to potential future problems. We characterise both of these processes as navigational, based on creating and reading "signposts" that allow risky food futures to be plotted as trajectories in space and time. Supply chain maps describe a process as well as a set of spatial relations, and navigating futures with these maps is a skilled task involving accumulated knowledge about food risks and learning to recognise supply chain maps as encompassing time and space. Our analysis highlights how things not made visible by the map, but present through those involved in the mapping, are as important in its anticipatory use as the things made visible. Maps are part of a wider process of making sense of risky food chain futures that is filled with uncertainty and power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emergency preparedness is a distinctive feature of contemporary anticipatory politics, yet "preppers," a sub‐culture who prepare to survive a range of possible crisis events through practices including stockpiling and survival skill development, are subject to media ridicule and academic dismissal. If the hoarder is the symbolic deviant figure of the consumer society, the prepper is that of the security society. Such constructions of prepper pathology, however, work to reinforce the neoliberal security state. By repositioning the prepper as an amplifier of conditions of the present, what emerges is an emblematic and anticipatory figure who troubles the cracks in the security state's governing logics, exposing its social differentiation and rehearsing the inevitability of its future failures. Drawing on qualitative research on UK prepping cultures, I define prepping across three constellations of imaginative‐material practices, concerning "value," "temporalities," and "crisis." I argue that prepping exposes the contradictions of infrastructural weakening alongside the networked dependencies and restricted agency felt within late modernity, challenges the expert determination of what constitutes crisis, and unveils the myth of the universality of state security protection. Living with profound crisis attunement, preppers nevertheless recuperate pleasure in material potentiality and skilful practice, in thoughtful engagement with temporalities, and in the vitality of community and meaning formed in the times and spaces in, and around, crisis. Drawing on qualitative research on UK prepping cultures, this paper explores prepping through its imaginative‐material practices concerning "value," "temporalities," and "crisis." The prepper emerges as both an emblematic and anticipatory figure who exposes the contradictions of infrastructural weakening alongside networked dependencies, challenges the expert determination of what constitutes crisis, and unveils the myth of the universality of state security protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to critical discussions of austerity by examining the constructions of scarcity that underpin it. Specifically, it shows how notions of scarcity (re)emergent in a period of austerity have shaped materially insufficient and stigmatising welfare systems. We do this through the example of UK food banks. We suggest that under austerity a particular moral economy of scarcity has become embedded at the level of common sense, including in the common sense of many of those distributing food aid. In UK food banks this moral economy is shaped by images of the "empty cupboard" and discourses of absolute hunger which normalise practices of (self)rationing and exacerbate food insecurity. Tracing attempts by some food bank managers and volunteers to challenge this moral economy, we conclude with a critical agenda for academics and practitioners to rethink relationships between welfare, austerity, and scarcity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the neglected mobilities associated with a sample of UK women reported as missing. Refracted through literatures on gendered mobility and abandonment, the paper argues that the journeys of these women in crisis are not well understood by police services, and that normative gender relations may infuse their management. By selectively exploring one illustrative police case file on Kim, we highlight how reported and observed socio-spatial relationships within private and public spaces relate to search actions. We argue that Kim's mobility and spatial experiences are barely understood, except for when they appear to symbolise disorder and danger. We address the silences in this singular case by using the voices of other women reported as missing, as collected in a research project to explore the agency, experience and meaning of female mobility during absence. We argue that women reported as missing are not abandoned by UK policing services, but that a policy of continued search for them may be at risk if they repeatedly contravene normative socio-spatial relationships through regular absence mobilities. By way of conclusion, we address recent calls for research that explores the relationships between gender and mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paradigm shift to more distributed flood risk management strategies in the UK involves devolved responsibilities to the local, and the need to enhance risk ownership by communities. This poses questions about how communities build resilience to future flood risk, and how agencies support these processes. This paper explores results from interdisciplinary research on 'sustainable flood memory' in the context of effective flood risk management as a conceptual contribution to a global priority. The project aimed to increase understanding of how flood memories provide a platform for developing and sharing lay knowledges, creating social learning opportunities to increase communities' adaptive capacities for resilience. The paper starts by conceptually framing resilience, community, lay knowledge and flood memory. It then explores key themes drawn from semi-structured interviews with floodplain residents affected by the UK summer 2007 floods in four different settings, which contrasted in terms of their flood histories, experiences and kinds of 'communities'. Sustainable flood memories were found to be associated with relational ways of knowing, situated in emotions, changing materiality and community tensions. These all influenced active remembering and active forgetting. The paper reflects on varying integrations of memory, lay knowledges and resilience, and critically evaluates implications of the sustainable flood memory concept for the strategy, process and practice of developing community flood resilience. Given the concept's value and importance of 'memory work', the paper proposes a framework to translate the concept practically into community resilience initiatives, and to inform how risk and flood experiences are communicated within communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out the value of the concept of 'careering' to understanding the global mobility of urban policy across historical and contemporary contexts. Through a case study of one colonial and post-colonial career in urban development, we demonstrate the material and ideological connections between late colonial development in Nigeria, British reconstruction and international consultancy. Empirically, the paper provides novel post-colonial perspectives on Britain's post-Second World War reconstruction spanning the mid- to late 20th century, globalising the geographies of the British new town. Conceptually, the paper argues that careering provides a valuable tool for progressing the study of urban expertise and its mobility in four ways. First, it provides a tool for connecting geographically distant urban development projects. Second, careering allows us to explore intersections between urban development policies and geopolitical transformations. Third, careering allows us to see the impact of ideas, skills, experiences, affiliations and contacts formed at different stages of a career on later professional practice, slowing down and lengthening out our understandings of the processes though which urban policy is made mobile. Fourth, careering as a method demonstrates the continued value of biographical approaches to urban policy mobility, highlighting in particular professional lives worked with colleagues and contacts rather than in isolation, and foregrounding the everyday embodied nature of urban expertise. The article concludes by suggesting such approaches could be productive for the writing of new post-colonial histories of geography and its allied disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines the political geography of asylum accommodation in the UK, arguing that in the regulation of housing and support services we witness the depoliticisation of asylum. In 2010, the UK Home Office announced that it would be passing contracts to provide accommodation and reception services for asylum seekers to a series of private providers, meaning the end of local authority control over asylum housing. This paper explores the impact of this shift and argues that the result is the production of an asylum market, in which neoliberal norms of market competition, economic efficiency and dispersed responsibility are central. In drawing on interviews with local authorities, politicians and asylum support services in four cities, the paper argues that the privatisation of accommodation has seen the emergence of new assemblages of authority, policy and governance. When combined with a market-oriented transfer of responsibilities, depoliticisation acts to constrain the possibilities of political debate and to predetermine the contours of those policy discussions that do take place. In making this case, the paper challenges the closures of work on post-politics, and argues for an exploration of the situated modalities of practice through which forms of depoliticisation interact with, and are constituted by, processes of neoliberalisation. In this context, the framing of asylum seekers as a 'burden' emerges as a discursive and symbolic achievement of the neoliberal politics of asylum accommodation. Framing asylum seekers as a burden represents both a move to position asylum as a specific and managerial issue, and at the same time reiterates an economic account of asylum as a question of resource allocation, cost and productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the multitude of studies of factors that determine residential (im)mobility, relatively little attention has been paid to the length of time that people spend in a particular location and the importance of duration of stay for future relocation propensities. This study uses a large and detailed commercial survey sample of individuals in England and Wales and an appropriately tailored statistical approach to uncover new insights into the multilevel and spatially heterogeneous interactions that exist between residential duration, place attachment and plans for future residential relocation. We demonstrate how an individual's residential duration, as an essential ingredient for the accumulation of social capital and place-based attachment, is critical for informing plans for future (im)mobility. After controlling for a range of individual and contextual covariates, the predicted probability of planning a residential relocation is found to increase initially with duration of stay, to a peak after 4-5 years, and then to decline as the length of duration increases. However, there is evidence of strong geographical variation in this relationship, with some neighbourhoods being characterised by stable or even increasing propensities for movement with duration. The paper pays particular attention to the importance of wider neighbourhood dynamics (composition, selective sorting and population (in)stability), suggesting that they too play an important role in mediating duration-of-stay effects for individuals. The paper concludes by highlighting the need for researchers and policy practitioners interested in community dynamics, the development/accumulation of social capital and place attachment/rootedness, to give due consideration to multilevel durations of residence and, more broadly, the inherently spatial and temporal ties that bind individuals to place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances geographical perspectives on household sustainability by extending the range of insights from consumption scholarship that are brought to bear on the issue. Research that links consumption to the dynamics of variously sustainable practices currently dominate, resulting in a particular and partial reading of material culture. I suggest that geographical approaches to the social life of things may yield new insights into materiality and household sustainability. Specifically, I argue that "following the thing"-which is typically focused on commodity chains -could usefully be extended into people's homes. This is not introduced as a way to acknowledge the connections between points in a network, rather, it is positioned as a set of theoretical and methodological resources that can be utilised to explore the movement and placing of things as they move through a critical juncture - in this case the household. To illustrate, I present material drawn from two empirical studies of households in the UK. The first is an ethnographically-informed study of how food becomes waste; the second is a quantitative survey of laundry habits. Attention is paid to the ways in which the ongoing categorisation and valuation of things shape their trajectories and move them in directions that give rise to (adverse) environmental impacts. To conclude I sketch out an agenda for future studies, consider how a focus on households can yield more comprehensive biographies of things and address the implications of this analysis both for consumption scholarship and for engagement with sustainability research and policy beyond human geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate national-scale economic assessments of flood risk should, first, allow policy and resource allocation to be determined sensibly by relating both to the scale of that risk and, second, provide a benchmark against which any possible future changes in risk can be assessed. This paper critiques the UK's National Flood Risk Assessment ( NAFRA), its development for England and Wales over a decade, and its evaluation of economic fluvial and coastal flood risk. We find, when comparing the results with other data on flooding and the damage caused over 20 + years (including insurance claims), that NAFRA appears to overestimate the economic risk by between four- and five-fold (i.e. at c.£1.1bn p.a., as opposed to a central estimate here of £0.25bn p.a.). The flood problem faced is still serious, and may be increasing, but we suggest that an exaggeration has become embedded. The assessment models and their data need further enhancement if this situation is to be corrected and a realistic assessment made of the scale of the current fluvial and coastal flood risk. Only then will the results be adequately credible and hence useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Areas within England and Wales have population profiles that make them distinct from other locales; some areas have lower unemployment rates than others, while, in some places, there is a greater mix of ethnic groups than elsewhere. Thus, the degree of difference between areas differs geographically and between population sub-groups. Being able to measure change in these differences is crucial in assessing whether the population has become more or less similar over time. The spatial distribution of the population by, for example, ethnicity or employment status can be characterised and the resulting measures show how the population is geographically organised, and how this changes through time. For example, spatial concentrations of the population by age may be less obvious locally (e.g. within a town or city) or regionally (e.g. the north west of England) than by housing tenure. This paper makes two key contributions: (i) it introduces methods for the analysis of spatial distributions of population sub-groups and (ii) enhances our understanding of the characteristics of population sub-groups in England and Wales and how they have changed over time. Based on Census data for Output Areas, the analysis uses the index of dissimilarity, Moran's I autocorrelation coefficient and the variogram to measure (spatial) variation in variables representing population sub-groups by age, ethnic group, housing tenure, car or van ownership, qualifications, employment, limiting long term illness and National Statistics Socio-economic Classification. The analysis shows that, between 2001 and 2011, unevenness in most population sub-groups reduced and the populations in individual Census zones across England and Wales became more similar. Neighbouring Census zones also became more similar (more 'clustered'). The findings suggest that there were decreased differences both within and between regions for many population variables between 2001 and 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that processes of social reproduction are central to our understanding of body formation under capitalism. Articulated through a feminist historical materialist framework founded on a social ontology that recognises the material foundation of social life as constituted of both productive and reproductive activities, this paper develops the concept of uneven body as a more holistic approach integrating into corporeal geography a social reproduction lens. I explore the social and historical analytical capacity of the concept through a study of food distribution in Britain c.1850-1914 in order to reveal how certain bodies absorbed, mediated and embodied contradictions between production and social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We reflect on the decision to abandon the mainstreaming of zero-carbon house building in England, in the context of our paper (Walker et al. 2015) that took this long-standing policy commitment as its case study. We consider this denouement as further evidence of how the exigencies of capital accumulation resist moves towards low-carbon transition. We reflect on what it reveals about the relation between politics and governance, the grounding and locating of carbon responsibilities and the necessary role of the state in enabling the everyday reproduction of low-carbon living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]