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This paper considers the nature of social surveillance through the physical activity tracking app MapMyRun and examines how this was experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic during the UK and USA summer 2020 lockdowns. In contributing to debates in digital geographies around the entanglements of the fleshy and digital body, the paper responds to calls for research to recognise the increasing sociality of self-tracking (Couture, 2021), specifically considering how, during the COVID-19 pandemic, these apps offered a form of connection during a time of isolation. Using data from email and video interviews, I argue that whilst a Foucauldian account of surveillance can be used as a point of departure, it is limited in accounting for the social aspects of self-tracking. I therefore propose that applying Robinson's (2000) concept of 'noisy surveillance' to self-tracking is useful for understanding the messiness of surveillance in terms of the complications and noisiness involved in interactions in digital spaces, as well as the opportunities for performance management online particularly during lockdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Examines the possibilities and challenges of nurturing UK agri-food justice. • Land justice is crucial to engender food system transformation. • 'Public goods' approach to agri-food policy acts as a depoliticising consensus frame. • The land-food nexus must be placed more prominently on the research agenda. • Argues for participative, inclusive agri-food praxis based on socioecological justice. This paper examines the possibilities and challenges of nurturing agri-food justice by using land as a foundational node in the context of the UK leaving the European Union – what has been termed 'Brexit'. Drawing upon the interconnected literatures of land justice and food justice, which have received sparse coverage in the UK, we develop an agri-food (in)justice lens to reveal the diverse contestations and struggles to transform the physical and political agri-food Brexit landscape in more socioecological just ways. Our research highlights the tensions and difficulties in addressing the complex social and environmental injustices bound up with UK agri-food relations, given the unequal power dynamics that permeate food and farming politics and policy. In particular, the research reveals the continued 'hidden' politics of historically-embedded land (in)justice. We therefore argue for greater focus on the multiscalar relationships between land and the intersecting contestations of agri-food labour, capital and knowledge. We end the paper by discussing the limitations of the nascent 'public goods' approach to agricultural policy under a purported 'Green Brexit' and arguing for participative and inclusive agri-food praxis based on land and food justice to cultivate more socioecologically just futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rising demand for emergency food during the last couple of decades in the UK has led to a great deal of academic interest in food aid provision, and food banking in particular. Efforts have also been made to examine food poverty and responses to it in more critical terms, which has entailed moving beyond a focus on emergency food support to engage with 'more than food aid' approaches. In this paper, I discuss how these latter approaches are beginning to be mobilised by national organisations, local authorities and place-based food partnerships in the UK. An important catalyst for this shift was the Covid-19 pandemic, which provided the crisis conditions that encouraged public and third-sector actors to think about, and act upon, food poverty in different ways. Drawing on an analysis of submissions to a Covid-19 food inquiry, place-based food initiatives implemented during the pandemic period and more recent initiatives instigated by national food support and anti-hunger groups, the paper examines how a diverse range of organisations are becoming more critical of existing (food aid) responses to food poverty and are seeking to develop more supportive local foodscapes based on a 'more than food aid' approach. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this shift for future research on food poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Seaside resorts face socio-economic challenges which can exacerbate family crises. • Inequalities in seaside resorts can complicate delivery of family support services. • Innovative embedded research approach within Children's Social Care. • Preventative Early Help strategies need to be attuned to differing care ecologies. Effective Early Help services are key to halting rising rates of children in care in the UK. Yet despite family support and child welfare interventions being unequally distributed across the country, the role of 'place' has received limited attention in the children's social care arena. This paper examines the connections between coastal challenges, Early Help and child welfare interventions, drawing on embedded research undertaken within a Local Authority on England's coast with elevated levels of children in care. We focus on families' experiences raising children in a seaside resort area as well as professionals' perspectives on the place-based challenges faced delivering effective and accessible Early Help support. The study generated data from ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups with local parents/carers (n = 57), service managers and frontline professionals (n = 14), and the Voluntary, Community, and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector (n = 22). The findings highlight how the socio-economic challenges associated with many seaside resort areas, including housing pressures, a seasonal and low-wage economy, and the transience of the population, present difficulties for parents/carers in raising and supporting their children. For professionals delivering Early Help, high levels of housing instability, elevated inward migration, resource constraints and challenges around recruitment and retention presented challenges to delivering services. This paper recommends increased emphasis in regulation and resourcing around family support that considers the spatial and geographic dynamics that influence the incidence, structuring, and experiences of child and family welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The clothing sector is under increased global scrutiny as the second biggest polluter behind the oil industry. What was once termed the 'democratisation of fashion', fast fashion has become a low cost, high speed and resource intensive market. As a result, sustainable consumerism has gained traction, with innovative alternatives such as collaborative consumption and product service systems becoming more popular. However, despite growing concern, sustainable alternatives remain a niche market compared to the scale of global fast fashion. Rental clothing schemes remain under-researched in the UK. These collaborative consumption schemes promote a circular economy through reducing waste and increasing life cycles. This paper examines the determinants of rental clothing adoption by employing semi-structured interviews, specifically accounting for different generations across rural and urban areas. It presents a UK perspective on rental clothing. The findings suggest that the affordability of rental is dependent on the nature of the items and adoption is driven by style, sustainability desires, and geography of consumers. This paper concludes that to increase the adoption of rental clothing schemes, trust in schemes and increased accessibility are essential to allow them to become mainstream alternatives to fast fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Financial geography is one of the fastest growing subdisciplines in geography. • Financial geography emerged in the UK in the late 1980s after London's Big Bang. • The subfield remains exceedingly British with the growing engagement from Continental Europe. • Financialization emerged as the subfield's central focus after the 2008 global financial crisis. • Financial geography has a pluralist theory-culture represented by four distinct intellectual traditions. The past decade has yielded an unprecedented surge in geographical research on money and finance. Amidst this apparent financial turn, the paper aims to provide an institutional sociology of the rapidly growing subdiscipline of Anglophone financial geography, using Web of Science bibliometric data and oral histories of key figures in the field. Employing a two-track methodology involving an analysis of 440 financial geography articles published since 1986 and 23 interviews conducted with self-identified financial geographers and scholars allied with the financial geography project, the paper aims to deconstruct how financial geography emerged as a field by examining the people present at the birth, the intellectual histories that shaped it, and the conditions that have influenced its wider reception. The paper presents three main findings. First, it shows how the political economic conditions of financialization in the UK coupled with the patterns of institutionalization and the subfield's origins resulted in an enduring British dominance. Second, citation patterns reveal that during the three decades of its existence, financial geography evolved into a poly-centric and pluralist subfield with four main intellectual traditions represented. Finally, the paper exposes the extent to which the 2008 global financial crisis was the major force behind the consolidation of financial geography as a subfield, giving momentum to studies of financialization and amplifying the visibility of financial geography's scholarship within the broader social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Academic staff often experience pedagogic dissonance when first teaching in another country. • They adopt classroom and curriculum strategies to address these challenges. • These strategies are shaped by their own experiences, student diversity and institutional context. Drawing on material from qualitative research with Chinese academics in a UK university and British academics in the Chinese branch campus of that university, this paper places pedagogy at the centre of geographical debates about mobility and the internationalisation of higher education. In particular, it moves beyond the usual focus on the mobility of pedagogy in schools or the teaching of international students in higher education to consider how pedagogic practices are embodied in mobile academic staff, within particular classroom and wider institutional environments. These individuals bring their prior experience of teaching and institutional cultures to a new environment where they come up against approaches and pedagogic practices which may clash with their beliefs about good teaching. This pedagogic dissonance may create feelings of frustration or insecurity, but may also provide opportunities for creativity and self-reflection. The paper focuses on three aspects of pedagogic practice: classroom interactions, language and assessment. The focus on the embodied nature of pedagogic practice extends geographical debates around academic mobility, hierarchies of knowledge, and the internationalisation of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volunteers have been increasingly important in responding to rising UK poverty in the last decade in the context of austerity and the retracting welfare state. Faith-based organisations in particular have played a vital role in this response but whilst there has been attention to how religious faith can motivate people to volunteer, this paper is one of the first geographical pieces to specifically focus on how volunteers' religious faith is affected by volunteering. Inspired by the geographies of religion, it conceptualises faith as fluid and relational. This means faith cannot only be understood as a motivation at the start of volunteering, and therefore how faith is affected by volunteering needs to be understood. This paper is based on the experiences of volunteers at a participatory research project 'Lunch' responding to UK children's holiday hunger. Engaging with volunteers' journeys at Lunch drew out two dominant ways in which volunteers' religious faith was affected: encouragement and challenge from volunteering at a faith-based project without explicit faith content, and secondly, the challenge of giving an unconditional welcome to volunteers and children at Lunch. Overall, I argue that whilst religious faith can motivate people to volunteer, this is not a unidirectional relationship because volunteers' faith can also be challenged by their experiences which can not only affect their motivations and whether they will persist in volunteering, but can also fundamentally change their understanding of their religious faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how conceptions of displacement have been challenged and adapted as the study of gentrification has expanded to encompass a series of new contexts, including post-industrial conversions and new-build urban developments within and beyond the Global North. Attention is draw to Peter Marcuse's work on displacement, and how some of his conceptualisations of different forms of displacement have been significant in cross-contextual discussions of gentrification, although other aspects of his work, such as his discussions of the relationship between abandonment and displacement have received less attention. Drawing on work of Marcuse, the earlier work of George and Eustice Grier, and a series of more contemporary studies, the paper argues for the adoption of more multi-dimensional and temporally sensitive conceptualisations of gentrification displacement. It then seeks to illustrate the value of this conceptualisation in the study of a further context of gentrification, namely the study of rural gentrification. The paper highlights recent debates over the significance of displacement, and thereby gentrification, to the study of demographic change in rural areas of the UK. Attention is drawn to studies that have made reference to displacement impacts of rural gentrification, before drawing on research conducted by the authors in nine villages located in six districts of England. The paper highlights evidence of 'disinvestment displacement' occurring prior to the major onset of gentrification in these villages, through 'reinvestment displacement' and 'direct displacement' at the point of gentrification, 'chain displacement' occurring both before and after the point of property gentrification, and 'exclusionary displacement', and material and experiential 'displacement pressures', operating once gentrification had started to take hold in these locations. Displacement is further shown to involve not only housing but also employment conditions, access to services, and the symbolism, practices and affective relations that people have with human and more-than-human constituents of space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Digital foodscapes are increasingly populated by digital food influencers (DFIs). • Different digital platforms offer different affordances to talk about food. • DFIs create a series of good food grammars related to clean eating and lifestyle. • DFIs position good food within notions of how to be in life. • DFIs re-inscribe white, hetero-normative middle- and upper- class privilege. Drawing on recent debates around food, space and digital media, this paper introduces and develops the concepts of the digital foodscape and 'good' food grammars. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of digital platforms, discourses and personas, we investigate the ways a key set of digital food influencers (DFIs) construct, curate and share the meanings of good food. We first explore who these influencers are, describe what platforms they inhabit, how the variable social media affordances work through these platforms and the notions of good food they construct. We then focus specifically on DFIs' communicative practices on Twitter to analyse the core discourses DFIs produce and those that are taken up by audiences through re-tweets and likes as well as the re-tweeted tweets of DFIs. Overall, our findings suggest that first, good food grammars are being constructed by rule setters beyond the already well-established food personalities and celebrity chefs of the UK's foodscape. Yet, these grammars also re-inscribe a form of white, hetero-normative middle- and upper- class privilege that produces particular grammars of good food. Second, different social media and digital platforms provide space for diverse good food grammars given their variable affordances. Twitter, in particular, is the place where the grammars of DFIs take on non-food themes such as self-empowerment, inspiration, charity campaigning and awareness raising. Third, the notions of good food in DFI grammars revolve around a range of constructions, with the most elevated related to 'clean' eating and/or 'clean' lifestyles that combined healthy, 'free from' diets with fitness regimes and expand DFI grammars – and ultimately their brands – into a more holistic lifestyle brand. This paper's initial empirical and conceptual foray into digital foodscapes and DFIs opens up space for further research on food and digital media within Geography and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around the globe, people seeking asylum are subject to ever-increasing levels of securitisation, surveillance, hostility and violence. In the UK, successive Labour and Conservative governments have sought to create an increasingly 'hostile environment' for people without leave to remain in the country, generating and perpetuating anti-immigrant sentiment in the process. This paper centres attention on the implications of this politics of hostility, which has combined with sweeping levels of austerity, for third sector organisations in and around a city situated in the North East of England. We specifically focus on organisations offering cultural, sporting and artistic activities to gain an insight into how the ways they operate are affected by the UK's immigration and austerity politics. Through researcher volunteering and observation at several organisations and interviews with people associated with them, we document some of the shared practices of quiet care and solidarity, in spite of the significant funding challenges they face. We show how these organisations are providing a crucial support structure to people seeking asylum, offering shared spaces that facilitate the 'doing together' of various activities. However, we also show how these third sector responses, and the people who attend them, are shaped and constrained by this hostile politics. We examine how organisations initially set up to focus on the provision of cultural and artistic activities are increasingly having to tailor their services to provide vitally important forms of support through the provision of, for example, food, clothing and assistance with bureaucratic (but essential) form-filling. The paper makes a key contribution to the relatively scant literature on cultural and artistic initiatives in the third sector set up for people seeking asylum and calls for sensitive academic critiques of the sector that forefront state structural violence and the socio-political contexts in which asylum sector organisations operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Waste reduction and avoidance are key to understandings of thrift. • How motivations for thrift are explained depends on their temporal context. • Thrift as the preservation of economic resources is seen as something from the past. • Moralities of thrift change with the rise of single use products and packaging. • Municipal waste management and infrastructures impact understandings of thrift. This paper explores shifting ideas of waste and recycling in narratives on thrift in the UK. Drawing on texts written by 33 respondents who answered two separate Mass Observation Directives on the subject of thrift in 1987 and 2016, it illuminates how waste reduction and avoidance is described by 'ordinary people'. The ways in which these practices are framed are dependent on the temporal context in which the narrative is set. Two key findings are presented. Firstly, respondents explain motivations for such practices differently, depending on whether their examples relate to what they were exposed to during their upbringing or to their own practices at present. Between these two contexts, the moralisation of thrift through practices of waste reduction and avoidance shifts from a focus on financial hardship towards consciousness/satisfaction, which indicates that current understandings of thrift combine values of ethical consumerism and hedonism. Secondly, responses to the 1987 and 2016 directives differ in terms of how thrift through waste reduction and avoidance of disposable items is accounted for. In 1987 writings, thrift was associated with efforts to find ways to use single-use multiple times, whereas in the 2016 writings, thrift is associated with a firm commitment to household waste recycling through municipal services. This indicates that since the 1980s, material and infrastructural changes have led to a shift of norms in dealing with single-use products and recycling. The findings point towards critical considerations of how moralities of thrift are employed in the context of material culture in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The flood insurance industry is facing an existential threat from climate change. • Effective governance of climate change adaptation cannot rely on markets alone. • In the UK, new forms of intervention are being developed by the Flood Re initiative. • Structural reform of the flood insurance industry is needed. Floods are one of the most commonly occurring natural hazard events globally, and present a significant threat to the UK from climate change. Operating since 2016, Flood Re is an industry-government initiative, set up with the goal of reforming the flood insurance market in order to provide universal, affordable cover for UK households. Principally providing reinsurance services to insurers and including mutualisation arrangements, it aims to withdraw from the market in 2039, having paved the way for risk-reflective pricing without subsidy. Drawing on the theoretical work of Francois Ewald, and empirical data from interviews with 12 key stakeholders and documentary analysis, this paper traces a shift in Flood Re's insurantial imaginary, exemplified by the development of several solutions which go beyond its initial remit of providing reinsurance to private insurers. Findings show that this shift has been driven by the growing realisation that climate change is not merely a complicating factor for the ability to achieve a thriving insurance market, but demands a paradigmatic change in the governance of flood risk. We argue that Flood Re has an opportunity to adopt a leadership role in the governance of climate adaptation, but that it must be expanded to include a wider variety of stakeholders covering land-use planning, housing, consumer and community representatives. That a market for flood insurance that delivers on risk reduction and affordability for all can be brought about without structural reform to the industry nor a strong role for the state, is a delusion in light of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Insurantial imaginaries' describes the shared structures of comprehension and action that establishes the social value of insurance and its practical influence. As insurance is a bricolage of economic, legal, political, cultural and moral elements that vary across time and space, for insurance to be intelligible and functional, these imaginaries render this dynamic complexity into stable and discrete forms. In this paper, we explore one such imaginary constituted through the intersection of housing and insurance norms, vis a vis house and contents insurance, in home-owning democracies. Drawing on the cases of Australia and the United Kingdom, we observe how a rise in renting in these countries is resulting in an increase in underinsurance, with renters less likely to insure their assets. This is refashioning a long-standing insurantial imaginary shaped by socio-cultural aspirations for home-ownership, liberal norms of individual autonomy, and links between home-ownership and democracy, including participation in voting. In observing that this imaginary valorises home-ownership and insurance, and problematises renting and underinsurance, we draw attention to the covert power of insurance in co-constituting everyday practices and identify a novel spatialised insurantial imaginary. In grounding our analysis within home-owning democracies, we also make a broader contribution to economic and financial geography by extending understanding of the complex spatial nature of financial mechanisms and processes, and how market-based economies appear to be reconfiguring democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The experience of debt involves affective entanglements of people, technologies and objects. • Financial subjectivities "run in the background" of our experiential worlds. • Indebted lives are lived in states of heightened anxiety and vigilance. • Austerity as an experiential mode is lived through practices of financialised anxiety. In the context of a perfect storm of measures – welfare reform, precarious work, stagnating wages – increasing numbers of households find themselves in complex webs of debt. This paper addresses the lived experience of debt in the UK, tracing some affective contours of indebtedness that are often overlooked in debt research. Focusing on domestic settings and emotional routines, the paper explores how the everyday experience of indebted life seeps into relationships, frames life projects, and mediates hopes for one's children. The paper argues that the affective architecture of debt operates just as much through moments of intensity – the letter of default, the pressure cooker of an advice session – as through a background hum in which individuals are engaged in ongoing practices of self-assessment, despair, desire and satisfaction. Drawing on in-depth interviews with indebted subjects, this paper investigates contemporary financial subjectivities through such forms of affective modulation that "run in the background". In addition to those moments of intensity, it argues that indebted lives are composed through low-level affective states that include hypervigilance, dissociation and anxiety. It examines the deep entanglements of people, technologies and objects that produce these affective states, highlighting relations of obligation and codependency, and the forms of vigilance and anxiety these relations create. In doing so, the paper troubles understandings of debt as a binary relationship between creditor and debtor and argues for a perspective that considers the complex affective entanglements of indebted lives and the imbrication of indebtedness, financial subjectivity, love and care in the making of life projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Argues for a psychosocial geography of austerity. • Offers a rich account of austerity for low-to-middle income families in the UK. • Interrogates the category of the 'squeezed middle'. • Documents the manifestation of austerity in the intimate spaces of family life. • Concludes that austerity is felt and negotiated psychosocially. This paper seeks to explore the experiences of recession and austerity in a small number of low-to-middle income households in North Tyneside. To try to make sense of the diverse and intimate ways that austerity is thought about, felt, related to, engaged with, and contested, the paper connects a psychosocial perspective to a focus on everyday social geographies and insists on the relation between the psychic and the social. It starts by exploring the coordinates of a psychosocial geography, outlining and building on the growing work in psychosocial studies and connecting this to an explicitly geographical perspective. It then sets out the focus of this particular study – low-to-middle income families in North Tyneside – placing them in the narrative context of the squeezed middle, both sketching the demographic outlines of this cohort and interpreting the squeezed middle as a psychosocial category. At this stage, it also describes and reflects on the research process, one designed to access the psychosocial dimensions of living with austerity. The focus then shifts to narrating and exploring the researched households experiences of austerity, framing them through a focus on 'big things' and 'little things', following the language and sense-making of my participants, and at every stage engaging with the psychosocial aspects of these experiences, attachments, values, practices, spaces, senses and times that need to be understood by holding together the psychic and the social. These experiences are drawn together in a discussion section which attempts to map the psychosocial landscapes of austerity and which concludes by making connections to wider psychosocial framings that signpost further explorations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to emerging geographical literature on what is here conceptualised as 'actually existing austerity'—referring to the uneven ways through which austerity is felt, negotiated, embodied and contested in the varied spatial tapestry of everyday life. Through theorisation of the contemporary operation of food banking in the UK, it will be argued that the gaps in provisioning (in this case, of food) left by welfare reform and state spending cuts in the UK under the guise of austerity are engendering new forms of responsibility that are unevenly distributed and performed—often by those already excluded, marginalised and impoverished. This localisation of responsibility has crucial implications for how austerity becomes embodied and negotiated, as well as the unequal material implications it holds for different people and places. This paper concludes by arguing for a future research agenda concerning actually existing austerity, signalling the need for 'thicker' and more grounded accounts of austerity at scales beyond the nation-state and/or city alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Human-cow-robot relations around Automated Milking Systems can be dissonant. • These relations can be analysed through the concept of divergent conduct. • Divergent conduct highlights that actors' conduct can follow multiple trajectories. • These trajectories co-constitute topological and topographical spatialities. This paper begins to develop a terminology for discussing less-than-convivial more-than-human entanglements. The paper reviews existing work on such relations, showing how they tend to have been conceptualised in terms of animal transgression and resistance. It then develops critiques of these terms, focusing on their problematic representations of animals' actions and subjectivities, and engaging with arguments that non-living nonhumans also need to be considered in conceptualisations of problematic more-than-human situations. Drawing on empirical material from research into automated (or robotic) milking systems (AMS), and the associated relations between machines, humans and cows in specific places, the paper proposes and outlines the concept of divergent conduct. It argues that this is a way of exploring how heterogeneous entities co-produce activity which is likely to differ from accounts of trouble-free introductions of technologies and practices. The concept draws together an emphasis on the 'lively' nature of machines with a focus on the agency of nonhuman animals and the topological relationships involved in attempts to establish AMS in UK dairy farming. It suggests that the characteristics and capacities of heterogeneous entities make multiple and relational differences to situations. As such, the concept emphasises the constitution of AMS in relation to multiple human and nonhuman requirements, and their related conducts, which may pull in different directions. The paper argues that divergent conduct provides a way of exploring problematic and politicised entanglements in which inequalities of power can be many-layered and intersectional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last three decades have witnessed increasing interest in the connections between migration and development. Within this body of work less attention has been paid to the ways in which ideas of race and racialised histories and geographies shape the migration-development nexus. Focusing on diasporic communities as key actors within this nexus and using empirical material from Great Britain's Department for International Development (DfID), this paper explores the shifting constructions of 'the diaspora' within the global development context from DfID's inception in 1997 to its demise in 2020. Constructions of the diaspora-development nexus can be framed as a (shifting) assemblage, bringing together contemporary post-colonial politics of belonging, the racialised histories and geographies of development and the changing (neoliberal) architectures and cultures of development. The paper concludes that in this context, diasporic-centred development can be considered a racialised socio-political mechanism, shaped by the shifting politics of race and belonging, which are themselves bound to colonial pasts and contemporary colonialities. This attends to processes of inclusion (and exclusion) in the global development sphere in contemporary Britain and speaks to the need to think more widely about how race intersects with the migration-development nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • This papers explores perceptions of UK 'supply-side' microcredit stakeholders. • Conceptions of alterity are then used as an analytic lens to examine these results. • A new, detailed conceptualisation of microcredit is provided. • Lenders are conceptualised as alternative-oppositional institutions. • Policies are outlined to protect this 'alternative' economic space. Abstract One response to the major societal challenge of financial exclusion in the United Kingdom (UK) is microcredit lending for enterprise. Typically delivered via Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) in the UK, these lending institutions can be conceptualised as 'alternative' economic spaces. Yet the nature of their alterity is unclear as categorisations of alternative-oppositional or alternative-substitute institutions are possible and could also be influenced by complexities in the UK relating to the welfare system and sustainability. Alterity is rarely static, being influenced by policies and regulation, and the nature of institutions' alterity could have consequences for wellbeing, as different values and ideals underpin different conceptions of alterity which affect how these institutions operate. In this paper, the complexities of microcredit for enterprise lending within the UK are explored through in-depth interviews with UK 'supply-side' stakeholders. Conceptions of alterity are then used as an analytic lens to examine these results. Results suggest that these lenders remain in opposition to the mainstream as the needs of low-income individuals are embedded within their operating model. Microcredit lending is conceptualised in terms of responsible lenders offering fair credit to financially-excluded individuals using relationship banking practices. Such a conceptualisation provides a touchstone against which to assess shifts in lenders' alterity and a platform from which to introduce legislative and regulatory changes to protect these 'alternative-oppositional' economic spaces. This paper begins to outline these responses that could help to ensure and grow a more community-engaged and varied local financial infrastructure within the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper examines household debt in the United Kingdom, using the practices and organisation of the debt advice sector as a prism for understanding the changing role of debt in shaping the experience of poverty. Based upon fieldwork carried out with debt advisers within the Citizens Advice service, I explore how the mapping practices carried out by advisers reflect the varied connections between debtors and different creditors, as well as with significant others who become entangled in previous and ongoing money problems. In contrast to recent analyses of debt focusing on re-compositions of subjectivity through enfoldings of the temporal, I propose that the multiple connections with creditors, friends and family that constitute a debt problem suggest the need for a topological approach. Indeed, I argue that the specific form of interventions into debt sought and achieved by debt advisers need to be understood in these terms – as an attempt to disrupt and recompose these topologies. Taking into account the significant shift in the UK from consumer' debts to 'priority' debts, the paper asks whether the UK debt advice sector can be seen as a challenge to the logic of 'governing through debt', or whether it serves to further the central role played by debt in the neoliberal re-structuring of the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Shared mobility spaces need to be understood as complex sites of practice. • These spaces often present partial and dysfunctional approaches to sharing space. • In the UK, shared mobility spaces represent limiting approaches for promoting sustainable mobility. • Researchers need to question whether shared spaces promote sustainability. Shared mobility spaces have become increasingly popular internationally as attempts to increase the uptake of active travel modes (walking, cycling and running) have turned pavements, shopping streets and public spaces into multi-mode mobility spaces. From a sustainability perspective, policy makers in the UK have argued that shared spaces afford greater opportunities for cycling off-road in areas with busy traffic, whilst in public spaces they provide greater accessibility and connectivity to a wider range of users. Yet there has been little conceptual critique and empirical research on the impacts of how individuals and groups negotiate what are new forms of public space in the UK. Accordingly, in this paper we use insights from the new mobilities paradigm and social practice theories to analyse data gathered from qualitative research with different travel mode users in the city of Exeter (South-west England) to demonstrate the complexity of shared spaces, the tensions they produce and the challenges they may pose for promoting sustainable mobility. First, we explore the practices that unfold within shared spaces and demonstrate how researchers need to appreciate the social complexity of negotiating new and conflictual sites of practice. Second, we examine how a fragmented approach to the design of shared spaces may compromise the development of sustainable mobility practices through representing a partial and dysfunctional approach towards sharing space in cities. Third, we demonstrate the problematics of deploying shared spaces as short-term and politically expedient devices for delivering individually-focused behavioural goals instead of radical alternatives that embed sustainable mobility infrastructure into urban fabrics. We conclude by suggesting that to realise the benefits of collectively sharing mobility space in the UK requires long-term changes in urban infrastructure that can embed practices and promote a shift away from the political dominance of the private vehicle as the axis around which urban development pivots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of decision support tools on-farm may help to deliver evidence-based guidance to farmers, helping to improve productivity and prevent environmental degradation. While much research has sought to increase the uptake of decision support tools in practice, largely by identifying desirable characteristics of system design, rather little work has used a spatial lens to investigate how they are actually used. Using Latour’s notion of ‘the script’, this paper looks at the spatialities of technological and user re-scripting associated with the introduction of decision support tools on-farm. Although there is some literature on how technologies may be re-scripted by users, studies concerning decision support tools are more limited. Furthermore, while there are studies about how technology (not decision support tools) re-scripts agricultural societies, these are generally concerned with macro-level impacts (e.g. labour changes), rather than exploring life on individual farms. This paper, therefore, focuses on exploring the spatialities of re-scripting, investigating how tools themselves are co-constituted in various ways by different users in different spaces, but more particularly on how life on the farm may be changed by the introduction of decision tools. A case study of decision support tool use on farms in England and Wales demonstrates the need to explore spaces on individual farms if we wish to understand processes occurring at the interface between tools and farmers. Firstly, situated knowledge held by farmers and advisers leads to resistance, negotiation, and re-scripting of decision support tools, which are perceived to provide the ‘view from nowhere’. Secondly, the introduction of decision support tools changes the workflows of farmers, affecting how and when they interact with different spaces of their farm. In signalling the need for more research to theorise the spatialities of re-scripting, we briefly explore how our work can inform policy and the development of decision support tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2014, Tesco – one of the world’s largest food retailers – revealed that it had generated almost 57,000 tonnes of food waste in its UK operations over the previous twelve-month period. This shocking statistic added to existing evidence of a significant environmental and social problem in the UK and across the world. This paper utilises convention theory to examine the role of major retailers in the context of this global problem and assesses their motivations for acting on food waste. Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders (including major retailers), the analysis investigates their main justifications for action on food waste. It finds that retailers mostly appealed to three conventions or ‘orders of worth’ (civic, market and opinion) and used these as a basis for their commitment to food waste reduction. We argue that the combination of these different justifications is feasible and necessary in the context of the retail sector but that they may also lead to some unintended consequences (in the retail sector and beyond). Crucially, we demonstrate how the dilution of civic justifications (by their financial and reputational counterparts) might produce negative outcomes and inaction as retailers attempt to adhere to the so-called ‘food waste hierarchy’. The paper highlights the continuing significance of convention theory as a framework for analysing possible responses to the social and environmental challenges confronting global agro-food systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The media are one of the main arenas in which nutrition information is framed and developed. Research has shown a predominantly individualistic framing of diet-related health issues such as obesity, type-2 diabetes and coronary heart disease in international media coverage. These issues are framed as personal, ’lifestyle’ issues rather than requiring policy or structural change. In addition, research has shown a tendency in nutrition research and media coverage of it, to emphasize individual ingredients or components more than overall diet. The media have a tendency to report diet related research simplistically, often without contextualization. Taking a case study approach, this paper analyses UK news media coverage and framing of British Medical Journal (BMJ) published research into dietary fibre and bowel cancer risk. I investigate how the health issue fibre and bowel cancer is framed and dissect the process of mediation (from press release to mass media to local media), analysing the shifting ’geographies of responsibility’ that result. This paper argues that media coverage of research into diet and bowel cancer can be explained by the technologies, conventions and routines of media representation. Key gatekeepers were found to have an important role in framing the information that was reported. Taking a critical approach, this paper argues that like obesity, type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease, coverage of nutritional means of preventing bowel cancer is set predominantly in the ’lifestyle’ frame, laying responsibility for increasing dietary fibre at the door of the individual rather than looking at broader social, economic, or political drivers of dietary change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The Hostile Environment and austerity create challenges for migrant civil society. • Women in migrant civil society are active providers of care, not only recipients. • Migrant civil society makes use of the scant resources available to provide care. • These actions are tenacious, continuing despite the effects to their own wellbeing. In this paper, we examine the role of migrant women in civil society in Wales in a triply-hostile environment created by UK government policy since 2010. Drawing on interviews carried out with EU migrants between 2016 and 2017, we outline the active support and care work provided by these women to migrants and others and the way in which they navigated austere and hostile conditions (contrasting the popular construction of migrants passively requiring support and care). Contributing to the literature on resourcefulness, we introduce the notion of tenacity to highlight the exhausting care-full labour of these migrants, who continue despite challenging circumstances and impact on their own wellbeing. We conclude that the care work provided by these women plays an important civil society role in tackling ongoing austerity and hostility but that precarious conditions bring a lack of sustainability which can heighten the socio-spatial inequalities seen across the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • The drawing River of Life is used to map rhythms in migration trajectories. • Rhythms of privilege, precarity, social mobility, alienation and plenitude are seen. • I show how various rhythms (de)(re) territorialise the migrant self. • Migrants' becoming entails confusion but also excitement over who they are. • I develop the idea of the double deterritorialisation of self in (return)migration. Drawing empirically on the case of Romanian migrants in the UK, this paper reflects on some of the ways in which the intertwined rhythms of education, work, housing, home, place, family and body combine and contribute to the (de)/(re) territorialisation of the self in migration. While rhythmanalysis gained currency in the study of urban processes, I take the challenge of exploring its potential for understanding migrants' experiences of traversing, ignoring, struggling against or working with assemblages of all sorts and thereby reworking their selves. To pursue my goal, I engage with the visual method of the River of Life, a hand-drawing of one's own migration trajectory, which is used for elicitation in interviews. I show how structural alignments, random encounters and personal desires produce specific rhythmical formations (of different patterns, pitch and frequency, energy and intensity) along which participants work relationally to (de)/(re) territorialise their changing selves as they travel through cultures, places and experiences. Whether migrants 'succeed' or 'fail' to achieve their desires, their becoming entails confusion but also excitement over who they are, where they should be and whether return to what once was is possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a geographical analysis of the concept of ‘distinction’ in relation to student mobility within the UK. The analysis in this paper is based primarily on interviews with Scottish students who have chosen to study in England, and English students who have done likewise in Scotland. The paper problematises the concept of ‘distinction’ in the stratified higher education system of the UK. The paper’s originality lies in showing how global forces affect these intra-state student flows and how ‘distinction’ as a driver of mobility is signified. The research offers a starting point in understanding the glocalisation of student mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We argue that emotional geography adds a missing dimension to energy geography. • We use oral history to discuss how atmospheres arise in a mining energy system. • We show the affectual agency of the energy system in everyday production of space. • We argue that exploring emotion and affect is key for managing energy transitions. In this paper, we make a case for bringing energy geography into closer dialogue with emotional geography, and argue that doing so has the potential to greatly improve our understanding of energy systems and their intersection with everyday life, bringing essential but often overlooked aspects into view. We draw on research carried out as part of an arts and humanities-based project in South Wales (UK), a region once dominated by coal extraction. We present and discuss material from sixteen oral histories recorded with long-standing members of the village of Ynysybwl. Reading their accounts through the lens of emotional-affective constructs reveals not only participants' emotions about aspects of energy production and consumption, but also the atmospheres and affects arising within and out of the energy system. This brings to light the affectual agency of the energy system as an infrastructure assemblage and its role in everyday production of space. Related to this, it surfaces essential aspects of experiences of energy system change. We argue that recognising and exploring affect and emotion is crucial for energy geography as it continues to explore the functionings of energy systems, and energy transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Transport planning assumptions about housing, employment and transport are outdated. • Precarity in housing and employment systems often mean people have to move. • Uncertainty about when move influences decisions on accessibility and transport. • Implications for sustainable mobility, urban development and social welfare. The importance of the nexus between transport, housing location and employment location has long been identified as important to social welfare. In transport research this has however operated largely at either end of the spectrum of advantage. There exists a strong tradition, with roots in welfare economics, which explores those with choices and how they make trade-offs between where to live and work, the associated wage rate and the commute costs. At the other end is work which recognises the social costs for those that do not have access to transport and struggle to participate in employment. This paper focuses its attention on households that fall between these extremes and for whom the choice/no-choice dichotomy does not work. Through in-depth interviews with 46 people in the UK we find that the interactions between the location and, critically, security of both housing and employment plays a critical role in shaping what 'choices' exist. In particular, the findings explain why some households own cars although, on other metrics, they would not be expected to find ownership affordable, and how the security of housing tenure shapes long-term household trajectories. The literature on planning and travel behaviour has paid little or no attention to the security of housing and employment. This study suggests the importance of addressing this gap and refocussing attention on the different ways in which transport connects to wider planning and social policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the failure of the zero carbon homes agenda in the UK and argue that it represents a case of policy dismantling, where a range of policies and programmes have been introduced, revised and then removed by government. We bring together the sustainability transitions literature with the literature on policy dismantling, regime resistance and regime detractors, and suggest that the zero carbon housing agenda in the UK offers useful insights into the politics of sustainability transitions. We identify three phases of policy change, from policy expansion, symbolic dismantling and eventual active policy dismantling. In the conclusions we offer some suggestions on processes of policy dismantling and what this might mean for future sustainability transitions given the significant contributions of buildings to greenhouse gas emissions and the urgent need for rapid low carbon transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Research with non-Western immigrants challenges Western assumptions about sustainability. • Somali immigrants living in the UK display a strong sense of concern for the environment. • Many of the 'green' or sustainable household practices are carried from pre- into post-migration lifestyles. • Religion and relationships of care are strong social motivations for continuing to engage in sustainable household practices. • Material and structural factors explain why some activities and practices change or are discontinued. This paper explores the household sustainability practices of people who have migrated from the Global South to the Global North, by studying how Somali immigrants living in the UK engage with the sustainability agenda, why, and to what effect. We report on the findings of a mixed methods study conducted in Manchester in summer 2018, identifying patterns of continuity and change between country of origin and current residence in three environmentally significant areas of practice: resource conservation, recycling, and enjoyment of the natural environment. We then show how engagement or non-engagement in household sustainability practices is motivated by material/structural, ideational, and social factors. Our findings suggest that Somali immigrants are engaged with household sustainability for a variety of reasons, experience tensions and frustrations related to barriers to sustainability, and have knowledge that could make a positive contribution to green policy agendas. The findings allow us to disrupt dominant conceptions of household sustainability and to challenge the assumption that newcomers from 'less developed countries' need to be socialised into adopting household sustainability practices. We further argue that policy makers should consider more elastic notions of household sustainability, to better fit with and respect the lifestyles and motivations of immigrant communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global cities and megacities are locales where (super)diversity is experienced in a condensed form. Their social textures are in permanent evolution; they are constructed, deconstructed, and reinvented by their constantly changing inhabitants. Cities constitute spaces where largely identical lifestyles, 'modes of behaviour', and 'patterns of thought and feeling' (Giddens and Sutton, 2013: 206-220) can be experienced. In the migration literature, superdiverse host country cities, primarily of the global North, are often investigated as destinations of migration, whilst the role of superdiverse home country cities, from which migrants arrive and which are often situated in the global South, is rarely considered. This paper draws on findings from a qualitative study on understandings of integration of highly educated Indian migrant women living in the UK, and mainly in London, who prior to moving to the UK had resided in socially, culturally and demographically highly diverse Indian or other cities. It is argued that pre-migration residence in superdiverse cities shapes the ability to negotiate superdiverse host city spaces. In particular, exposure to superdiverse social environments in India in everyday life and the need to deal with them greatly enhances the propensity for acquiring such mental states and pragmatic skills and approaches that can later be used, at least partially, in other superdiverse contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focussing on the changes in sitting tenants' right to buy their council house (introduced in the UK in 1980), we explore the long-term impact of this policy change upon the lives of UK citizens. Using two longitudinal studies of UK citizens born in 1958 and 1970, we exam how policies aimed at achieving one set of goals (providing families with their own homes, reducing the control of councils and weakening the Labour Party's voting bloc) may have also altered experiences of housing, homelessness, and contact with the criminal justice system not just for those for whom the policies were initially designed (adults living in council owned properties in the 1980s) but also for subsequent generations (most typically their children). Our contribution examines how legislative changes may have altered the lives of citizens, and highlights some of the unintended consequences of the 'right to buy' in the UK. We are able to investigate what happens when systems which have previously been tightly regulated suddenly become much less well regulated. Our paper utilises ideas developed by life-course theorists and historical institutionalists in order to understand in more depth how radical policy changes may shape and alter the lives of citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Development NGOs in the global North undergo complex processes of professionalisation. • Top-down neoliberal professionalisation isn't the only driver of professionalisation. • A form of self-legitimating professionalisation profoundly shaped UK education NGOs. • For UK development education NGOs the driver was education to enable change. This article explores the complex ways in which development NGOs become professional development actors. It offers a uniquely holistic understanding of professionalisation that draws on extensive new research data. It challenges the accepted narrative, presented by development scholars, of neoliberalism as the fundamental driver of professionalisation. Instead, it offers a more nuanced theorisation that recognises that professionalisation from outside, driven by neoliberalism, is often preceded by a professionalisation from within. Here the paper develops the concept of self-legitimising professionalisation as part of a 'two stage process' through a case study of international development practice delivered by UK based development education actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Sustainability experimentation research tends to focus on governance and infrastructure. • Festivals are a good example of under-researched already existing collective experiments. • 'Not doing' for sustainability is important, and change need not always be so effortful. • The festival also highlights the importance of social legitimisation of alternative practices. • Recognising flexible everyday practices as adaptive capacities is essential in climate change policy and research. Experimentation has become a popular term amongst those interested in fostering more sustainable social futures. But the ways in which researchers and policy makers have thought about experimentation have generally been with reference to new infrastructural and governance conditions. Focusing on intentional interventions downplays the capacity for change stemming from peoples' already existing practices. In this paper, we propose that the camping music festival – a site that continues to be seen by some as a cultural laboratory in which attendees try out new identities – can be thought of as a site of 'already existing' sustainability experimentation. Drawing on 60 interviews about personal washing at two camping music festivals in the UK, we explore the festival as a site from which we can draw lessons about how societies in the Global North might cope with the disrupted water supply linked to future climate change. Interviewees divulge how escaping societal expectations about bodily cleanliness can become pleasurable and the enjoyment found in resurrecting otherwise disappearing societal skills for living without easy access to familiar washing infrastructures. Spending an extended period without these infrastructures, and enjoying the experience, brings into question the assumption of an unwavering consumer need for constant supply that is embedded in modernist visions of 'Big Water' systems. Thus, we argue that research on the geographies of 'already existing' sustainability experiments holds new potential for reimagining mundane, everyday practices within research and policy agendas on sustainable futurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Curtains are an understudied everyday object which have considerable power. Research on their use within hospitals has primarily focused on their role in infection control, rather than as an agent for ensuring privacy and dignity. This paper presents an autoethnography of an Early Pregnancy Unit by a medical ethnographer experiencing an ectopic pregnancy, with a phenomenological focus on curtains. Within the treatment room, curtains facilitated bodily privacy and emotional support for those preparing for invasive scans. On the ward, staff attempted to use curtains to provide privacy, but the curtains were inadequate. This reduced the dignity of patients by allowing private moments, including visibly miscarrying a foetus, to be observed. It also allowed discussions around disposing of foetal remains to be overheard by others, reducing privacy. Hospital curtains are important agents of privacy and dignity, particularly around bereavement and loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Anthropocene research has been critiqued for portraying a generic vision of humanity. • The concept of 'encountering' situates the Anthropocene in everyday, lived experience. • An encountering approach helps to reveal trauma and injustice in the Anthropocene. • Encountering thinking also uncovers conditions for politically active, hopeful futures. The Anthropocene, proposed as a new era in human-nonhuman relations, is potentially both profound and far-reaching. However, it has also been critiqued as a universalising concept detached from the realities of people's day-to-day lives. The aim of this paper is to address this shortcoming by examining the situations of coastal communities on the 'frontline' of global environmental change in North Norfolk in the UK. In this region, sea defences that have protected towns and villages for decades are deteriorating and, consequently, the effects of coastal erosion on human settlements are becoming increasingly evident. Through the conceptual framework of 'encountering', I explore how human-nature relations are being reconfigured as a result and with what consequences for the actors involved. The findings show that coastal communities are becoming more and more aware of nonhuman forces as the unruly sea impinges upon daily life in various, multisensory ways. These effects not only cause people to 'give way' to the encroaching waters through relocation of homes and businesses but also attempt to 'buy time' with an active nature by extending the life of existing defences. The revitalisation of nature in coastal regions is also intersecting with long-held experiences of marginalisation and disempowerment to produce new, 'bottom-up' naturalcultural discourses concerning social justice. Overall, I demonstrate how an approach that emphasises encountering in the global era of the Anthropocene helps reveal rather than conceal the personal traumas and injustices experienced by different groups as well as the emergent conditions for more politically active, hopeful futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides commentary to Sarah Marie Halls' lecture on "A Pregnant Pause? Waiting, Reproduction, and Silences in the Everyday Endurance of Austerity" for Geoforum's Annual Lecture delivered at the 2022 RGS-IBG Conference in Newcastle. It reflects on the relevance of this approach, considering the complex temporalities of living with austerity and precarity and how these experiences might be especially punctuated by long-standing experiences of marginalisation. Considering how crisis becomes everyday, ordinary, or even inevitable for some communities, this commentary draws on Lauren Berlant's notion of 'cruel optimism', and reflects on the classed dimensions of waiting during austerity, and finally, reflect on the relevance of these discussions for those working in the neoliberal academic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings together relational geographical writings on the politics of waiting, austerity and social reproduction, and also speaks to feminist methodology and praxis. I draw on a recent research project exploring experiences of reproduction in austerity, in particular having any or more children, to think about how austerity in the UK is endured in everyday life. I engage with geographical ideas about temporality – pauses, silences and futures – to unpick everyday and intimate experiences of economic change in the UK. I offer multiple interpretations of 'a pregnant pause' in this context. Firstly, of pausing and waiting 'with' decisions to having any or more children as a direct result of changes in the name of 'austerity': welfare cuts, precarious housing, unaffordable childcare etc. Secondly, the pauses and silences in public discussions about the economic impacts of austerity on reproduction, as a rarely shared experience and one that participants seldom spoke to anyone else about. And thirdly, the literal pauses and silences in verbal discussions on this topic, and how to respond in method and praxis. In doing so, I refocus discussions about the everyday life of austerity towards a relational politics of endurance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Digital technologies draw together knowledge, practice and self-care in novel and productive ways. • Digital curation provides young farmers with the agency to connect or disconnect from others. • Digital mediation encourages young farmers to critically reflect on their own practices of digital self-care. This paper explores the geographies of digital curation and self-care among young farmers in the UK, examining how virtual and digital spaces are having a significant impact on how young farmers negotiate their identities, (dis)connection and self-care within their everyday lives. Drawing on interviews with 28 young famers in the UK, we observe how farming identities are (re)produced and practiced online, via carefully curated social media, and how these might constitute practices of self-care in overcoming issues such as disconnection and rural isolation. Our analysis reveals how social media posts are more than simple connections, they are curations of the self that are complexly bound up in the emotional, spatial and temporal contexts of the author's identities. We examine how digital curation is not just an act of the self, but something drawn relationally to others. Attention is given not just to what is posted, but how others are (dis)engaged with, and how posts of others are reacted to, or endorsed, implicitly or explicitly. Through our examination of young farmers' social identities, we therefore argue that digital identities are produced, practiced, managed and understood in very specific ways 'online', in ways that carefully overlap with other geographical identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Debates over the real/virtual divide in human geography are critically reanimated. • Qualitative methods captured young people's outdoors experiences without smartphones. • Smartphones influence the perceived quality of participants' socio-spatial relations. • Sharing kinaesthetic and social difficulties contribute to place's moral function. • Relating to landscape allows young people to engage with issues of societal concern. Over-use of smartphones and under-engagement in outdoor pursuits are popularly touted as inter-dependent phenomena with various implications for the health and well-being of young people. At the same time, there has been a relative lack of social scientific scrutiny on the topic which, we contend, has been stifled by the imperative to avoid ontological distinctions between the 'technological/virtual' and the 'real', as well as deterministic renditions on the role of technology in social life. In this paper we provide evidence to reanimate this discussion by drawing into focus that, from the perspectives of young people themselves, there are and remain discernible differences in the socio-spatial relationships mediated by the presence/absence of technology in different settings. The empirical material draws on participant observation, walking- and group-interviews with young people taking part in the UK's Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, which requires them to undertake outdoor expeditions without their smartphones. We use the metaphor of 'avoiding the easy route' to emphasise the differences in experience that manifest themselves for young people during co-present, and often more challenging, embodied encounters. We argue that co-present encounters with places and others are often fuller in terms of the breadth of embodied sensory experience, and often more difficult in terms of i) the kinaesthetic experience of place and ii) the non-selectivity of social relationships. The combination and sharing of these difficulties, we further argue, has a moral and political function in ordering young people's environmental and social values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper critically engages with the role of conservation practitioners as ‘expert intermediaries’ in the development of payments for ecosystem services (PES) schemes in the UK. Centring on the case study of the Wildlife Trust’s Pumlumon Project in Mid Wales, the paper connects the advance of neoliberal governance strategies to the experiences and attitudes of conservationists, charting a more personalised geography of how PES has gained traction here, beyond its dissemination as an anonymous discourse or top-down imposition. In methodological terms, the paper combines ethnography with the insights of governmentality in order to demonstrate how conservationists have made sense of, and subsequently engaged with processes of neoliberalisation. This is set out as a means to attain a grounded perspective on the advancement of PES, but equally to appreciate how the hegemony of market-style governance is accepted and advanced by the conservationists involved. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper explores the spaces and power relations of ethical foodscapes. Ethics can offer a commodity a valuable unique selling point in a competitive marketplace but managing the changeable and multiple motivations for stakeholder participation throughout the commodity chain in order to utilise this opportunity is a complex negotiation. Through exploring the spaces and relations within three South African–UK ethical wine networks, the discursive tactics used to sustain these are uncovered. The discourses of Fairtrade, Black Economic Empowerment and organics are highly adaptive, interacting with each other in such a way as to always be contextually appealing. This ‘tactical mutability’ is combined with ‘scales of knowing’, which, this paper argues, are essential for network durability. ‘Scales of knowing’ refers to the recognition by stakeholders of the potential for different articulations of a discourse within the network, which combines with ‘tactical mutability’ to allow for a scalar, contextual and ’knowing’ (im)mutability to ensure the discourse’s continued appeal. However, even when one discourse is the ‘lead’ it always folds within it linkages to other ethical discourses at work, suggesting that ethical practice is mutually supportive discursively. This means that at the producer end ethical interactions may offer more capacity to enact genuine transformation than the solo operations of a discourse. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The overall aim of this paper is to contribute to debates on the relationships between citizenship and migration in the UK context in the light of recent changes in UK immigration policy. In particular, it focuses on the question of what an increasingly neo-assimilationist state articulation of national belonging means for transnational migrants living in Britain. The paper begins by charting the evolving nature of citizenship conceptualisations in Western neoliberal contexts and illustrates how Britain has responded to this shifting landscape. The context is one of enhanced ‘migration securitization’ wherein the state implies that the integrity of the nation state and its security can only be assured if migration flows and migrants themselves are closely controlled and monitored. This has led to Britain attempting to bolster the formal institution of citizenship (with its attendant rights and responsibilities) and tie it more explicitly to notions of belonging to the nation. Through research with national/regional policy officials and migrant organisations this paper firstly examines the political landscape of citizenship and belonging in Britain as it relates to migrants. Secondly, it draws on research with African transnational migrants in northern England to explore their senses of belonging and ask whether these cohere with the described state discourse or whether their feelings of belonging exist in tension with neo-assimilationist policies designed to promote a core national identity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper examines the political negotiations which underpin the performance of charitable spaces. In particular, the paper draws upon a period of ethnographic research at a UK drop-in centre for asylum seekers to consider how notions of charity, generosity and the right to give are structured within the daily accomplishment of an environment of care. Through considering the accounts of both asylum seekers and volunteers within this site, the paper outlines how the interactions and relations brought forth in the drop-in centre served to produce a space associated with ideas of welcome and generosity. The political nature of such a space is brought to the fore when considering how practices of care and generosity within the drop-in relied upon, and actively reinscribed, normalised visions of charity, belonging and citizenship. Through highlighting moments of transgression in which positions of giving and receiving are questioned, the paper suggests that the relations of the drop-in centre may reproduce a politically passive and marginalised vision of the asylum seeker within the UK. This reading of an environment of care for those seeking sanctuary has implications for how we understand the spatial experience of asylum itself, and for how we might envision more politically attentive and ethically responsive spaces of sanctuary. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The financial exclusion of enterprise is a concept that has been largely neglected by economic geographers. This is surprising given the attention dedicated to personal financial exclusion and alternative sources of finance. This paper compares financial inclusion policies in deprived areas of the United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK) through the example of Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs). CDFIs help overcome financial exclusion by providing local sources of loan finance to micro, small-and-medium-sized enterprises and social enterprises. Drawing upon interviews with key actors within the CDFI sector in the US and UK respectively, the paper aims to compare the CDFI landscape across the US and UK through the provision of finance for enterprise. This is in order to understand the geographies of finance that are being created by such alternative financial institutions thereby contributing to financial inclusion debates. The research concludes that although CDFIs do provide an important source of finance to excluded enterprises, policy initiatives have created uneven geographical coverage and market gaps leaving marked spaces of financial exclusion. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Town twinning describes the establishment and practice, by various groups and to various ends, of relatively formal and long-term relationships between settlements usually located in different nation–states. Twin towns are sometimes called sister cities. This paper draws on a study of town twinning that focused on the involvement of British localities since the end of the Second World War and analysed data collected by the Local Government Association (for England and Wales), materials archived in the National Archives at Kew, London and various local record offices, and transcripts of interviews with representatives of relevant local, national, and international organisations. The paper makes three main contributions. Firstly, it provides a brief history of town twinning involving British localities. Secondly, it develops from this historical narrative an original conceptualisation of town twinning, arguing that it should be approached less as a coherent movement and more as a device, a repertoire, and a model. Thirdly, it argues that town twinning has often been used as a device for extending care across space – and that much can be learned from its history for contemporary geographies of care. Town twinning participants have approached the problem of care-at-a-distance as both an ontological problem and a practical problem. Some have focused more than others on the role of distanciated causal relationships in the generation of needs in distant places. Some are currently encountering another problem as they attempt to globalise care: the problem of care-in-a-hurry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper focuses on a particular group of food commodities, associated with the wider turn to ‘alternative food networks’, that are described as ‘naturally embedded food products’ (NEFPs). These are commodities (specifically meats and cheeses) that utilise grassland biodiversity as an input into production to positively influence, in various ways, the final qualities of the commodity. Building on the geographical literature on commodity circuits and analysing data derived from NEFP promotional materials and focus groups with urban and rural residents in the UK, the paper interrogates the geographical knowledges that are deployed by producers in the promotion of NEFPs and how these knowledges are accommodated and contested by consumers as they bring their own geographical knowledges to the interpretation of these commodities. The paper undertakes this task in order to problematise the extent to which alternative food networks in general and NEFPs in particular are bringing about a reconnection of producers and consumers and, concomitantly, a defetishisation of food, as is claimed for them by many of their policy and academic proponents. In the process the paper reveals how the food commodities associated with alternative food networks entail the creation of new and rival fetishes paradoxically as a result of efforts to ‘thicken connections’ between the production and consumption of food. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper explores the shifting cultural politics of development as expressed in the changing narratives and discursive transparencies of fair trade marketing tactics in the UK. Pursued through what I call ‘developmental consumption’ and the increasing celebritization of development, it is now through the global media mega-star that the subaltern speaks. After a more general discussion of the implications of the celebritization of development, specific analysis focuses on two parallel processes complicit in the ‘mainstreaming’ of fair trade markets and the desire to develop fair trade as a product of ‘quality’. The first involves improving the taste of fair trade commodities through alterations in their material supply chains while the second involves novel marketing narratives designed to invoke these conventions of quality through highly meaningful discursive and visual means. The later process is conceptualized through the theoretical device of the shifting ‘embodiments’ of fair trade which have moved from small farmers’ livelihoods, to landscapes of ‘quality’, to increasing congeries of celebrities such as Chris Martin from the UK band Coldplay. These shifts encapsulate what is referred to here as fair trade’s Faustian Bargain and its ambiguous results: the creation of increasing economic returns and, thus, more development through the movement of fair trade goods into mainstream retail markets at the same time there is a de-centering of the historical discursive transparency at the core of fair trade’s moral economy. Here, then, the celebritization of fair trade has the potential to create ‘the mirror of consumption’, whereby, our gaze is reflected back upon ourselves in the form of ‘the rich and famous’ Northern celebrity muddling the ethics of care developed by connecting consumers to fair trade farmers and their livelihoods. The paper concludes with a consideration of development and fair trade politics in the context of their growing aestheticization and celebritization. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]