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Despite a well-established interest in the relationship between space and identity, geographers still know little about how communal identities in specific places are built around a sense of religious belonging. This paper explores both the theoretical and practical terrain around which such an investigation can proceed. The paper makes space for the exploration of a specific set of religious groups and practices, which reflected the activities of Methodists in Cornwall during the period 1830–1930. The paper is concerned to move analysis beyond the 'officially sacred' and to explore the everyday, informal, and often banal, practices of Methodists, thereby providing a blueprint for how work in the geography of religion may move forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers recent pleas for a 'geography of gentrification', arguing that they have been very urban in focus and often enact what, following Soja (1996), might be described as `firstspace epistemology'. The paper identifies traces of other, secondspace and thirdspace geographies of gentrification. It is argued that these geographies may not be fully commensurable with each other but that they each may have some commensurability with rural as well as the urban spatialities. The paper goes on to explore these arguments in relation to studies of gentrification of the British countryside, focusing particularly on gentrification in rural Norfolk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic concerns of Progress in Human Geography are with research in the discipline – and rightly so. The great majority of the articles we publish and the progress reports we commission focus on research, and the ‘Classics in human geography revisited’ series similarly concentrates on seminal research papers and books (although a small number of the books covered have been ‘texts’ – broadly defined). Only in the book reviews sections is more attention paid to textbooks – and even here we tend not to review those which are explicitly texts, especially if written for introductory courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This third and final progress report traces developments in geography education in England from 2007 to 2012. I identify four recent education policy reforms introduced by the Coalition Government that impact on school and HE geography – international comparisons, core knowledge and the English baccalaureate (E-bac), teacher education and the A-level/HE interface – before focusing on each one in turn. The main themes to emerge from the analysis are: first, questions about using international comparison to inform national education policy change; and, second, the social divisiveness of increasing differentiation and selection in curriculum knowledge and subjects. The third theme is the predicted curtailment of theoretically informed, critical engagement with educational and, specifically, geographical issues by teachers following the introduction of ‘on-the-job training’. Recent education policy reform has created an ever-growing level of control and regulation over school knowledge, the geography curriculum, students and teachers which will surely impact upon university geography education in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: The last decade has seen a proliferation of theoretical approaches, which have sought to uncover the changing form and governance of cities and regions following the dissolution of the Fordist ‘sociospatial fix’. This article provides a critical review of some of the more influential of these debates that have sought to analyse: the central?local relations of government; the growing influence of ‘regimes’ and ‘growth coalitions’ in energizing urban economies; and the rise of the ‘learning’ or ‘institutionally thick’ region. The authors argue that, although providing valuable insights, these theories suffer from: 1) a failure to integrate analytically into their inquiries a relational account of the state, and thereby to neglect the state’s influence in actively shaping the urban and regional fabric; and 2) a similar failure to problematize the issue of scale, often taking for granted the spatial context of their own particular inquiry. Thus, terms like urban regimes, urban coalitions and learning regions are deployed as if they were ontological and epistemological givens. Drawing on neo-Gramscian state theory and recent work on the ‘politics of scale’, this article seeks to open up urban and regional research towards a multiscaled analysis, and to consider political economic activity as a series of situated, context-specific and politically constructed processes. These arguments are then briefly deployed to demonstrate the multifarious and multiscalar changes that characterize London’s governance in the late 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]