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Austerity policies and austere socio-economic conditions in the UK have had acute consequences for everyday life and, interconnectedly, the political and structural regimes that impact upon the lives of women and marginalised groups. Feminist geographies have arguably been enlivened and reinvigorated by critical engagements with austerity, bringing to light everyday experiences, structural inequalities and multi-scalar socio-economic relations. With this paper I propose five areas of intervention for further research in this field: social reproduction, everyday epistemologies, intersectionality, voice and silence, and embodied fieldwork. To conclude, I argue for continuing feminist critique and analyses given the legacies and futures of austerity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freedom from harassment is a basic human right and precondition to mental and physical health. While sexual harassment has become a higher-profile issue in recent years across a range of cultural contexts, including through the global rise of the # MeToo movement and the Everyday Sexism project, this issue has also attracted the attention of policymakers at the highest levels, leading, in the UK, to a Parliamentary Inquiry in 2018 on sexual harassment in public places, and a briefing paper on sexual harassment in higher education from the House of Commons in 2018. All of these highlight the urgent need for both deeper understanding and cultural change on this issue. Meanwhile, sexual harassment constitutes an important area of academic inquiry across a wide range of scholarly fields including psychology, sociology, women's studies, criminology, law and social policy as well as geography. This article critically reviews key trends in scholarship on sexual harassment in public. It focuses on the spatial contexts of the street, the night-time economy and higher education institutions. A fundamental question of spatial justice, I argue that sexual harassment can be approached through three conceptual lenses: the relational emergence of bodies; the politics of everyday spatial practice; and the ways affects and the atmospheres they generate shape spatial experience. I argue that geographers have a vital role to play in advancing knowledge on this issue, and conclude by outlining a research agenda tracing outlines along which this work might unfold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an agenda for research into the geographies of UK livestock agriculture as these are being reconfigured through the increasing intervention of genetic techniques and technologies. After discussing three particular techniques, four areas of research are identified. The first three relate to different spaces and scales at which the effects of genetic techniques can be examined: the animal body and animal-human relationships; the farm and other rural spaces; and the national and international networks of genetic knowledge-practices relating to livestock. The fourth area outlines an agenda for engaging with Foucault's notion of biopower as a possible means of gaining a theoretical purchase on three key issues which span these three scales: knowledge, power and life. In its reflections on the wider implications of the proposed research the paper aims to speak to a number of audiences within and beyond the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Counter-cultural back-to-the-land experimentation is a very long-standing social phenomenon across the global North but has been little studied by geographers. This paper provides a critical overview of its manifestation in Britain over the last 40 years. It emphasizes the importance of placing it in its entangled context of the dominant form(s) that rural space takes. While 1960s/1970s back-to-the-land raised critical questions about the countryside, it mainly 'diverted' marginal spaces to alternatives outside the mainstream. In contrast, it exists today at a time when rural spatiality's 'productivist' alignment is being sorely challenged. This presents, in principle, greater scope both for its longer-term survival and for it to engage in a 'productive' critique of the mainstream rurality that is emerging. The paper suggests that interrogating critically the extent of consubstantial relationships between land and everyday life is also essential for evaluating back-to-the-land experimentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Economic and Social Research Council, the body which funds much social science in the UK, recently imposed on UK social science a system of research ethics governance already well established in other areas of research and in much of the rest of the developed world. This system requires that research involving human subjects receive prior ethical approval from a committee made up of, typically, multidisciplinary researchers and lay people. Our aim in this paper is to prompt debate about the purpose and practice of such an anticipatory ethical review. We begin by describing the rich and varied ethical and political debates ongoing in human geography. We argue that these are, at best, ignored and, at worst, threatened by this system of ethical review by committee. We describe the emergence of these formal mechanisms of research governance and important differences between the ethical contexts, history, and demands of research in the medical and social sciences. The paper draws on empirical research investigating National Health Service (NHS) research ethics committees to propose three salutary lessons geographers would do well to consider from experience elsewhere with ethical review. We argue that in review by committee deliberations extend beyond the ethical to include the methodological, that the system is a self-perpetuating and increasingly rule-bound mechanism, and that despite a rhetoric of accountability it is a system as obscure to outsiders as professional ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most towns and cities in the UK and USA possess a number of venues offering sexually orientated entertainment in the form of exotic dance, striptease or lap dancing. Traditionally subject to moral and legal censure, the majority of these sex-related businesses have tended to be situated in marginal urban spaces. As such, their increasing visibility in more mainstream spaces of urban nightlife raises important questions about the sexual and gender geographies that characterize the contemporary city. In this paper we accordingly locate the phenomena of adult entertainment at the convergence of geographic debates concerning the evening economy, urban gentrification and the gendered consumption of urban space. We conclude that these sites are worthy of investigation not only in and of themselves, but also because their shifting location reveals much about the forms of heterosexuality and homosociality normalized in the contemporary city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the author's emphasis on the significance of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) to illuminate aspects of the history of the academic discipline of geography in Great Britain. It is stressed that this paper concentrates on neglect of the generic form of biographical writing, specifically its narrowing of perspective on what comprises the field of geography. The author affirms that this dictionary offers geography historians an important new resource. ODNB, in its electronic form, is described as more easily accessed and debated.

In this paper, I build on Paul Cloke's (2002) provocative argument about the necessity of developing an ethical stance in human geography. I do this, however, through an assessment of the implications of a number of changes - in the nature of the labour market in Great Britain, in the assumptions that lie behind welfare provision under New Labour and in the position of women and men in Britain - rather than through an emphasis on the Christian values that infused Cloke's argument. I show how the dominance of an individualistic ethos pervades both the labour market and the welfare state, undermining notions of collective welfare and an ethic of care, within the wider context of the hegemony of a neoliberal ideology in global as well as national politics. If an ethic of care is to be (re)instituted, it will demand wide-reaching changes in the ways in which organizations and institutions operate at a range of spatial scales as well as new sets of responsibilities towards co-workers, member˜5Ê [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in lactation technology in recent years have changed the ontological status of breast milk, giving it new-found mobility. This paper considers the contested meanings over breast milk's 'proper place' in US and UK society. By synthesizing scholarship from geography, gender studies and science and technology studies, I use the case of mobile breast milk to propose a new framework for how geographers might conceptualize mobile biosubstances. Drawing on the work of Waldby and Mitchell (2006), I suggest that the ways in which breast milk now travels reflect how mobile biosubstances increasingly function as a hybrid form, drawing together elements of both gift-exchanges and commodity-exchanges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines recent work on geography in the eighteenth century. Although it principally considers Britain, the paper also incorporates evidence from other countries and, in its concentration upon the eighteenth century rather than 'early modern geography' (the period c. 1600–1850), the essay offers a focus different from much other work. It is argued that, although geography may in its books have been understood by contemporaries as a consistently defined textual practice, significant variations existed in the cognitive content, purposive nature and institutional setting of geography. That this is so has important implications both for what we take geography in the eighteenth century to have been and for the nature of further research on the subject's historical, intellectual and geographical dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we review current assumptions about post-productivist agricultural regimes - developed largely within a UK/advanced economies framework - and attempt to answer the question whether the concept of post-productivism can be used to understand contemporary agricultural change in developing world regions. Our analysis is loosely based around six interconnected 'indicators' of post-productivism: policy change; organic farming; counter-urbanization; the inclusion of environmental NGOs at the core of policy-making; the consumption of the countryside; and on-farm diversification activities. We argue that the successful 'exporting' of the theory of post-productivism to the South relies on shared definitions, meanings and - ultimately - discourses of post-productivism. Although similar patterns can be observed in rural areas of the developing world, there is confusion about the exact meaning of complex agricultural/rural activities. Further, our analysis questions the implied linearity of the traditional concept of the productivist/post-productivist transition. Ultimately, a relative assessment of the shift towards post-productivism would circumvent discursive problems related to definitions and meanings of specific post-productivist concepts and indicators. Weconclude by arguing that the notion of post-productivism and the developing world are not necessarily 'discordant concepts', but we suggest that the concept needs to be adapted and developed to address specific conditions in the rural South, possibly by combining theoretical approaches surrounding the notion of 'post-productivism' developed largely from a Northern perspective, and 'deagrarianization' from a Southern perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex and uneven family geographies, and divisions between ‘family-absent’ and ‘family-dominated’ neighbourhoods, are emerging. A factor is processes of internal, long-distance family migration. To understand the linkages, theories of space and place need to be brought to the forefront of family migration scholarship. This is essential to integrate the effects of the geographic contingences of places of origin and destination, identifying how different gender, social class, sexuality and other relations are reconstituted and reproduced by family migration. Cooke’s (2008) proposal for the family to be effectively theorized within family migration needs to be extended to include a spatial turn. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is the first of three reviews in which economic geography is viewed through the lens of crises. This article focuses on the resurgence of uneven development as a political problem, which has led to public policy debates and responses in which economic geography is an underpinning construct. The article focuses on the UK where public policy responses have engaged with the problems caused by uneven development. Arguments made over many years about the long-term damaging impacts of geographical inequalities in opportunity and income have broken through into the political mainstream and gained traction. The article explains how this happened, as an already unbalanced regional economy was exacerbated first through growth led by financial services and then austerity-led decline. There are opportunities for economic geography in this public policy conjuncture, although it will require an ability to engage competently and critically with mainstream economics, and a willingness to work with political actors and a challenging, frustrating, and uncomfortable political process. Moreover, it also requires that the problem of uneven development remains adequately defined and attended to, so that appropriate public policy responses may be formulated, and continues to garner sufficient political attention, to allow both time and opportunity for intervention in public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this, the first of three reports on geographies of retailing and consumption, I will attempt to map out and delimit the boundaries of this large and growing research area. From being one of the most undertheorized and ‘boring of fields’ (Blomley, 1996), retail geography has come to occupy a central position within social-scientific research. Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest that the spaces, places and practices of consumption, circulation and exchange lie at the very heart of a reconstructed economic geography (Crang, 1997), and that retailing is in many ways redefining the economic and cultural horizons of contemporary Britain (Mort, 1995). Quite how such a transformation has occurred forms the basis of the following account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Continuing criticism of the term `sustainable development' deflects attention from the political project that has to underpin shifts in human behaviour. It is more important to redefine the roles and functions of public and private institutions in ways that legitimate sustainable actions in the belief that latent public support for environmental protection can be converted into a widening range of new but customary behaviours. A brief review of the UK government's response to the Rio declaration demonstrates faltering purpose, reinforcing and reflecting public distrust of government and those commercial interests that benefit from the status quo. Only very modest comfort can be taken from its limited initiatives which range from the greater dissemination of information to the setting of some environmental targets. The unwillingness of government to promote major fiscal or financial reforms, or significantly to decentralize power and initiative, or to recognize the limitations to scientific knowledge when seeking the bases to `rational' decision-making in the face of uncertainty, reveal the inadequacy of the steps so far taken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as its cue the debates in 2009 at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) about the relative role of the institution in geographical exploration, science and pedagogy, this essay reviews recent work in the history and philosophy of geography. It argues that there is a long tradition of debates between educators and explorers within the RGS, and shows how these have been revisited in current work on Halford Mackinder and Charles Darwin. It concludes that attention to the processes of remembering and forgetting should be particularly acute at this moment in the history of geographical practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article the author discusses series of proposals for reform in the welfare system of Great Britain and its geographical impact. It states that the proposals include topics regarding the reduction of housing benefits level, limitations on council tax benefits, and time limitation support and employment for persons capable of working. It also mentions the uneven geography of welfare benefits and the little geographical analysis of the impact of the government's welfare proposals.

The article focuses on the implications of reconstituting poverty as a social exclusion practiced by states which aim to pursue social order and welfare. It highlights Great Britain's Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) and the bubble laws in the U.S. It is stated that the British ASBO allows police forces, housing associations and community organizations to undertake sub-criminal behavior by delinquent families, gangs and noisy neighbors to instill a culture of respect and responsibility while the U.S. bubble laws tend to curb the increase of anti-abortion protesters. The author believes that the legal efforts to improve public life involve changes of public space, public morality and public access.

This article focuses on the academic discipline of geography in Great Britain. Like many other academic disciplines, geography is largely a twentieth-century creation. University-level teaching was introduced at Cambridge and Oxford Universities in the late 1800s, after considerable lobbying from the Royal Geographical Society. Geography as a subject has a long history, but it was only from the late nineteenth century that the efforts of individual geographers were crucial to the creation of a credible niche for an academic discipline within the country's universities.

Geography grew rapidly within British universities during the 1950s and 1960s. At the beginning of the latter decade, however, the discipline was excluded from most of the new universities established to meet expanding student demand. This first essay in a pair looks at why such an ostensibly successful discipline was not incorporated in the plans for those new institutions, focusing on the external view of geography at the time and on its lack of effective champions in the highest `corridors of power', notably its learned societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the role played by population geography in fertility research in Great Britain and the United States. Historical patterns of population change presented by geographers; Persuasive argument against the dominant role of social class and occupation in explaining fertility change; Geographical perspectives of understanding fertility and family decision-making.

I Governance, regulation and retailing My writing of this second report coincides with the publication in the UK of two influential and long-awaited reports which both directly address issues of retailing and consumption, and underscore the close connections between academic debate and public policy. The first of these, the Competition Commission’s (2000) report into possible spatial monopoly in the supermarket sector, reveals the power of local market concentration in the retail sector and the implications which this has for consumer food choice[sup 1] (see also Bowlby, 2000; Crewe and Davenport, 1992; Humphrey, 1998; Wrigley, 1999, 2000a, 2000b). Following a 16-month enquiry, the Commission found evidence of both entry and sunk cost exit barriers and also of three pricing practices by the leading UK food retailers that distorted competition and gave rise to complex monopoly situations (Competition Commission, 2000; see also Doherty 1999; Wrigley, 2001). Although the Commission was broadly of the opinion that the retail industry is competitive and that ‘overall, excessive prices are not being charged, nor excessive profits earned’ (Competition Commission, 2000: vol. 1, 7), it nonetheless found evidence of effective local monopoly situations in some local areas and acknowledged that significant local concentration was a cause for concern and should not be allowed to deteriorate (vol. 1, 154, quoted in Wrigley, 2001). Significantly, too, the Commission argued that competition and consumer choice issues cannot be effectively addressed within the current regulatory regime. The picture becomes even more muddied when recent reports from the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) pointing to the negative effect of out-of-town superstores are taken into account. The result, then, seems to be growing public concern over the power and practices of large grocery retailers alongside a contradictory planning framework and, more broadly, a benign regulatory environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the sustainable agricultural practice in Great Britain. Policy developments for wildlife and habitat management; Methods of enhancing the scenery of individual farms; Implementation of an integrated agricultural management of landscapes.

Discusses the nature of quality in learning and teaching in geography in higher education in Great Britain. Review of different definitions of quality; Examination of the findings from the Teaching Quality Assessment of geography; Impact of the declining unit of resource and the Research Assessment Exercise on teaching quality; Review of the dissemination of good practice; Argument that there is a need to shift the emphasis from assessment to enhancement of the quality of learning and teaching.

The article presents the author's reaction on the comments made by other two authors concerning his purpose of using Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which is to clear aspects of the history of the academic discipline of geography in Great Britain. He stresses that he is not alone in detaching the academic discipline from the wider field of geographical knowledge. He conceives the difference of geographical contributions of university geographers from those of people who perform beyond the university sector. The author likewise reacts on the criticism about his lack of awareness of the specific genre of writing.