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Recent theoretical discussions of the ‘spaces of hospitality’ have remained largely abstract, and have also ignored the commercial hospitality industry. At the same time, commercial hospitality is becoming increasingly important for the branding and promoting of cities. This paper highlights the connection between urban regeneration, commercial food and drink spaces, and the idea of the ‘hospitable city’ as it is conceived in both theoretical writings and in accounts of urban regeneration. The paper highlights the work of hospitality in the commercial sector, but also argues that commercial hospitality should not be seen as merely calculative, instrumental, economic exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on David Livingstone's lecture entitled "Progress in Human Geography." It states that the paper begins with complications and contradictions, but ends trying to assert something bigger, something exceeding life itself. It acknowledges the elegance, creativity, and sophistication of the paper, the most impressive of which is the idea of a double geography of progress. The article argues the conclusion of Livingstone and discusses his strategy of contrasting progress with the most extreme form of relativism.

This paper shows that, despite receiving significant attention, the relationship between alcohol, drunkenness and public space has been undertheorized. We show that where drinking has been considered it has generally been as a peripheral concern of political-economy accounts that have sought to conceptualize the development of the modern city, or more recently the impact of global economic restructuring on urban life and public space. Moreover, such work has posited the relationship between drinking and the political, economic, social, cultural and spatial practices and processes bound up with, for example, social control in modern city or with contemporary gentrification, corporatization, fragmentation and regulation of the night-time economy, public space and revanchist urban policy in very general terms. While drawing on evidence from around the world, this paper focuses on the UK and highlights the need for a research agenda underpinned by a more specific consideration of urban drinking. We suggest that such a project must seek to unpack the connections and differences between supranational, national, regional and local drinking practices and related issues, and in particular pursue a more nuanced understanding of the social relations and cultural practices associated with the emergence of particular kinds of urban drinking spaces. [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]

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 reviews contemporary approaches in Anglophone human geography to the geographical constitution and expression of militarism and military activities. Three main approaches are identified, and the merits, limitations and insights of each are discussed. These are: traditional Military Geography, intimately associated with state military discourses of military power; a broad political geography, focused on the spatiality of armed conflict; and research from across the social sciences on the political economies and sociocultural geographies of militarism, particularly in nonconflict situations. The paper concludes with some suggestions for further empirical and theoretical inquiry, and argues on moral grounds for a human geography explicitly concerned with military geographies in all their forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the central role of computerized code in shaping the social and geographical politics of inequality in advanced societies. The central argument is that, while such processes are necessarily multifaceted, multiscaled, complex and ambivalent, a great variety of 'software-sorting' techniques is now being widely applied in efforts to try to separate privileged and marginalized groups and places across a wide range of sectors and domains. This paper's central demonstration is that the overwhelming bulk of software-sorting applications is closely associated with broader transformations from Keynesian to neoliberal service regimes. To illustrate such processes of software-sorting, the paper analyses recent research addressing three examples of software-sorting in practice. These address physical and electronic mobility systems, online geographical information systems (GIS), and face-recognition closed circuit television (CCTV) systems covering city streets. The paper finishes by identifying theoretical, research and policy implications of the diffusion of software-sorted geographies within which computerized code continually orchestrates inequalities through technological systems embedded within urban environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade geographers, especially social, cultural, critical and feminist geographers, have shown a keen interest in the mutually constitutive relationship between bodies and spaces. There is, however, one aspect of embodiment that has escaped geographers' attention, that is, fatness. In this paper I aim to develop some geographical research agendas that examine fatness as an important component of subjectivity. The paper begins by discussing some of the discourses surrounding fat and fatness, such as fat oppression, fat-phobia and fat acceptance. Secondly, there is an examination of some possible reasons why fat bodies have been for the most part absent from geographical research. Thirdly, the paper draws together the limited references that geographers have made to fat bodies, spaces and places. Finally, the paper offers suggestions for developing geographical research agendas that address fatness using a range of scales and theoretical perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) involved in international development has been case-study-based, with questions about the broader geographies of NGO intervention rarely asked. This paper explores the factors that drive such NGO geographies and considers how they relate to the uneven geographies of poverty and livelihood produced under contemporary processes of capitalist expansion and contraction. Explanations of NGO presence and absence must of necessity be historicized and contextualized, and particular attention should be paid to the influences of the politics and political economy of aid and development, the geographies of religious, political and other social institutions, the transnational networks in which these institutions are often embedded, and the social networks and life histories of NGO professionals and allies. The resulting geographies of intervention pattern the uneven ways in which NGOs become involved in reworking places and livelihoods, though this reworking is also structured by the dynamics of political economy. The paper closes by drawing out implications for geographical research on NGOs, as well as for efforts to theorize the relationships between intentional development interventions and immanent processes of political economic change, and their effects on inequality and unevenness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to contribute to the debate concerning the current and future state of human geography by focusing on its changing treatment of the past. I argue that, while contemporary human geography has experienced a welcomed explosion in terms of its thematic breadth, it has also suffered from a considerable narrowing of the time periods that inform its empirical and conceptual studies. The paper begins by demonstrating the changing temporal focus of the subdiscipline over the past 50 years, drawing particular attention to its temporal narrowing over the past 20 years. Following this, I seek to suggest possible reasons for the foreshortening of the times studied in the subdiscipline. I then illustrate the benefits of extending our temporal frame of reference to discuss earlier times. I conclude by arguing that the project of lengthening the timeframes that we use to structure our geographical research has the potential to enable us to tell different stories about the geographical past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an examination of the material and imaginative geographies of colonial philanthropy in parts of the British Empire from the late eighteenth century to the midnineteenth century, this paper advocates a more nuanced conception of the heterogeneity of colonial discourse. At the same time, it elaborates a networked conceptualization of empire. Particular attention is paid to the moralities of closeness, distance and connection, the spatial politics of knowledge, and the spatial and temporal translation of the trope of 'slavery' within philanthropic discourse. The paper raises colonial philanthropy as an object of inquiry that has relevance for contemporary globalized humanitarianism as well as for cross-cultural tension within former imperial sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is concerned with spatial clustering of economic activity and its relation to the spatiality of knowledge creation in interactive learning processes. It questions the view that tacit knowledge transfer is confined to local milieus whereas codified knowledge may roam the globe almost frictionlessly. The paper highlights the conditions under which both tacit and codified knowledge can be exchanged locally and globally. A distinction is made between, on the one hand, the learning processes taking place among actors embedded in a community by just being there - dubbed buzz - and, on the other, the knowledge attained by investing in building channels of communication - called pipelines - to selected providers located outside the local milieu. It is argued that the co-existence of high levels of buzz and many pipelines may provide firms located in outward-looking and lively clusters with a string of particular advantages not available to outsiders. Finally, some policy implications, stemming from this argument, are identified. [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]

This paper develops ideas from poststructuralism, actor-network theory, non-representational theory and complexity theory to begin to produce a topological consideration of cities in global networks. In other words, the paper argues that fluids and flows, actant networks, performances and practices fold the spaces and times of cities in ways that question the privileging of geometrical space (near and far) and linear time (now and then) in explanations of global and world cities. To reach a conceptualization of world city topologies, the paper is in four parts. First, space is set free and rethought as everywhere and folded into everything. Second, time is rethought as non-linear, multiple and folded into everything. Third, these new conceptualizations of space and time are mobilized to challenge the spatialities and temporalities produced through the political-economy approach of a writer such as Saskia Sassen. Finally, my rethinking of space and time in globalization is worked through to portray global and world cities as 'Bodies without Organs'. This spatial formation is seen to be one that connects and disconnects through networks and folds. Overall, my rethinking of space, time, globalization and cities produces a spatiotemporal pattern or topology that defies familiar geographical borders and temporal frames to point to the spaced and timed quality of relations that stretch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a critical assessment of the concept of transnationalism and its place within the current refiguration of cultural geography. Identifying three specific concerns with current theorizations of transnationalism (regarding the concept's scope, specificity and politics), the paper discusses the widely perceived need to 'ground' the study of transnationalism in specific empirical research. It argues that this discussion has been unhelpfully dominated by an overemphasis on identifying transnational migrant and diasporic communities. The paper highlights the authors' research with a range of food and fashion firms working between Britain and the Indian subcontinent to argue that an analysis of commodity culture provides an alternative way of advancing our understanding of contemporary transnationality. This approach suggests that transnational space can be recognized as both multidimensional and multiply inhabited. The paper concludes by outlining the alternative ways in which attention to commodity culture helps 'ground' the concept of transnationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against a background of concerns about the ability of advanced capitalist states to meet the welfare needs of their populations, the erosion of citizenship and declining social capital, voluntarism is increasingly presented in political and academic discourses as a 'panacea' to social and political problems facing liberal democracies. Building on human geographers' established interests in this field, this paper focuses on contemporary developments in voluntarism within advanced capitalist states. It examines how national programmes of welfare reform in the UK and the USA are affecting voluntary organizations and their ability to contribute to the welfare of local populations, and how place-based differences in the nature and meaning of voluntary activity are impacting on strategies to promote active citizenship and social capital. The paper concludes by highlighting some of the empirical, methodological and theoretical limitations of current geographical perspectives on voluntarism in order to suggest ways in which research in this field can move forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that an important obstacle to the continued development of critical human geography are 'islands of practice', through which scholars become embedded in a research and writing tradition that limits their intellectual and political horizons. I use a recent nondebate in Progress in Human Geography between Sallie Marston and Neil Brenner as an illustration of how islands of practice can stifle intellectual exchange. The paper suggests that the best way to dissolve the islands is a methodological program to create a more synthetic approach that consciously integrates multiple aspects of the critical project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to the scarcity of work on rural embodiment. We argue that a consideration of 'the body' can contribute significantly to an understanding of rural social relations and communities. In particular, this paper provides an additional critical dimension to the understanding of the relationship between changing femininities, masculinities, rurality and the performance of sexuality in rural areas. It shows how dominant constructions of rural masculinity and femininity incorporate highly traditional assumptions about the body and reflect conventional attitudes to sexuality and gender identity.This paper gathers together some partial and underdeveloped ideas and data in the production of a more coordinated and sustained consideration of embodiment and rurality, and details some emerging research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper has two purposes. The first is to provide a selective review of the history of locational analysis as it bears on economic geography. Three periods are examined: the German location school of von Thünen, Weber and Lösch that begins in the first part of the nineteenth century and ends in the middle of the twentieth century; American spatial science that starts in the mid-1950s and is in decline by the late 1970s; and the new economic geography associated with the economist Paul Krugman, and inaugurated by his 1991 book, Geography and trade. The second is to make a methodological argument. Locational analysis is most frequently justified in terms of the purity of its logical and mathematical reasoning, permitting some commentators to trace an unbroken line of progress over its 175-year history. I argue that such a claim is based upon acceptance of a broader philosophical position, rationalism - the belief that the foundation of knowledge is reason - which takes its most perfect form in logic and mathematics. Rationalism has been criticized in various ways ever since it first emerged in the Enlightenment, however, and the same critical sensibility informs this paper. Specifically, I criticize the rationalist interpretation of locational analysis by drawing upon a recent interdisciplinary body of literature arguing for the importance of local knowledge, the idea that knowledge, even abstract theoretical knowledge of the kind found in locational analysis, is shaped not by the universal but by the peculiar historical and geographical context of its production. This antirationalist argument in favour of local knowledge is exemplified by discussion of the three periods of locational analysis that form the paper's core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces some new theoretical ideas to a literature that is just beginning to conceptualize globalization and cities as networks. The idea of networks is a fashionable one, but the idea is not new and has taken several forms over the years. This paper discusses some of the more recent and influential ideas about networks to argue for some new theoretical and empirical directions in the field of globalization and world cities. First, the shift from the idea of a hierarchy of world cities developed by writers such as John Friedmann to the idea of a world city network developed by writers such as Peter Taylor is discussed. Second, the paper provides a critique of the neo-Marxist account of globalization as a series of meta-networks advanced by Manuel Castells to expose the limitations of an approach that has been broadly adopted by several globalization and world cities scholars. Finally, it is argued that further progress in the conceptualization and empirical study of world cities and their networks can be made through an engagement with the literatures of actor-network theory and non-representational theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the key findings and insights offered by recent work on public understandings of air pollution, which has begun to adopt some of the concepts and methodologies associated with social constructionism. We begin with a brief discussion of debates in the social sciences generally, and human geography specifically, regarding the precepts of 'social constructionism', before setting out the 'heterogeneous' mode that we adopt in this paper. In this light, we trace briefly the fairly narrow empirical, methodological and conceptual preoccupations of early air pollution perception work. These accounts usefully situate the remainder of the paper, which focuses on the recent body of research that explores public understandings of air pollution, with quite different approaches to theory and data collection to that which has gone before. The argument we develop asserts that a constructionist interpretation, in revealing 'complexity' and the entangled interaction of society-environment-technology, raises serious questions about the dominant political discourse of air pollution and the policy responses which it legitimates. The issues raised by this review, we believe, offer a fresh perspective and the potential to progress not only our understanding and management of air pollution risks but also the contribution of geographers to a challenging research terrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the dilemma of how easy it is to talk and write about human geographies of ethics and justice compared to the difficulties of living out those geographies in our everyday life practices. If radical ideas and radical practices are to go hand in hand, we need to address the apparent inability to retain a critical political edge in human geography. The paper comments on new readings of moral and ethical geographies, noting Marc Augé's distinction between a sense of the other and a sense for the other, and arguing that any goal in human geography for developing an emotional, connected and committed sense for the other may necessitate a prompting of the moral imagination which includes political/ethical/spiritual constellations of issues such as charity, agape and evil. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Melissa Orlie, the paper emphasizes imaginations of power that recognize 'evil', the crisis of the citizen-subject, and the recovery of political enthusiasms for 'invisible powers'. It envisions a human geography in which living ethically and acting politically can be essentially intertwined with a sense for the other in a sensitive, committed and active approach to the subject. This entails both a continuing engagement in collective political action against ordered evil, and taking responsibility for what we have been made to be and for who we are becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the contribution that the concept of social capital might make to geography, and the contribution geography might make to the analysis of social capital. We begin by summarizing the conceptual origins and dimensions of social capital, in the process of which we distinguish it from several other social properties (human and cultural capital; social networks). We then summarize key criticisms of the concept, especially those levelled at the work of Robert Putnam. The core of the paper is a discussion of the issue of whether there might be a geography of social capital. We consider links between geographical debates and the concept of social capital, and we assess the difficulties of deriving spatially disaggregated measures of social capital. We illustrate this discussion with reference to literature on three sets of issues: the question of 'institutional tissue' and its effects on regional development; the understanding of health inequalities; and the analysis of comparative government performance. In conclusion, we argue that the popularity of the concept reflects a combination of academic and political developments, notably the search for ostensibly 'costless' policies of redistribution on the part of centrist governments. We therefore conclude with a discussion of the practical applications of the concept in different contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there have been repeated calls for a convergence between 'the cultural' and 'the economic'. This paper provides a specific take on these issues through an exploration of the contested geographies of contemporary commercial culture. Traditionally, 'culture' has been associated with meaning and creativity, with works of the imagination and aesthetic practices that are far removed from the pursuit of economic profit. By contrast, 'commerce' has conventionally been regarded with disdain by critically minded social scientists, signalling a vulgar and materialistic world, devoid of morality,where human agency is subordinated to the logic of capital. This paper aims to challenge such dualistic thinking by exploring the commodification of cultural difference and by demonstrating that the rational calculus of the market is inescapably embedded in a range of cultural practices. The argument moves from an analysis of linear commodity chains to an exploration of more complex circuits and networks, illustrated with examples from contemporary commodity culture, looking specifically at the food and fashion sectors. Rather than demonstrating complexity for its own sake, the objective is to identify new forms of understanding and new possibilities for intervention in what can sometimes seem like an all-encompassing 'consumer culture' where every act of resistance is immediately recuperated in successive rounds of commodification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Telemedicine is an innovation that is changing the geography of medical care provision. Regionalization of care is one important type of geographical change resulting from the implementation of telemedicine technology. This paper introduces a range of issues bound up with telemedicine and medical care regionalization and offers a geographical conceptualization of those issues through a synthesis of ideas from several literatures. It begins by providing a background for regionalization and telemedicine. The paper continues by examining the formation of 'virtual' regions and the problem of their internal integration and integration with 'material' regions of care. A penultimate section argues for the use of regional economic geography and territoriality as contexts for understanding the continued growth and development of telemedicine networks. As part of an overall critical challenge to the protelemedicine bias in the medical care literature, the paper ends by suggesting the development of a normative ethics by medical geographers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explore a theoretical framework that can assist in understanding the extent to which the increased integration of macro-regional economies (such as the European and North American) and the global economy is leading to divergence and/or convergence in the pattern of economic activity and the distribution of value-added and wealth. In particular, the paper focuses on the extent to which changing divisions of labour, the production, appropriation and allocation of value, and economic organization underpin these processes of convergence/divergence. We focus on developing an understanding of the changing divisions of labour across space in increasingly integrated macro-regional economies such as Europe and North America, and the (unequal) flows of value between places that underpin mosaics of territorial inequality. We argue that the production and flows of value associated with different forms of economic activities and commodity production and exchange in different localities provides a framework for understanding changing geographical divisions of labour. We also argue that a critical engagement with the range of work associated with analysing 'commodity chains' and 'commodity networks' provides a way into thinking about the (dis)organization of economic activity and value creation, appropriation and distribution. In particular, we argue that the focus on the commodity, while initially helpful, is misplaced because commodities embody and carry with them relations of value. Consequently, our attention should be focused on the organization of the production, appropriation and realization of value flows and the various forces that structure these processes, such as state governance, labour organization, corporate practices and so on, that are fundamental to understanding the (re)configuration of economic activity in macro-regional economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Science studies are an increasingly prominent interdisciplinary body of work. Now a diverse literature, one of its most consistent and common themes is a reluctance to accept the standard model of scientific explanation (‘internalism’) that conceives scientific knowledge, and the disciplines with which it is associated, as the product of a rationality that is progressively realized over time. Instead, science studies emphasize the importance of local circumstances in shaping knowledge, which, in turn, makes such knowledge messy and context-dependent. The purposes of this paper are twofold. The first is to provide a selective review of science studies. In particular, the paper recognizes three subtraditions within the larger genre: Mertonian institutionalism, the sociology of scientific knowledge, and cultural studies of science. The second purpose is to begin developing a case study in order to apply such literature, that of the institutional origins of economic geography during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and linked to a series of wider social processes around commercial trade and imperialism. To make the case study manageable, I concentrate on only two authors and their respective key books: the Scottish geographer George Chisholm, who wrote the first English-language economic geography textbook, A handbook of commercial geography (1889); and the American geographer J. Russell Smith, author of the first US college text in economic geography, Industrial and commercial geography (1913). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Contemporary research on innovative processes makes use of a range of scales, from the global to the regional/local. In addition, network-based approaches have introduced a non-territorially bounded dimension to studies of innovation. While much of the latter has, to date, been concerned with local networks, recent work has pointed to the importance of non-local interconnections. This paper seeks to build upon such insights suggesting that greater attention be given to extra-local connections in studies of innovation. We explore ways in which extra-local interconnection may be extended beyond the globalization of formalized R&D by, and between, transnational corporations (TNCs), which is the overwhelming preoccupation of existing research. The paper is divided into two main parts. The first consists of a review of work on the three key scales of innovation. The second considers the role of firms and individuals as key actors in systems of innovation, and suggests how network-based approaches may offer the best way for analysing how these actors operate through and across spatial scales. In conclusion, we emphasize the need to further investigate non-TNC-based dimensions of extra-local interconnection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper takes up the problem of how to structure a productive and genuine interdisciplinary engagement from the standpoint of geography. It examines first what makes interdisciplinarity difficult, focusing on the production of disciplinary cultures that define the material practices, social relations and epistemological commitments characteristic of a field of study. The paper then considers why interdisciplinarity seems to be in the ascendant and why and how geography has been used in this project. It cautions against a reductionist or imperialist style of interdisciplinary work and encourages geographers to develop their own approach to a productive engagement with other fields, in part through attending to the interdisciplinarity inherent in our own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I Introduction Nearly ten years ago, Gearoid Ó Tuathail and John Agnew published a paper ‘Geopolitics and discourse: practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy’ (1992) in Political Geography.[sup 1] Their analysis precipitated a research agenda, which conceptualized geopolitics as a form of political discourse rather than simply a descriptive term intended to cover the study of foreign policy and grand statecraft (see Ó Tuathail, 1986; Dalby, 1988; and indirectly Waterman, 1998). This paper in alliance with an earlier geo-economic analysis of the world economy (Agnew and Corbridge, 1989), urged political geographers to investigate not only the politics of geographical knowledge but also the geographies of the changing world economy. They argued that geopolitics’ close association with Halford Mackinder and others had obscured the extent to which all models of global politics are informed or even guided by geographical understandings (see Agnew, 1983). As a then doctoral student at the University of Bristol, I read this paper with great excitement. Enriched with a critical geopolitical appreciation, I returned to my archival material and (over the next eight years) investigated how the Falklands/Malvinas and Antarctica were represented within British and Argentine geopolitical cultures (see Dodds, 2000a; 2000b). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While researchers are increasingly re-conceptualizing international migration, far less attention has been devoted to re-thinking short-distance residential mobility and immobility. In this paper we harness the life course approach to propose a new conceptual framework for residential mobility research. We contend that residential mobility and immobility should be re-conceptualized as relational practices that link lives through time and space while connecting people to structural conditions. Re-thinking and re-assessing residential mobility by exploiting new developments in longitudinal analysis will allow geographers to understand, critique and address pressing societal challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we unpack how geographers have studied institutions, focusing specifically on institutional ethnography, often called ‘IE’. Sociologist Dorothy Smith is widely credited with developing institutional ethnography as an ‘embodied’ feminist approach. Smith studies the experiences of women in daily life, and the complex social relations in which these are embedded. Institutional ethnography offers the possibility to study up to understand the differential effects of institutions within and beyond institutional spaces and associated productions of subjectivities and material inequalities. We suggest that geographical scholarship on institutions can be enhanced and, in turn, has much to contribute to the broader interdisciplinary field on institutional ethnography, such as understandings of institutions that account for spatial differentiation. We argue that IE holds potential to enrich geographical research not only about a multitude of kinds of institutions, but about the many structures, effects, and identities working through institutions as territorial forces. In spite of recent interest by geographers, the broader literature on institutional ethnography remains under-engaged and under-cited by human geographers. Critical of this lack of engagement, we suggest that it has left a gap in geographical research on institutions. Our aim is to analyze and advance existing scholarship and offer this article as a tool for geographers thinking about employing IE. We develop a typology, categorized by methodological approach, to highlight ethnographic approaches to institutions undertaken by geographers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Processes of juridification are a defining feature of late modern war. But geographic accounts of war have generally not considered the role that law plays in shaping its conduct. This paper explores the juridification of war using the concept of lawfare. Lawfare may signal an intensification and shift in the relationship between war and law, but I argue that understanding the nature and extent of these changes requires a careful examination of the historical geographies of war, law and lawfare. Drawing from critical legal approaches I offer a preliminary geographical and historical theorization of lawfare so that we may better understand the relationship between war and law today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, governments are experimenting with ways to provide public goods by involving the private sector in the planning, financing, building and operating of a range of services, facilities, infrastructure, etc. In the geographical literature on neoliberalism this entanglement of the state and markets has been loosely conceptualized as a process of marketization. This concept describes the insertion of markets or market forces into the state and public sector. In this paper we unpack this concept by highlighting the need to think about a range of marketization processes at play across a range of geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heightened concerns about long-term sustainability have of late enlivened debates around the circular economy (CE). Defined as a series of restorative and regenerative industrial systems, parallel socio-cultural transformations have arguably received less consideration to date. In response, this paper examines the contributions human geographical scholarship can make to CE debates, focusing on ‘generative spaces’ of diverse CE practices. Concepts infrequently discussed within human geography such as product service systems and ‘prosumption’ are explored, to argue that productive potential exists in bringing these ideas into conversation with ongoing human geographical research into practices, materialities, emergent political spaces and ‘everyday activism’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how physical and material properties of the urban fabric help enable the evolution of programmatically coherent spatial districts. It considers how contingent and non-linear processes intertwine to manifest in the unfolding of distinct sites and territories. Drawing concepts and terminology from both evolutionary economic geography and the sciences of complexity, it emphasizes how physically situated morphological traits help underpin urban processes of self-organization and emergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents critical perspectives into alcohol-related violence and disorder. In doing so, we advance writing by geographers challenging ontological and epistemological orthodoxies which dominate ‘alcohol studies’. By engaging with work focused on playful or ludic urbanism, and literature considering emotions, embodiment and affect, we address an impasse between medical and social sciences approaches in order to better understand and tackle alcohol-related violence and disorder. We conclude with theoretical and policy-relevant insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on the designation of networked spatial information technologies (both hardware/software objects and information artifacts) as ‘spatial media’ to advance media as an epistemology for engaging these presences as both channels for content and as cultural apparatuses. Doing so directly asserts their materiality as coincident with (new) media techno-cultural productions. This allows for a theory of mediation that belies narratives of ‘virtual’–‘real’ spatial hybrids by instead understanding spatiality (as the nexus of material socio-spatio-technical relations) as always-already mediated – i.e. as the ontogenetic effects of the contingent, necessarily incomplete comings-together of technical presences, persons, and space/place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates the enduring yet changing role of world cities as centers of capitalist ‘command and control’ amidst deepening uneven development. By incorporating financialization processes in Friedmann’s (1986) world city hypothesis, we hypothesize that the world city archipelago remains an obligatory passage point for the relatively assured realization of capital. The advanced producer services complex appropriates superprofits as producers of co-constitutive knowledge on operational and financial firm restructuring, the creation of new circuits of value, and capital switching. Geographically, beyond the international financial center shortlist, the wider world city archipelago inserts finance capital (logics) in contemporary economies and societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper unpacks the contested inter-connections between neoliberal work and welfare regimes, asylum and immigration controls, and the exploitation of migrant workers. The concept of precarity is explored as a way of understanding intensifying and insecure post-Fordist work in late capitalism. Migrants are centrally implicated in highly precarious work experiences at the bottom end of labour markets in Global North countries, including becoming trapped in forced labour. Building on existing research on the working experiences of migrants in the Global North, the main part of the article considers three questions. First, what is precarity and how does the concept relate to working lives? Second, how might we understand the causes of extreme forms of migrant labour exploitation in precarious lifeworlds? Third, how can we adequately theorize these particular experiences using the conceptual tools of forced labour, slavery, unfreedom and precarity? We use the concept of ‘hyper-precarity’ alongside notions of a ‘continuum of unfreedom’ as a way of furthering human geographical inquiry into the intersections between various terrains of social action and conceptual debate concerning migrants’ precarious working experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report juxtaposes recent statements on geographical knowledge by Robert Kaplan and David Harvey to review current concerns in the history and philosophy of geography. Three general trends are identified. First, there have been attempts to address the geographical contributions evident in the corpus of key thinkers, particularly Immanuel Kant. Second, a broader concern with articulating histories of disciplinary subfields, such as cultural, economic and physical geography, has been evident, often connected to personal biographies and reminiscences. Third, a body of work has attempted to put geography’s story into dialogue with that of the wider social sciences, especially for the Cold War period. The paper concludes by noting the continuing difficulties of engaging with the histories and philosophies of geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In disaster science, policy and practice, the transition of resilience from a descriptive concept to a normative agenda provides challenges and opportunities. This paper argues that both are needed to increase resilience. We briefly outline the concept and several recent international resilience-building efforts to elucidate critical questions and less-discussed issues. We highlight the need to move resilience thinking forward by emphasizing structural social-political processes, acknowledging and acting on differences between ecosystems and societies, and looking beyond the quantitative streamlining of resilience into one index. Instead of imposing a technical-reductionist framework, we suggest a starting basis of integrating different knowledge types and experiences to generate scientifically reliable, context-appropriate and socially robust resilience-building activities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For some time now, calls have been made for a more adequate theorization of the state and institutional frameworks in work on global production networks (GPNs) and global value chains (GVCs). However, despite claims in GPN research that institutional contexts matter, there remains an absence of theoretical frameworks on the state in GPNs. Consequently, understanding of the relations between state action and the changing geographies of production networks remains in its infancy. This paper explores a strategic-relational understanding of the state and the rearticulation of scales of state formation to understand the dynamics of global production networks in macro-regional spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we present an analysis of the German legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt as a spatial thinker whose work contains many elements relevant to the concerns of political geography. In examining his fundamental concern with how to ground modern political order without theological foundation, we identify a conceptual matrix between space, political order and conflict that underpins his thought. Charting the development of his spatial theory across his work, we focus on two key spatial moments from immediately before and after the Second World War: first, his theory of Großraum (‘greater space’) order as a reformulation of global order after the eclipse of the state and its complicated entanglements with Nazi spatial thinking and expansionism in eastern Europe; second, his notion of nomos, developed after the war to embrace both a geo-elemental spatial ontology and an account of the rise and fall of Eurocentric global order. We conclude by noting Schmitt’s failure to move beyond an understanding of order grounded on spatial division and his increasing retreat into eschatological fantasy as global spatio-political relations became increasingly more complex in the late 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper responds to a recent call for geographers to engage with the ecosystem services concept which is an increasingly dominant global model for environmental policy and management. We focus on its economic exchange mechanism, payment for environmental services (PES), and reject the conventional notion of it as either an economic or an environmental strategy. Rather than treating a disaggregated nature as the ‘fixed stock’ of ecosystem services, we value instead actual human and non-human interrelations and practices and focus on how we might reconfigure the socio-cultural relations between people and nature as the valued stock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographical research into migrants’ use of transnational space has contributed towards the materialization of a purely metaphorical construct. A largely separate literature on borders has sought to ‘transnationalize’ the border by identifying how control practices move away from the physical border line. This paper brings these developing approaches together. The various ways in which state institutions attempt to control transnational relations require some account of control mechanisms that surpass the state’s current territorial limits. Three techniques of control are identified from the literature review – physical, symbolic and imaginative. These are explored in two case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In view of persisting and multiple ‘crises’, coming to grips with sociospatial change is one of the key tasks in geographical political economy today. However, to date, philosophical misunderstandings and the related lack of productive scholarly exchange has prevented this task from being satisfyingly addressed. In this paper I discuss the Cultural Political Economy approach and discourse theory in order to expose some key misunderstandings and to argue in favour of more philosophical awareness. By setting up a dialogue between the two approaches I aim to demonstrate the benefits of a constructive engagement between perspectives rooted in ontologically different positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the golden age of philanthropy. Over the 55-year period 1998–2052, bequests to charity in the USA alone are estimated to be between $109 and $454 billion per year. This paper exhorts geographers to give critical attention to less-than-charitable consequences of the so-called ‘new philanthropy’ among the super-rich. It sets out a number of areas that appear to warrant critical geographical inquiry, including: bonds between philanthropic engagement and place; diaspora philanthropy; jurisdictional taxation arrangements favouring the wealthy and super-rich; characteristics of culturally variegated philanthropy; and philanthropy’s geographical links with spaces of exploitation and territories of guilt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]