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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]

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 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]

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]

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]

Why does critical political geography struggle to address, and research, peace? Recent efforts in geography do seek positive accounts of peace, but we argue that critical geographies remain problematically reliant on social agonism. Dominant theoretical lenses used to address critical politics reproduce dissension as the causal grammar of critical sociality and the constitutive effect of difference. We seek an alternative account of peace and sociality. The first half of the paper diagnoses how prevailing conceptual approaches to critique privilege agonism. The second half advances a positive account of peace, without losing the critical tenor of post-foundationalist or relational political insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a field of research or possible sub-discipline, sports geography has not realized its full potential. This paper summarizes some of the main subjects investigated and approaches taken to date, then using this as a launching point, describes a particular way forward for research. It is argued that a better engagement with, and showing of, the physicality, energy and feeling of sport might be achieved through employing non-representational theory, itself involving an emphasis on exposing the immediate and moving in life, including the less-than-fully conscious practices, performances and sensations involved. In particular, these arguments are framed by discussions of some of the fundamental qualities of ‘movement-space’ that might be more clearly animated in future scholarship – specifically rhythm, momentum, vitality, infectiousness, imminence and encounter – and are supported by highlighting some pathbreaking sports geographies that have already begun to convey them. It is argued that, whilst these qualities are critical to sport in their own right, importantly they interplay with social, political and economic processes in sport that geographers already have a modest record of engaging with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we develop linkages between non-representational theory and emerging work by disability scholars in geography. We argue that non-representational thinking has the potential to advance our understanding of the complex and emergent geographies of dis/ability. We first outline key dimensions of non-representational thinking within geography. We then explore how this perspective has begun to, and might further inform, geographical scholarship on disability. Next, we extend our thinking to consider how NRT might provide the basis for a critical geography of the ‘able-body’. We conclude by reflecting on the conceptual, political, methodological and empirical implications of our argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographies of food banks have focused predominantly on issues of neoliberal political-economy and food insecurity. In this paper, we trace alternative understandings of food banking – as spaces of care, and as liminal spaces of encounter capable of incubating political and ethical values, practices and subjectivities that challenge neoliberal austerity. Our aim is to develop a conceptual approach to voluntary welfare capable both of holding in tension the ambivalent and contradictory dynamics of care and welfare in the meantime(s), and of underlining some of the more hopeful and progressive possibilities that can arise in and through such spaces of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for expanded listening in geography. Expanded listening addresses how bodies of all kinds, human and more-than-human, respond to sound. We show how listening can contribute to research on a wide range of topics, beyond enquiry where sound itself is the primary substantive interest. This is demonstrated through close discussion of what an amplified sonic sensibility can bring to three areas of contemporary geographical interest: geographies of landscape, of affect, and of geotechnologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we demonstrate how writings on affect, materiality and relationality necessitate a rethinking of theories of the nation, focusing on the intermittent emergence and flickering presence of nation-ness and national identity. In moving beyond Billig's notion of 'banal nationalism', we argue that the presencing/absencing, foregrounding/backgrounding, and individualizing/collectivizing of feelings results from the differential capacities for bodies to affect or be affected and the assembling of particular configurations of bodies and materials. We demonstrate this through a discussion of how national feelings and affects have gathered around two infrastructures in Wales, the A470 road and the Severn Bridge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to a growing body of geographical literature exploring the interface between ontology and politics. We develop an understanding that does not start by building ontological bedrocks, to which the question of politics is then rooted. Ontology building, we argue, operates against the essential possibility of the political invested in ontological openness, and thus remains blind to politics inconsistent with, but also practised upon, its own foundations. We propose a relation between the political and the ontological as questioning that grows from the events and situations, which ontologically position us in multiple and unexpected ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last 20 years have witnessed a deepening of the imbrication between capital and the university. This paper seeks to map one point at which this binding occurs: in critical theory. Recently scholars in strategic management have turned to processual and relational ontologies in an attempt to reimagine the logics of profit, value, and growth. These same ontologies have appealed to critical geographers as a means of reconceiving space as unfixed. Drawing on a case study of Deleuze’s appropriation in management literature, I show how such ontologies presuppose a vitalism that necessarily reproduces and obscures the structures of exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we seek to map out the specific geographies through which spatialities of religion have been imagined. These involve such spatial metaphors as islands, networks and spheres. Less attention has been given to new forms of spirituality, and to the consequences of thinking through these for our understanding of modernity itself. We argue that modernity, religion and spirituality are entangled and spread through daily life. We conclude that adding new forms of spirituality to the mix of geographies of religion requires reconsidering more than the boundary between secularity and religion, but also rethinking the place of spirituality in modern life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the persistence of Malthusian arguments that human population will grow to outstrip the Earth’s capacity and resources, current demography actually foretells the impending end of growth in the next half century. We are approaching a global baby bust. What does this mean for global political labor economies, regional resource economics, and local struggles over gender and power? This paper concludes, through a survey of current research, that geographers already have the conceptual equipment to answer these enormously important questions. We further argue that the fundamental underpinnings of much contemporary economic and social theory, having been developed in times of rapid population growth and labor surplus, must be reconsidered as we enter a period of different material conditions. Reviewing recent developments in population geography and feminist geopolitics, global geographies of labor and aging, and emerging patterns of resource intensification and disintensification, we suggest that – if infused with an explicit political economy – attending to the baby bust can show the way forward to help revitalize our understanding of bodies and materiality in critical and human geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on work on forced labour and human trafficking to argue for the value of geographical approaches to legal scale, and for more geographical research on the process of jurisdiction. Vulnerability to forced labour and human trafficking is related to processes of social and political categorization and legal characterization. Yet territorial understandings of jurisdiction, and those which conceptualize jurisdiction as a process of sorting, often imply a relatively straightforward correspondence between legal scales and legal subjects. I propose an approach to legal scale that builds on feminist analyses in labour law and human geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses disaster risk reduction (DRR) in the context of emerging geographical ideas about topologies and assemblages. It focuses on the role of expert advice in DRR and the resulting political and epistemological issues. The critical geography of disasters still struggles to communicate with persistent scientific technical-rational approaches to hazard assessment. Furthermore, recent studies have shown the potential for expert advice to be (mis)used for political purposes. Assemblage theory might be useful in opening up this hybrid area of research, as it allows a nuanced view of disasters and DRR that can incorporate complex human-environmental relationships and diverse knowledges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the geographical notion of chora, i.e. the earth as ethically shaped by human practices, according to my interpretation of Strabo’s Geography. I argue that this chora is bearer of a logic of the included third/middle, as it coincides with the logico-semantic third way of Plato’s notion of image. Re-interpreting today’s geographical turns in the light of a re-turn to Strabo’s chora/image, I argue that this return is moral, inasmuch as the geographical chora shows that ethics has preserved a logic of image and representation, which is the most ancient in Western thought, but also the most appropriate to contemporary issues. The geographical model of chora which I delineate here – a complex model on the basis of which ethics works in the same way as an image – is also the attempt to propose an alternative theory on the nature of image as well as an alternative interpretation of the role which ethics can play in current debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental justice (EJ) scholarship is increasingly framing justice in terms of capabilities. This paper argues that capabilities are fundamentally about well-being and as such there is a need to more explicitly theorize well-being. We explore how capabilities have come to be influential in EJ and how well-being has been approached so far in EJ specifically and human geography more broadly. We then introduce a body of literature from social psychology which has grappled theoretically with questions about well-being, using the insights we gain from it to reflect on some possible trajectories and challenges for EJ as it engages with well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claims about neoliberalism and its geographies frequently involve assumptions about the affective life of neoliberalism and/or neoliberal societies. However, existing cultural approaches to neoliberalism as a discursive formation, an ideology or governmentality collapse a concern with affect into a focus on the operation of signifying-subjectfying processes that make ‘neoliberal subjects’. Political economy approaches only make implicit claims about the ‘mood’ of neoliberal societies. In this paper, I argue that collective affects are part of the conditions of formation for particular neoliberalisms and therefore understanding the affective life of neoliberalism is critical to explaining how it emerges, forms and changes. Through examples including The Mont Pelerin Society, the Chicago School of Economics and Thatcherism, I propose a vocabulary that supplements existing approaches by focusing on the affective conditions for neoliberalism, specifically the atmospheres that are part of the formation of neoliberal reason and the structures of feeling that condition how particular neoliberalisms actualize in the midst of other things. The result is a way of discerning neoliberalisms as both conditioned by affects and ‘actually existing’ affectively – as dispersed affective ‘qualities’ or ‘senses’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds from scholarship on whiteness and white privilege to argue for an expanded focus that includes settler colonialism and white supremacy. We argue that engaging with white supremacy and settler colonialism reveals the enduring social, economic, and political impacts of white supremacy as a materially grounded set of practices. We situate white supremacy not as an artifact of history or as an extreme position, but rather as the foundation for the continuous unfolding of practices of race and racism within settler states. We illustrate this framework through a recent example of a land dispute in the American West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the world increasingly urbanizes, the imaginaries, conceptions and politics of urban density will become increasingly urgent for research, policy, practice and activism. Density is a keyword in the history of how the city has been conceived and understood, and is firmly back on the global urban agenda. However, we lack sustained studies of how the geographies of density have been defined, lived, and contested. This paper develops a topological approach to urban density, considers key ways in which density has been politicized, and examines an emerging research area that understands the life and politics of density as ‘intensive heterogeneities’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reproducible quantitative research is research that has been documented sufficiently rigorously that a third party can replicate any quantitative results that arise. It is argued here that such a goal is desirable for quantitative human geography, particularly as trends in this area suggest a turn towards the creation of algorithms and codes for simulation and the analysis of Big Data. A number of examples of good practice in this area are considered, spanning a time period from the late 1970s to the present day. Following this, practical aspects such as tools that enable research to be made reproducible are discussed, and some beneficial side effects of adopting the practice are identified. The paper concludes by considering some of the challenges faced by quantitative geographers aspiring to publish reproducible research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a framework to explain the uneven development of housing prices in cities. Since the main price component of housing is capitalized rent, the financial base of this rent is analysed. Therefore three categories of accumulation strategies are defined: places of production, places of consumption and places of business services. The restructuring of urban economies after the crisis of Fordism is interpreted as a shift from places of production to places of consumption or business services. Subsequently, the disciplining function of places of production on housing prices eroded, resulting in uneven price developments. [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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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 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 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]

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]

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 paper examines the deployment of nonviolence within critical geopolitics. It contends that geographers’ engagements with nonviolence lack grounding, often sliding towards ethical appeals for people’s responsive commitments. Building on Judith Butler’s notion of ‘precarious lives’, I underscore the emotional impetuses through which nonviolence can be harnessed as a concrete pathway for social change. ‘Precarious geopolitics’ as I call it, represents a geopolitics that is sensitive and sympathetic to the claims of nonviolence and a subdiscipline that can seize the opportune juncture truly to reposition itself as one of the arts of peace. [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]