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The article announces the 2017 Progress in Human Geography Best Paper Prize given to Key MacFarlane of the University of California, Santa Cruz for high-quality publishing work in human geography.

Human geographers actively studied ports in past decades. However, the extent to which port geography constituted a specific research stream within human geography remained largely unanswered. By reviewing 399 port papers published in major geography journals, the authors critically investigated the trends and changing tides of port geography research. The findings point out the emergence of the core community shifting from mainstream geography research to increasing connection with other disciplines, notably transport studies. The paper offers a progressive view on human geographers’ abilities to form a research community on port development, while identifying opportunities in the pursuit of collaboration between different academic disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In dialogue with recent studies that have sought to foreground the negative and the abyssal in human geography and that have struggled in vain to prevent their foreclosure, we introduce the work of the French theorist Maurice Blanchot, whose challenging and thought-provoking writings remain largely unknown within our discipline despite their significance for deconstructing geography's conceptual architecture. After explicating Blanchot's neutralization of the problem of negativity and positivity, the paper brings Blanchot's neutral writings to bear on three areas of contemporary geographical concern: the trouble with subjectivity and identity; the unhinging of space and time; and the disaster of writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human geography's onto-epistemological expansion in recent decades has not been well matched by methodological development. Learning from the methodological pluralism in four relational approaches, this paper reflects on key issues in relational-explanatory theorizing before introducing a social science method of process tracing in relation to a comparative methodology. I argue that contrastive explanations can be developed through deploying comparable methodological practices as different 'moments' of a research process in appropriate evidential contexts. This research process-based comparative methodology can better trace actors and their relational networks through in situ research and generate explanatory theoretical insights into the complexity of socio-spatial life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A list of referees who provided their comments on the papers submitted to the journal "Progress in Human Geography" (PiHG) during 2010-2011 is presented, including Neil Adger, Justin Beaumont, and Allan Cochrane.

The article announces the recipients of the 2015 Progress in Human Geography (PiHG) Best Paper Prize including Samuel Kinsley and Chi Yuan Woon.

Progress in Environmental Geography is a new journal that has been launched alongside Progress in Human Geography and Progress in Physical Geography. It aims to be the go-to peer-reviewed journal for those interested in the latest research in all areas of environmental geography. The journal welcomes contributions from diverse authors and aims to encourage collaboration and interdisciplinary submissions. It will publish perspectives papers, progress reports, and themed interventions, covering a wide range of topics within the discipline. With the launch of this new journal, Progress in Human Geography will no longer publish review articles and reports in the field of environmental geography. [Extracted from the article]

The contemporary ecological condition is one of 'global weirding', a term coined to describe both anthropogenically changed worlds and the experience of dwelling within them. In this paper, we foreground New Weird fiction as a progressive literary style, distinct from its problematic roots, with conceptual import to human geography. Through attention to the New Weird's treatment of difference, dis/orientation and ecological relation, these texts provoke geographers to foster a speculative ethics suited to a weirding world. In suggesting this ethical approach, this paper contributes to emerging debates in geography concerning ambivalence, disorientation and affirmation/negation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines scholarship on resistance within geography. Its contention is that conceptualisations of resistance are characterised by a predetermination of form that particular actions or actors must assume to constitute resistance. Asking what we risk ignoring if we only focus on predetermined, recognisable resistant forms, the paper revisits some of the fundamental assumptions (of intention, linearity and opposition) that underpin accounts of resistance. It calls for geographers to engage with resistance in emergence. The paper concludes by detailing what this might look like in practice, including intersections with work on potentiality, incoherent subjects, agentic materiality and speculative futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a new disciplinary research agenda for a geography of the human face. Locating a research lacuna within the subfield of embodied geographies, the paper highlights existing interdisciplinary scholarship on the face, suggesting avenues through which geographers can both complement and advance such discussions. The overall proposal is to (re)consider the spatialities of the face via three routes: the political and biometric, the aesthetic and facial modification. The paper concludes by suggesting a disciplinary opportunity for a future facialised geography, providing valuable insight into this dynamic bodily site upon and through which the world is encountered and experienced. [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]

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 emphasises the decolonial importance of geographical engagement with the materiality of language as an embodied and embedded relation. It shows how abstractions of language(s) as discrete, codified and possessable objects participate in a 'coloniality of language' that risks obscuring alternative geographies of language within, against and beyond the territorialised monolingualism of the colonial nation-state. Through considering Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero's analysis of Western modernity's systematic 'devocalisation of logos' from a modernity/coloniality perspective, I argue that geographical consideration of language as a 'revocalised' relation could contribute to moving beyond colonial and (ethno)nationalist geographies of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the article "The postmodernism challenge: reconstructing human geography" by Michael Dear that was published in the 1988 issue of journal "Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers." The author expresses that the work allows the inclusion of social theory into the writings of geographers that gives more open claims to knowledge. It states that the paper is instrumental in promoting language awareness in human sciences within geography among geographers. It is argued that human geographic research is an implicit or explicit context of the article.

Research on the integration of the human-environment system has been an important part of Chinese human geography for over a century, constituting the distinctive academic nature of the field. Human geography has been established as an interdiscipline of natural science and social science, highlighting the combination of academic inquiry and decision application, and exploring the interaction mechanisms and sustainable development model between the human sphere and natural sphere at different spatial scales. The development of the discipline is in line with the basic concepts advocated by the global research platform "Future Earth", which has promoted the strong development of human geography in China, and has produced important societal influences. By selecting some of the most influential academic achievements, this paper briefly describes theoretical methods and social contributions to reflect the development process of human geography in the study of integrated human and environment systems in different stages in China. It also demonstrates the influence of the following elements on the adherence of Chinese human geography to the integration of human and environment systems: classical Chinese philosophical thinking on harmony between people and land, western theories of the human-environment relationship, Soviet economic geography research methods, the science of sustainability, the social demands of the construction of contemporary Chinese ecological civilization, ever-improving mathematical models and big data methods for studying enormous and complex systems, and management system reform and special scientific research system and background in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends discussions of the geographies of the body by examining hair as a geographical lens that reimagines the body's borders. Hair is a key agent in producing and representing the body, specifically through the presences and absences of hair that influence, disturb, transform and transcend its margins. By examining the materialities, performances and discourses associated with how and where hair is situated (or not) on the body, this paper situates hair as a geographical prism that explores new frontiers of the bordered body, shapes corporeal understandings of appearance and projects identities and power well beyond its physical limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge creation is recognized as interaction between individuals in a social context, but geography-of-knowledge-creation research inadequately connects social context to physical place. The proximities approach reduces physical place to near-far dichotomies and territorial innovation models conflate social context and physical place. This paper introduces the concept of ‘conversations’ as social spaces of knowledge creation and develops typologies of how conversations are connected to physical places, based on the effort required to bridge distance and on the attractiveness of places for knowledge creation. Addressing the socio-spatial dynamics of knowledge creation, the paper explains how conversations may be anchored in multiple locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores tensions that emerge from the injunction to make progress in geographical knowledge production in the globalizing landscape of higher education and research. The paper identifies gaps that emerge between disciplinary geographical knowledge production and area studies knowledge production, particularly connections to non-western areas on which many geographers work. It suggests these gaps are symptomatic and productive of the discipline’s problematically constituted community: the ‘we’ of Geography’s vanguard. The paper charts the precipitation of these tensions within Geography’s disciplinary dispositif before suggesting three alternative knowledge production tactics aimed at closing any such gaps and that in turn democratically reconstitute disciplinary Geography’s ‘we’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on existing work in the discipline of human geography and cognate fields in order to develop the concept of the 'geo-constitution'. This concept aims to: (1) highlight the importance of intersections between geography and political institutions in the constitution of government; (2) consider the path-dependent development of political institutions and their impact on statecraft and citizenship; (3) explore the implications of this for political reform. The paper provides an overview of current thinking in political geography and applies the concept of the geo-constitution to the example of devolution and localism in the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews recent commentary on and interpretations of the ongoing financial 'crisis' unfolding in many western economies. It finds that a central theme of these readings is the twofold argument that modern finance is too complex, and that this complexity is responsible for the crisis. The paper, inspired both by the economist John Galbraith and by the geographer David Harvey, argues against this widespread ascription and scapegoating of complexity. It does so as part of a wider argument that progress in human geography can be fostered through demystification of modern money and finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of "Progress in Human Geography" (PiHG) journal towards progress. The author claims that PiHG sets out to offer a critical map or guide to the dynamic landscapes of knowledge in human geography. PiHG's mission remains critically important for scholarly collaboration and research and in graduate education and training. Its mission has been refined and refocused over the years as PiHG continues to help set the agenda for human geography through papers submitted, referred and published. Moreover, PiHG is concerned especially with critical accounts of emergent knowledge and reviews of developments within the subfields of human geography.

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 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]

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 argues that human geography's scale debate has arrived at somewhat of an impasse surrounding scale's relative position to ontology. Divides are most evident between those that see scales as 'already existing' and those considering this as a form of 'ontological reification' that stifles our understanding of politics. I suggest that reading the 'politics of scale' through Jacques Rancière's political thinking, and in particular his aesthetic approach to the problem of ontological reductionism, can offer one way forward. It enables geographers to take existing 'common-sense' ideas around scale seriously whilst also being sensitive to emergent politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In geography the key theoretical registers of assemblage theory and Actor Network Theory have been psychoanalytic-semiotic, materialist and vitalist (emphasising affect). In contrast, this paper indicates the original influence and continued relevance of philosophical pragmatism's action-oriented approach for assemblage and ANT. It suggests how a pragmatist understanding of human experience, situation and reason offers a different perspective on the nature of emergent and relational space in assemblages and networks. This perspective extends existing pragmatist work in geography to explore the distinctive, hyper-relational spatialities of human activity in a world of acting things, suggesting wider implications for progress in human geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harnessing the cartographic attributes of line, contour and legend, this paper generates a conceptual vocabulary attentive to the proliferation in everyday mapping. By developing theoretical work that questions the representational certitude of cartography, the paper argues that attention needs to be focused on the non-representational vectors of mapping. This is to establish the grounds for future empirical research into quotidian cartographies and their politics. Instead of categorizing these variegated, mapping practices as either ‘counter’ or ‘indigenous’ movements, the notion of ‘vernacular mapping’ is proposed as one way in which geographers might begin to encounter the vibrant micropolitics of contemporary cartography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reviews the diverse literatures on negative experiences of home at the domestic scale and sets out an agenda to further ‘critical geographies of home’. Tying into broader debates in critical geography on the delineations between the ‘mapping’ of exclusionary landscapes versus the ‘doing’ of something to transform them, the paper finds that the line between these two modes should not always be dichotomously drawn. Now is the time that the burgeoning interest in, and catalogue of research on, home is capitalized upon by pushing towards a critical geography that simultaneously illuminates and catalyses the addressing of domestic injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper engages with Hanson Thiem’s (2009) critique of geographies of education. Accepting the premise that education warrants fuller attention by geographers, the paper nonetheless argues that engaging with research on children, youth and families reshapes understanding of what has been, and might be, achieved. Foregrounding young people as the subjects rather than objects of education demands that attention be paid to their current and future life-worlds, in both inward and outward looking geographies of education. It also requires a broadening of our spatial lens, in terms of what ‘count’ as educational spaces, and the places where we study these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to elucidate the geographies of brands and branding through interpreting their geographical entanglements. Focusing upon goods and services, it argues, first, that the object of the brand and the process of branding are geographical because they are entangled in inescapable spatial associations. Second, these spatial associations matter because they are geographically differentiated and uneven. Third, geographically entangled brands and branding are closely related to spatially uneven development through the articulation and reinforcement of economic and social inequalities and unequal and competitive sociospatial relations and divisions of labour. Despite their apparent pervasiveness and significance for geographical inquiry, the geographical entanglements of brands and branding have been under-investigated in Geography and hardly recognized and poorly specified in other social science research. A critical account is provided that demonstrates the entangled geographies of brands and branding in their: (1) geographical origins, provenance and sociospatial histories; (2) spatial circuits of value and meaning and uneven development; and (3) territorial and relational spaces and places. Reading the changing forms, extent and nature of the geographical entanglements of brands and branding provides a novel but relatively overlooked window to consider and illustrate the vital spaces at the intersections of economic, social, cultural and political geographies, the tensions between relational and territorial notions of space and place and the politics and limits of brands and branding. Learning from wider social science, the paper demonstrates the importance of geography by projecting more clearly specified and sophisticated treatments of space and place into accounts of brands and branding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous and decolonising geographies should be unsettling and challenging to the ontological foundations of the geographical discipline. Yet despite many scholars recognising and arguing for the need for these perspectives, Indigeneity remains marginal and Indigenous knowledge has been denied academic legitimacy within geography. Using 'doings' as an active, emergent, and evolving praxis, this paper examines how we can do Indigenous and settler geographies better. It illustrates how knowledge, emotions, feelings and intuition only come into being through the doings of the body with other bodies, places, and objects, including non-humans. Action and thought are indistinguishable, feeling is knowing, and the world becomes known through doing and movement. In these doings, place – particularly the land and sea – is an active agent in the making of beings and knowledge. By focusing on active doings in place, and acknowledging the temporalities of Indigenous ontologies, geographers are better able to support political and everyday struggles, situate our work in relation to colonialism, recognise and value everyday practices of resurgence, and spend time building relationships. 'Doing' geography differently would decentre academics as the source of knowledge production, employ more diverse voices in our teaching and provide embodied and material resistance to colonialism and neoliberal capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]