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The expedition's complicity in the imperial project of conquest, extraction and settlement has placed it as an object of critique, but largely discredited its significance as a valid research method in the critical social sciences. Yet dismissing the expedition merely as an imperial remnant risks ignoring more nuanced histories that bear no resemblance to myths of conquest and masculine heroics. Instead, this paper considers the expedition as a malleable practice that can be critically appropriated and manipulated in ways that retain and further the critique of violence and knowledge production, while also experimenting with creative alternatives to some of its conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we outline the case for feminist geolegality, a project that integrates legal geography and feminist geopolitics. The approach captures the myriad ways that law intermeshes with intimate corollaries of geopolitics and geoeconomics. It includes yet surpasses scholarship on international lawfare and military conflict to examine intimate wars that law mediates in the more mundane battlefields of everyday life. The body and home act as heuristic sites to review existing work and future trajectories of feminist geolegality. Its significance is marked further by the era of Trumpism, the gendered spatial and temporal legal implications of which are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent diagnosis of the Anthropocene represents the public death of the modern understanding of Nature removed from society. It also challenges the modern science-politics settlement, where natural science speaks for a stable, objective Nature. This paper reviews recent efforts to develop ‘multinatural’ alternatives that provide an environmentalism that need not make recourse to Nature. Focusing on biodiversity conservation, the paper draws together work in the social and natural sciences to present an interdisciplinary biogeography for conservation in the Anthropocene. This approach is developed through an engagement with the critiques of neoliberal natures offered by political ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper develops a sympathetic geographical critique of the concept of financialization which seeks to account for the growing influence of financial markets over the unfolding of economy, polity and society. Processes of financialization are claimed to be manifest at a number of scales, from higher levels of instability within the economy as a whole, through pressure exerted on corporations by capital markets, to the equity effects of the financial system on individuals and households. In seeking to explain change within contemporary society, financialization has circulated less widely than similar and related concepts such as neoliberalization. While financialization has the potential to unite researchers across cognate social science fields, thereby building critical mass and recognition within social studies of money and finance, we argue that research has been insufficiently attentive to space and place, both in terms of processes and effects. Financialization is a profoundly spatial phenomenon, representing as it does the search for a spatial-temporal fix, or quasi-resolution of the crisis tendencies of contemporary capitalism. The paper explores a number of possibly fruitful directions for work on financialization, focusing in particular on the idea of financial ecologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed the beginnings of a renaissance in the field of comparative urban studies. The paper discusses this body of work's history, drawing on contributions from across the social sciences. Following this it highlights some of the work's limits, namely its weak theorization of place, scale and causality. The paper then offers a relational comparative approach to the study of cities as a means of attending to these limits. This acknowledges both the territorial and relational geographies behind the production of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper examines the recent attempts to develop geographies of science both within, and beyond, the discipline of geography. Such efforts have been most successful in work by historical geographers and historians of geography. Investigating the 'geographical turn' evident across science studies more widely, this paper considers a broad range of engagements with spatiality by historians, sociologists, anthropologists and posthumanist practice theorists. In doing so, the paper thus argues that different geographies of science are emerging. Indeed, bringing together variegated conceptions of the spatiality of scientific activity will allow for wider audiences for geographies of science, inspire further investigation of the geographical sciences, and provide resources for debates regarding disciplinary histories and futures. [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]

How can the modalities and whereabouts of power – and specifically the spatiotemporal contingencies and reach of power relations – be more effectively studied? This paper shows how issues of validity and reflexivity restrict existing empirical work’s ability to advance understandings of power, and demonstrates how such issues can be overcome through the refined use of methods and analytical techniques that tease out the double contingencies of the social relations that underlie power. Refinements are shown to be possible by learning, in particular, from approaches to analysing power elsewhere in the social sciences, and particularly from management studies and linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Human geography is in a unique position to understand how local structural factors shape social, political, and ultimately economic outcomes. Indeed, the discipline has had much to say about the interaction between local institutions and the economy in general, and about how the broader institutions of society influence local economic development. Yet, to date, geographers have for the most part avoided debates on more generalized theories of economic growth and development. With the increasing recognition — among sociologists, political scientists and even economists — that explaining economic growth robustly requires taking into account the role of both formal society-wide institutions and local and sometimes informal institutions, geographers are in a position to make an important contribution. In order to do so, however, they will need to take greater account of the theories and developments that are taking place outside the discipline. Using the framework of community and society as complementary structural forces shaping development trajectories, this paper presents a broad overview of the principal theoretical and empirical developments in the institutionalist approaches to economic development and identifies areas in which geographical research could contribute to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reopens debates of geographic theorizations and conceptualizations of social capital. I argue that human geographers have tended to underplay the analytic value of social capital, by equating the concept with dominant policy interpretations. It is contended that geographers could more explicitly contribute to pervasive critical social science accounts. With this in mind, an embodied perspective of social capital is constructed. This synthesizes Bourdieu's capitals and performative theorizations of identity, to progress the concept of social capital in four key ways. First, this theorization more fully reconnects embodied differences to broader socioeconomic processes. Second, an exploration of how embodied social differences can emerge directly from the political-economy and/or via broader operations of power is facilitated. Third, a path is charted through the endurance of embodied inequalities and the potential for social transformation. Finally, embodied social capital can advance social science conceptualizations of the spatiality of social capital, by illuminating the importance of broader sociospatial contexts and relations to the embodiment of social capital within individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In economic geography the notion of the network has come to play a critical role in a range of debates. Yet networks are rarely construed in an explicit fashion. They are, rather, assumed as some sort of more enduring social relations. This paper seeks to foreground these implicit assumptions – and their limitations – by tracing the selective engagement of economic geography with network approaches in economic sociology. The perception of networks in economic geography is mainly informed by the network governance approach that is founded on Mark Granovetter's notion of embeddedness. By embracing the network governance approach, economic geography bypassed the older tradition of the social network approach. Economic geography thus discarded not only the concerns for network position and structure but also more calculative and strategic perceptions of networks prevailing in Ron Burt's work. Beyond these two dominant traditions, economic geography has, more recently, started to tinker with the poststructuralist metaphor of the rhizome of actor-network theory while it took no notice of Harrison White's notions of publics and polymorphous network domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we offer a discussion of the 'materiality' of the urban. This discussion is offered in the context of recent calls in various areas of the discipline for the necessity of 'rematerializing' human geography. While we agree with the spirit of these calls, if human geography (and, within that, urban geography) is going to return to the material, let alone articulate some kind of rapprochement between the 'material' and 'immaterial', it needs to be clear about the terms it is employing. Therefore, and drawing on a range of work from contemporary cultural theory, sociology, urban studies, urban history, architectural theory and urban geography, we sketch out more precisely what a 'rematerialized' urban geography might involve. Crucially, we argue that, rather than 'grounding' urban geography in more 'concrete' realities, paying increased attention to the material actually requires a more expansive engagement with the immaterial. In developing this argument we outline some important conceptual vehicles with which to work up an understanding of the material as processually emergent, before offering two pathways along which the materialities of the urban might be usefully apprehended, pathways that avoid simple oppositions between the 'material' and 'nonmaterial' while also restating the importance of understanding the complex spatialities of the urban. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is concerned with understanding the geography of intellectual creativity and change using as a case study the quantitative revolution in geography. First, I review briefly the sea change occurring over the last 40 years in understanding intellectual production, and made most forcefully in the literature in the sociology of scientific knowledge. I highlight three elements: the nature and persistence of intellectual breaks and ruptures; the embodiedness and material embeddedness of the intellectual process; and the centrality of networks and alliances. Secondly, I take each of these three components of intellectual production, and work them through different theories of place to illuminate the role of the geographical within each. In particular, I argue that the geography of intellectual rupture is clarified by using Michel Foucault's notion of heterotopia, that the place of intellectual embodiment and embeddedness is elucidated by Kevin Hetherington and John Law's work on materiality, and that spaces of network and alliance are enhanced by the recent writings on place by Nigel Thrift. Finally, using these three features I present an interpretive analysis of the place of geography's quantitative revolution drawing upon 36 oral histories I conducted with first- and second-generation pioneers of that movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geography grew rapidly within the British university system during the 1950s and 1960s. In the middle of the latter decade, however, the discipline was initially excluded from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). This essay looks at why such an ostensibly successful discipline was not incorporated in the initial plans and how a successful challenge led to its later acceptance in the SSRC. It shows that the acceptance was a consequence of individual initiative rather than representations from the discipline's learned societies, throwing further light (as discussed in the first paper in this pair) on their failure to promote the discipline during that key period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen the emergence of what might be called a 're-scaling' literature. This paper tries to combine this literature with insights from regulation theory in order to identify some of the ways in which antagonistic relationships are regulated in the after-Fordist period. It is argued that re-scaling not only affects (anti-)regulatory forces by manipulating the power distribution among different agents but also manipulates the ways in which agents perceive their own positionality. The propositions are illustrated with evidence from The Netherlands. [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.