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In recent years sexualised drug use, usually referred to as chemsex, has become the object of intense media health‐related panic and increasing academic scrutiny. Critical social scientists have challenged pathologising perspectives, analysing the socio‐cultural and political economy dimensions of chemsex. Against the silence of geographers in this emerging field, the paper develops a geographical relational analysis of chemsex, focusing on the experiences of gay men living with HIV in two Italian cities (Bologna; Milan) and Italian gay men living with HIV in three English cities (Leicester; London; Manchester). Demonstrating the constitutive role of place in the practice of chemsex, the paper frames place relationally, that is, as the encounter between here and there, the material and the virtual, imagined geographies and lived spaces. To emphasise the central role of place and geographical knowledge to understand chemsex, the paper builds on 'weak theory', as it conceives things as open, entangled, connected and in flux, while focusing on ordinary practices and heterogeneity in more‐than‐human worlds. Showing how chemsex represents an embodied, relational geographical encounter among different human and non‐human actors, places (both physical and digital), imaginations and desires, the paper highlights the role of sexual practices in the relational construction of place‐making, therefore calling for an increased engagement with sex itself within the field of geographies of sexualities. The paper introduces a relational geographical perspective to the analysis of chemsex. Demonstrating the constitutive role of place in the practice of chemsex, the paper frames place relationally, i.e. as the encounter between here and there, the material and the virtual, imagined geographies and lived spaces. The paper calls for an increased engagement with the materiality of sex within the field of geographies of sexualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the work that attentiveness can and can't do in generating more ethical relations with non‐humans. How to build better relations with non‐humans has been a central debate in geography and cognate disciplines. These concerns include ethical relations with non‐humans who both pervade and create liveable environments, such as soil biota. Scholars have specifically identified attentiveness as key in generating more‐than‐human ethics. However, how attentiveness may arise, and what work attentiveness may be able to do in generating ethical relations, has not been sufficiently explored. Additionally, soils as relational materialities remain underexplored in social sciences. In this paper, I address these two important gaps in scholarship. Investigating the rising concern with soil biota in conventional English farming, I propose the care network as a way of conceptualising and investigating the ethical potential of attentiveness. As concerns grow about soil degradation, and the dangers this is posing to food production and to human survival, land managers are attending to soil ecosystems as part of caring for their farm businesses. While this attentiveness is producing some transformative effects, its potential is limited by the configuration of the soil care network. As long as soil care is configured primarily as farmers' concern, the potential of attentiveness in generating ethical regard to the needs of soil biota will be limited. In the Conclusions, I suggest ways of expanding attentiveness to soils and of building a wider and practical relational ethic of soil care. I also argue we need more attention in geographic research to attentiveness and care as systemic, unequally distributed, and operating at multiple scales. Human life depends on the life of soil ecosystems. This paper draws attention to soils as underexplored in social sciences, and asks how we may form better ethical and practical relations with soil biota. In doing this, it shows the need for a more nuanced understanding of the work that attentiveness can do in generating more‐than‐human care ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the spaces through which legal trials take place shape attitudes towards justice. There has been a growing academic interest in the role of courts in configuring the relationships between trial participants and consequently reproducing pre‐established hierarchies of power. This paper builds on this work to consider the spatiality of trials from the perspective of a particular group of court users: defendants. Drawing on qualitative data drawn from a longitudinal study conducted in prisons in England and Wales, the paper examines how defendants perceive trial spaces, exploring in particular how such insights expand beyond the narrow focus on the courtroom to draw in experiences of transportation, holding cells, bodily restrictions, and the provision of food. In doing so, we seek to contribute to debates concerning penal consciousness, whereby the subjectivity and embodiment of individual participants illuminate differential experiences of the material and legal nature of trial processes. The paper concludes by emphasising how a focus on penal consciousness can help to address perceptions of the injustice of trial outcomes while improving the accessibility of courts. There has been a growing academic interest in the role of courts in configuring the relationships between trial participants and consequently reproducing pre‐established hierarchies of power. This paper builds on this work to consider the spatiality of trials from the perspective of a particular group of court users: defendants. Drawing on qualitative data drawn from a longitudinal study conducted in prisons in England and Wales, the paper examines how defendants perceive trial spaces, exploring in particular how such insights expand beyond the narrow focus on the courtroom to draw in experiences of transportation, holding cells, bodily restrictions, and the provision of food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rights that guarantee public passage across private land are known as rights of way. In this paper, we argue that rights of way are a literal manifestation of a politics of space. The paper's purpose is to suggest rights of way are central to issues surrounding social and spatial inequality, specifically with regards to public access to urban and rural space. They are a neglected topic in geographical research, despite their relevance to many sub‐branches, including landscape studies, urban natures, GIS, and open‐source geospatial research. Rights of way in England and Wales are currently facing their biggest legal threat to date. On 1 January 2026, unregistered rights of way are set to be extinguished. Path extinguishment threatens thousands of kilometres of footpaths, bridleways, restricted byways, and byways open to all traffic. The paper concludes by examining how geographical approaches help reveal the cultural and historical value of two at‐risk footpaths in Coventry, England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the crisis of post‐politics has sparked an authoritarian turn in spatial planning in England. The proposed reform of the English planning system in 2020 is a defining moment, marking not only the failure of consensus‐seeking politics in governing dissents but also the rising authoritarian responses to fix it. This is manifest in the intensification of state control, strengthening of executive power, and decline of democratic institutions, with a shift of emphasis from techno‐managerial to executive‐punitive practices, and from seemingly consensual to openly antagonistic approaches. This drift to authoritarianism has been justified by invoking a "state of exception," whereby the established rules and procedures are displaced by the appeal to "exceptional" circumstances, such as emergencies, national securities, and global pandemics. We draw on a case study of shale gas "fracking" in England to show how authoritarianism has crept into planning processes through changes in legislation, reconfiguration of rules, rescaling of decision‐making, and shrinking of democratic spaces. We discuss the role of a "political moment" in the politicisation of fracking, arguing that the return of the political has engendered antagonistic and exclusionary practices, rather than the agonistic pluralism that planning scholars have called for. In managing planning conflicts, consent, compromise, and co‐option are increasingly complemented or replaced by discipline, control, and explicit exclusion. Instead of denying, neutralising, or suppressing antagonism by calling for consensus, authoritarian politics exaggerates it by establishing frontiers between legitimate and non‐legitimate voices of dissents. The paper concludes by emphasising that the authoritarian turn can only offer a contingent and fleeting solution to the failure of post‐political planning to deliver neoliberal pro‐growth goals. It cannot eradicate the crisis of legitimacy in planning, nor can it foreclose the political struggle for fixing its meaning and purpose. This paper argues that the crisis of post‐politics has sparked an authoritarian turn in spatial planning in England, and that the proposed reform of the English planning system in 2020 is a defining moment that marks the failure of consensus‐seeking politics in governing dissents and the rising authoritarian responses to fix it. We draw on a case study of shale gas "fracking" in England to show how authoritarianism has crept into planning processes through changes in legislation, reconfiguration of rules, rescaling of decision making, and shrinking of democratic spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on embodied and de‐colonial approaches to geopolitics, this paper examines the relationship between forms of governance in municipal cemetery and crematorium provision and the needs of established minorities, arguing that inadequate infrastructure and services can constitute harm. Crucially, it is contended that forms of governance impact not only on the living, but also on perceptions of the wellbeing of the dead. Grounded in a study of four towns in England and Wales, the paper identifies firstly how intersectional identity fundamentally shapes people's experiences of deathscape governance; secondly, the possibilities of infrastructural benefits of inclusive services; and thirdly, the harms done by non‐inclusive forms of governance, implicit territoriality and inadequate infrastructure. This is evidenced in the negative impact of poor municipal cemetery organisation and management on specific minority groups, such as inadequate burial space, high burial costs, hindrances to timely rituals, and reduced access to services as a result of government austerity measures; as well as protracted local planning processes. The conclusion calls for a wider conceptualisation of necropolitics, based on a critical‐feminist‐decolonial geopolitics of deathscapes in multicultural societies, and offers insights for the practical governance of inclusive cemeteries and crematoria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arising from seven months of auto/ethnographic research in an English city, this paper attends to the mundane practices through which we – "the homeless" – renegotiate ourselves to become more‐than‐homeless. The "we" through which these auto/biographies are writ denotes an inflection on the spectral presence of my own experiences of homelessness, spectral because they reflect a historic occurrence brought back in the doing of this research. Affording a unique position of betweenness, this paper thus seeks to add depth and nuance to the homeless literature by emphasising the embodied performances through which we become more‐than‐homeless. To this end, this paper contributes to recent approaches in homelessness research drawing on performativity and embodiment to show how we are neither ontologically nor existentially reducible to our homelessness. Exploring the webs of relational engagements between human and non‐human others, space and subjectivity, the ongoing (re)negotiations expressed in acts of remembering, forgetting, suppressing, misremembering, and imagining, distance the moment of homelessness so that we are able to become someone other than "homeless." This distancing is not to shade the ways in which we are different. Rather, it is to reveal a dimension of possibilities, both spatial and temporal, through which we resist a subsumption into the singular mass of "the homeless," becoming instead someone more‐than‐homeless. From seven months of auto/ethnographic research in an English city, this paper attends to the mundane practices through which we – "the homeless" – renegotiate ourselves to become more‐than‐homeless. Exploring the webs of relational engagements between human and non‐human others, space and subjectivity, the ongoing (re)negotiations expressed in acts of remembering, forgetting, suppressing, misremembering, and imagining, distance the moment of homelessness so that we are able to become someone other than "homeless." To this end, this paper contributes to recent approaches in homelessness research drawing on performativity and embodiment to show how we are neither ontologically nor existentially reducible to our homelessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alongside the emergence of various populisms, Brexit and other contemporary geopolitical events have been presented as symptomatic of a generalising and intensifying sense of uncertainty in the midst of a crisis of (neo)liberalism. In this paper we describe what kind of event Brexit became in the impasse between the UK's EU referendum in 2016 and its anticipated exit from the EU in 2019. Based on 108 interviews with people in the North‐East of England, we trace how Brexit was variously enacted and felt as an end, advent, a harbinger of worse to come, non‐event, disaster, and betrayed promise. By following how these incommensurate versions of Brexit took form and co‐exist, we supplement explanatory and predictive approaches to the geographies of Brexit and exemplify an approach that traces what such geopolitical events become. Specifically, we use the concept of "modes of uncertainty" as a way of discerning patterns in how present uncertainties are lived. A "mode of uncertainty" is a shared set of practices animated by a distinctive mood through which futures are made present and felt. Rather than treat uncertainty as a static, explanatory context, we thus follow how different versions of Brexit are constituted through specific "modes of (un)certainty" – negative hope, national optimisms, apprehensive hopefulness and fantasies of action – that differentiate within a seemingly singular, shared sense of uncertainty. In this paper we describe what kind of event Brexit became in the impasse between the UK's EU referendum in 2016 and its anticipated exit in 2019. Based on 108 interviews with people in the North‐East of England, we trace how Brexit was variously enacted and felt as an end, advent, a harbinger of worse to come, non‐event, disaster, and betrayed promise. Specifically, we use the concept of "modes of uncertainty" as a way of discerning patterns in how present uncertainties are lived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the most ethnically diverse spaces in England. We define multi‐ethnic neighbourhoods as spaces where no one group is in a majority and at least five ethnic groups have representation. Around 4% of all English neighbourhoods (Lower Layer Super Output Areas) met these criteria in 2011. Often mislabelled as "segregated" spaces, the growth of ethnically diverse neighbourhoods helps benchmark increased inter‐ethnic contact, yet we know very little about their spatial extent and the dynamics of their expansion. We use Census data for 1991, 2001, and 2011 to consider how neighbourhood‐level diversity has changed during a period of substantial increase in ethnic diversity at the national scale. To what extent did these highly diverse areas grow, and what is the geography of that growth? Which types of areas did these neighbourhoods transition from? For example, were multi‐ethnic neighbourhoods formerly low or moderately diverse, and which groups dominated these locales? We also consider if multi‐ethnic neighbourhoods are here to stay, or if they are compositionally unstable. We reveal a surprising aspect in England's neighbourhood transitions: multi‐ethnic neighbourhoods are highly stable, and increasingly so. Some 88% of neighbourhoods that were multi‐ethnic in 1991 retained their high‐diversity status in 2001, while over 95% of 2001 multi‐ethnic neighbourhoods remained highly diverse by 2011. This is a different story to that of the USA, where high‐diversity neighbourhoods have received more scholarly attention, and where these neighbourhoods have high attrition rates, functioning as stepping stones to another type of space. We explore the demographic and housing dynamics associated with this stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I seek to explore the role of biodiversity offsetting in the evolution of public debates over controversial urban development projects and the way it may influence the outcome of social‐environmental conflicts. By drawing on empirical data obtained through 25 interviews with key stakeholders involved in a conflict around executive housing in North East England, 48 interviews with several stakeholders involved in offsetting across England, and an extensive document analysis, I explore the depoliticising effects of offsetting as an indicative example of actually existing neoliberal conservation. I also pay attention to the way offsetting relates to the fast policy complex to trace the links between neoliberalisation and depoliticisation particularly in the era following the 2008 financial crash. Understanding social‐environmental conflicts through the lens of the post‐political hypothesis can shed light on the way both participatory planning and neoliberal conservation, by favouring technocratic management and consensual policy‐making, attempt to remove contestation and agonistic engagement from the public terrain. On the other hand, seeing conflicts only through the post‐political hypothesis has important limits, primarily because it implies a catholic hegemony of post‐politics that can be both disorienting and paralysing. I conclude by showing through five key propositions the necessity for contextualised readings of historically and geographically specific political practices and for analysing depoliticisation by means of a theory of hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the parallel discourses of 'lost' local flood expertise and the growing use of commercial consultancies to outsource aspects of flood risk work. We critically examine the various claims and counter-claims about lost, local and external expertise in flood management, focusing on the aftermath of the 2007 floods in East Yorkshire, England. Drawing on interviews with consultants, drainage engineers and others, we caution against claims that privilege 'local' floods knowledge as 'good' and expert knowledge as somehow suspect. This paper urges carefulness in interpreting claims about local knowledge, arguing that it is important always to think instead of hybrid knowledge formations. We conclude by arguing that experiments in the co-production of flood risk knowledge need to be seen as part of a spectrum of ways for producing shared knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]