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In this editorial we ask key questions about what it means to publish ‘a journal’ in a world of publishing which is driven by individual article metrics and online access. Seeing the value of journals as venues for intellectual debate, we therefore set out a renewed vision as to how the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers can provide space for more collective and collaborative approaches to geographical debate. This approach revolves around the idea of ‘transactions’ itself and creating spaces in the journal for more commentary, debate and dialogue, alongside continuing to publish landmark papers. more...

My comment addresses a theme in several of the papers in this collection that gestures to the limits of queer theory, as a body of scholarship developed mainly from within Euro-American feminist frameworks. I will ask if perhaps groundedness in place and historical specificity might suggest registers of 'queerness' that exceed the potentials of queer theory. Particularly considering precarity - a sense of embodied vulnerability to each other - this piece will examine the potentials of frameworks that are rooted in place-based ideas about reciprocity, kinship, and intimacy as integral to understanding queer precarities. Indeed, such a view might suggest that what is 'queer' is often framed through a normatively modern and often colonial rendering of binary gender, and sexuality as fixed in sexual identity. It will ask what an archive of queer precarity might look like, and what geographies it might suggest if we decentred queer theory. Simultaneously, the essay will ask how forms of reciprocity, indebtedness, kinship, and homemaking that exceed the limits of coloniality might open up registers for queerness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

Protestant communities in South India were vocal in dissenting against colonial rule and in expressing their discomfort with the demographic politics of nationalist discourse. Within this context, this paper focuses on young Christian women in Madras, who, in the 1930s and 1940s, articulated an internationalist ethic and a geography of ecumenical belonging that drew on their positioning within internationalist humanitarian, Christian socialist and global student Christian networks. Critiquing the narrowly regional and national geographies within which minoritised communities in South Asia have tended to be studied, I argue that these young women drew on social gospel theology to imagine an expansive international geography of social action, while critiquing their positioning as 'minorities' within the emergent Indian nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

Recurring floods and erosion result in displacement, which adversely impacts women who are 'left behind' when men migrate. Policy and programme measures for disaster response and climate adaptation often perceive women as homogenous, vulnerable groups, instead of addressing underlying structural and conceptual barriers and strengthening their adaptive capacities to disasters and displacement. This article draws upon a political ecology lens to understand gendered recovery processes following disasters across four districts in Assam, northeastern India using empirical research from 2012 to 2018. The findings add nuances to the displacements of women in Assam as being 'climate-induced' by showing the different mechanisms of displacement and how it impacts particular groups of women, as well as their differential ways of coping with these changes. This article draws on sustained long-term qualitative research among rural villagers, particularly women, in Assam where migration is connected to riverbank erosion, exacerbated by the construction of a new embankment, and disrupted due to waterlogging caused by embankments and government relocation schemes in order to construct further dams/embankments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

The lives of children and young people are conditioned in important ways by the imperial and colonial intimacies that have shaped our world. Yet, we know relatively little about how they encounter and comprehend the histories, legacies, and continuities of colonisation and racial capitalism, nor how this comes to shape their political orientations and practices. This article introduces a series of five papers that examine the everyday practices, reflections, and desires of young people in different parts of the world as they seek to understand where they fit in imperial constellations that cross generations, borders, and oceans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...