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Shane Glackin's 2019 Philosophical Quarterly article aims to (a) offer a framework for understanding the philosophical debate about the nature of disease and (b) utilise this framework to reply to several standard objections to normativist (particularly social constructivist) theories of disease. Specifically, Glackin claims his model avoids three central challenges to normativism, which we term the ‘Flippancy Problem’ (which charges that normativism implies diseases can be cured by adjusting our attitudes towards them), ‘Repugnancy Problem’ (which charges that normativism implies we must endorse repugnant historical views regarding ‘conditions’ like Drapetomania as ‘genuine diseases in their day’), and the ‘Explanatory Problem’ (which charges that normativism cannot explain why diseases warrant certain kinds of medical intervention without lapsing into vicious circularity). Although we find Glackin's framework helpful in clarifying the terrain of the debate, we argue these three challenges continue to afflict his preferred construal of the normativist/social constructivist position.

Borders are sites of epistemic struggle. Focusing on the illegal tactic of the “pushback,” which is routinely deployed by state authorities to forcefully expel asylum seekers from European Union territory without due process, this article explores the uneven politics of knowledge that helps to support or unsettle this clandestine border violence. Drawing on long-term qualitative research on the Croatia–Bosnia border, including interviews with pushback survivors and activists, as well as a database of border violence reports, we explore the competing truth claims and epistemologies that help to conceal, or counter, the pushback regime. Informed by postcolonial perspectives and contributing to political geographies of violence, we argue that “epistemic violence” (Spivak 1988) is a central feature of contemporary borders. We propose that epistemic borderwork is regularly used by state authorities to silence unwanted voices, undermine insurgent perspectives, and stifle the capacity of refugees to draw attention to their own mistreatment. In opposition to this injustice, activists are documenting, mapping, and archiving pushback survivor testimony to construct a counternarrative of refusal, which subverts the harmful knowledge claims of state authorities. In doing so, refugees and activists create epistemic friction, which helps to resist the ontological violence of borders, and “pushes back” against the pushback regime.

Waste has become a pivotal public health and environmental problem during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this interdisciplinary review, we move beyond the ‘coronalitter’ and ‘coronawaste’ discourses, which have come to dominate public imaginaries of waste, to consider less-visible dimensions of waste infrastructures and systems . We demonstrate how waste is coming to matter in new ways that offer opportunities for reconfiguring health research. By examining the literature addressing the impacts of COVID-19 on the geographies of waste, we shed light on how waste is being problematised and researched through logics of public, environmental, and occupational health. We argue that these logics structure understandings and practice, whilst drawing attention to the overlaps and limits that allow links across disciplinary silos and problem domains to be forged. Developing a multi-logics approach, the paper outlines a research agenda for approaching waste as a critical public health problem at a time of intersecting health crises.

In 2020, over 8,400 people made their way from France to the UK coast using small vessels. They did so principally in order to claim asylum in the United Kingdom (UK). Much like in other border-zones, the UK state has portrayed irregular Channel crossings as an invading threat and has deployed a militarized response. While there is burgeoning scholarship focusing on informal migrant camps in the Calais area, there has been little analysis of state responses to irregular Channel crossings. This article begins to address this gap, situating contemporary British responses to irregular Channel crossers within the context of colonial histories and maritime legacies. We focus particularly on the enduring appeal of “the offshore” as a place where undesirable racialized populations can be placed. Our aim is to offer a historicized perspective on this phenomenon which seeks to respond to calls to embed colonial histories in analyses of the present.

European refugee camps are postcolonial entities. By discussing the postcolonial nature of informal refugee camps in Europe, we highlight how race, othering, and empire continue to underpin the logics of contemporary border politics. Reflecting on research in the Calais migrant encampment, nicknamed the ‘jungle’, we suggest that the invocation of biopolitics, bare life, and citizenship - at the expense of postcolonial thinking - may inadvertently diminish the role that racism plays in constructing the camp. An excavation of the ideological and material linkages that tie colonial histories with contemporary border governance is key to understanding Europe’s shifting constellation of camps, and the racial politics that underpins them. Drawing on necropolitical theory and dovetailing with recent calls within geography to forward postcolonial approaches, we call on critical geographers and migration scholars to incorporate the legacies of imperialism in their analysis of the ongoing ‘refugee crisis’.

This paper examines how racial violence underpins the European Union’s border regime. Drawing on two case studies, in northern France and the Balkans, we explore how border violence manifests in divergent ways: from the direct physical violence which is routine in Croatia, to more subtle forms of violence evident in the governance of migrants and refugees living informally in Calais, closer to Europe’s geopolitical centre. The use of violence against people on the move sits uncomfortably with the liberal, post‐racial self‐image of the European Union. Drawing upon the work of postcolonial scholars and theories of violence, we argue that the various violent technologies used by EU states against migrants embodies the inherent logics of liberal governance, whilst also reproducing liberalism’s tendency to overlook its racial limitations. By interrogating how and why border violence manifests we draw critical attention to the racialised ideologies within which it is predicated. This paper characterises the EU border regime as a form of “liberal violence” that seeks to elide both its violent nature and its racial underpinnings.

This book examines the relationship between environmental justice and citizen science, focusing on enduring issues and new challenges in a post-truth age. Debates over science, facts, and values have always been pivotal within environmental justice struggles. For decades, environmental justice activists have campaigned against the misuses of science, while at the same time engaging in community-led citizen science. However, post-truth politics has threatened science itself. This book makes the case for the importance of science, knowledge, and data that are produced by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards. The international, interdisciplinary contributions range from grassroots environmental justice struggles in American hog country and contaminated indigenous communities, to local environmental controversies in Spain and China, to questions about “knowledge justice,” citizenship, participation, and data in citizen science surrounding toxicity. The book features inspiring studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research; different ways of sensing, witnessing, and interpreting environmental injustice; political strategies for seeking environmental justice; and ways of expanding the concepts and forms of engagement of citizen science around the world. While the book will be of critical interest to specialists in social and environmental sciences, it will also be accessible to graduate and postgraduate audiences. More broadly, the book will appeal to members of the public interested in social justice issues, as well as community members who are thinking about participating in citizen science and activism. Toxic Truths includes distinguished contributing authors in the field of environmental justice, alongside cutting-edge research from emerging scholars and community activists.

The idea that field research is an inherently “messy” process has become widely accepted by geographers in recent years. There has thus far been little acknowledgment, however, of the role that failure plays in doing human geography. In this article we push back against this, arguing that failure should be recognized as a central component of what it means to do qualitative geographical field research. This article seeks to use failure proactively and provocatively as a powerful resource to improve research practice and outcomes, reconsidering and giving voice to it as everyday, productive, and necessary to our continual development as researchers and academics. This article argues that there is much value to be found in failure if it is critically examined and shared, and—crucially—if there is a supportive space in which to exchange our experiences of failing in the field.

Although geography has long associated itself with photography, the rapid advancement of technology has created a clear divide between the visual practices regularly used in wider society and the way photography is utilized by critical geographers in their teaching. We suggest the door is ajar for new modes of (geo)photographic thinking, and one visual tool at our disposal is social media applications that allow images to be instantly shared, analysed, and discussed. This article critically reflects on the use of Instagram to enhance student participation, engagement, and learning on a geography field course in Berlin. Based on interviews with students, their field journals, and our own critical reflections, this paper looks at some advantages of using Instagram in teaching geography, but also promotes caution and presents drawbacks to relying on instant visual digital methods.

This article explores how time interacts forcefully with the experience of living within toxic spaces. Through ethnographic research and interviews with residents of a contaminated town in Louisiana, the article unpacks the uncertain temporalities of industrial pollution and potential means of resistance. Putting Mbembe's (2003) postcolonial treatise on necropolitics in conversation with Nixon's (2011) work on slow violence, the article examines the racialized, uneven, and attritional experience of petrochemical pollution in a former plantation landscape. By exploring the necropolitics of place, the article reveals how unjust exposure to toxic chemicals creates contemporary “death-worlds” that are experienced in temporally uncertain and constricting ways. The oppressive nature of uncertain temporality makes the material assemblages of petrochemical infrastructure daily environmental concerns. Yet by focusing on the lived experience of communities inhabiting this toxic geography, the article notes how witnessing gradual changes to the local environment has become a barometer for perceiving chronic pollution. The idea of “slow observation” is posited as a useful counterpoint to slow violence and the permanent wounding of toxic pollution. Slow observation is an important aspect of living with sustained environmental brutality and offers a potential means of political resistance and doing undone environmental justice.\ud \ud

Failure is a pervasive yet rarely articulated reality of being an academic. From grant rejections to fieldwork mistakes, this editorial introduces a special issue that engages with the notion of ‘failure’ within the neoliberal university. Highlighting the uncomfortable impacts of ‘failure’ across contrasting spaces and career stages, the authors explore its politics, power, and emotional resonance, as well as raising crucial questions of resistance, hope, and refusal within geography and its allied disciplines. Three key themes emerged from these 16 papers: (i) failure is embedded in the structures of the academy; (ii) failure is an inherent part of academic knowledge production; and (iii) failure is an experience that is not equally felt, but is contingent upon uneven power relations and positionalities. We situate the special issue within the context of the coronavirus pandemic and suggest that the failure of the university sector to cope with this existential threat has exposed the very worst characteristics of market-driven education. Ultimately, this special issue aims to push back against the fear and loneliness that ‘failure’ can create, in order to confront the neoliberal university. In troubling conventional models of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in academia, we conclude that refusing to accept the unrealistic expectations, impositions, and demands of the University-Industrial Complex is not a failure at all.

Accounts of environmental racism in America often begin with the emergence of the environmental justice movement in the 1980s, with the collision of hyper-modern hazards, contemporary chemicals and...

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The ongoing emergency for refugees is having profound and hidden health consequences for thousands of displaced persons who live in informal ‘makeshift’ camps across Europe. This interdisciplinary paper reports the results of the first environmental health assessment in such a location, in what was Europe’s largest informal refugee camp in 2016, in Calais, northern France. We detail the lack of facilities for sanitation, safe provision of food, water and shelter, demonstrating how conditions fall short of agreed international standards for formal refugee camps. Rather than the notion of migrants being the cause of health problems, this paper critically reveals the hidden materiality of bodily injury caused by poor health conditions, where the camp itself produces harm. Drawing upon theories of biopolitical exclusion, the paper concludes by (i) emphasising the empirical and conceptual themes that tie refugee politics and biologies together and (ii) makes a call for increased attention to makeshift camps as key sites of health exclusion in Europe and beyond.

This article investigates the memories and lived experiences of those who dwell in the deindustrial landscape of Chernobyl in north Ukraine. Taking a visual approach to an invisible issue, the article explores the use of photography as a research tool to examine the ‘hidden spaces of everyday life’ in the shadow of Chernobyl.1The article finds that many people have suffered a ‘double exposure’: once from radiation and then again from the failures of the Ukrainian state. While these communities are exposed as “bare life”2to the risk of nuclear pollution, they also contest official conceptions of radiation through local knowledge, shared memory, and informal activity. The article interrogates the complex ways people perceive, negotiate, and come to terms with the ever-present but unseen menace of radiation. Through these memories, images, and lived experiences of the marginalized, we can begin to make the invisible threat of radiation appear more tangible. Finally, the article provides a short discussion about the use of participant photography in researching the invisible.

Recent informality debates have started exploring, in addition to monetary and pure economic transactions, non-monetary ones, often embedded in long term and established social relations. In spite of this, the role informality plays in various aspects of people's lives has been studied only partly. In our work we explore the case of a retiring state that stops providing benefits and social services to a given area of a country. We concentrate our analysis on the practices and mechanisms that emerge from this de jure and de facto abandonment by both the state and the private sector. By so doing, we concentrate a large variety of transactions and actors that emerge to replace the state and shed the basis for a large and comprehensive informal welfare mechanism. The geographical area studied here is the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine. We maintain that these areas have seen the establishment and consolidation of mechanisms of social security completely independent from, but yet complementing, the state welfare provider. We will show that informality, and informal practices, are vital to survival in a marginalised and risky environment.

Since the discovery of radioactivity in 1895, ionising radiation has become an increasingly prominent part of modern life. Here, we explore the diverse modes of interaction that occur between bodies and nuclear technology and point towards the scope for further research on nuclear geographies. We bring together different strands of this nascent discipline and, by doing so, highlight how nuclear technology interacts across a spectrum of geographic scales, communities, and bodies. Although nuclear geographies can be sensational and exceptionalising, such as the experiences of nuclear accident survivors and the creation of “exclusion zones,” they can also be mundane, everyday and largely unrecognised, such as the production of nuclear energy and the life-giving nature of radioactive medicine. To frame our discussion, we take three cuts at nuclear geography, highlighting the importance of zones, bodies, and communities. By discussing this gamut of spaces and societies created through ionising radiation, we open the way for more research into the cross section of benefits, challenges, and social phenomena that arise, as we coexist with nuclear technology.

The effects of exercise on the distensibility of large and medium-sized arteries are poorly understood, but can be attributed to a combination of local vasodilator effects of exercise opposed by sympathetic vasoconstrictor tone. We sought to examine this relationship at the conduit artery level, with particular reference to the role of the sympatho-excitatory muscle metaboreflex. The effect of maintained muscle metaboreflex activation on a previously passive or exercised limb femoral artery was investigated. A total of ten healthy volunteers performed 2 min of isometric ankle plantar-flexion at 40% MVC (maximal voluntary force), in conjunction with 2 min of either non-ischaemic isometric HG (handgrip; control condition) or IHG (ischaemic HG) at 40% MVC. IHG was followed by 2 min of PECO (post-exercise circulatory occlusion) to maintain muscle metaboreflex activation. FTPWV [femoral–tibial PWV (pulse wave velocity)] was measured in the exercised or contralateral limb at baseline and immediately following calf exercise. BP (blood pressure) and HR (heart rate) were measured continuously throughout. In the HG condition, BP and HR returned promptly to baseline post-exercise, whereas exercised leg FTPWV was decreased (less stiff) by 0.6 m/s (P

The riots of 2011 have generated substantial interest, leading many media commentators, politicians, senior police officers and others to consider the causes of the surprising, and even, shocking s...

Recent debates on informal economic activities have partially switched away from a pure monetary logic towards a more complex one, embedded in long term relations and reckoning with non materialistic paradigms. The role of informality in certain aspects of people's lives has however, remained largely unexplored. This article uncovers what happens when the state retires from (providing benefits and social services to) a geographic area and what kind of mechanisms, practices and institutions are created to make up for this. We suggest that, in the face of de facto abandonment by state welfare, and the absence of a private sector alternative, a myriad of transactions and actors can make up for this by replacing these forms of welfare informally. Our case study focuses on the nuclear landscapes around the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in north–central Ukraine as we reveal the ways the excluded and abandoned, which we frame as post-nuclear “bare life” (Agamben, 1998), have created a mechanism of social security that is independent from the state and yet complements it. Informal, local and unofficial understandings of nuclear spaces are central to survival in this marginalised and risky environment.