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Research on the use(fulness) of student-led film has emphasized the benefits of combining fieldwork and the production of moving image in terms of active, deep and reflexive learning. This paper contributes to this literature by discussing how a video documentary assignment can (also) help fostering relational thinking -- a main objective of human geography education. Inspired by Doreen Massey's notion of a "global sense of place", the assignment asks students to explore, in a neighbourhood of the Dutch city of Utrecht, how external influences and relations to other places have shaped the neighbourhood's development and identity. Based on the in-depth qualitative analysis of videos, students' logbooks and personal reflections from two cohorts, we argue that a film assignment can stimulate relational thinking, but there are some important caveats. The assignment needs to be embedded into a course where relational thinking explicitly figures as an overarching perspective. Furthermore, offering students supervised autonomy and continuous feedback, and the inclusion of follow-up reflection is key to making students critically engage with their own and others' "essentialist gaze". Finally, to help students exploit the added value of film in conveying a sense of relationality, sensitization to and training on aspects of cinematography is needed.

This paper discusses efforts to re-integrate feminist classroom perspectives and pedagogies within the undergraduate geography curriculum at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. As 'feminist educators' of this recently revised programme, we identify the mounting hegemony of postfeminist and neoliberal ideologies as key contextual challenges to our endeavour, coupled with the legacy of Dutch geography as a pragmatic, applied discipline. By zooming in on and collectively reflecting on our roles and practices in the courses we coordinate and teach, we delineate three strategies worth pursuing to achieve a feminist teaching agenda under the current political-institutional climate. The proposed strategies of valuing lived experiences, embodied immersive epistemologies, and partial local knowledges, are rooted in the main concerns of feminist-inspired research and help create and cultivate situated moments of connection, reflection, and learning. While these strategies are certainly not capable of subverting neoliberal and postfeminist tendencies on their own, we contend that they can be useful building blocks for feminist inspired teaching agendas beyond our discipline as they help expose traditional power hierarchies within and outside the classroom, as well as underscore the societal relevance of feminist thinking in times of increased social polarisation and reactionary politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A magyar tértudományi diskurzusban az utóbbi másfél évtizedben élénk vita bontakozott ki azok között, akik szerint a tér a valóság eleve, az emberi értelemadástól függetlenül jelen levő része, illetve azok között, akik szerint a tér alapvetően társadalmi konstrukció, tehát mindig az ember általi jelentésképzés, az emberi praxis által befolyásolt. Jelen tanulmány célja, hogy az e két nézőpont képviselői között kialakult, látszólag megfeneklett eszmecserét továbblendítse. E célból először áttekinti, hogy a magyar írásokban gyakran előkerülő pozitivizmus, illetve posztmodern címkék hogyan vesztettek jelentőségükből a nyugati térelméleti vitákban mint az elhatárolódás eszközei, s hogyan vált ezzel párhuzamosan egyre elfogadottabbá a térelméleti pluralizmus. Másodszor, a tanulmány a divergens (különösen a realista és a nem realista) térfelfogások közötti dialógus nehézségeire fókuszál, s a diskurzus fogalma körüli félreértések példáján keresztül szemlélteti, hogy ezek hogyan küszöbölhetők ki (részben) nagyobb filozófiai tudatossággal. Számolva a térelméleti címkék tudománypolitikai jelentőségével és a filozófiai alapfeltevések közötti különbségek áthidalhatatlanságával végül úgy érvel, hogy az eddiginél gyümölcsözőbb eszmecseréhez a „sajátunktól” eltérő megközelítésekkel szembeni nagyobb nyitottságra van szükség. Ez elősegíti a mélyebb (ön)reflexiót, valamint annak felismerését, hogy az egyes megközelítések meglátásai hogyan egészíthetik ki egymást.

This paper intends to fill a gap in critical smart city scholarship regarding the Central Eastern European (CEE) context. To this end, smart city understandings and practices in Hungary's five (non-capital) major cities are examined through a discourse-analytical focus on relevant municipal planning documents, existing interventions and key actors' interpretations. The paper concludes that although smart city building in Hungary in many ways aligns with trends in the Global North and South, there are also notable differences that need to be contextualized in the country's historically shaped trajectory of urban (policy) development, especially its post-socialist institutional path-dependencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A diszkurzív megközelítés terén a kilencvenes évektől kezdve igazi „boom" figyelhető meg, nem utolsósorban a területi kérdésekkel foglalkozó szakirodalomban is. Ez a nyelvi közlést előtérbe állító nézőpont a térfogalmakat mint az emberi kommunikáció nélkülözhetetlen elemeit és termékeit fogja fel, melyek maguk is a valóságot alakítják. A szerző tárgyalja ezek jellegzetességeit, illetve bemutatja, hogyan tekinthetünk a térstruktúrák létrejöttére mint a térről való beszéd eredményére, s ez milyen kérdéseket vet fel. Mindezt, ahol lehet, a régiók, illetve azok hazai kialakulásával, kialakításával kapcsolatos példákkal teszi, mely most a térről való beszéd egyik leggyakrabban felbukkanó tárgya.

Research on the use(fulness) of student-led film has emphasized the benefits of combining fieldwork and the production of moving image in terms of active, deep and reflexive learning. This paper contributes to this literature by discussing how a video documentary assignment can (also) help fostering relational thinking – a main objective of human geography education. Inspired by Doreen Massey's notion of a "global sense of place", the assignment asks students to explore, in a neighbourhood of the Dutch city of Utrecht, how external influences and relations to other places have shaped the neighbourhood's development and identity. Based on the in-depth qualitative analysis of videos, students' logbooks and personal reflections from two cohorts, we argue that a film assignment can stimulate relational thinking, but there are some important caveats. The assignment needs to be embedded into a course where relational thinking explicitly figures as an overarching perspective. Furthermore, offering students supervised autonomy and continuous feedback, and the inclusion of follow-up reflection is key to making students critically engage with their own and others' "essentialist gaze". Finally, to help students exploit the added value of film in conveying a sense of relationality, sensitization to and training on aspects of cinematography is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently proliferating 'smart city' building efforts have lent themselves well to interpretations through the lens of the policy mobilities literature. Applying this perspective, studies have insightfully shown how policymaking centred around smart cities is at once a messy, networked process stretching across scales, while also manifesting itself in concrete practices shaped by territorial–regulatory contexts. Informed by empirical research on smart city policies in Hungary and the Netherlands, this paper argues that the policy mobilities approach tends to overemphasize the global and the local. Notwithstanding the transnational circulation of smart city ideas, the national scale continues being reproduced by these ideas as a relevant scale of urban regulation, discursive framing and strategy-making under globalization. To acknowledge this, and to move towards a more decidedly multiscalar perspective on actually existing smart urbanisms, it is suggested that we incorporate the national scale, understood as a relational set of practices and discourses, more explicitly into our analysis. Insights from the Hungarian and Dutch case studies are used to illustrate the manifold ways in which the local embedding of the globally mobile smart city concept is shaped by the national scale, as well as how the national itself is being renegotiated in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is now a wealth of literature discussing how regional development and spatial planning practices in Central Eastern Europe have been shaped through the alignment with EU policy frameworks. However, scholars have tended to study governance dynamics in terms of adaptation and learning, paying thus little attention to how spatial policy change is inherently interlinked with the political contestation of nation-state spaces. This paper proposes to address this lack by combining insights from political economic work on state spatial restructuring and discourse theory. From this perspective, the institutionalization of spatial policies is examined as a political process in which particular understandings of space become seen legitimate and stabilized depending on how well they fit existing discourses. The paper demonstrates the added value of this approach through a case study of spatial policy change in post-1990 Hungary, and argues that the approach is more generally applicable to examine shifts in spatial policies and to address concerns with the increase in uneven development at different scales. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In view of persisting and multiple ‘crises’, coming to grips with sociospatial change is one of the key tasks in geographical political economy today. However, to date, philosophical misunderstandings and the related lack of productive scholarly exchange has prevented this task from being satisfyingly addressed. In this paper I discuss the Cultural Political Economy approach and discourse theory in order to expose some key misunderstandings and to argue in favour of more philosophical awareness. By setting up a dialogue between the two approaches I aim to demonstrate the benefits of a constructive engagement between perspectives rooted in ontologically different positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

VarróK. and LagendijkA. Conceptualizing the region – in what sense relational?,Regional Studies. Recently, the question of how to conceptualize the region seems to have created a division in geographical scholarship between those propagating the primacy of a relational view, on the one hand, and those defending the relevance of a territorial view, on the other. This paper argues that two main factors have impeded a fruitful discussion, to the extent that even some points of convergence have been neglected. First, the two strands have drawn, sometimes implicitly, on incommensurable philosophical assumptions. Second, scholars in favour of a relational view have at times made statements that do not fit well (some of) their philosophical sources of inspiration. The paper suggests the task of conceptualization is readdressed by following consistently a discourse–theoretical relational ontology. 区域 相关性以及空间领域方法 VarróK. and LagendijkA. 概念化区域-就什么而言是相关的？区域研究。目前关于如何能够概念化区域这个问题在地理学研究者中出现了分歧， 一部分研究者坚持相对性视角，另一部分则坚持领域相关性观点。本文认为，有两个原因阻碍了有益的探讨，涉及到对两者的联性的忽略。首先，两种思路是建立在不同的哲学假设上的。其次，学者关注相关性观点在很多情况下其论点并未完全符合其哲学假设。本文认为，概念化这一任务需要建立在语境理论相关性存在论的基础上。 Régions Façon relationnelle et territoriale d'aborder l'espace VarróK. et LagendijkA. La conceptualisation de la région – dans quel sens est-ce relationelle?,Regional Studies. Au cours des dernières années, la conceptualisation de la région semble avoir divisé les spécialistes de la géographie entre ceux qui prônent d'un côté la primauté de l'approche relationnelle et de l'autre côté ceux qui justifient la pertinence de l'approche territoriale. Cet article affirme que deux facteurs principaux ont empêché un débat fructueux, dans la mesure où des points de vue convergents même ont été négligés. Primo, les deux fils ont quelquefois puisé, de façon implicite, dans des suppositions philosophiques incommensurables. Secundo, les spécialistes qui prônent l'approche relationnelle ont quelquefois fait des déclarations qui ne correspondent pas bien à (quelques-unes de) leurs sources d'inspiration philsophiques. Cet article laisse supposer que l'on devrait aborder à nouveau la tâche de la conceptualisation en poursuivant systématiquement une ontologie relationnelle fondée sur un discours théorique. Regionen Relationale und territoriale Betrachtung des Raums VarróK. und LagendijkA. Die Konzeptualisierung der Region – in welchem Sinne relational?,Regional Studies. In letzter Zeit hat die Frage, wie sich eine Region konzeptualisieren lässt, offenbar zu einer Spaltung der geografischen Wissenschaft geführt, wobei sich ein Lager für das Primat einer relationalen Perspektive ausspricht und das andere die Relevanz einer territorialen Perspektive verteidigt. In diesem Beitrag wird argumentiert, dass vor allem zwei Faktoren einer fruchtbaren Diskussion im Wege stehen und sogar zur Vernachlässigung einiger Konvergenzpunkte geführt haben. Zum einen haben sich beide Richtungen – manchmal implizit – auf inkommensurable philosophische Annahmen bezogen. Zum anderen haben manche Wissenschaftler, die eine relationale Perspektive verfechten, teilweise Aussagen getroffen, die nicht gut zu ihren philosophischen Inspirationsquellen (oder einigen davon) passen. Wir schlagen vor, die Aufgabe der Konzeptualisierung neu anzugehen und dabei konsequent eine diskurstheoretische relationale Ontologie zu befolgen. Regiones Enfoque relacional y territorial para el espacio VarróK. y LagendijkA. La conceptualización de la región; ¿en qué sentido relacional?,Regional Studies. Recientemente, la cuestión de cómo conceptualizar la región parece haber creado una división en la ciencia geográfica entre, por una parte, los que abogan por la primacía de una perspectiva relacional, y por otra, los que defienden la relevancia de una perspectiva territorial. En este artículo sostenemos que existen dos principales factores que han impedido un provechoso debate, de forma que incluso se han descuidado algunos puntos de convergencia. En primer lugar, los dos grupos se han basado, algunas veces implícitamente, en suposiciones filosóficas inconmensurables. En segundo lugar, los académicos a favor de una perspectiva relacional a veces han hecho declaraciones que no encajan bien (algunas) de sus fuentes filosóficas de inspiración. En este artículo sugerimos que se considere de nuevo la tarea de la conceptualización siguiendo sistemáticamente una ontología relacional de discurso teórico. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The political nature of spatial restructuring has featured prominently in recent discussions of globalization. This paper argues that we cannot understand these political processes by focusing on the interaction of institutional actors alone; we also need to consider how various spatial narratives are mobilized and interact to naturalize “given” scales and spaces. To illustrate these points, this paper first assesses the construction of a multi-level, united European Union (EU) space. It then more closely examines the narratives induced by Hungary's accession to complement institutional analyses in explaining why it was Hungarian national space—rather than the newly created regional spaces—that joined the EU in 2004. As will be shown, understandings of globalization, as part of these narratives, are indispensable to understand the re-scaling of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]