Debates In Geography Research Articles

The Political Ecology of Landscape Change, Malaria, and Cumulative Vulnerability in Central Ghana’s Gold Mining Country

Following the 2008 global financial crisis, small-scale gold mining operations proliferated worldwide. Along Ghana’s Offin River, the landscape has been radically transformed by mining, including disruptions to agriculture and surface hydrology, with adverse health outcomes. Yet, health research on small-scale mining tends to focus on miners’ mercury exposure. Further, studies on the relationships between disease and landscape change typically examine disease clustering and risk factor identification, rather than complex nature–society dynamics shaping infection and uneven vulnerability. Combining ethnographic, remote sensing, and quantitative methodological approaches, we detail how the socioecological outcomes of mining—from food insecurity and water-logged pits to profound anxiety and mercury contamination—combine to increase local malaria incidence. We argue that these changes interact with existing sociostructural conditions and Plasmodium falciparum’s unique biological capacities to render women and children most vulnerable to the disease. We suggest that mental health profoundly shapes malaria incidence and, countering individualized constructions of risk, family members’ health is deeply interconnected. This article contributes to current geographic debates in several ways. First, a cumulative vulnerability approach helps scholars conceptualize how biological, psychological, structural, and social conditions interrelate to shape humans’ conjunctural vulnerabilities along axes of difference, particularly in health contexts. We also highlight the importance of materiality in mediating vulnerability and malaria dynamics. Finally, we argue for more scholarly attention to familial relationships of care and mental health, heretofore unexplored topics in political ecologies of health.

Moving beyond Marcuse: Gentrification, displacement and the violence of un-homing

Displacement has become one of the most prominent themes in contemporary geographical debates, used to describe processes of dispossession and forced eviction at a diverse range of scales. Given its frequent deployment in studies describing the consequences of gentrification, this paper seeks to better define and conceptualise displacement as a process of un-homing, noting that while gentrification can prompt processes of eviction, expulsion and exclusion operating at different scales and speeds, it always ruptures the connection between people and place. On this basis – and recognising displacement as a form of violence – this paper concludes that the diverse scales and temporalities of displacement need to be better elucidated so that their negative emotional, psychosocial and material impacts can be more fully documented, and resisted.

Benefits of voluntariness – The company image as a multidimensional motive for socially responsible engagement of enterprises in city and region

Benefits of voluntariness – The company image as a multidimensional motive for socially responsible engagement of enterprises in city and region The voluntary local and regional responsible behaviour of non-governmental actors (e.g. companies, patrons or foundations) and the impacts of their actions on society, economy and planning have been receiving growing attention in geographical debates, ranging from governmental research projects and topic-related events to scientific literature. One of the major questions becoming apparent in this debate is how to foster voluntary responsible behaviour in order to address those local and regional shortcomings, the nation state is not able to address itself. A better understanding of the underlying reasons of responsible behaviour is estimated to be of crucial importance in order to answer this question. By focusing on empirical literature dealing with the reasons of corporate citizenship activities of companies, the article reveals the aspect “improvement of the corporate image” as one of the most important levers of voluntary responsible behaviour that has not yet received much attention in geographical research. The article draws on the relevant literature of marketing and consumer behaviour in order to demonstrate the functional, intrinsic and social dimensions of the corporate image for a company’s target groups as well as the benefits for the company itself. In addition the concept of local identity and its impact on the need of local companies to be known as responsible corporate citizens is discussed.

Staging atmosphere: collective emotional labour on the film set

ABSTRACT Despite a significant multidisciplinary body of work on emotional labour, its application to geographical debates regarding space remains thin, and the role of emotional labour in the interrelations that produce space is poorly understood. In contrast, a substantial literature has developed in social and cultural geography concerned with ‘affective atmospheres’, understood as the relational and collective nature of affects. Within this literature, consideration has been given to the ways in which atmospheres might be staged to affect people’s moods for a variety of artistic and commercial reasons. Placing the concepts of emotional labour and atmosphere into dialogue, this paper offers a relational account of the film set as a space in which directors, cast and crew engage in performances of individual and collective emotional labour in order to stage particular atmospheres. Drawing on primary qualitative data, we present the on-set work of film directors as attending to three relational projects: comportment, corpsing and conflict. In so doing, this paper offers a new understanding of the staging of atmosphere through performances of collective emotional labour. Such a perspective goes beyond the material to consider the emotional qualities of space and brings agency and intentionally to the fore in accounts of atmosphere.

Beyond the European Union’s Neighbourhood: Liberation Geographies in the Mediterranean

ABSTRACT The notion of a Mediterranean Neighbourhood points to how a specific geopolitical space is scripted, imagined and then translated into practice through the European Union’s foreign policy towards this region. I contend that the Arab Spring took place within this European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) framework contesting many of its underlying principles. This wave of social upheaval across a marked EU vs. non-EU space enabled a series of geographical imaginations and spatial practices able to rethink the Mediterranean region otherwise. This paper introduces three concepts developed by Hamid Dabashi to the geographical debates rethinking Europe’s contours through a post/de-colonial analytical lens. Drawing from the spatial thinking that characterises Dabashi’s recent work, this paper contributes to the rich critical literature on the ENP’s macro-regional imaginary. Concretely, building on Dabashi’s notion of “liberation geographies”, I emphasise how recent organising as well as ongoing migratory movements in the region constitute serious geopolitical interlocutors able to produce alternative Mediterranean spaces.

Space and Time in 100 Million Words: Health and Disease in a Nineteenth-century Newspaper

The abundance of information contained in nineteenth-century texts means the traditional ‘close reading’ of Victorian culture has limitations. With the burgeoning availability of newspapers in digital format, there is a pressing need to look at how we might effectively and efficiently use these digital resources to help answer research questions and add to key historical and geographical debates. Focusing on the analysis of a large digital corpus, this paper has two key foci: (I) to apply an innovative digital methodology, that combines corpus linguistics and geospatial technologies, to a very large corpus of newspaper texts and; (II) apply said methodology to a case study assessing the presentation of health and disease in a nineteenth-century newspaper. The paper illustrates that by linking existing techniques with new and innovative approaches it is possible to temporally and spatially analyse and map themes of interest in large digital corpora on a scale not possible through more traditional close reading methods.

Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities

AbstractIn the conspicuously geographical debate between ‘North’ and ‘South’ urbanism, settler colonial cities remain displaced. They are located in the ‘North’ but embody ‘South‐like’ colonial dynamics and are hence neither colonial nor postcolonial. Heeding the call to theorize from ‘any city’, this article aims to contribute to a more systematic theorization of the urban from settler colonial cities. In it we focus on the work property does to materialize the settler colonial city and its specific relations of power. We identify three faces of property—as object, as redress and as land—and use case vignettes from Israel/Palestine and Australia to consider how each register continues to inform the functioning of settler colonial cities. We find that, through property, dispossession and settlement are continuously performed and creatively enacted. At the same time, the performance of property reaffirms the endurance of Indigenous land systems amid ongoing colonization. The article makes a contribution to contemporary debates in urban studies about the importance of surfacing the specificities of urban experiences around the world, while further unsettling the dissociative nature of urban property.

Illegal geographies and spatial planning: developing a dialogue on drugs

ABSTRACT Recent debates in this, and other, journals have focused ‘illegal geographies’, ‘geographies of the illicit’ and ‘planning and criminal powers’. This paper fuses these debates in geography and planning through an interrogation of the interface between illegal drugs and spatial planning. In unpacking and problematizing the drugs–planning nexus and developing a dialogue on drugs, it sets the context for a new research agenda concerning contemporary deliberations on the territoriality, governance and planning of the contemporary city. It is argued that such a paper is necessary as there is a noticeable absence of a debate on planning for drugs; in fact, academic and professional planners largely ignore this hugely important and challenging issue facing cities, regions and countries around the world. The paper fills this void by exposing and interrogating the links between drugs and planning, and it demonstrate that planners can, and indeed should, contribute positively towards understanding and dealing with the ‘drugs problem’. Ultimately, the aim is to stimulate a new debate on this fascinating but under-researched topic of drugs and planning. The insights from this study are relevant to an international academic audience; more professionally, the policy and practice implications are transferrable across geographical space to planners around the world.

Where horses run free? Autonomy, temporality and rewilding in the Côa Valley, Portugal

This paper builds on work about rewilding and human–animal relations by focusing inquiry on Portugal's Côa Valley, where a concentration of prehistoric rock art animal figures shares a landscape with a rewilding pilot which seeks to re‐establish a population of wild horses. In response to recent geographical debates, the paper offers a sustained, situated analysis of the temporalities of rewilding and related claims to non‐human autonomy. In the Côa Valley, ancient images of animal others are enrolled in efforts to return “wild” horses to the landscape, but conceptions of wildness and domesticity, and autonomy and temporality, remain fluid and unfixed – even as they are implicated in the production of bounded spaces and invoked in present‐day management imperatives. To conclude, we argue for an appreciation of degrees of animal autonomy in rewilding contexts, moving beyond the binaries that often seem to be the focus of rewilding debates. Understanding of these degrees of autonomy, we argue, must be grounded in histories of landscape co‐habitation and co‐production, and consider the intersection of past cultural tradition and conceptions of desired future natures.

Molar and molecular mobilities: The politics of perceptible and imperceptible movements

In this paper, I examine the processes through which movements emerge and are rendered perceptible or imperceptible, building upon the writings of geographers, mobility scholars and philosophers who have sought to overcome or efface the binary of mobility/stasis without flattening differences or overlooking questions of ‘the political’. The paper does this by distinguishing between ‘molar’ and ‘molecular’ movements, drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus to trace how perceptions of movement and stasis emerge in a world that is in process and becoming. The molar and molecular are not presented as opposed terms in binary tension, but as overlapping tendencies or ‘segmentations’. I argue that a focus on movements and political forces that are becoming-molar and becoming-molecular requires mobility scholars and political theorists to move beyond narrow definitions founded upon binaries of mobility/stasis, the political/apolitical, and micro/macro. In doing this, the paper seeks to advance debates in geography, mobility studies and contemporary philosophy on processual thinking, vibrant matter, micropolitics and the politics of affect. Drawing upon the example of the Israeli separation wall in the West Bank, I then examine how molecular movements and affects are important for understanding the multiple movements and complex materialities of seemingly static molar entities.

Reading hospitality mutually

This article addresses debates in geography regarding the nature and significance of hospitality. Despite increasingly inhospitable policy landscapes across the Global North, grassroots hospitality initiatives persist, including various global travel-based initiatives and networks. Drawing from research with these travel networks, we argue that hospitality is fundamentally based on a pervasive, mutualistic sociality in a multitude of forms. Such initiatives, and hospitality more generally, can be better understood in terms of their relationship to these wider mutualities. we therefore use Peter Kropotkin’s anarchist-geographic concept of mutual aid – in conversation with Jacques Derrida and other thinkers – to reimagine hospitality as ‘mutual hospitableness’; systemic, spatio-temporally expansive and underpinned by a conception of self that is constituted through, and gains its vitality from, intertwinement with the other.

MULHERES EM BICICLETA: MOBILIDADE URBANA E DIREITO À CIDADE

O direito à cidade tem ocupado um lugar de destaque no debate geográfico. E a mobilidade urbana apresenta-se como um importante elemento de constituição desse direito. Porém, ainda são muitos os desafios, principalmente para as mulheres. A ocupação e a apropriação do espaço urbano se estabelecem de forma distinta entre os diversos grupos sociais, portanto, é fundamental que esse debate se construa a partir da perspectiva de gênero. Dessa forma, o presente trabalho se propõe refletir sobre essa problemática, apresentando as experiências de mulheres cicloativistas como contribuição para a efetivação do direito à cidade.

Negotiating acquired spinal conditions: Recovery with/in bodily materiality and fluids

The paper explores the concept of recovery; the unexpected material changes that occur to, and within bodies following acquired spinal conditions. The phrase ‘acquired spinal conditions’ is used as a collective name for the four accounts of recovery that emerged using Participatory Action Research in the north east of England (2010-11). Using two qualitative methods, Photovoice and participatory diagramming, the empirical material examines the role of physiological changes as a way to enrich understandings of disability and the bodily experience of impairment. Three themes, bodily materiality, material objects and fluids became significant during one-to-one and small group interactions with participants. The paper is situated in wider debates in geographies of disability and impairment, focusing on the interplay between different physiological states of being and the bodily changes experienced through recovery. It argues that recovery is the process of negotiating, adapting and adjusting to changes, from the way bodily materiality shifts and fluctuates following accidents and medical interventions, settling over time as participants become aware of bodily changes, to the role of material objects and the fluids that pass back and forth changing bodily interiors. The paper closes with a call for geographies of affect to explore the individual and collective feelings associated with fluids, and the human-animal relations affecting recovery and bodily interiors.

The (un)habitual geographies of Social Anxiety Disorder

This article investigates experiences of Social Anxiety Disorder (‘social anxiety’) with reference to recent geographical debates on habit. It considers how habit simultaneously captures (un)reflective modes of being in the world and the foreboding disruptive capacity of uncertainty as people attempt to adapt to, negotiate and manage everyday life with social anxiety. Drawing on lived accounts from online questionnaires and online interviews with people diagnosed, or self-diagnosing, with social anxiety, it uncovers the relational and embodied practices—and the inherent spatialities of such practices—that enable individuals to (re)gain control of their socio-spatial surroundings. It also considers the capacity for habits to become disrupted and displaced through pervasive anxieties and persistent rumination and anticipation, situated within the context of participants' everyday lives. This analysis highlights the social, spatial and temporal dimensions of socially anxious experiences. Overall, by interpreting lived experience in this way, this article introduces a socio-spatial dynamic to otherwise extremely limited accounts of social anxiety found outside of the dominant biomedical framework.

The enclosure of “waste land”: Rethinking informality and dispossession

The paper contributes to the recent geographical debates on the connection between dispossession and informality. Existing scholarship recognises that informality is an integral part of capitalism. Arguments reinforcing the formal–informal dichotomy dominate research on processes of dispossession. Drawing on analyses of the struggle of waste recyclers in Beijing, this paper conceptualises informal activities in relation to circuits of capital. It contends that theories of dispossession need to be extended in order to analyse processes of enclosure in the informal economy. The conclusion discusses the potential of reconceptualising dispossession as a variegated process operating both outside and within the capitalist space.

When Secular Universalism Meets Pluralism: Religious Schools and the Politics of School-Based Management in Hong Kong

This article examines the politics of school-based management (SBM) in Hong Kong, with a specific focus on the conflicts between the state and three Christian churches (Catholic, Anglican, and Methodist) running state-funded religious schools. Although the state based its advocacy for SBM on neoliberally driven ideas of participation, transparency, and accountability, religious groups expressed worry about the loss of control over schools as an institution of value transmission anchored in religious beliefs. This article uses the SBM controversy as a case study to advance geographical debates on religious schools and argues that neoliberalism forms a necessary lens through which to examine the state–religion relations concerning religious schools. It offers an analytical framework that emphasizes the mutually constitutive relationship between religious schools and state building. It lends evidence to this argument by situating religious schools in the context of neoliberalization of education policies and arguing that faith-based sensibilities create new vectors of resistance to neoliberalism as a distinctive secular formation. The empirical analyses address three questions. First, we develop a detailed analysis of the discourses and rationalities upheld by the Hong Kong government and the churches. Second, we consider interactions and exchanges between the state and the churches, focusing on the assertions, negotiations, and concessions that both needed to make in a prolonged struggle over the decision-making process. Third, we reflect briefly on the aftermath of the passing of SBM to situate the churches' concerns in a broader context of neoliberal education policy.

Urban service provision: Insights from pragmatism and ethics

In their work and life, urban service providers are continually torn between policies and pressures from higher scales and the realities of the cities they inhabit. The ways in which they negotiate these tensions imply the complex adjudication of a range of normative issues, conditioned by the variety of socio-technical, political, and economic factors that are underscored in the literature. In this way, geographical debates on pragmatism and ethics have an important, yet largely overlooked, contribution to make to the study of urban services. These approaches can promote the careful consideration of how people engaged in service provision manage such complexity – including its normative dimensions – through their long-term embodied experience. Pragmatic and related ethical perspectives necessarily contextualize decision-making, taking us beyond ideology or institutional exigencies to debates about practical reason, everyday ethics and embodied practice.

Local people unprotected by protected (depopulated) natural areas: the case of Sierra Norte Guadalajara, Spain

The aim of this study is to place the current geographical debate on nature in the context of protected natural areas severely affected by depopulation processes, in which the daily lives of the inhabitants have been altered by changes in the traditional balance between human and non-human populations. A significantly humanized area within the Sierra Norte de Guadalajara National Park in central Spain is considered as an example. The qualitative methodology followed is based on documentary analysis and interviews with key inhabitants in the area, revealing narratives with a productive or consumer view of the nature. The national park appears as a container of a cultural nature, initially created by the traditional inhabitants, which generates an artificial, excessive nature and accelerates regressive sociodemographic dynamics.

Un‐earthing the Subterranean Anthropocene

In this paper, we argue that the role of the underground has been discursively absent from contemporary debates about the Anthropocene. We build on recent geographical scholarship that has challenged “surface bias” and call for geographical debate to go deeper into the third dimension; to explore the Subterranean Anthropocene; to embrace volume ontologies. We present three core arguments. (1) The Anthropocene is about our future underground, a geological epoch signifier where stratigraphic signatures will be etched in future rocks. This requires us to critically reflect on how our human identity and practice is entangled with rock stratum, both now and in the future. (2) The Anthropocene is about our subterranean past. It involves the emergence of capitalisation and industrialisation – two major driving forces of epochal change – that are predicated on new technologies that redefine the underground as an epistemological space for economic, social and political calculation. (3) We propose that the Anthropocene is about our current sub‐surface relations. That the underground matters in contemporary society as a resource, as a site of urban infrastructure, as a source of soils for agriculture and as a dump for waste, among many other uses. However, this important protagonist role in society, and hence the Anthropocene, is still somewhat obscured. There is therefore a need for new metaphorical tropes to bring the underground into contemporary environmental discourses. As such, we conclude, subterranean spaces should become more prominent epistemic, physical, technical and conceptual locations for geographical exploration and political geo‐ecological framings.

Catching the bus: A call for critical geographies of education

AbstractInformed by recent struggles over schooling, this article proceeds from the premise that education is a deeply geographic and urgently political problem increasingly engaged by a wide range of scholars and activists. We argue that the current political moment demands increasing geographic attention to the confluence of social processes that shape schooling arrangements. We contend that this attention also must address how people involved in collective action understand and enact alternatives and how these mobilizations may articulate with other social movements. Although existing geographers of education have studied schooling in relation to other processes such as gentrification and citizenship, we argue that centering schooling as an object of study can enliven important disciplinary conversations. In light of these arguments, we call on geographers to advance geographic scholarship on education by creating a cohesive critical geographies of education subfield. Drawing from intensified interest in the geographies of education, this subfield can contribute to broader geographic debates by centering schooling in theory generation, rather than only studying education as a site of test cases for existing geographic theories. Given this call, this review highlights how the existing literature on schooling signals the potential of geographic work on education and marks considerations for the development of future research.