Geographical Imagination Research Articles

Apocalyptic nothingness: lacks, holes, and the limits of the geographical imagination

Apocalyptic nothingness: lacks, holes, and the limits of the geographical imagination

‘From the Land before Birth’: Harry Clifton’s Gone Self Storm

Harry Clifton’s family connection to Chile on his mother’s side is well known, not least through poems like ‘A Gulf Stream Ode’ from his award-winning collection Secular Eden (2007) and ‘The Rain Shadow’ and ‘Mother Tongue’ from The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass (2012). However, in Gone Self Storm (2023), Clifton searches more extensively for what he has called his ‘lost origins’. This essay seeks to interpret that ante-natal quest and elucidates Clifton’s geographical imagination in drawing together Latin America and Ireland in a ‘Gulf Stream of energy, tragic knowledge’. The elegies for his mother are read in terms of the parched emotional climate of mid-century Ireland alongside the ‘waterless deserts’ of northern Chile. The essay further explores the valedictory timbre of Clifton’s latest poems suggesting that the Keatsian motif of ‘gone self storms’ is part of Clifton’s endeavour to distil the essence of his and his contemporaries’ lives.

Beyond Long-Distance Nationalism: Khorasan and the Re-imagination of Afghanistan

Abstract This article explores the geographical imagination of diasporic activists from Afghanistan. It examines the significance of the historic-geographic region of Khorasan for their attempts to re-imagine Afghanistan and its place in the region and wider world. The article documents ethnographically the forms of intellectual exchange in which these intellectual-activists participate, and their modes of materializing the geographical imagination of Khorasan in everyday life. Rather than analyzing their geographical imagination solely through the lens of ethnicity, it treats it as reflecting the activists’ underlying yearning for sovereign agency and as an attempt to forge politically recognizable subjects capable of action.

Coloring in the world of others: color use in visual orientalism, 1890–1920

This study investigates the impact of media on color sense: our ability to see different colors and use them to interpret the world. Specifically, we examine the role of color in the cultural construction of the Orient—an ‘imagined geography’ used to justify colonial domination—in two turn-of-the-twentieth-century types of color(ed) photographs: photochromes, where a printer added color, and autochromes, where colors were captured during exposure. While most research on visual Orientalism has focused on content, we use machine learning methods to study the most important formal element of visual Orientalism: color. After using K-means clustering to extract sixteen dominant colors from each photograph in our dataset, we train three different random forest classification algorithms to make a distinction between (A) the two color media (B) photochromes of the Orient and the Occident; and (C) autochromes of the Orient and the Occident. Subsequently, we apply Shapley Additive Explanations, an explainable AI method, to interpret the output of the classifiers. This allows us to examine how specific features (colors) impacted the classifiers’ predictions. While the algorithm can easily separate photochromes from autochromes (0.95) and Oriental from Occidental photochromes (0.93), it struggles with the same task in the autochrome collection (0.68). These findings support three interconnected conclusions: (1) color sense became mediated in the late nineteenth century, (2) in photochromes, the presence and absence of specific colors was a vital aspect of visual Orientalism, (3) the autochrome, where color was derived from light, provided a more objective picture of countries in the near and middle East than the photochrome.

China, geoeconomics and the ‘new’ state capitalism

In contributing to a critical examination of geoeconomics, this article challenges the prevalent phenomenon of ‘geoeconomic othering’ ingrained within certain mainstream International Relations (IR) analyses. Focusing on the case of state capitalism in China, we argue that in typical orientalist fashion, some predominantly Anglo-American analyses tend to disproportionally emphasise China’s distinctiveness at the expense of glaring similarities with Western polities, and use this construct to normalise the neoliberal project and the geopolitical behaviours of the Global North. The task of a critical geoeconomics is to unpack these geographical imaginaries, to transcend essentialising depictions of the state and to explore the dialectic entanglements between state and corporate power.

Data Curation and Cartographic Narratives on Indigenous Circulation Networks in the Orinoco Region: Methodological Reflections on the Project Inventar Colombia

Inventar Colombia: una mirada desde el Orinoco is a digital research project that seeks to reconstruct aspects of the geographic imagination, forms of relationship with nature and its resources, of at least 15 Indigenous groups that inhabited the Orinoco region between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Responding to the limits to what we can know in the archive about the ways in which various Indigenous groups inhabited and conceived the territory, we carried out a process of curation and extraction of geospatial data in historical and archaeological sources. We identified some patterns of territorial occupation and exchange networks of the multiplicity of Indigenous communities that have inhabited the Orinoco region. From iterations for the construction of maps with QGIS and typical GIS conventions, we explored other forms of visualization and narrative construction to deploy the arguments of the research on the web. We proposed a CSM-free web interface developed with JavaScript and open-source libraries and developed a set of cartographic narratives.

Imaginary Geography of Children’s Books: Adding One More Dimension

This review paper explores the 2022 collection Storybook Worlds Made Real: Essays on the Places Inspired by Children’s Narratives, edited by Kathy Merlock Jackson and Mark I. West. The 18 chapters of the collection cover a range of theme parks and literary playgrounds related to children’s literature, spanning Europe, America, and, to a lesser extent, Asia. The chapters combine historical and theoretical approaches with detailed descriptions of the parks and engaging first-person travel narratives. Inspired by diverse book characters – from German fairy-tale gnomes through Peter Rabbit and Alice to Pippi Longstocking, Moomins, and ubiquitous Harry Potter – numerous theme parks became a fertile ground for discussing many important topics, including children’s imagination, reading encouragement, authenticity, simulation, commercialisation, Americanisation, Disneyfication, and Pottermania.

Constructing the geographical imagination: the Dickensian as a discourse

ABSTRACT Charles Dickens (1812–1870) is one of the most culturally significant writers in British history. From A Christmas Carol to Oliver Twist, his writings shape geographical imaginaries of social issues like poverty and child labour to such an extent, that the term ‘Dickensian’ has now become synonymous with poor social conditions. Despite the recent upsurge in references to Dickens and ‘Dickensian’ in the press and amongst policymakers, there has been almost no critical engagement with how the term is being used in the contemporary, how it has evolved or how it functions as a social critique. In response, this paper traces the shifting definition of ‘Dickensian’ over time and introduces the idea of the Dickensian as a discourse. It argues that as an assemblage of linguistic signs, symbols and practices, the Dickensian performs a specific reality of ‘the Victorian’ in the geographical imagination, one underscored by precarity. It is these precarious affects, this paper argues, which give the Dickensian such broad appeal in the contemporary and enable its functioning as a tool of social critique. By using discourse as a theoretical framework, this paper aims to further understandings of how literature and cultural forms more broadly, construct geographical knowledge and imaginaries.

“Borderism”: Imaginative Geographies and the Production of Modern Boundaries in Spain and Portugal, 1840–1870

This article aims to analyze the nature and main characteristics of the discourse on borderlands and border local communities during the process of delimiting the Spanish–Portuguese boundary that took place in the middle third of the nineteenth century. It examines how both local and state actors represented conflicts and violence in border areas and how these discourses played a crucial role not only in securing the involvement of central state agencies in local conflicts but also in legitimizing state intervention in border disputes. Beyond the case studied here, this research contributes to a comparative perspective across different geographical and historical contexts on how border regions and their inhabitants have been frequently represented as problematic spaces and societies. In this regard, the article provides a critical understanding of the border-delimitation process undertaken by the Spanish and Portuguese liberal states as part of a broader national and territorial building process that, among other objectives, sought to control, normalize, discipline and integrate peripheral regions and their populations. Drawing on some of the main concepts coined by Said’s Orientalism and the contributions of Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic as well, it proposes the term borderism to describe the imaginative geographies that legitimized this kind of border-delimitation processes, not only in the Iberian context but also in other similar cases.

Book Review: Geographical Imaginations: Literature and the ‘Spatial Turn’ by Indranil Acharya and Ujjwal Kumar Panda

Book Review: Geographical Imaginations: Literature and the ‘Spatial Turn’ by Indranil Acharya and Ujjwal Kumar Panda

The work of fluid metaphors in migration research: Geographical imaginations and the politics of writing

Fluid metaphors describing “floods of migrants” or an “influx of migrant workers” are often used by journalists, politicians, and scholars to describe migration processes. While scholars have critiqued these metaphors as part of popular discourse, the roles fluid metaphors play in migration scholarship itself have received less attention. Through analysis of five academic journals, this article analyzes scholarly usage of fluid metaphors in contemporary migration research. We argue that fluid metaphors foster specific geographic imaginaries, which often run counter to otherwise complex theorizations of migration and mobility. In response, we call for practices of writing that center precision and care.

Critical geographies of disaster, and the geographical imagination

This paper combines assemblage theory, feminist ethics of care and decolonial theory to build on recent work in disaster studies that seeks to address the systematic and intersectional inequalities that underlie the emergence of disaster. We argue that Western logics of “risk” do not always have traction with communities, and so researchers must “stay with the trouble” in engaging with tensions between lifeworlds. We suggest that geographical imaginaries provide a means to analyze the diverse ways of being and knowing that are involved in this process.

Holding space for strangeness: in favor of critical utopianism in urban geography

Abstract. What could urban geographers continue to learn and unlearn from critical utopianism and emancipatory futurities? This contribution seeks to recover transformative academic practices and work towards didactics of speculative estrangement. Specifically, I propose to draw on science and speculative fiction literature to support the revision of established geographical imaginations and epistemologies in a higher-education context.

The UK: international child poverty outlier

ABSTRACT The UK has not only one of the highest rates of child poverty in the rich world, but also the most rapidly rising rate in this grouping. Within the UK, a higher proportion of children are poor in the South East of England than in Scotland. The huge rise in economic inequality in the 1980s caused the UK to become an international outlier in terms of child poverty. All subsequent UK governments have maintained inequality at high levels – by choice. The results are telling: children in England are, on average, becoming shorter in height and child death rates in England are rising, almost certainly due to rising poverty and destitution. As inequality rises poverty rises, but so too does ignorance of each other. Those who study human geography in the UK, if they went to university in recent years, are the least likely graduates to have ever been poor. Child poverty remains off our mental maps and largely outside of our geographical imaginations. That has to change.

The Geographical Imagination and the Diaspora of Birds in Park Nam-soo’s Poetry

The Geographical Imagination and the Diaspora of Birds in Park Nam-soo’s Poetry

DISORIENTING EASTERN EUROPE: JUDITH HERMANN'S AFFECTIVE GEOGRAPHY

ABSTRACTThis article presents a geocritical interpretation (based on the methodological approach developed by Robert Tally) of two of Judith Hermann's short stories – ‘Diesseits der Oder’ and ‘Osten’. Written almost twenty years apart, the first of these takes place amidst the Oderbruch, whilst the second comprises Hermann's only literary text about a journey to Ukraine. Drawing on interdisciplinary spatial research, I offer a close reading of both stories as they stage, in different ways, an affective experience of East European space. Moreover, I argue that through her critical investigation of the ‘East’ as an imagined and real space, Hermann emerges as a geocritic herself. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's queer phenomenology and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's notion of latency in post‐war culture, I contend that ‘Diesseits der Oder’ and ‘Osten’ are constituted as poetic texts that foreground disorientation through the mode of latency as a crucial phenomenological device. Once brought together into their historical and geopolitical contexts and explored through the aesthetic prism of representation of the ‘East’, Hermann's short stories are seen to advance a radical critique of perceptions of Eastern Europe in the German post‐war literary and geographic imagination.

Imaginações geográficas e a descentralização da figura humana nas paisagens do cinema contemporâneo

This study seeks to acknowledge the forms of destabilization of the geographic space and the decentralization of the human figure in the landscapes of contemporary cinema. This study focuses on the films Meek’s cutoff (2010) by Kelly Reichardt, Jauja (2014) by Lisandro Alonso, and Il buco (2021) by Michelangelo Frammartino, representatives of a spatial reiteration that crosses contemporary cinema. First, we focus on the concept of “geographical imaginations” by Ângela Prysthon. Then, we address the concept of the figure by the theory of image and with how some ways to address this figuration can lead to a decentralization of the human in relation to space.

Reporting on Europe’s Migration ‘Crisis’ for BBC Radio 4: Journalists and the Geopolitics of Storytelling

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to critical and popular geopolitics by exploring the production of BBC Radio 4’s reportage on Europe’s migration ‘crisis’. It draws on original interviews conducted with journalists, producers, editors, and senior commissioners at the BBC to uncover the thought-processes and practices that lie behind its diverse coverage. The paper identifies the professional codes that govern BBC journalists and documents the strategies of storytelling journalists employ to try and secure listener engagement and spark their geographical imaginations. It highlights the power and agency of journalists to construct geopolitical scripts on migration, but also points to creative room for journalists to inflect broadcasts with personal styles of witnessing and reporting. The journalists interviewed emerge as thoughtful and self-reflexive geopolitical ‘agents’ who are aware of their representational power and recognise the tension between objective and impartial BBC reportage and critical issues of emotion, positionality, and situated knowledge. Overall, the paper answers calls for more ‘peopled’ accounts of geopolitics and highlights the importance of investigating the production and practice of journalistic storytelling.

Conjuring place: The photo-geographical imagination of Thomas Joshua Cooper

The World's Edge — The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity showcases, in exhibition and book form, the work of Thomas Joshua Cooper (b. 1946) and his project to chart photographically the edges and extremities of the Atlantic Basin. Cooper's large black-and-white prints, often abstract and tied tenuously to a specific location by words, are visually arresting and intensely geographical. This essay points to Cooper's work as an imaginative geography that inspires a deep rethinking about how we encounter land, sea, and sky; map space; contemplate emptiness; label extremity; and assign meaning to place.

Theorizing Multiple Geographies: Interrelations of Space and Multiplicity in Geographical Research

ABSTRACTStarting from the observation that the notion of “multiple geographies” has gained considerable traction in geographical research in the past years while its theoretical foundations have often remained abstract, in this paper we contribute toward elaboration of multiple geographies as a research perspective, recognizing its potential as a valuable framework for analyzing divergent spatial relations. Initially, we provide an overview of the diverse applications of multiple geographies through a review of relevant literature, focusing on papers within the realms of political geographies that mention the term in their title or abstract. Subsequently, we categorize these papers thematically, identifying three main theoretical strains: post‐colonial geographies, uneven geographical development, and feminist geographies. We then propose a theoretical scaffold for navigating the complexities of multiple geographies by engaging with broader discussions on plurality and multiplicity in relation to the aforementioned strains. Finally, we synthesize the insights garnered from this analysis, exploring the potential of a multiple geographies research perspective to contribute to a nuanced understanding of the diverse ways in which space is produced and experienced. Our contribution aims to enrich ongoing debates within human geography on how space can be redefined in more relational, decolonial, socially just, feminist, and diverse ways, opening pathways for pluralistic geographical imaginations.