Geographical Praxis Research Articles

Syncopating the Ground Rhythm: W. E. B. Du Bois and Black Geographic Futurity on New Orleans’s North Claiborne Avenue

This research reads New Orleans’s North Claiborne’s 22-block landscape through a Du Boisian cartographic analytic that traces the ground rhythms of white supremacy and the syncopating daily life of Blacks residents’ resistance to racial oppression. Drawing on Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro as well as his work of speculative fiction, The Princess Steel, and cartographic experiments for the 1900 Paris World Exposition, and through textual and visual analyses of this critical Black geography, I argue that Du Boisian spatial analytics continue to be critical to how Black futures and freedom might be imagined. This Du Boisian analytic tends to archival and canonical absences; insists on the temporal, relational, and geographical dimensions of white supremacy; challenges the flattening of racial classificatory systems and cartographic logics; and represents heterogeneity as a rich and complex genealogical intermix of resistance across time and space. By reading North Claiborne for its geographical and temporal synergies, I draw on Du Bois to empirically grapple with and represent a capacious Black geographical imaginary and grounded praxis that blurs geographical and temporal delineations, contrasts white supremacy with freedom as a geographical praxis, and transposes abstract cartographies with Black life and placemaking.

Decolonising ecological research: A generative discussion between Global North geographers and Global South field ecologists

AbstractIn this article we draw on recent debates in ecology and human geography on the project of decolonising academic practice. Our objective is to address two key questions via a generative discussion across disciplines: what can ecologists learn from ongoing debates in human geography? And how might those learnings translate back into geographical praxis? We make the central argument that vibrant debates in human geography can push ecologists to take more radical steps towards a decolonial vision that, in turn, can guide geographers to a more material decolonising praxis. We build this argument by working through various dis/connections—between ecology/human geography, theory/praxis, South/North—in the wider project of decolonising academia to provoke critical reflection around the themes of (i) language and publishing; (ii) collaboration and ‘inclusion’; and (iii) the geographies of ecological research.

Towards accountable digital geographies

The proliferation and everywhereness of digital materialities, operations, and mediations require attention to the ways that colonial knowledge assumes access to Indigenous lands. In this commentary, I consider what an agenda for accountable digital geographies might look like. With the turn to (re)imagine the futures of geographical praxis, I invite a collective inquiry on how digital practices can work toward geographies of accountability and restitution on Indigenous lands with the aim of honoring the places, spaces, and communities in which geographical knowledge emerges. I suggest that decolonial and anticolonial methods redirect digital practices toward Land Back, re-orienting geographical knowledge to the affirmation of Indigenous life.

Claiborne love song: black place-making toward a vast imaginary of freedom

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on a temporally and geographically scaled Black geographical praxis and history of place-making along New Orleans’s North Claiborne Avenue. Employing both visual and textual examinations of North Claiborne in the post-reconstruction moment, it argues for a representation and reading of Black geographical praxis, the everyday habits, spatial lives and geographical claims in and along such corridors, as a temporally scaled and capacious demand for a Black future. Analytically engaging through both text and collage, this paper argues for a new spatial analytic that can contest white supremacist spatial formations and focus on a vast imaginary of freedom.

After Wilding: exploring environmental futures through place-based, speculative documentary filmmaking

In 2021 and 2022, we engaged in a collaborative filmmaking project at Maple Farm, a rewilding site in Southeast England. The project resulted in After Wilding, a speculative documentary film that explores different perspectives on rewilding and the future of Maple Farm and natures in the United Kingdom more broadly. After Wilding envisions what it would be like to visit Maple Farm in June 2042; to do so, we used 360° imagery of the present site and computer-generated visualisations of possible future landscape features. These visualisations were underscored by three narrative vignettes reflecting on different interventions and perspectives on the site. This article describes creating After Wilding as a three-part process – attunement, perspectives and synthesis. We then reflect on the potential opportunities that digital technologies offer for collaborative speculations between researchers, artists and practitioners for geographical praxis and conservation activities.

The spatial variable: Professor Ron Johnston’s inaugural lecture (University of Sheffield, 1975)

ABSTRACT This paper presents a recently transcribed copy of Ron Johnston’s inaugural lecture that he gave in 1975 following his appointment as Professor of Geography at the University of Sheffield. Entitled ‘The Spatial Variable’, it is published for the first time, with a foreword by one of Ron’s subsequent colleagues at the University of Bristol, highlighting the lecture’s continuing relevance to contemporary geographical praxis – especially quantitative geography – as well as Ron’s own interest in studying the histories of geographical thought. The lecture is offered as an intellectual tour de force that reverberates with Ron’s deep knowledge of and passion for the discipline of geography, and is infused with a belief in its social and academic validity; a validity that the lecture showcases with a wide range of examples, many in topics that Ron would continue to study throughout his career. Underpinning the lecture is recognition of the challenges but importance of geographical explanation to understand the (re-)production of socio-spatial inequalities. The lecture richly demonstrates Ron’s fascination with ‘the spatial variable’, the study of which would be a life-long pursuit and, in his pioneering approaches to its understanding, cement Ron’s recognition as one of Geography’s most prolific and respected practitioners.

Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios: A decolonial feminist geographical methodology to conduct research with migrant women

ABSTRACT Global North migration studies have historically been marked by colonising discourses partially stemming from methodological nationalism tendencies and a limited engagement with the body. In particular, Anglophone studies on intimate partner violence against migrant women have largely reproduced problematic gendered culturalist representations, which may be symptomatic of a methodological scarcity of research with, for and/or by – rather than about migrants. Expanding on methodological attempts to counter these trends, this paper proposes a decolonial feminist geographical praxis for migration studies, which builds on existing efforts to decolonise feminist geographical methodologies. Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios is a travelling methodology to conduct decolonial feminist geographical research with migrant women. As a Brazilian woman researching Latin American women’s experiences of intimate and state violence(s) and resistance in England, I implemented this methodology in a Global North context of COVID-19 restrictions. Mobilising and adapting Cuerpo-Territorio (“Body-Territory”), as an embodied Latin American ontology and as a method, I methodologically advance critical migration studies and feminist geopolitics’ perspectives towards a decolonial direction. This approach decolonises migration research by proposing a multi-scalar methodological framework that centres on a decolonial feminist understanding of the body, as the first territory-scale of analysis and from which knowledge is critically produced.

Composing the social factory: An autonomist urban geography of Buenos Aires

Through the creation of an original theoretical framework, this paper demonstrates the value of a deeper engagement between autonomist Marxism and (urban) geography. By spatialising arguably the autonomists’ key theoretical contribution – class composition – the paper develops the ideas of technical and political spatial compositions. These dialectically intertwined concepts provide a framework with which to analyse the relationships between shifting urban spaces and struggles, and clarity is therefore added to another key autonomist concept, the evocative yet nebulous ‘social factory’. Applying these to Buenos Aires, the paper focuses on various spatial conjunctures, exploring their emergence and the immanent potentials for radical spatial politics they afford and preclude. In particular, the paper provides a detailed reading of the complex role Buenos Aires’ ‘informal’ settlements play in both perpetuating and resisting a neoliberal, financially extractive economy. The benefit of a ‘spatial composition’ framework is twofold: it provides a periodising heuristic with which to originally and usefully approach urban struggles, and, in unpacking the ‘social factory’, it can be applied widely as a form of radical geographical praxis. The paper thus makes important theoretical and empirical contributions to an exciting, emerging autonomist (urban) geography, as well as to studies of Buenos Aires.

The limits to Marx

Responding to David Harvey’s critique of my article, ‘Why a Radical Geography Must Be Anarchist’, I reiterate the importance of anarchist perspectives in contemporary politics and geographical praxis. In challenging Harvey on the limits to Marx, I urge him to think again about the hidden vanguardism, implied statism, and veiled hierarchy that continue to lurk within the Marxist project, and importantly how these specters constrain both our collective political imagination and the possibilities of radical geography. I am admittedly very critical of Harvey, but I nonetheless refuse to close the door on dialogue between the Black and Red, even in the face of ongoing Marxist ridicule of anarchist politics. Accordingly, I propose an agonistic embrace of a ‘postfraternal’ or ‘postsororal’ politics on the left, where we come to appreciate ongoing conflict as a sign of a healthy leftist milieu. In doing so, we can move beyond the misguided idea that all disagreements over strategies, tactics, and organizing methods will ever be resolved. Ultimately, what I have dubbed ‘the condition of postfraternity’ keeps us alert to the continually unfolding possibilities of a thoroughly politicized and forever protean space. By embracing this shifting horizon, not as a static limit to our politics but as a beautiful enabler of visionary possibilities, the rhizomes of emancipation grow stronger.

From heterogeneous worlds: western privilege, class and positionality in the South

The aim of this paper is to meet a repeated challenge that comes from within postcolonial writing: to turn postcolonial theory and strategies ‘inward’, and to examine our postcoloniality. Specifically I use social class to interrogate the idea of western privilege in a postcolonial context, examining whether postcolonialism can enable the politics of class to intersect with the politics of ‘Otherness’ in such a way to open up ethnography to a more ethical geographical praxis. The paper first presents a genealogy of the figure of the privileged western researcher, drawing attention to the historical contingency within subsequent issues of positionality in the South. Taking this figure, the discussion is then guided by two ‘heteros’ of postcolonial writing – heterogeneity and heterotemporality – to disrupt the assumption of historical contingency. I use my own class history as a heterotemporality to insist on a more heterogeneous conceptualisation of western postcoloniality that accounts for the varied experiences of the British working classes. The paper closes with the crucial question of what this largely theoretical work might offer the empirical business of ethnography in (especially) poor areas of the South, asking explicitly: can class, like gender and ethnicity, qualify western privilege in a way that reduces researcher–researched power imbalance? The main argument made is that geography's imperial past is an elite historiography that cannot draw the contours of western researcher relations with postcolonial ‘Others’. Consequently, I propose social class as an aspect of subjectivity that moves hyper self‐reflexivity towards a more ethical praxis across difference.

Attention and geographical praxis

Attention is, according to Bernhard Waldenfels, “like the salt in the soup, which is indispensable, but which one scarcely notices” (Waldenfels 2004, 15). This paper presents the concept of attention, as well as a critical political economy built upon it, as potentially fruitful additions to constructivist approaches in human geography. These additions are aimed at rehabilitating the recently neglected importance of direction, the directedness of human engagements. In pursuing this goal, the paper offers a clarification of the long-standing problem of the apparent persistence of stable geo-social orders despite growing recognition of the contingency of all such orders. The argument consists of a detailed explication of the concept of attention, an overview of recent discussions of the political economy of attention in neoliberal capitalism, and finally a series of suggestions as to how central aspects of constructivist human geography could be rendered more precise through an engagement with attention. Concretely, this last section addresses the social geography of everyday regionalization of Benno Werlen, studies of city marketing and capitalist landscapes, and finally, problems relating to the reflexive positioning of human geographic research.

Portugal, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Geographical study

Portugal, o Mediterrâneo e o Atlântico [Portugal, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic]:2 regardless of their branches of study, areas of expertise, or even epistemological views of the geographical praxis and theorization, very few Portuguese geographers would not claim knowledge of, and reverence for, this seminal piece and, more generally, of its author’s work. Un-arguably one of (if not) the most distinguished and recognised Portuguese Geography professors and researchers, and one of the most important european geographers of the XXth century, Orlando ribeiro (1911-1997) numbered among his many career achievements the creation of the renowned Centre for Geographical studies of the University of Lisbon and the organization of the first post-war congress of the international Geographical Union (1949), a group for which he was elected vice-president in 1952. as stated in the website dedicated to the spreading of his life and worki, “particularly important landmarks [hence definitely not falling short from those mentioned earlier] of his career are Portugal, o Mediterrâneo e o Atlântico, one of his best known works of synthesis, first published in 1945, and the creation of Finisterra in 1966, a journal that still continues as one of the major publications to divulge the Portuguese geography, at a national and international level.” Given the previously stated, the intended purpose of this text is – through the association of these two landmarks, and taking the opportunity for dissemination provided by an issue of finisterra published in english – to contribute to expand on the festivities of the centenary of his birth, which took place all around the year 2011, through the presentation and reviewing of the latest (the 8th)ii and celebratory edition of Portugal, o Mediterrâneo e o Atlântico, published in that same year. the Portugal presented in this book through the hand of this regionalist and humanistic geographer is a markedly rural one; one with a predominantly agrarian economy; one deeply marked by history, and physiographic and climatic features; one resulting from the combination of a myriad of Mediterranean and atlantic influences whose human expressions were still widely visible at the time of its original writing (1945). synthetically, the author expands

Toward an Open Sense of Place: Phenomenology, Affinity, and the Question of Being

This article contributes to ongoing efforts in human geography to theorize place as a basis for progressive politics by linking recent work in phenomenology with contemporary interpretations of affinity politics. The phenomenological insight is that existence is a foundational kind of placing through which the world presents itself and that a place-based ontology can be developed by exploring the features of situatedness. Affinity politics involves creating noncoercive, cooperative, and spontaneous relationships through direct action and mutual aid. The argument presented here is that an embodied awareness of place is a kind of affinity politics aimed at possibilities for self-determination through deep relationships with other human and nonhuman beings. This open sense of place is revealed in the existential attunement to wonder and compassion, a mode of being that derives from attending to the world in utter watchfulness, without thinking, while engaging the edges of lifeworld to reveal existence as a situated connectedness of flow, orientation, and exchange. The article concludes by discussing the implications of this argument for geographical praxis.

The communicative dimension of landscape: A theoretical and applied proposal

The fusion of knowledge, the interrelationship of disciplines and, finally, the interaction of learning fields, provides new challenges for an auto denominated global society. The contemporary value of landscape, linked to the patent commodification of culture, the commercial construction of identities, the triumph of inauthenticity, of the induced representation or the economy of symbolism, open up great prospects for studying the symbolic value of landscape. The rapprochement of geographical praxis to the study of space intangibles, linked to the discovery of emotional geographies, besides the growing interest of communicational sciences on the territorial discourse, allow us to envisage a communicative study of landscape based on a fusion of geographical and communicational knowledge. The balancing of the variables: geography, landscape, emotion and communication, enables the progress towards analysing the emotionalisation of space to discern its intangible value, which emerges from the application of different communication techniques.

La dimensión comunicativa del paisaje: Una propuesta teórica y aplicada

The fusion of knowledge, the interrelationship of disciplines and, finally, the interaction of learning fields, provide new challenges for an auto denominated global society. The contemporary value of landscape, linked to the patent commodification of culture, the commercial construction of identities, the triumph of inauthenticity, of the induced representation or the economy of symbolism, open up great prospects for studying the symbolic value of landscape. The rapprochement of geographical praxis to the study of space intangibles, linked to the discovery of emotional geographies, besides the growing interest of communication a science for the territorial discourse, allow us to envisage a communicative study of landscape based on a fusion of geography and communicational knowledge. The balancing of the variables: geography, landscape, emotion and communication, enables to progress towards analysing the emotionalisation of space to discern its intangible value, which emerges from the application of different communication techniques

Work and wonder at the weekend: on emotions in feminist geographical praxis

This article explores intersections between academic work and emotional work at a feminist geography reading weekend held by the Women and Geography Study Group of the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers in the UK in 2006. It points to the importance of the fleeting, often unreported, spaces of feminist geographical praxis and of inserting these in our disciplinary histories. Using a performative textual strategy it offers a poly-vocal reflection on the complex, challenging and productive experiences of this kind of academic workspace. In so doing it contributes to feminist engagements with the practices of neo-liberal academia, to debates about the emotional geographies of feminist geographical work, and to discussions of the value of activities outside the norms of academia in providing potentially supportive and creative spaces for geographical praxis.

Geography in Higher Education in Australia

This article discusses the current state of the geography discipline in higher education institutions in Australia. Geography in Australia is vulnerable—and perhaps more so than in many of the other countries covered in this special issue. Reasons for this are discussed. Amidst description of a series of struggles, this article also seeks to highlight some of the complexities and contradictions of the Australian situation. The importance of teasing out discipline-specific issues from wider problems of the tertiary education system is emphasized—as is a reading of geography not as a coherent ‘whole’ but as a series of variously situated ‘scenes’ or ‘neighbourhoods’ encompassing teaching and research (Mee, 2006). These sites of geographical praxis and knowledge have their own cultures, lives, struggles and opportunities. Vulnerabilities are not uniformly present, and amidst scenes of decline are experiences of survival, growth and diversity. Specific initiatives are much needed to improve the visibility of geography in Australia, and there is a lot to learn from experiences of restructuring. But prescriptive ‘solutions’ to vulnerabilities are unlikely to fit the needs of all geography units. Instead, a rhizomatous agenda of disciplinary strengthening is suggested as a means to both buttress discipline visibility and accommodate the diversity of geography's many identities.

Exclusions, Inclusions, and Occlusions in ‘Anglo-American Geography’: Reflections on Minca's “Venetian Geographical Praxis”

Exclusions, Inclusions, and Occlusions in ‘Anglo-American Geography’: Reflections on Minca's “Venetian Geographical Praxis”

Natural Theology and Neo-Lamarckism: The Changing Context of Nineteenth-century Geography in the United States and Great Britain

Abstract During the first half of the nineteenth century, natural theology provided a common integrative context for research in natural history in general and geography in particular. With the anti-teleological challenge of the Darwinian revolution, however, natural theology became progressively fragmented, Providence increasingly identified with the uniformity of nature, and the process of social legitimation transferred to the new laws of nature. The writings of many geographers in this period reflect a transitional stance between, in effect, two theodicies and demonstrate how a reconstituted natural theology continued as a major context of geographical praxis before its secularization in naturalistic interpretations of man-environment relations deterministically construed. The changing character of natural theology and its integrative role during the nineteenth century are thus important factors in any attempt to construct a contextual history of geographical thought and practice.