Human Geography Research Articles

(Un)critical geographies of race: A critical race discourse analysis of an online local history resource

ABSTRACT Websites that provide accounts of local history represent powerful curricular possibilities for K-12 history teachers and those of all ages who engage with historical narratives centered on place. The extent to which, however, such resources furnish explicitly racialized interpretations of place often determines how educators and learners can use them in social studies contexts. In this critical race discourse analysis, we examined the function of race in Wacohistory.org, a local history website comprised of 200 entries. Drawing on critical geographies of race as our theoretical lens, we found that the website de-racialized Waco’s geography and ultimately overlooked how racial power has shaped the history of this city, and we consider specifically what this oversight meant for Black Wacoans. Thus, we argue that Wacohistory.org discounted how race has historically determined placed-based access and experiences for Wacoans. This study offers implications and recommendations that speak to what was lost in failing to racialize a particular online history curriculum, contributing to the literature concerned with race-evasive spatial histories that ultimately thwart meaningful local historical inquiry and the theoretical prospects that critical geographies of race offer social studies.

The Language Desert: Ecosystems of Praise and Barrenness in Saint-John Perse’s Anabase and Lorand Gaspar’s Sol absolu

Life changes that impelled Saint-John Perse and Lorand Gaspar into the desert are well known: Perse’s 1920 expedition into the Gobi Desert during his diplomatic assignment in China, and Gaspar’s residence in Jerusalem near the Judaean Desert, 1954 to 1970. More interesting is the poetic stratification that barren ecologies instill in Anabase (1924) and Sol absolu (1972). Perse’s adventurer prince encounters several climates during his inland journey yet binds particularly with the desert, which infiltrates his discourse and the texture of his self-image. Human geography becomes a means to master the habitat as a stepping-stone for personal assertion. Climate on the frontier inspires his encomiastic language of jubilation for quest and companions. Gaspar’s topography suggests a less rhetorical contact with environment, yet his desert’s materiality penetrates its inhabitants, nomads like the Beduin or the poet, who treks this desert via language. Gaspar’s poetics of barren environment is not as epic as Anabase (1924), yet the jubilation that tectonic challenge incites in his idiom is founded on interpenetration of psyche and ecosystem rather than the poetics of dominion deployed in Anabase. Omnipresent conceits of “living matter” and “material psyche” are critical to the understanding of these two desert poems.

Intellectual lessons from Dr Aleida Guevara (Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara's daughter) and a special meeting with Aleida March (Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara's wife) – Conversations on education, revolution, and socialism of care, Havana, May 2024

On 2 May 2024, a special meeting was arranged with Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara's daughter, Dr Aleida Guevara at their home in Havana which was followed at the end with a greeting from Che's wife Aleida March. The authors (migrant-settler in Canada originally from India and Cuban friend/colleague who had arranged for the visit – both Human Geographers) along with three Brazilian friends (Doctor, Dentist, and Sociologist) were invited. For more than 3 hours, an intense dialogue ensued. We recount three intellectual lessons that emerged during our discussion. Each of the topics addressed by Aleida reflected her stance as an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, anti-neocolonialist, and internationalist revolutionary. The discussions included the essential concepts in Che's Marxism, which were integral during the construction process of the Cuban Revolution. Three main themes that emerged included: Cuban Revolution and the socialism of care; challenges facing Cuban socialism today; and the continuing importance of international solidarity. The discussions were interspersed with personal stories, recounts of her father, and humorous anecdotes. Dr Aleida Guevara's tricontinental solidarity work that she shared with us and lessons learned across different historical and geographical contexts in the spirit of her father's intellectual insights towards struggles for freedom provide a theoretical foundation for us to consider today.

Public art’s counter-temporalities, the case of the Garden Library, south Tel Aviv

In research on public art, there is a tendency to link art’s transformative potentialities to its temporal dimensions, namely duration, rhythm and the type of social relations they produce. However, beyond acknowledgement of what it might do, temporality received little conceptual attention. Using The Garden Library as a case study, this article foregrounds temporality as a theoretical and methodological framework to examine public art’s performative and structural patterns. The Garden Library is a multi-lingual and cultural space for refugees and migrant workers founded by the art group Arteam in the southern neighbourhood Neve Sha’anan, Tel Aviv in 2009. This article traces the project’s changing temporalities and considers how they create an inclusive time-space that is largely unavailable for the migrant communities living in Israel. It largely draws from art history and human geography scholarship to conceptualise time and temporality in relation to space, practice, and displacement and to further deepen our understating of the unique modes of knowledge and socio-political critique public art enables. The article also brings forth the entanglement of multiple oppressed temporalities, including native Palestinians and non-Jewish refugees, and reads the Garden Library against the background of Israel’s settler-colonial and ethnocratic state. Centring temporality, therefore, has two goals. The first is to examine the usage of time, alongside space, as a control mechanism and to draw links between shared experiences of dislocation and dispossession that are often studied separately. The second is to amplify the occasional collisions and intersections of marginalised temporal landscapes, including that of the Mizrahi (Arab-Jews) working class residents of Neve Sha’anan, and the possibility of such moments to produce counter-temporalities that adjust and resist forms of spatio-temporal power.

Advancing Process-Oriented Geographical Regionalization Model

Existing regionalization methods have largely overlooked the temporal dimension, leading to outcomes that predominantly reflect spatial differentiation of regional variables only at a singular temporal instance, rather than across their entire evolutionary process. In response, this research proposes a novel model for geographic process regionalization based on spatial time-series (STS) data. This model is designed to amalgamate adjacent entities exhibiting analogous trends in regional variable fluctuations, while segregating those with disparate trajectories. The study starts by establishing methodologies for the assessment of three distinct types of STS data similarities: value-based, shape-oriented, and periodic patterns. Following this, a tailored regionalization methodology specific to STS data is delineated. This methodology facilitates a quantitative analysis of time-series variables within each geographical region, leading to the development of a process-oriented geographic boundary model (GBM). The efficacy of this model is validated through empirical testing with synthetic data sets and further elucidated via case studies focusing on the dynamics of population and pollution levels, underscoring its substantial applicability in both human and physical geography. The proposed methodology is adaptable for any time-series data that incorporate locational information for regionalization.

Producing Space(s) Through Poetry: Geofeminism in Contemporary Romanian Poetry

This paper aims to analyse recent tendencies in contemporary Romanian poetry from a geofeminist perspective. This specific form of feminism emerged within humanistic geography and socio-spatial theories as a response towards the “masculinist particularism” (Michèle Le Dœuff) of western geography as an academic discipline. By denouncing the postulated exhaustive nature of geographical knowledge, geofeminism’s programme is to rearticulate the traditional social space from the perspective of a cartography produced by flexible gender relations and performances. For its geopolitical position within the globalising phenomenon powered by uneven influences, the Romanian literary scene appears to be urging to consolidate the post-communist void regarding feminist theory through manifesto-texts and queer poetry. I rely my study specifically on poetic works from the frACTalia publishing house, due to their affirmed left-wing feminist consciousness. By following the factors involved in producing a space for the post-socialist Romanian queer experience, I undertake an analysis of the specific methods through which geofeminism is rendered in accordance with the need of a new poetic vocabulary and praxis.

Creating Thirdspace: Indigenous Learning Lab to Transform a School Discipline System

Racial disproportionality in school discipline is an enduring systemic problem. This study is based on a collaboration with 14 school stakeholders: American Indian students, parents, community members, and educators at a high school in a community-driven problem-solving process called Indigenous Learning Lab (ILL). ILL members addressed the root causes of the racialized school discipline and created a new school discipline system. Using critical geography and decolonizing methodology as the theoretical and analytical framework, this study aimed to unpack the emergence of Thirdspace—a space of resistance, possibilities, and hopes—in ILL to address enduring racial disproportionality. Members challenged race-neutrality of data sense-making, mapped out dystopia, revitalized American Indian epistemology, and mapped out a real utopian vision of schooling.

Citational politics in and through animal geographies: interrogating onto-epistemological diversity

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to geographic literature on the effects of inequity in citational practice and politics, focusing in particular on onto-epistemological diversity (or lack thereof) in animal geographies’ citational structures. Through a bibliometric analysis of journal articles in Anglophone animal geographies (as a subdiscipline of human geography), we examine the intersections between citational trends, the contours of knowledge in the field and everyday academic lives. Our goal in this paper is to highlight some of the ways in which citational inequities are fueled. Specifically, our analysis shows that within Anglophone animal geographies, citational esteem can accrue through institutional networks and shared onto-epistemologies, which often go along with ethical and political orientations that refrain from explicitly contesting the status-quo of anthropocentrism. We ground our analysis with a reflective discussion of everyday academic practice to understand the multi-scalar dynamics and implications of citational politics and prompt heightened reflexivity among geographers concerning how animal and other geographies are constructed and reproduced – and how these reproductions can be contested.

Reaching across social divides deliberately: Theoretical, political, and practical implications of intergroup contact volition for intergroup relations

AbstractThe benefits of positive intergroup contact for intergroup attitudes are well‐established. Yet individual and group self‐segregation practices demonstrate that opportunities for intergroup contact are not sufficient for contact uptake; and persistent institutionalized segregation reinforces and compounds this problem. Hence, we need to understand what drives people towards and away from intergroup contact and what consequences the capacity to deliberately engage or avoid contact has for individuals, groups, and communities. This paper formally introduces the concept of intergroup contact volition: our perceived personal control over intergroup contact engagement and avoidance. We demonstrate this concept's theoretical, political, and practical significance by highlighting its embeddedness in both old and recent literature. We document debates around volition in early intergroup contact research and note a prolonged neglect since. After discussing reasons for that neglect, we present a detailed analysis of the concept, outlining how the idea of volition itself is contested and political, as well as the ways it intersects with broader societal power and status dynamics. We then outline pathways for future research, including investigations of when taking volition away (making contact mandated) might be helpful, intersections between psychological and human geography perspectives on volition, and connections between volition and system justification. We argue that contact volition is intimately and ultimately linked to issues of social change: support of, versus resistance to, policies promoting intergroup integration. As a result, an enhanced understanding of volition is critical to developing intergroup contact research and practice into outcomes that maximize social justice.

Investigation on the coupling coordination of pseudo human settlements in the urban agglomerations in eastern China

In the information age, digital information technology has gradually become a new quality of productivity to improve international competitiveness, and the status and importance of the pseudo human settlements(PHS) constructed by digital and information has been increasing in the human settlements(HS) system. In this context, exploring the coupling coordination of the internal systems of the PHS provides a theoretical basis for promoting the comprehensive improvement of the quality of the HS in the urban agglomerations, provides a theoretical reference for rationally interpreting the new type of human-land relationship in the information age, and provide a new perspective for the study of the human settlements geography. Currently, research on PHS is in its nascent stages, therefore, we construct a theoretical framework for the coupling coordination of the “three states” of the HS, takes the internal system of PHS as the entry point, empirically analyze the spatiotemporal characteristics of the PHS coupling coordination degree within urban agglomerations in eastern China and the driving factors by using the coupling coordination degree, spatial autocorrelation, the center of gravity and the ellipse of the standard deviation, and geo-detector models. Research shows: (1) Time course: exhibits an upward “inverted L” trend. (2) Spatial pattern: exhibits a general spatial pattern of “high in the north and low in the south”. (3) Spatial correlation: shows a spatially positively correlated clustering trend. (4) Spatial evolution: demonstrates a decentralized pattern of migration from the northeast to the southwest, indicating that the coupling coordination grows faster in the southwest than in the northeast. (5) Driving factor: the development of coupling coordination degree of PHS results from multiple factors and systems. This research provides theoretical support for promoting the comprehensive improvement of the quality of PHS in the urban agglomerations in eastern China, and offers scientific reference for the construction of PHS in other regions of China.

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.

Speed as an expression and texture of space: Theory at play in a movement activity

In recent years, following new materialist, posthumanist and non-representational turns, human geography has increasingly understood the worlds it studies as vital, immediate and emergent. As part of this vision, studies have empirically animated and theoretically articulated various expressions/textures in the movement of space, including its rhythms, shapes, timings, repetitions, sensuousness and infections. Speed is one such expression/texture that has received some empirical attention but, in comparison to most others, it has not been so thoroughly theorized. In response, this article conducts a reconnaissance into speed, its intentions being to convey some foundational theoretical understandings of speed and, through empirical research, show these at play in social contexts. Specifically, naturalistic participant observations of forms of the movement activity of cycling are used to animate how (1) speed can be represented and affective as a scalar quantity, (2) all objects possess speeds and affect other speeds, (3) speeds and objects are known through relative positions and speeds, (4) speeds create rates of happening, (5) speeds occur in all expressions/textures of space and (6) the accelerating world is engaged at relational speeds. From this reconnaissance, to assist future research on speed, the article closes with some suggested avenues for further inquiry.

Defining geoeconomics amid shifts in global hegemony: Critical geographies of new international conjunctures

Recent shifts in global hegemony make the need for critical geographical accounts of geoeconomics and geopolitics that much more critical. They underline that we need to come to terms with their dialectical relationships and tensions, doing so in relation to both underlying struggles over international hegemony and uneven capitalist development as well as in relation to all sorts of complex overlying socio-cultural formations. Critical geographers can combine their diverse approaches more effectively to do this analytical work by adapting recent forms of conjunctural analysis in urban, economic and regional geography.

Towards an exclusionary social contract: Narratives of a revanchist city in (post)war Syria

ABSTRACT This article asks to what extent national narratives drive changes in social contracts on both national and local level. Societal and especially state actors can use narratives to underline or omit specific rights and duties in social contracts, or to privilege particular contracting parties. In the Syrian case, repression and foreign intervention triggered changes in the national social contract, yet the exclusionary narrative functioned as a catalyst for these changes and entrenched them on both, the national and the city level. We show that housing, land and property (HLP) policies in (post-)war Damascus have an urban scope but a national impact. Not only wartime destruction but also post-war demolition have been particularly high in selected neighbourhoods and (re-)construction favoured upscale urban mega projects. This approach to urban planning reflects an exclusionary national narrative, which stigmatizes parts of the population as ‘terrorists’ and suspects them of stirring up public disorder. In consequence, these groups are marginalized or even ‘evicted’ from the social contract. For those Syrians still covered by the social contract, the narrative seeks to offer a justification for the large-scale exclusion of fellow citizens. Our analysis is based on an extensive review of literature from human geography, with a focus on the physical and social urban fabric, and political science, on intra-societal power relations.

Ekistics in Arnold J. Toynbee Works

In the article the author examines the origin and development of the research interest of the British historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889–1975) in ekistics, the science of the formation and evolution of human settlements. It describes the circumstances of his meeting and cooperation with the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis, the originator of this science, and analyses three of Toynbee’s books written in the course of this collaboration, which have not yet attracted much scholarly attention so far. Toynbee tried to combine the view of the city offered by ekistics with his own historical ideas and his interest in human geography. The author demonstrates that for Toynbee the city is part of the general civilizing process, a general historical phenomenon – both horizontal and vertical – and it is this view of the city that is the least developed aspect of world urbanism. Toynbee makes a number of interesting observations, showing how patterns of urban life developed in antiquity, have been transmitted in time and space, appearing in different areas of the globe, and have been partially transformed under the influence of world processes, especially colonialism and globalization. The author concludes that Toynbee’s observations on the relationship between tradition, modernization, and colonization in the structure of cities, on the specificity of imperial cities, on the peculiarities of creating an urban environment in the space of the modern megacity and Ecumenopolis may have a certain potential for future urban studies.

For an Environmental Ethnography in Human and Physical Geography: Reenvisioning the Impacts and Opportunities of El Niño in Peru

In 2017 El Niño Costero devastated the northern coast of Peru. This article seeks to learn from this experience for future large central and eastern Pacific-driven El Niño events. It directs attention away from dominant disaster narratives to reflect on the opportunities that El Niño rains have generated for desert livelihoods over time. We make a call for and set out the key elements of a historical geographical ethnography approach in environmental geography, which, as well as examining climate dimensions (paleoclimatology, dendrochronological, and atmospheric changes) of El Niño, also aims to consider its impacts on the livelihoods and management strategies of desert communities over time. We take as a starting point the responses of people who themselves come directly into contact with environmental change, yet whose agency and experiences are often marginal in knowledge production about El Niño. Responding to recent calls for qualitative geography researchers to be more explicit about how data are collected and analyzed, we explain how and why it is important to compare stakeholder interviews and climate records with newspaper archives and community memories of the 1983 and 1998 El Niño events. We illustrate that for desert populations in northern Peru, El Niño can represent abundance as well as disaster and make visible their role in managing change after El Niño flooding.

Transnational corporate influence and local politics: how mining companies intervene in neighbouring communities

AbstractThis paper analyses how transnational mining companies influence decision-making processes and public policies in communities adjacent to industrial gold mines. Most social science research on mining focuses on the emergence and dynamics of social conflicts over mining and overlooks the political influence mining companies exert by implementing development programmes to gain social acceptance. This paper fills this gap and develops a refined understanding of the multiple layers of political influence of companies in mining areas. It finds that mining companies spatialise corporate interests, contribute to an informalisation of political decision-making, assume quasi-governmental functions and, in this way, intensify the privatisation of local politics. This paper draws on approaches from critical governance research, critical geography and participation theory. It analyses corporate influence by distinguishing between socio-spatial, political-institutional and political-developmental forms of influence that companies use to create social acceptance for their particular mining project. Empirically, this paper is based on a comparative case study of corporate influence in communities near industrial gold mines in the Argentine north-west and southern Patagonia. For conflict research, the article offers a novel framework for shedding light on the workings of corporate micropolitics in mining areas beyond manifest conflicts. This contribution illustrates that mining companies have the capacity to mould political institutions and public policies by implementing development programmes that are in fact designed to serve corporate purposes.

Geography Teachers’ Pedagogical Reasoning and Action While Integrating Sustainable Development into APHG Courses

The aim of this study is to explore the pedagogical reasoning and action of high school geography teachers when teaching sustainable development within the context of the Advanced Placement Human Geography classroom. Through a multiple case study approach, this research examines the instructional decisions and rationales of seven APHG teachers throughout their entire teaching activities. The findings illuminate how participating teachers make informed instructional decisions through specific teaching strategies and practices and the rationale behind their decisions, encompassing both planned pedagogical actions and responses to unexpected instructional challenges in their classrooms.

Social construction of geographicity: A vision from humanistic geography

Society is a human construct in a continuous historical process, hence, also geographical. The Social is always composed of a temporal and spatial dimension and, therefore, necessarily endowed with historicity and geographicity. According to Dardel (2022), geographicity is the existential connection of the human being with the earth, that is, the spatial experience obtained by the subjective apprehension of the objective world. This article aims to establish a revaluation of the concept of geographicity in the social sciences debate, discerning it as a social construct by considering theoretical foundations from humanistic geography, phenomenology, and the sociology of knowledge, linked as a proposal for an epistemological alternative in the field of theoretical geography itself. The concepts of space, landscape, place, perception of space, material space, conceived space, and lived space are the key concepts that interlace the dialectical relationship between the objective and subjective manifestations of reality, as a way of socially constructing geography. The result is, therefore, the evident epistemic fertility of humanistic geography, presented in this work through the theoretical review regarding a social construction of geographicity.

Research on the spatiotemporal distribution and factors influencing intangible cultural heritage in Fujian Province from a multiscale perspective

The spatiotemporal distribution of intangible cultural heritage in Fujian Province, China, and the factors that influence it were explored using multiple spatial scales. The samples include five batches of Chinese national-level and six batches of Chinese provincial-level intangible cultural heritage items, totaling 554. The samples involve city-scale, county-scale, and traditional dwellings, and the analysis uses various methods, such as gravity migration theory and the GeoDetector model. The results show that, in terms of historical timescales, the moving trajectory of the center of gravity of the intangible cultural heritage distribution in Fujian Province involves reciprocation from north to south, and the center moves south in time from the pre-Qin period to the modern period. Spatially, intangible cultural heritage in Fujian Province forms an overall aggregate pattern, among which traditional skills fall into an aggregate pattern; five categories, including traditional drama, fall into an aggregate-random pattern; and four categories, including traditional medicine, fall into a random pattern. The traditional art category and other intensive distribution areas are located in coastal areas, and the traditional dance category is scattered in northwestern Fujian Province. Experiments on the factors influencing intangible cultural heritage distribution were conducted at the city and county levels. At the city level, human geography factors, such as the resident population, urbanization rate, and gross domestic product, have a greater influence on distribution. At the county level, the influence of physical geographical factors clearly increases. The dominant factors for coastal cities are the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), average precipitation, and coastline, and that for inland cities is elevation. From the perspective of categories, the dominant factors of traditional music and Quyi are human geography factors, and those of other types of intangible cultural heritage are the synergistic effects of physical geography and human geography. The conclusions of this study are helpful for systematically protecting and developing the intangible cultural heritage industry and improving research theories and methodological systems of the spatiotemporal distribution and mechanism influencing intangible cultural heritage.