Relational Geography Research Articles

The Palestinian-Israeli diagram: From normative and symbolic spatialities to geographies of compensations

This research challenges unilinear and disparate explanations of the Palestinian-Israeli spatial composite. We argue that traditional Westphalian spatial model and related Geographies of Adaptation predicated on mimetic structural expectations, as well as a localized response to its problems, that is, Geographies of Defiance informed by post-colonial theory, are insufficient. By introducing novel research around Geographies of Compensations, we rethink spatial relations and political organization, revealing the hidden functionalities within ostensibly dysfunctional spaces. Utilizing Deleuze and Guattari’s diagrammatics, we avoid perspectivist normativity and symbolism, which have obfuscated much of the existing analyses. Through spatial analysis grounded in human geography, we re-examine three critical sites: Palestinian refugee camps, Palestinian embassies, and Israeli settlements. Our study demonstrates that while the Westphalian structure dominates, it is far from operating according to normative isomorphism and has in fact been a part of a wider assembled spatial composite. We show how non-Westphalian actors—both Palestinian and Israeli—effectively penetrate and operate within this structure, showcasing its elasticity. Although our primary contribution is theoretical, exemplifying transferrable research on trans-structural spatial circulations, our research carries notable empirical implications. The article utilizes recent interviews conducted by the authors with experts, diplomats, journalists, humanitarian workers, and representatives of UNRWA.

The Place of World Economy Research in the Heterodox Analytics of Eurasian Integration

Aim. The article shows the increased productivity of heterodox approaches in the part of economics that studies the problems of the world economy, including regional integration.Methods. Illustrations of the apparent paradoxicity (for representatives of the economic mainstream) of geopolitical and world economic dynamics after 2022 are used to explain the importance of analyzing economic processes in the world economy, taking into account approaches of related social disciplines. The connection of some important scientific results of Russian scholars in the field of economics with the achievements of historians, orientalists and cultural scientists, representatives of economic and political geography and studies of international relations is shown.Results. The article describes the boundaries of the mathematization of the considered segment of heterodox analysis related to the unreliability of world economic statistics, with examples of the successful application of approximate (in a broad sense relative to mathematical terminology) calculations to assess shifts in foreign trade and foreign direct investment in contemporary Russia. The author demonstrates that the heterodox approach reveals the absence of contradiction between Russia’s intensification of Eurasian economic integration (including within the narrow limits of the EAEU) and our country’s efforts to build a more equitable polycentric world order, including strengthening the BRICS format. Greater interdisciplinary transparency for heterodox economists against the background of representatives of the mainstream, among other things, makes it possible to intensify fruitful cooperation between scientists and practical analysts representing analytical centers — think tanks of the post-Soviet space and neighboring countries in the interests of developing integration projects.Conclusions. The proposed methodological framework can enhance the effectiveness of the work of the analytical community of Russia and its friendly countries in obtaining new applied conclusions in the economic sphere, especially in terms of enhancing the effectiveness of integration efforts in Greater Eurasia. At the same time, heterodox economists are more receptive to cooperation with historians, political scientists and other analysts who have focused on Eurasian economic integration.

From News Rooms to Press Releases- Redefining Public Relations as the New Journalism

This paper attempts to look at the changing geography of public relations as it's fleetly transubstantiating to perform with old journalism. It critically assesses how PR has come a major player in public converse and how these have made their way into the mainstream media stories and eventually public opinion. The paper shall take a critical look at the strategy the PR companies employ to produce popular and harmonious press releases and pitches with intelligencers and the followership, in areas similar as liar, media relations, extremity operation, and the objectification of new media, social media engagement. It also arises the ethical considerations and problems that PR professionals must have, including not getting prejudiced and transparent while representing the interest of their guests. This demonstrates how public opinion can be manipulated and used through the help of PR and the need to uphold the loftiest integrity norms within those professionals working in the field. This study is understood by the literacy areas into the farther direction of communication and PR manipulation, as well as its eventuality.

Despotic dominion and union organizing: Law, property, and the historical geography of class struggle in California agribusiness

Despotic dominion and union organizing: Law, property, and the historical geography of class struggle in California agribusiness

The current state of foreign trade relations of the Republic of Azerbaijan

Nowadays, various trade operations are carried out in the international economic relations and economic relations between the world’s countries. Trade is one of the leading sectors of the world economy. Trade plays a vital role in shaping the world economy, increasing its efficiency based on historical stages of development, and regulating international relations. Specialisation, globalisation, and integration principles are taken as a basis in this case. Trade efficiency is achieved through a pricing policy that optimises international trade. It is also based on supply and demand. From this point of view, the article extensively studies the foreign trade relations of the Republic of Azerbaijan, along with its positive trends, and explores the areas hindering its development. Thus, the geography of foreign trade relations of the Republic of Azerbaijan has significantly expanded in recent years, has become a member of international trade organisations, and has achieved positive trends in trade. The Republic of Azerbaijan has established foreign economic and trade relations with several countries worldwide and constantly develops these relations.

Relational geographies of urban unsustainability: The entanglement of California’s housing crisis with WUI growth and climate change

One of California’s most pressing social and environmental challenges is the rapid expansion of the wildlands–urban interface (WUI). Multiple issues associated with WUI growth compared to more dense and compact urban form are of concern—including greatly increased fire risk, greenhouse gas emissions, and fragmentation of habitat. However, little is understood about the factors driving this growth in the first place and, specifically, its relationship to urban–regional housing dynamics. This paper connects work in urban social science, urban and regional planning, and natural sciences to highlight the potential role of housing crises in driving displacement from the urban core to relatively more affordable exurbs, and with this, WUI growth. We analyze this relationship in California, which leads the nation in lack of affordable housing, scale of WUI growth, and many associated WUI hazards, including wildfire. We offer three related arguments: first, that California’s affordable housing crisis, with its effect of driving migration to exurban areas, should be recognized as a significant urban form-related sustainability challenge; second, that to understand this challenge scholars must expand the spatial scale and analytic toolkit of both urban and WUI analysis through relational, mixed methods research; and third, that political and programmatic efforts to address California’s housing crisis should undergird efforts to address WUI growth and climate change. Ultimately, we argue that expanding access to affordable urban housing can produce a more sustainable and just urban form that mitigates WUI-related climate and environmental impacts and reduces the vulnerability of growing numbers of WUI residents living in harm’s way.

Understanding pre-service geography teachers’ conceptions of nature using photovoice

This study explored how pre-service geography teachers conceptualize “nature” using photovoice. The researcher analyzed the participants’ data to extract six themes: primary nature, secondary nature, nature as the law of things, nature as a relational geography, nature as a threatened place, and nature as a necessity for human well-being. The participants said that their conceptualizations of nature helped confirm their experiences and the level of their conceptualization of nature acquired through school education. This study has also helped the instructor understand students’ levels of conceptualization of nature and is significant as a guide to planning and practicing follow-up classes.

All the city’s a stage: Greenpeace, #VWDarkside, and the popular appeals of urban climate activism

Through the lens of Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad, this study examines the role of the city as a consequential forum for environmental activists—providing efficient and dynamic platforms of expression and contestation and opportunities for public communication outreach. Building on the view of urbanist Jane Jacobs that cities only reach their democratic potential when they are inclusive, responsive, and created by all, the metropolis is explored in terms of both its viability and untapped potential for activist communicators. This study also builds upon previous research asserting the city as both a site of continuous transformation and communication conduit for social change. In this context, cities provide a key platform for public communication practitioners and audiences, as well as for exploring environmental advocacy as a socio-cultural practice. Such a platform also aligns with the argument for the role of public relations as a vehicle for relationship cultivation, organizational participation in public life, and democratic dialogue. This study ultimately establishes a popular environmental dramatism that forges the geography of public relations to material and symbolic ecological change.

In a positive light? experiencing Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and the promise of biosolidarity

ABSTRACT This paper explores Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) as an idiopathic and idiographic phenomenon in a discussion about (low) light and social relations. Tracing a history of unsuccessful biosociality around SAD via archived and contemporary testimony, the paper uses narrative responses from a recent qualitative survey to explore how and why winter depression might be a difficult experience around which to form community. With brief reflections on a series of public workshops led by the research team in Scotland, we suggest that social and cultural geographies of creative practice are one vehicle for fostering new kinds of environmental biosolidarities, arguably rendered essential in the face of uncertain climatic futures that threaten increasingly disruptive light-mental health relations. More broadly, we discuss our contributions to human geographies of light-dark relations, SAD and biosociality. We conclude the paper with a call for more nuanced account of social, cultural, and emotional geographies of environmental illness.

Towards carceral protectionist territories: Relational geographies of anti-trafficking confinement in Nepal

The article draws on labour and migration bans in Nepal as a case study to advance nascent, yet growing attention towards trafficking borders in critical geographical research on anti-trafficking. It does so by highlighting a relational geography of carceral protectionist spaces which are encountered, navigated, and sometimes escaped by women citizens on the move who are pre-emptively rescued/‘saved’ from the possibility of being ‘trafficked.’ Specifically, we aim to extend these critical interventions on carceral protectionism in two interconnected ways. First, whilst extant research mainly focuses on institutions and actors within migrant destination states, we examine the operations of carceral protectionist spaces within the home countries of migrant women. Second, we tease out the ways carceral protectionist spaces can actively produce the very subjects they seek to deter or eradicate as they navigate and challenge these institutional spaces. Through the discussion, we develop threads of the conceptualisation of a carceral protectionist territory to indicate the multiple and diffuse, yet interconnected, sites through which women’s mobility aspirations are constrained by anti-trafficking infrastructures.

Editors, Journals, and the Relational Geographies of Geographic Knowledge Production

Important in the dissemination of knowledge are the networks of editors and their editorial board members. These are crucial gatekeepers in maintaining contacts with their professional fields as well as identifying others to evaluate manuscripts submitted for possible publication. We examine the countries of editorial board members of twenty-nine major Anglophone journals and the regional sources of manuscripts and reviewers. The data reveal some journals have large numbers of board members and many submissions and others have much smaller numbers of both. North America (United States and Canada), Western Europe, and China were the major sources of English-language manuscripts submitted from 2017 to 2021. These results are useful for junior and senior scholars who seek to publish in major geographic journals.

“Too hot to handle”: Making lost and stolen pets present in virtual space

“Too hot to handle”: Making lost and stolen pets present in virtual space

Everyday Experiences of In-Work Poverty and Policy Responses in the Assemblage of Situations of Precarity in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract: Lived experiences of in-work poverty remain under-researched in countries such as Aotearoa New Zealand NZ. Community-orientated psychologists often argue that people experiencing such complex issues develop considerable expertise that is invaluable in efforts to reimagine effective responses. The core aim of this article is to explore participant experiences of government efforts to alleviate the negative impacts of in-work poverty on socioeconomically marginalized groups, including the emergent Māori precariat class. From the perspective of assemblage theory, this article documents how government efforts to support low-income households become territorialized within a dynamic geography of relations as experienced by 10 precariat households (9 Māori, one Cook Island Māori). The analysis is based on four interviews per household, with a total of 40 interviews across the 10 households. These interviews encompassed photo-elicitation and mapping exercises and document householder experiences of policy initiatives, including annual minimum wage rises, the introduction of healthy homes standards, and related government support initiatives. What emerges from participant accounts is considerable disappointment regarding government efforts to render assistance that do not address dysfunctional and extractive relationships between precariat households and more affluent groups, such as private landlords. Evident from the analysis is how current policies do not adequately address the relational nature of poverty and how many policies combine in the everyday lives of the precariat to cancel out potentially positive impacts on poverty reduction. We offer a series of recommendations for how participant concerns might be addressed.

A New Geography of Theological Education and the Ethics of Community-Centered Learning

Institutions and scholars working in the area of community-based education are keenly attuned to the ethics of engaging those communities and their members. The concern is that the local community not be exploited but be treated with respect and understood as a mutual partner in the program. Yet continually, as we argue in this essay, such programs tend to repeat the very instrumentalization they are hoping to avoid because their design focuses more on student-centered experiences of individual growth and enrichment constructed upon a relational geography that privileges the ends of the learning institution. Such a dynamic shapes community-based theological education too, the institutional location we focus on in this essay. Hence, we propose that our institutions of learning need to be (re)located within local communities if we are going to shift this structural dynamic. To develop more just and transformative learning institutions, we argue, requires a new geography of education by developing community-centered modes of knowledge production through action-research practices that foster collaboration, solidarity, and collective action to forge a shared ethic. Moving in this direction will require a new geography of education for community-based learning. As an example, we offer a sketch from our own work at The Black Mountain School of Theology & Community.

Modernity's Antillean ecologies: Dispossession, disasters, justice, and repair across the Caribbean archipelago

The Caribbean region has been (re)shaped by colonial transformations of Amerindian ecologies, enslavement of Africans, and Indenture of Asians on plantations designed for European profit. Yet longstanding practices of resistance to human­–environmental domination and ecocidal violence have enabled Caribbean people to (re)create and sustain affirmative socio-ecologies. This report reflects on four axes characterizing the contestations over Caribbean environmental geographies: resistance to extractivism and dispossession, denaturalization of disaster, theorizing global ecological justice, and pursuit of repair. The article suggests how Caribbean environmental philosophy and ecocriticism offer analytics for mapping relational geographies beyond Western epistemes of progress and spatial imaginaries that peripheralize the region.

‘Executive robbery’: UK public law, race, and ‘regimes of dispossession’ in the Chagos Archipelago

AbstractThis article explores the relationship between United Kingdom (UK) public law and ‘regimes of dispossession’, taking the Chagos Archipelago as its point of departure. This article argues that this instance of dispossession, typically understood as fortifying the military power of the United States, was also part of a wider geography of states dispossessing land for a specific set of economic purposes that were tied to particular class interests. Deploying a relational geographies of materialist public law approach, the article reconceptualizes the scales of public law, extending an examination of its effects and constitution beyond the territory of the UK, and considers public law's relation to capitalism, exploring the ways in which its technologies (re)produce regimes of dispossession. The article argues that the dispossession of the Chagos Archipelago was an example of ‘executive robbery’, a racialized dispossession (produced through conferring displaceability and disposability on the Chagossians) enacted to construct military infrastructure that was key for accumulation in the Middle East.

How couples negotiate livelihoods in a Danish island setting: the role of history, geography and gender relations

Finding a way to make a living may be difficult if one lives in a small island with few possibilities for regular full-time jobs. Focusing on how co-habiting couples negotiate their livelihood options with each other and with the island setting, the paper shows how the local labour market and its inherent (im)possibilities are shaped by a specific history, geography and set of gender relations. Empirically, the paper draws on couple interviews from the Danish island of Læsø, with approximately 1800 inhabitants. The analysis shows how history, traditions, geography and gender relations impact on livelihoods and possibilities for developing new lines of work. It also shows how these factors continuously interact with one another and are negotiated by both individuals and couples. Underscoring the argument that island labour markets are different from mainland labour markets, the analysis suggests that the need for negotiation may be more obvious in an island setting which is demographically and economically under pressure. Islands cannot simply be treated as ‘smaller’ versions of mainland communities. They pose qualitatively different contexts. The palpable geographic borders of the island community entail that ‘everybody knows everybody’, thus enhancing visibility of individual choices and roles in the local labour market. Therefore, the impact of intangible factors may be enhanced in island settings, where deviations from tradition become immediately observable as people live in close proximity to one another.

“No me dejaran ir porque they needed me here”: spatializing corrective representatives by critiquing Latinx teacher role model discourse

ABSTRACT This article examines the formations and tensions of Latinx teacher role model subject positions in spaces with relatively few Latinx teachers. To address the under theorization of space and Latinx teacher subjectivity, I insert a relational space frame to previous literature that critiques neoliberal attempts to place both the blame and solution for racialized educational injustice on the shoulders of individual (student/teacher) Latinx bodies. I use discursive ‘moments’ to illustrate how and where a certain type of Latinx teacher role model emerges while also extending Singh’s idea of corrective representations by accounting for the role relational geographies (spaces) play in producing ‘rational/normal,’ neoliberal, and racialized subject positions for Latinx teachers. I close with concluding thoughts about space, subjectification, and representation, suggesting that teacher education offers an underutilized area to center the politics of such.

Unpacking intercity competitive relations in the global corporate spatial organization of manufacturing

AbstractDespite being a traditional research topic in urban studies, competitive relations among cities have rarely been quantified in empirical research. Drawing on methods of social network analysis, this study aims to extract intercity competitive relations at the global scale based on the global corporate spatial organization of manufacturing. The geographies of competitive relations manifest different patterns from those of global city networks based on cooperative relations. This study finds an inverse U‐shaped relationship between cities’ connectivities and their gross intensity of competition. Although most global cities have unique positions in global manufacturing competition, intensive competition occurs among some global cities, whereas extensive competition exists between wide‐ranging cities with weak global connectivities. Furthermore, there is strong competition among cities of similar size and among those located in the same region. This research not only re‐examines global intercity relations from a competitive perspective but also informs the formulation of policy‐making on competition strategies of cities.

Spatial variability in socio-demographic factors affecting participation in the Australian national bowel cancer screening program

Spatial variability in socio-demographic factors affecting participation in the Australian national bowel cancer screening program