Geographical Scholarship Research Articles

Health geographies II: Resilience, health and place

Resilience means doing well in the context of difficulty; it is both process and outcome, individual and collective, and it relates to inequities because it is about accessing resources. Resilience helps understand and improve health and wellbeing because it incorporates adversity and challenges. In this report, I argue resilience is also inherently geographical, and operates at interconnected scales. I highlight health geographers are well-placed to help understand and enhance resilience through critically-aware and contextualized approaches. Moreover, resilience offers a way to connect and further develop health geographical scholarship on both wellbeing and addressing health and other inequalities.

YI-FU TUAN’S LEGACY: IMPACTS ON THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW, DISCIPLINES, SCHOLARSHIP, AND TEACHING

ABSTRACT Yi-Fu Tuan published extensively in a number of outlets throughout his long career, including in the Geographical Review between 1968 and 2002. While Tuan’s influence on research and teaching in geography was far reaching, he also inspired scholars in other disciplines, such as education and environmental psychology. This retrospective essay commemorates Tuan’s relationship with the Geographical Review and brings together a diverse group of scholars in geography, science education, and environmental psychology, who address Tuan’s influence on their professional and personal lives, research, and teaching. Reoccurring themes across all the individual essays include place, home, and human experience. In addition, each author stresses the broader implications of Tuan’s scholarship on peace, love, caring, and belonging.

Plotting a Geography of Paradise: Black Ecologies, Productive Nostalgia, and the Possibilities of Life on Sinking Ground

AbstractThis article considers the cultivation of Black life in the face of environmental crisis in the sinking grounds of southeast Louisiana. In dialogue with scholarship in anthropology and geography on Black place‐making and memory, I examine how individual and collective memories of past ecological practices provide counternarratives of ecological demise for the present. Working with the concept of productive nostalgia, I situate my analysis of collective memory via Sylvia Wynter's and Katherine McKittrick's formulations of the plot as a countergeography of the plantation through which Black people cultivate ecologically based self‐reliance, care, and freedom. I use oral history and ethnography to demonstrate how the socioecological ethos of the plot travels across time through collective memory, interrupting present‐day ecological crisis narratives with visions of climate changed futures tied to ecological and racial justice.

Being Italian: the peculiar journey of blackness

ABSTRACT Generations of African and Black Italians are extending the boundaries of what it means to be Italian, in the face of denial, diversion, and an insistence on whiteness as the measure of inclusion, and humanity. Drawing on Allan Pred’s work on racist geographies of the everyday and taken-for-granted in Sweden, I advance the concepts of B/black spaces and relational places to approach to the study of identity, belonging, and place in Black Europe, with a focus on Italy. Black and African Italians from diverse origins and generations are asserting their belonging in Italy. Pred’s work on every day situated practices, power relations, taken-for-granted knowledge, and silences, is useful to contemporary scholarship in Black geographies, antiracist and decolonial scholarship. Pred’s holistic studies of modernity and the impacts of global political and economic transformations in lived experiences demonstrate the centrality of racism to national societies and cultures. His work is valuable to scholars of modern Western colonial systems of knowledge production and power, advancing insights and encouraging new directions based on abundant, ordinary yet silenced everyday realities and experiences. This paper expands on Pred’s work through an analysis of Blackness, place and belonging in Italy, offering an approach to the study of African Diaspora in Europe.

Practising geography in/with technical worlds

Over the past decade, geographical scholarship has grown steadily enamoured with all things technical. In some ways, such a focus is an outflow of the recent philosophical turn towards critical realism, which has encouraged a keener eye on more-than-human worlds. It demands careful delineations and understandings of the multi-stranded relationships between humans, technical objects, organisms, energies, and artificial intelligences that exceed anthropocentric epistemologies. This commentary seeks to address the challenges of studying the ‘technical’ in relation to the futures of geographical thought and praxis by proposing three strategies that might be developed in geographical research. These are, namely, the acquisition of a stronger grasp of technoscience expertise, care in following non-human things over time, and openness to interdisciplinary research. As more geographers enter into the fold of investigating ‘technical’ things, developing these skills would be invaluable to producing innovative spatial knowledge about these cryptic worlds.

The geographies of colonial infrastructures: Mobility, im/materiality, and politics on walking trails in the Middle East

AbstractThe past 20 years have seen an expansion of walking trails across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, including the Abraham Path, Palestine Heritage Trail, Jordan Trail, Israel National Trail, Lebanon Mountain Trail, and Sinai Trail. Many of those who walk these trails do so primarily for leisure, yet to relegate these trails to being merely cultural or leisure sites is to miss the less visible but equally important entanglements of space, mobility, and colonialism. The growth of these trails coincides with a context of (post)colonial and settler‐colonial mobility restrictions and the associated material and imagined infrastructures that control that movement. By attending to the im/material and state/embodied tensions of walking trails, this paper demonstrates how an innocuous‐looking site can enrich understanding of infrastructures and work exploring the mobilities and temporalities of colonialism. To understand the relationships between infrastructure and colonialism through walking trails, I employ a mixed‐method approach combining participant observation, interviews, and discourse analysis of official material pertaining to trails. Such an approach enables the productive tension between official narratives and experiences to emerge. In doing so, this paper makes three arguments surrounding the geographies of colonial infrastructures. First, how nationalism is embedded in the mobilities of trails. Second, how exploring the intimacies of infrastructure can highlight ongoing connections of capitalism and colonialism. Third, how infrastructure might be refused and imagined otherwise. In these mobilities, intimacies, and refusals an expanded geography of colonial infrastructure emerges that makes two broader contributions to geographical scholarship. First, the need to centre attention on the MENA region beyond dominant foci that orientate more readily around state or geo/political practices. Second, how a focus on walking trails centres a site in which the discursive and representative is in constant relationship and tension with the experiential and embodied.

Thinking problem‐space in studies of revolt and archival methods

AbstractThis article engages with Jamaican anthropologist David Scott’s conceptual analytic of problem‐space and maps out the potential contributions problem‐space thinking can make to geographical studies of revolt and protest as well as archival methods. Scott's theory is broadened spatially through the introduction of space‐time geographies scholarship and in particular the spatial ontology of Massey. I suggest Scott's theory can compliment and advance the work of political and historical geographers seeking to produce more broadly spatialised and temporalised accounts of insurrections and political protests. Problem‐space thinking also develops efforts to recover subaltern voices and political motivations in such studies both empirically and methodologically.

Beyond the Flâneur: Urban Walking as Peripatetic Phenomenological Pedagogy

This essay analyses a key motif in geographical scholarship: the most basic form of mobility achieved by an abled-bodied person engaging in acts of walking. By embedding “walking” firmly within a phenomenological tradition, the essay places “being mobile” qua walking within a field of enquiry that conceptualises an embodied form of mobility as both enabling and limiting. Building furthermore from a growing body of literature that has differentiated between “walking” as an active form of engagement and a host of different geographically relevant modes of being, the paper adds a specifically epistemological set of considerations in an attempt critically to contribute to existing literatures and to interrogate the embodied practice of walking. Key in this endeavour is the contribution mobile modes of existence make to the construction of knowledge about the social world. The paper concludes with a prolegomena that recasts walking in the form of a geographically informed pedagogical practice.

A sexuality pivot: Thinking through solidarity, geographies of sexuality, and a world in transition

While work on solidarities forms a core element within geographical scholarship, especially as related to forms of shared connection to address forms of inequality, few studies from the geographies of sexualities literature have directly engaged with the concept. This article argues that there are two complementary logics as to why scholars working on sexuality may want to consider more forcibly the concept of solidarity. One of these logics suggests that a focus on solidarities can further pre-existing key interests within the geographies of sexualities literature, especially in parts of the world that have historically received relatively limited research attention. A second logic suggests that a focus on sexuality-based solidarities can help enable sexualities scholars to further critical engagement regarding broader discourses, and offer alternative framings, regarding a world in transition. This article presents a series of examples, drawn from across sub-Saharan Africa, related to both logics together with a series of potential future directions for research. Taken collectively, this article, by drawing on earlier work on solidarity from within the discipline of geography, contends that there are a number of key benefits for sexualities scholars to undertake a ‘pivot’ or choice to explore solidarity more directly in the current moment.

Hidden Geographies: Migration, Intersectionality, and Social Justice in a Global Contemporaneous Space

In June 2020, a group of transnational scholars responded to an invitation to participate in a themed issue on migration and social justice, following the American Association of Geographers statement against discrimination and hate crimes resulting from COVID-19 (May 2020; followed by a 2021 statement against anti-Asian racism and violence) and its statement on Racism and the Death of George Floyd (June 2020). The six articles bring together an exceptionally diverse scholarship on hidden geographies of migration, immigration, and transnational migration; the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, class, nationality, and citizenship in creating systems of oppression and discrimination; and social justice in a global contemporaneous space. This article (1) introduces the context shaping the birth of this Focus section, including the conjuncture of events, embodied effects, and the disciplinary past; (2) discusses its echoing with antiracist and feminist geography scholarship and race and ethnicity scholarship (primarily by women of color), and its creative contribution, as a collection, to connecting the conceptual theme of “hidden geographies” with the epistemological thinking of “contemporaneous geography;” and (3) highlights the analytical tool of intersectionality and summarizes all six articles and their contributions to the Focus section themes as the global “hidden geographies” project continues to empower more.

‘An aid to loveliness’: lavender, femininity and the affective economy of English beauty

By considering the cultural production, placement, promotion and personalization of a fragrant aromatic, this article attempts to compile a historical geography of lavender and loveliness. The purpose of this experimental exercise is threefold. First, to examine the emergence of modern affective economies based around fashioning the self, directed at women's physical appearance and delineating desirable new standards of femininity. Second, to interrogate how the mid twentieth century beauty industry formulated the new concept of facial skincare in which ideas of a healthy complexion was complexly encoded with an aesthetic of whiteness. Third, to understand how the exercise of researching and writing such a sensory history is a means to address the challenges which non-representational theory has raised for scholarship in historical geography. Empirically, the article focuses on the operations of the House of Yardley, one of London's oldest perfumeries and beauty companies, and its foremost perfumier-cosmetician of the modern era, W.A. Poucher. To explore how the scent of lavender was deployed in markets globally, promoting a selectively English version of loveliness, it travels to various points along the supply line between the fragrant flower and female face.

Geography and environment: A time of change

Geography and environment: A time of change

Bedding into bags: the life histories of materials, makers and the time of making in a case study of fabric upcycling

ABSTRACT Geographical scholarship on making has established the interrelations between makers, materials and space. With this paper I explore how this scholarship can be developed to incorporate time through paying close attention to the time of making. Drawing on Karen Barad’s (2003) theorisation of multiple and entangled temporalities and materialities; the time of making is interpreted as a constituent of making rather than a homogenous vessel within which making occurs. Using an autoethnographic study of upcycling used domestic textiles into bags, I assemble the practices of making and distribute these into its constituent parts of heterogenous materials, tools and skills. The time of making is studied through autoethnographic reflections on the iterative interactivity between these constituent parts. My reflections on the time of making develop in two ways. First, I consider how the temporal heterogeneity of making segues the (de)stabilising skills of sewing with moments of hesitation, preparation, undoing, repetition and organisation. Second, I detail how the life histories of materials and makers are remade through making. In particular the case study of upcycling reveals how the potential of materials can be realised through re-orientating the skills and practices of makers towards (re)making the life history of materials.

Space, nature and hierarchy: the ecosystemic politics of the Caspian Sea

The Anthropocene has given rise to growing efforts to govern the world’s ecosystems. There is a hitch, however, ecosystems do not respect sovereign borders; hundreds traverse more three states and thus require complex international cooperation. This article critically examines the political and social consequences of the growing but understudied trend towards transboundary ecosystem cooperation. Matchmaking the new hierarchy scholarship in International Relations (IR) and political geography, the article theorises how ecosystem discourse embodies a latent spatially exclusive logic that can bind together and bound from outside unusual bedfellows in otherwise politically awkward spaces. We contend that such ‘ecosystemic politics’ can generate spatialised ‘broad hierarchies’ that cut across both Westphalian renderings of space and the latent post-colonial and/or material inequalities that have hitherto been the focus of most of the new hierarchies scholarship. We illustrate our argument by conducting a multilevel longitudinal analysis of how Caspian Sea environmental cooperation has produced a broad hierarchy demarking and sharpening the boundaries of the region, become symbolic of Caspian in-group competence and neighbourliness, and used as a rationale for future Caspian-shaped cooperation. We reason that if ecosystemic politics can generate new renderings of space amid an otherwise heavily contested space as the Caspian, further research is warranted to explore systemic hierarchical consequences elsewhere.

Re‐engaging psychology for (more) human geographies of the future

AbstractRecent work in several fields of psychology has advanced understanding of how humans imaginatively construct, simulate and (pre‐)feel the future. These advances have not yet been substantively engaged in social and cultural geography. In this paper, we identify, review and begin to draw together scholarship in human geography and several subfields of psychology on the ways in which people imagine and navigate towards the future. The most influential existing work on the future in geography has concerned powerful institutional and discursive depictions of threatening times‐to‐come. In contrast, psychological and neuroscientific work on cognitive processes involved in prospection extends possibilities for a human geographical approach to the future considering how people relate to discursive imaginaries and spatial environments. Reinvigoration of the human geography‐psychology nexus can further critical understanding of the spatialities through which futures are imaginatively formed and felt by individuals, and are thereby brought into the realm of political and social possibility.

On being a Black woman ‘Mzungu’ researcher

With limited inclusion of Black traveler experiences in tourism scholarship and given that gender and racialization occur across geographies, this article explores the ways in which positionality and embodiment influence a Black diasporic woman researcher’s experience in the cross-cultural context of Livingstone, Zambia. It further explores key player and researcher-participant relationships within the research context, where an autoethnographic approach and the creative analytic practice (CAP) of poetry are used as reflexive practices and to demonstrate the impact of researcher social identities (e.g. race, gender, nationality) on the research process. Aligning with the creative (re)turn in geography scholarship, the use of CAP demonstrates how similar methodologies can provide a more well-rounded view of participant voices, specifically that of Black people informing the production of knowledge. More importantly, the Blackness of diasporic researchers is valued, especially when coupled with mindful intentionality in the approach and assumptions of the research process.

Opening Up Endings: Action Performance Practice

Endings take multiple forms yet remain under theorised within geography. Informed by Hannah Arendt’s assertion that action has no end, this paper argues for the resonances and elaborations of endings, providing evidence from dance choreography. As an art form, dance has been variously conceived as ephemeral but also transient, thus neither capable of being lost nor destroyed. I explore these ideas through Renail Basail’s re/staging of the choreography Out of the Box, and it’s unexpected ending in March 2020. I ask, what might dance choreography tell scholars of geography and the geohumanities about how to work with such a sense of endings as contingent and open? This paper contributes to this gap in thinking and theorising by outlining four propositions on endings drawn from dance theory and practice. These are: endings and ephemerality, endings as conditional, endings and liveness, and endings as radical. Where endings are open and congruent, two key implications emerge. First, there is need to situate endings within bodies, articulating how they are practiced and performed, whilst always subject to external forces not fully known. Second, if action has no end, there is political possibilities to creative endings.

Situating Mark Fisher’s spatiality?

The work of the late Mark Fisher, one of the revered British cultural critics of the past 20 years, is implicitly spatial, yet remains largely absent from geographical scholarship. Callum Sutherland's paper provides a timely and long-overdue corrective to this disciplinary lacuna. This short response aims to build on Sutherland's exposition by bringing the work of the Situationists International into its orbit, as well as musing about how we can think Fisher – via Sutherland – ethically, given how urgent the need is for a more actualised post-capitalist politics.

Platforms and/as urban communication: Mediums, content, context

AbstractThis paper brings an urban communication lens to bear on the geographies of platformisation in cities. It does so by drawing on three select instances of platformised materialities in Toronto and Vancouver that represent familiar contours of urban platformisation: mobility (bike and car sharing), last‐mile logistics (on‐demand delivery), and labour (gig work). These examples are worked through Aiello and Tosoni's heuristic of cities as constituting the mediums, content, and contexts of urban communication, respectively. As mediums, platformised materialities in the form of street signs designate exclusive uses of public space by mobility platforms, communicating the spatial conditions of platform urbanism. As the contents of communication, stickers and signs advertising on‐demand meal delivery available at a restaurant venue express the platform‐driven transformation of the social relations that make the delivered meal take place. And as context, broader trends of the platformisation of labour render communication by other, non‐platform‐based materialities – such as posters calling on urban gig workers to unionise – meaningful. An urban communication perspective contributes to geographical scholarship on platform urbanism by nuancing our understandings of how platforms and platform technology capital secure and sustain themselves in cities through their material communicative capacities.

Workers’ motile subjectivities and the socio-spatial formations of Chinese state-owned enterprises

This paper explores the interplay between labor agency and the socio-spatial structure of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the context of globalization. Drawing on Coe & Jordhus-Lier’s theorization of constrained labor agency with insights from new mobilities paradigm, we develop the concept of motile subjectivity to explain the multiplicity of constrained agency and workers’ different employment practices intervened in SOE socio-spatial formations. Based on field research conducted in SOEs in the Northeastern provinces of China, our analysis unfolds that workers’ motile subjectivities mainly drive three threads of employment practices, namely demission, positional promotion, and part-time work, which involve workers’ variegated mobile and immobile experiences. These (im)mobilities affect workers’ ongoing social and spatial practices and further conjoin with the reproduction of SOE socio-spaces with both manifestations of stable danwei and multi-scalar modern enterprises. Our study contributes to labor geography scholarship by theorizing the actualization of workers’ motile subjectivities in SOE socio-spatial formations. It also provides insights for future SOE studies to seriously consider workers’ motile subjectivities.