Geographical Scholarship Research Articles

‘Everything I can do at home, I will do it at home’: the materialities, temporalities, and spatialities of telemedicine abortion care

ABSTRACT The advent of telemedicine abortion in 2020 in the United States meant that abortion care was increasingly pushed out of clinical settings and into the home. Yet, within the context of abortion inequalities and restrictions in the US, there is often more focus on provision of and access to medication abortion via telemedicine than there is on what happens after the abortion pills are acquired. This paper brings together and advances scholarship in abortion, care, and home geographies to address this empirical gap by exploring the material, temporal and spatial dimensions of telemedicine abortion care at home, and examining how these dimensions shape the embodied, emotional, and affective experience of abortion care. Telemedicine abortion allows individuals to self-manage the timing, symptoms, and space of their abortion, thereby creating a caring atmosphere. A geographical perspective on telemedicine abortion reveals that taking the abortion pills at home shapes the experience of abortion care.

Do women commemorate women? How gender and ideology affect decisions on naming female streets

Street names are not neutral identifiers to navigate through cities but are charged with strong symbolic connotations and reflect power relations within society. A growing body of geographic scholarship documents a strong gender bias in the urban namespace, where women only represent a small fraction of streets named after people. This article investigates whether the lack of women in political decision-making roles contributes to explaining their marginalization in urban toponyms. More specifically, we study the impact of the gender and ideology of town mayors on their decisions to commemorate women in the street map. Focusing on the universe of Spanish towns during the period 2001–2023, we find through fixed effects panel data models and regression discontinuity design that the mayor's gender does not affect the percentage of female-named streets, while the ideology of the governing party does. Our findings thus indicate that it is ideology rather than gender what shapes politicians' preferences regarding the commemoration of women in the street map. We argue that this is because, on the one hand, strong political parties can impose their agenda on local leaders, making irrelevant differences in their gender and, on the other, the ideological cleavage is more relevant than the gender one to account for differences in attitudes towards symbolic gender policies. A natural implication of our results is that simply having more female politicians will hardly suffice to address the gender gap in street names and in other symbolically charged policies.

‘Settler’ and ‘internal’ colonialism in ‘Canada’: Reconciling competing conceptual approaches to Canadian Colonialism in the North

Geography scholarship about Indigenous politics in Canada frequently draws upon ideas from the field of settler colonial studies (SCS). Yet, criticisms of SCS and the application of its concepts to Canadian contexts are becoming increasingly common. Such criticisms include: an overly rigid distinction between settler colonialism and so-called ‘franchise’ colonialism, a tendency to rely on a small number of non-Indigenous scholars as foundational thinkers in the field and a lack of attention to the ways in which Canadian colonialism has varied across space-time. This article argues that re-engaging the concept of ‘internal colonialism’ – an older approach that focuses on identifying parallels between the imperialist domination of the third world and the colonial subjugation of peoples that are ‘internal’ to nation states – can help advance our understanding of Canadian colonialism.

Climate change, bodies and diplomacy: Performing watery futures in Tuvalu

AbstractClimate change is one of the key foci of critical geopolitics in the twenty‐first century, with a proliferation of scholarship considering the international conferences, imaginaries, and securitisations of the climate crisis. Since 2019, Tuvalu has been using human bodies submerged in water – including diplomats, children, and politicians ‐ within its diplomacy to draw attention to the severity of the climate crisis. By examining contemporary Tuvaluan climate diplomacy, this article advocates for a greater engagement with feminist geopolitics to interrogate the embodied practices of climate diplomacy. It draws upon fieldwork conducted in the South Pacific in 2018 and 2019 including at the 50th Pacific Island Forum in Tuvalu. Firstly, this article explores the 2019 visit of the Secretary General of the United Nations to Tuvalu ‐ arguing the photoshoot of him wearing a formal suit in the lagoon connected the imaginary of Tuvalu as a ‘sinking island’ to a wider international community. Secondly, it considers the use of Tuvaluan schoolchildren playing in the water during the 50th Pacific Island Forum. It argues this constituted a vital territorial conjuncture that drew attention to Australia's inaction on climate change and the risk to Tuvalu's future from the rise of sea level. Thirdly, it considers the body of Simon Kofe, Foreign Minister of Tuvalu, during his addresses to COP26 and COP27 from firstly the lagoon in Funafuti and then the metaverse, to examine the shifting narratives of Tuvalu's future within its climate diplomacy. This article argues that climate diplomacy is a deeply embodied practice and human geography scholarship must be more attentive to the geopolitical work that bodies do within climate diplomacy to understand the temporalities and spatialities of diplomacy better.

Imagining post‐war futures amid cycles of destruction and efforts of reconstruction

AbstractThis commentary brings forward Ukrainian voices to this journal's conversation on the invasion of Ukraine and the dilemmas it poses to scholars in geography. We argue that there needs to be space in this discussion for the viewpoints of Ukrainians themselves who are on the ground, confronting the atrocities every day, and who can provide experiential knowledge about (i) the immediate cycles of destruction and efforts of reconstruction; (ii) the systemic impediments to reconstruction; and (iii) the diverse sets of post‐war imagined futures. These signpost to scholars the sheer scope of the conflict and the multitude of research avenues to explore in order to understand the realities of the war more deeply. They thus provide information and inspiration to geographers wondering about how to orient and where to respond.

Globally positioned digital heritage objects: how geo-spatial technologies territorialise the multiplicity, mobility and mutability of digital heritage

This article examines the use of geolocative technologies, methods and data in the production of digital heritage objects. Digital mediations of heritage have become pervasive, yet despite their increased circulation, they largely remain critically under theorised. The production of digital heritage objects is defined by the use of GPS instruments and the iterative processing of geospatial data. Despites this, however, they are rarely used in ways that could be described as cartographic. As such, this article explores the consequences of having so much of what is increasingly circulated, and consumed as heritage being now produced through the same tools and methods associated with maps, GIS or navigation. This article will use empirical data produced through an ethnography of The Cherish Project. Cherish is a multi-national research initiative centred around the objective of delivering a comprehensive baseline of 3D data for heritage sites currently threatened by climate change on both coasts of the Irish Sea. Building upon crucial literatures from the critical GIS and digital sectors of geographical scholarship, this article makes key contributions to how the theoretical orientations of the discipline might evolve towards new understandings of data and digital cultural objects. In both reorienting geographical literatures around theorists like Bruno Latour, Manual DeLanda and Yuk Hui – and contextualising such readings in the empirical work this paper volunteers – something unique and useful materialises. Namely, geospatial technologies, methods and geospatial data are revealed as agents of territorialisation and coding, the likes of which reconcile the situated, performative and thoroughly contingent nature of cartographic science with the derivation of discreet digital heritage objects.

Historical Geographies of Engineering: Knowledges, Practices, Identities

ABSTRACTDrawing on established scholarship in the historical geography of science, the history of technology and science and technology studies, this paper argues for the significance of an historical geography of engineering. Large‐scale and transformative infrastructure projects have been a common focus in historical geography, however comparatively little attention has been paid to the engineers responsible for designing and implementing them. This paper reviews recent work which has foregrounded engineers and their work across diverse times and places. It conceptualises engineering in three ways: as a form of knowledge about the world that is connected to, but distinct from, science; as a set of practices undertaken in specific locations; and as an identity that, since the profession's origin in the 18th century, has enabled individuals to claim expertise in relation to environmental management and therefore exert power over land, territory and people. The article reviews geographical inquiry that foregrounds these perspectives on engineering and suggests future directions for research in the field.

Digital Arrival Infrastructures: Housing Platforms and Residency Governance in Berlin’s Rental Sector

This article explores how notions of formality and informality in housing are produced in relation to digital infrastructure and localized bordering regimes. Drawing on a research diary project conducted with “International” migrants in Berlin, Germany, I draw on scholarship in Digital Geography and Migration Studies to frame digital platforms as “arrival infrastructures,” which allow “Internationals” to negotiate the legal process of becoming formally resident in the city. Rather than entry into the long-term “formal,” rental sector, the opportunity to codify residency status becomes the decisive factor in determining housing choices. It also determines the type of housing platforms which are used to seek accommodation in the city and influences digital behavior. My contribution in this article is twofold. Firstly, I advance an understanding of housing in/formality as a concept which is formed according to one’s own positionality in relation to State mobility regimes. Secondly, I describe how the interface of platform-mediated rental sites becomes a site of knowledge production about norms and behavior within an unfamiliar housing system. This is accomplished through the proposal of a typology which classifies platform services according to the ways in which they used to negotiate residency governance regimes: large and long-term housing platforms; “medium-term” platform-mediated rentals; platforms rented and shared; and supplementary tools. I conclude by highlighting the need for further research into the role of rental platforms as a bordering technology, especially in the European context.

Mail art methods and the social and cultural geographies of families affected by rare disease

ABSTRACT Building on geographic scholarship around disability and drawing on a programme of arts-based research, we bring attention to the social and cultural geographies of families affected by rare disease. Seeking creative methodological opportunities, we invited families to send us postcards as a means of sharing experiences and reflections. We contextualize the emergence of the postcard as a modality of communication, situating our work within a wider epistolary and artistic tradition, before examining the opportunities postcarding might produce for geographic and broader qualitative research, noting the forms conduciveness to multimodality and recent calls for more engagement with the medium. We detail our own practices of participatory postcarding and the questions, challenges, and hopes such raised. Analysing the postcards received, we discuss how such helps understand the shifting social and cultural geographies of rare disease, reflecting on themes of (in)accessibility and exclusion, changing domestic geographies, and the importance of, and challenges associated with, family-based identities and communities in the context of rare disease. Such highlights opportunities for disability geography to engage in cross-cutting conversations and agenda-building with the nascent area of family geographies, along with further geographic inquiry into the spaces and worlds of rare disease.

Introduction To The Special Issue: Navigating Organizations, Agencies, And Institutions In Research With Immigrants And Refugees

ABSTRACT Geographers and other immigration scholars must often navigate complex institutional landscapes to conduct migrant research, as a variety of organizations, entities, and agencies operate within immigrant-adjacent contexts. Such organizations can function as partners to facilitate a project, as gatekeepers who mediate access to immigrant communities and data sets, or as stakeholders who may influence project goals. To navigate these institutional contexts, geographers must make decisions with important logistical and epistemological implications for both project design and research contributions, shaping the knowledge production possible in these contexts. This article outlines relevant trends in the literature on the institutionalization and bureaucratization of immigration, connects these insights to feminist geographic scholarship on fieldwork and navigating immigrant institutions, and serves as an introduction to this special issue of the Geographical Review.

The pendulum swings: mobilizing policies to develop mass homeless encampments in the “progressive” city

ABSTRACT Portland, Oregon sits at the forefront of experimenting with policies for sheltering unhoused people outside of congregate shelter. In 2021, the City Government legalized sanctioned encampments by adopting them into city land use codes and for periods throughout its housing state of emergency, it also decriminalized sleeping in public. But with the continued increase of homelessness in Portland, the city has abruptly returned to more punitive policies concerning unhoused peoples’ use of space. In July 2023, the city opened its first mass encampment hosting nearly 200 people, and in July 2024, it began enforcing its ban on camping in public space. To understand this shift, the paper engages with policy mobilities and carceral geographies scholarship to examine how the City of Portland came to this about-face at this particular moment. I argue the city’s normalization of smaller tiny house encampments justified its development of mass encampments, a decision that was informed by approaches to homelessness practiced elsewhere, and one in which a significant portion of unhoused people experience more punitive conditions that partly emanate from the socio-spatial relationships in the encampment.

Toward Postsecular Feminism: Intersectionality and the Religious Subjectivities of Women Migrant Workers in China

This article investigates the subjectivities of Christian women migrant workers within the context of China’s social transformation, characterized by the interactive advancement of global capitalism, rural-to-urban migration, and “Christian fever.” Despite the burgeoning literature on women migrant workers in global capitalism within geographical scholarship, there has been less focus on women migrants’ religious subjectivity and agency. Drawing on empirical research on the intersectional experiences of women migrant workers, this article seeks to advance a postsecular feminism by bringing intersectionality into conversation with debates on postsecularity and gender inequalities. First, we examine the intersectional “matrix of domination” imposed through state power, Chinese patriarchal culture, and the gendered and class-based disciplinary labor regime under global capitalism, which serves as an ontological condition in which women migrants’ religious subjectivities form and are shaped. Second, we use intersectionality to help understand the process of becoming and a relation of emergence, wherein multiple agential qualities of women migrants—manifesting as counterpatriarchal subjects or through docile, tolerant, self-sacrificial, and pious femininity—arise at the intersections of religion, class, gender, and family. We therefore argue that postsecular feminist critique needs to carefully consider the patterns and diverse effects of intersectionality where both domination and religious agency are engendered and interwoven.

All roads lead to (New) Rome: Byzantine astronomy and geography in a rapidly changing world

During the first few centuries CE, the centre of the known world gradually shifted from Alexandria to Constantinople. Combined with a societal shift from pagan beliefs to Christian doctrines, Antiquity gave way to the Byzantine era. While Western Europe entered an extended period of intellectual decline, Constantinople developed into a rich cultural crossroads between East and West. Yet, Byzantine scholarship in astronomy and geography continued to rely heavily on their ancient Greek heritage, and particularly on Ptolemy’s Geography. Unfortunately, Ptolemy’s choices for his geographic coordinate system resulted in inherent and significant distortions of and inaccuracies in maps centred on the Byzantine Empire. This comprehensive review of Byzantine geographic achievements—supported by a review of astronomical developments pertaining to position determination on Earth—aims to demonstrate why and how, when Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453 and the Ottoman Empire commenced, Byzantine astronomers had become the central axis in an extensive network of Christians, Muslims and Jews. Their influence remained significant well into the Ottoman era, particularly in the context of geographical applications.

Indigenous Cultural Landscapes: Decolonizing Landscape Within Settler Colonial Societies

Geographic scholarship on landscape and colonialism has not substantially engaged with the specific logics of settler colonialism, propelling recent calls to “unlearn” and “decolonize” landscape studies. This article highlights the Indigenous cultural landscape (ICL), a policy tool used since the 1990s to protect aboriginal landscapes globally, as a vital resource for geographers interested in decolonizing both material landscapes and landscape studies. I analyze six ICL studies conducted by the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, a unit of the U.S. National Park Service, in robust partnership with Indigenous nations, academics, and conservationists between 2013 and 2022. In their approaches to scale, mobility, temporality, visuality, and modes of relationship, the ICLs documented and mapped in these collaborative studies fundamentally challenge settler colonial histories and conceptions of landscape. These conceptual distinctions have clear material impacts, as I demonstrate: In Virginia, the Rappahannock River ICL study facilitated the return of land along Fones Cliffs to the Rappahannock Tribe. Considering the processes, conceptual interventions, and material impacts of the Chesapeake ICL studies together, I argue that the ICL concept can generate and expand Indigenous relational space amid ongoing settler occupation, despite the tensions and limitations of working with the settler state to do so.

Pathways Through the Sea: Decolonial Geopoetics of the Mediterranean in Italian Folksong

Extending and connecting scholarship on decolonial geopoetics, critical Mediterraneanism and maritime (wet and more-than-wet) ontologies, this paper discusses Genoese folksinger Fabrizio De André’s political, poetical, and geographical work on the Mediterranean Sea. De André has been considered as a pioneer of “World Music” for his linguistic and historical research on sounds and stories of the Mediterranean. Yet, a socially and politically committed intellectual, De André fostered agendas that went well beyond the role that this author played in the history of Italian and international folksong, and should interest scholars in geography, geopolitics and geopoetics. Exploring his original texts and recollections, I argue that De André’s works open ways to connect critical studies on the Mediterranean to broader scholarship on decoloniality and relational ontologies. This emerges especially through his commitment to challenge cultural and linguistic borders, listening to “histories from below” and denouncing the colonial violence of states and other oppressive powers in North-South Mediterranean relations. Furthermore, De André’s geopoetics fosters ideas of Mediterranean entanglements between land and sea that challenge statist territorialities, enhancing different geopoetic and geopolitical imaginations to address current matters on migration, racism and exclusion.

Communities of exposure, community as exposure: Thinking collective life in the police abolitionist movement

The growing police abolitionist movement in the United States invokes the figure of community to bind various political claims, from shifting the arena of justice to fiscal restructuring. Geographic scholarship on community has yet to conceptualize its usage in this movement, and existing literature tends to critique conceptualizations of community-as-political-resistance by demonstrating a given community’s exclusionary practices and reasserting a liberal politics of inclusion. This article combines analysis of activist literatures from the liberatory harm reduction and transformative justice movements with elements of Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy to offer an understanding of community as a shifting and provisional spectrum of relations at once structural and intimate, thus challenging its prevailing figuration as a form of enclosure mediated by the terms of inclusion and exclusion. Drawing on archival work into informally circulated, praxis-based ephemera from movements under the umbrella of police abolition, I conceptualize an abolitionist understanding of community at the juncture of ‘communities of exposure,’ formed along a structurally-produced spectrum of exposure to the harms of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and cis-heteropatriarchy, and ‘community as exposure,’ the condition of relationality that resists enclosure and, in understanding our essential vulnerability to one another as a resource for care, refuses the notion that police could sanitize community of its risks.

Geographies of missing data: Spatializing counterdata production against feminicide

Feminicide is the gender-related killing of cisgender and transgender women and girls. It reflects patriarchal and racialized systems of oppression and reveals how territories and socio-economic landscapes configure everyday gender-related violence. In recent decades, many grassroots data production initiatives have emerged with the aim of monitoring this extreme but invisibilized phenomenon. We bridge scholarship in feminist and information geographies with data feminism to examine the ways in which space, broadly defined, shapes the counterdata production strategies of feminicide data activists. Drawing on a qualitative study of 33 monitoring efforts led by civil society organizations across 15 countries, primarily in Latin America, we provide a conceptual framework for examining the spatial dimensions of data activism. We show how there are striking transnational patterns related to where feminicide goes unrecorded, resulting in geographies of missing data. In response to these omissions, activists deploy multiple spatialized strategies to make these geographies visible, to situate and contextualize each case of feminicide, to reclaim databases as spaces for memory and witnessing, and to build transnational networks of solidarity. In this sense, we argue that data activism about feminicide constitutes a space of resistance and resignification of everyday forms of gender-related violence.

The scale, forms and distribution of volunteering amongst refugee youth populations in Uganda

AbstractGeographies of volunteering have examined the relationships between people, places and forms of voluntary action, but there has been limited geographical scholarship on the scales, forms and distribution of volunteering amongst specific populations in different settings, particularly in the global South. While in the global North there are some established quantitative data sets, often produced by humanitarian and development organisations, these are largely absent in the South. Where they do exist, they often reflect Western‐centric ideas and concepts, meaning that volunteering behaviours that do not fit Western norms—such as amongst young refugees in the global South—can be excluded, or captured in ways that are partial or unrepresentative. This paper provides an important challenge to existing geographies of volunteering, expanding them through an account of volunteering amongst young refugees in Uganda, and how it articulates with social inequalities within and between the spaces and places where young refugees live. We analyse quantitative data from 3053 young refugees surveyed on their volunteering experiences in rural and urban settings in Uganda. The data provides new evidence of who these volunteers are, beyond their refugee status, why, where and how they conduct their activities, and reveals how these are connected to livelihoods and community development. Through this survey analysis, the paper argues for the need to establish grounded conceptualisations of volunteering that consider the scales, distribution, and various forms of volunteering within specific groups. In doing so, the paper offers a new framework for better understanding the relationships between volunteering and refugee lives through four interlocking factors: place, (im)mobility, income and gender. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for wider geographies of volunteering and research on refugee youth and displaced populations.

Geography and ethics III: Description as a matter of moral concern

This report focuses on moral description. It considers how comparative practices often entangle moral geography in philosophical dilemmas, such as debates over moral relativism. Using examples from geographic work on language, algorithms, the appropriation of anti-colonial critique, and Indigenous data sovereignty, the report shows how and why descriptive praxis matters to accounts of moral geography. As the final installation of a three-part series of reports on ethics and geography, it draws together a broader critique of moral geography's initial distinctions and suggests a more constitutive view of ethics for geographic scholarship.

Reflections on a healthy discipline: Celebrating 50 years of health geography within the Royal Geographical Society

AbstractThis article introduces a special section comprising papers examining the evolution, current state and potential futures of the subdiscipline of health geography. Geographers’ engagement with ‘health’ has transformed from a strict rooting in the ‘(bio)medical’, coinciding with, and contributing to, a paradigm shift emphasising a recognition of health as multifaceted and shaped by everyday experiential spatial practices, rhythms and identities. The development of this area of geographic scholarship, we argue, has been inextricably linked to the simultaneous growth of the Geographies of Health and Wellbeing Research Group (GHWRG) of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), founded in 1972. Celebrating this golden jubilee, the Research Group initiated a project reflecting on how geographical knowledge on health has been produced and the networks that have influenced thinking. This coincided with an additional anniversary, the twentieth iteration of the ‘Emerging and New Researchers in the Geographies of Health & Impairment’, a conference developed to support new conversations relating to geographical scholarship around ‘health’, playing an important role in the development of ideas, scholarship and community since its inception in 1994. In introducing this special section, we underscore the importance of geographic interrogations of health for addressing contemporary challenges and providing interdisciplinary contributions. The articles in the collection delve into conceptual, theoretical and methodological developments that have shaped health geography, featuring work showcasing the breadth and depth of research within the subdiscipline. Complementing these empirical pieces, the special section traces the history of the GHWRG and its contributions, alongside interviews and conversations with scholars who have played pivotal roles in shaping the evolution of the subdiscipline. Overall, we are keen to celebrate health geography scholarship, question how academic networks shape thinking about interrelationships between health and place, and reflect on potential future directions for geographical scholarship on health and wellbeing.