Uneven Geographies Research Articles

Feeling the (post)colonial

AbstractThe Kokoda Track, which spans Papua New Guinea's Oro and Central Provinces, has become a site of profound Australian national feeling. Each year, thousands of Australian trekkers travel to Papua New Guinea to “do” the 96‐km hiking trail, in remembrance of the battle waged along it during the Second World War. For Oro Province people, meanwhile, Kokoda—denoting both the track and the place where the track commences—is also a site of intense feeling, albeit in ways that are both less mythologized and less amenable to mythologization. Attending to these divergent affective experiences highlights affect as a domain of postcolonial encounter. Affect works to reproduce colonial relations and animate ongoing regimes of territorialization. It does so while deflecting Australians’ attention away from the very colonial contexts within which affect is implicated. At the same time, uneven geographies of affect index complexities of Papua New Guinean feeling that exceed those sanctioned within the confines of the trekking industry itself.

Multiplexes in India: Building Castles in a Low-income Market of Uneven Geographies

The Indian film industry produces the highest number of movies in the world, in various languages, and casts a large shadow of influence on the socio-cultural landscape of the country. However, in terms of box-office value as a share of the total entertainment pie in India, films are a minor segment in a market with vast potential. The pandemic of 2020 drastically changed the fragile dynamics of the already-struggling film distribution and screening sector. Over the years, the Indian film business has staked its future on a business model forged around the “Mall-Multiplex” complex in a country that is mostly low-income or bottom of the pyramid (BoP). This exploratory article, with the help of existing data on theatre screen seats and high-potential population geographies, endeavours to understand India’s existing film entertainment business and sets out to spot the opportunities available for the low-priced film business as a value proposition.

Black Ecologies (Humanity, Animality, Property)

Black Ecologies (Humanity, Animality, Property)

Gateway cities for transnational higher education? Doha, Dubai and Ras al‐Khaimah as regional amplifiers in networks of the ‘global knowledge‐based economy’

AbstractThis paper investigates how the developmental ambitions of governments to attract university offshore campuses to Doha, Dubai and Ras al‐Khaimah and these universities’ internationalization strategies affect the three cities’ positionalities. It links interdisciplinary literature on globally uneven geographies of higher education to geographical debates on the intermediating role of cities in regional and global economies. The paper conceptualizes the three cities as a triadic ensemble of gateways for transnational higher education (TNE), thereby contributing to further theorization of gateway cities. The paper shows that the three cities fulfil two crucial gateway functions. First, they connect internationalizing universities with particular student segments from their regional hinterlands seeking access to TNE. Second, they thereby amplify and disperse hegemonic regimes of the globalising knowledge‐based economy in their regional hinterlands. While all three cities share similar functions and rationales, they also have distinct positionalities rooted in different strategies of the respective governments.

Monkeypox: A challenge for and to geographers

AbstractThe World Health Organisation declared the 2022 Monkeypox outbreak a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’, following the rapid spread of infections in non‐endemic countries. Unlike its usual epidemiology in Africa, most cases reported since May 2022 have been among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM). This commentary provides an overview of the current Monkeypox outbreak and public health responses to it, drawing out their uneven geographies and the contribution geographers could make to understanding this. The empirical focus is on Monkeypox in England, but the challenges posed are relevant to the dynamics of the outbreak in the USA and Europe. The commentary concludes by challenging geographers to collaborate across sub‐disciplinary boundaries to undertake research that can understand and explain not only the specific dynamics of Monkeypox but also broader geographical aspects of GBMSM's lives that could underpin effective public health work with these populations.

Spatial-temporal evolution and proximity mechanism of urban networks in China from the multiplicity perspective

As the important performance of intercity interaction, urban networks have a significant impact on the urban system and economic development of city-regions. However, previous studies have mainly analyzed the structure of a single urban network from a static perspective and lack in-depth analysis of the driving mechanism of network evolution. Based on the headquarters-branch data of companies and patent transaction data, this study uses spatial analysis, social network analysis, and negative binomial regression analysis to explore the structure evolution and proximity mechanism of the urban networks in China. The empirical results were as follows. First, different types of urban networks are characterized by stratification and geographical unevenness, and the evolution of urban networks shows priority linkage and path dependence. Second, the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, and the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei urban agglomerations shape high-value agglomeration centers but show a differentiated development trend. Third, geographical proximity has a stronger effect on the urban innovation network evolution, but institutional and cultural proximity has a stronger effect on the urban economic network evolution. The comparative study of urban networks not only helps to clarify the structure and characteristics of an urban system but also contributes to a comprehensive understanding of the diversity and complexity of intercity interactions.

Differentiated Rehabilitation and the Geographies of Unfreedom in Post-Colonial Bombay

Abstract The “refugee crisis” after the 1947 Partition of British India generated new contestations over urban resources, especially for securing accommodation. It resulted in a proliferation of encampment laws and policies with outcomes at multiple levels: city, neighborhood, and community. This article traces the uneven geographies produced by Bombay’s encampment laws and the (spatial) politics of refugee rehabilitation. It focuses on the state’s use of “camps” to segregate impoverished refugees and consolidate the urban periphery. The article explores the interplay between law, space, and property to illustrate how refugee entitlements created and sustained various forms of power and precarity in the metropolis. Refugee camps provided “conditional access” to shelter for indigent Sindhi refugees and became markers of social identification. Middle-class Sindhi refugees, on the other hand, secured their place in the city by establishing cooperative housing societies. This article highlights how caste and regional distinctions in pre-Partition Sindh translated into class-based spatial divisions among the displaced Sindhis in post-colonial Bombay.

Working the boundary: science–policy interactions and uneven knowledge politics in IPBES

The rising demand for policy-relevant knowledge has supported the emergence of global boundary organizations at the science–policy interface. By synthesizing environmental knowledge for policy-makers, boundary organizations influence how we know and govern sustainability challenges. Therefore, it is essential to better understand what happens in and through these organizations. This paper examines the very practices that configure science–policy relations in global boundary organizations by studying the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Through Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Political Ecology perspectives, we disclose mechanisms of boundary work that demarcate science from non-science and, hereby, determine which expertise becomes authoritative in IPBES. Building on original empirical data, we first examine how science and policy domains were interrelated during the IPBES global assessment process (2016–2019). Second, we investigate how this boundary work shaped the production of biodiversity knowledge. Our findings indicate that integration and demarcation efforts configured science–policy relations through formalized and informal mechanisms. We argue that this boundary work continuously established science as authoritative voice for addressing biodiversity loss in IPBES. Spatial aspects of boundary work highlight power differentials between IPBES member States that manifested in uneven geographies of knowledge. Instead of concealing these inequalities through the norm of political neutrality, we need to recognize boundary organizations as political spaces in which science and policy are co-produced. By adopting a critical and reflexive co-productionist approach, it becomes possible to addresses uneven knowledge–power relations through more inclusive and transparent practices. Boundary organizations, such as IPBES, are then able to provide more diversified environmental explanations and transformative solutions.

Peace through the lens of human rights: Mapping spaces of peace in the advocacy of Colombian human rights defenders

What kinds of peace do human rights defenders advocate? This question has become controversial in light of heavy criticisms raised against the scholarly paradigm that peace and human rights are co-constitutive universals. In this article, I explore how Colombian human rights defenders navigate potential tensions, erasures, and vested politics in their peace advocacy during the current peace process with the FARC-EP. I follow the trend in the geographies of peace literature to study the articulation of peace with human rights as situated and constitutive practices. My analysis of published activist statements maps out the discursivity of peace advocacy, that is, how human rights defenders articulate different political demands as interconnected conditions for peace and maintain a common activist space that cuts across the uneven geographies of violence in Colombia. The visualization of my results as discursive networks shows how activist practices open social and discursive spaces that integrate multiple understandings of peace, instead of obliterating differences in a single and homogenized, ‘local’ representation of peace. I further submit that elucidating how human rights defenders address peace beyond the end of guerrilla insurgency, the ambiguous role of the state, societal discrimination, and structural transformations helps us nuancing conceptual debates. We can learn from Colombian activists to move beyond rigid conceptual juxtapositions of human rights as either panacea or liberal fuel for conflict and to pay attention to how concepts are animated in political struggles to end violence.

Financialisation, central banks and ‘new’ state capitalism: The case of the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England

Monetary policies are not usually considered as part of the repertoire of ‘state capitalism’. However, unconventional monetary operations performed by central banks in recent years make this exclusion increasingly problematic. This paper thus explores whether recent central bank interventions should be considered manifestations of ‘new’ state capitalism. Analysis focuses on the actions of three central banks from the advanced capitalist core in the West – the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England. By mobilising the ‘financial chains’ perspective, this paper highlights the fact that, under financialisation, contemporary central banks have assumed a pivotal role in shaping Western capitalism and its uneven geographies. Through these recent unconventional interventions, central banks have in effect become ‘creators’ or ‘generators’ of (financial) capital. As such, their role in shaping uneven economic geographies across space (well beyond their official territorial boundaries) has expanded. Spatial ramifications of central banks’ capital-generating operations could thus fit easily within the framework of ‘uneven and combined state capitalism’. The possibility of considering the unconventional operations of central banks as state capitalist could also go hand in hand with a modified definition of state capitalism. Indeed, the rubric of state capitalism could potentially be enlarged to include configurations of capitalism where the state plays a particularly strong role not only as promoter, supervisor and owner of capital but also as a ‘generator’ of capital. This capital-generating role appears to be essential for the survival of contemporary capitalism.

FX swaps, shadow banks and the global dollar footprint

The era of dollar-based financial globalisation has seen a steady rise in the use of foreign exchange (FX) swaps. We provide a macrofinancial political economy perspective on the geography of FX swaps, and the spatial effects of central bank policies aimed at taming instabilities associated with the uneven geography of the dollar. First, we analyse the mechanisms and potential sources of instability involved in accessing dollars using FX swaps and repurchase agreement (repo) contracts, respectively, in both private and public (central bank) use. Second, we show that the distribution of currencies and institutions involved in trading swaps is skewed, reflecting both the dominance of the dollar as international financing currency and the uneven international distribution of dollar-denominated assets and liabilities. We document the changing composition of dollar swap users on both the long-dollar and short-dollar side and identify potential sources of macrofinancial vulnerability for dollar lenders and borrowers. The Fed's approach to global liquidity provision via both swaps and repos constitutes a spatially variegated strategy to preserve the hegemony of the US dollar. Despite its partial success in reducing instability due to cross-border financial imbalances, the Fed's uneven and hierarchical lender of last resort approach cannot sufficiently stabilise global finance to underpin a new era of macrofinancial stability.

Mapping police power and the limits of reform

In the response to mass protests calling to reform, defund, or abolish the police, a number of U.S. police departments have recently grappled with reforms. In a familiar cycle of periodic crises that lead to calls for police reform, many proposed reforms end up funneling more money into police departments while doing little to address entrenched and systemic forms of racism. In this article, I analyze a city-run reform effort in Lexington, KY that seeks to “dismantle systemic racism” in policing and other government agencies. I show how the police reform committee struggled to address everyday practices of policing that lead to racially disparate outcomes and, instead, largely focused on animus and bias exhibited by individual officers. In response to the perceived lack of data on racially uneven policing practices, in this article I argue that we take seriously minor ‘crime’ data as indicators of police discretion and priorities. To those ends, I map the uneven geographies of marijuana possessions enforcement, showing how they intersect with existing forms of vulnerability. In mapping enforcement, I offer a replicable means to shift the framing through which reform efforts are conceptualized and show how the existing, entrenched model of policing produces, amplifies, and reifies systemic racism.

Cultural governance within and across cities and regions: Evidence from the English publicly funded arts sector

There are significant inequalities in the publicly funded arts sector in England, including significant spatial inequalities. If anything, the critique of spatial inequalities in this ecology do not go far enough. This article uses a unique dataset of the boards of directors of Arts Council England’s national portfolio, derived from Companies House. While a majority of national portfolio organisations do not share board members with any other organisation, the analysis demonstrates that London-based organisations are significantly more likely to share board members with other companies than organisations outside London – and that, where an organisation outside of London does share a board member with a company in another region, it is more likely to be with a company in London than all other regions put together. It further demonstrates that this effect is most pronounced where these organisations are part of the same artform. Crucially, the organisations connected to London have more than double the portfolio income of other organisations, whether they share board members or not. This illustration of the concentration of power in London in the publicly funded arts sector, over and above the distribution of organisations in general, demonstrates the conceptual value of a cultural economy that emerges from interconnections within a local or national ecosystem. At the same time, the analysis and findings push the cultural ecology literature to centre inequality as a core issue as the concept is developed. Even the local cultural ecosystem is not exempt from the impact of the nation’s uneven (cultural) geography.

Unravelling the French National Fungal Database: Geography, Temporality, Taxonomy and Ecology of the Recorded Diversity.

Large datasets are highly valuable resources to investigate multi-scale patterns of organisms, and lay foundations for citizen science-based conservation strategies. Here, we used 1,043,262 records from 1708 to 2021 to explore the geography, taxonomy, ecology and distribution patterns of 11,556 fungal taxa in metropolitan France. Our analysis reveals a four-phase pattern of temporal recording, with a main contribution of post-1977 observations in relation with the structuration of associative mycology. The dataset shows an uneven geography of fungal recording. Four clusters of high-intensity sampling scattered across France contrast with poorly documented areas, including the Mediterranean. Basidiomycota and Agaricales highly dominate the dataset, accounting for 88.8 and 50.4% of records, respectively. The dataset is composed of many rare taxa, with 61.2% of them showing fewer than 100 records, and 20.5% recorded only once. The analysis of metadata brings to light a preponderance of the mycorrhizal guild (44.6%), followed by litter saprotrophs (31.6%) and wood saprotrophs (18.1%). Highly documented forests (76.3% of records) contrast with poorly investigated artificial (6.43%) and open habitats (10.1%). This work provides the first comprehensive overview of fungal diversity in France and identifies the Mediterranean area and open habitats as priorities to integrate into a global strategy for fungal conservation in France.

Southern reconfigurations of the ageing-migration nexus

ABSTRACT This article intervenes in the fields of migration and ageing studies by examining complex social experiences and local manifestations of ageing and mobility in regions of the world that remain at the margins of such debates. Specifically, it foregrounds groups that are less visible in existent scholarly and policy work: namely, ageing adults from low- and middle-income regions of the world moving across regions of the South, and to places in the North. In doing so, the article critically reflects and approaches ‘South’ and ‘North’ not as essentialised or discrete categories, but as shifting, relational categories that encompass much diversity and varying marginalities. The article introduces a set of contributions that qualitatively investigate translocal intersections of ageing and migration across Central Africa, South, East and Southeast Asia, and Latin America, and in some cases in connection to places in the North. The collection advances debates on the ageing-migration nexus with a southern focus by examining three key themes that display geographical unevenness and social diversity: (Im)mobilities of ageing, retirement and kinship strategies in light of restrictive mobility and citizenship regimes; multidirectionality of care across borders and generations; and the temporalities and spatialities of home, belonging, and displacement.

Service sector employment in Great Britain 1841–2011

ABSTRACT The most detailed published census data on occupations and industries from nine British censuses between 1841 and 2011 have been computerised, and original methods developed both to re-district them from constantly changing historical districts to the 380 Local Authority Districts reported on by the 2011 census and to re-classify them to the 20 ‘Sections’ of the 2007 Standard Industrial Classification. This large dataset is then used to reveal new insights into the long-run evolution of geographical unevenness in the British economy. Initial analysis reported here maps the total percentage in the service sector for 1841, 1931, 1991 and 2011, with original data for key sectors presented for 1841, 1931 and 1991. While counts for individual districts and ‘Sections’ must be used carefully, overall trends appear robust: the localities of Britain have not just been moving steadily towards economies dominated by the service sector, they have steadily been becoming more similar.

Toward “Total Freedom”: Black Ecologies of Land, Labor, and Livelihoods in the Mississippi Delta

We ground this article in the uneven geographies of the Mississippi Delta, a region constructed at the intersection of agro-environmental racism and plantation violence, nutrient-rich soil, and dynamic Black geographies. The processes of containment, dispossession, and commodification of life and land were essential to the construction of the region following a particular agricultural and racial development trajectory dominated by what Clyde Woods calls the Plantation Bloc. And yet, strategies and struggles to make life against and outside of these dynamics also took hold of the region. We reconceptualize the Mississippi Black Freedom Movement and the overlapping struggles for land, housing, healthcare, and new forms of work as movements against agro-environmental racism and the making of a place-based environmental justice rooted in Black ecologies. Drawing on Black and abolition ecologies we trace connections across rural Black organizing in cooperative, farm, and catfish processing communities in the Mississippi Delta. By organizing along modes of collective flourishing and against threats to daily life, these movements provide an alternative trajectory to agro-environmental racism and sought to create a place of stewardship and co-operation.

An amenity‐based approach to excellent returning scientists' location choice in China

AbstractThe rapid increase in the number of returning Chinese scientists in past years has fostered an uneven geography of academic capital in China. Yet, this noteworthy issue has scarcely been discussed in recent literature. This paper attempts to testify whether there is an effect of urban amenities on the location choice of the returning scientists listed by China's Youth Scholar Thousand Talent Plan (YSTTP). Applying a city‐level conditional logit model of skilled migration, it is suggested that YSTTP scientists were substantially driven by urban amenities, such as the scientific environment, and public infrastructures and services for elite residence. In particular, considerable attention was paid to high‐level academic institutions, public transports, healthcare, income, and R&D capability. In contrast, YSTTP scientists were less sensitive to natural amenities and cost of living. Meanwhile, there is evident heterogeneity in the significance of urban amenities among different social groups in terms of their gender, age, whether they choose to work in Alma mater, and where they return from. This study contributes to bridging the current literature of scientific mobility with the amenity‐based approach, and ultimately provides a critical reference for the brain gain policy in China.

Patents over patients? Exploring the variegated financialization of the pharmaceuticals industry through mergers and acquisitions

In recent years the pharmaceutical industry has been accused of prioritising profits from patents at the expense of the wellbeing of patients. Many argue that this transition reflects the full-scale financialization of the industry, whereby an increasing focus on shareholder value and financial performance has resulted in cost-cutting, outsourcing and novel forms of competition based on securing new patents and intellectual property rights through mergers and acquisitions (M&As). The aim of this article is to explore the variegated financialization of the pharmaceutical industry through the analysis of M&A data. Acknowledging M&As as a key tenet of pharmaceutical financialization and drawing from a sample of 1805 deals between 2001–2020, we reveal an uneven geography of acquirers and targets across the global, national and city scales. While we uncover a global rise in the value and volume of M&A deals, this activity is concentrated across a limited geography, with the US the largest market by value and China the largest by volume. Analysing these two countries in depth reveals the importance of institutional and regulatory conditions in not only shaping the implementation of M&As but fundamentally constituting the nature, causes and effects of financialization. These findings allow us to develop a relational conceptualisation of financialization which adds novelty to geographical debates around its uneven causes, processes and outcomes.

Uneven geographies of youth volunteering in Uganda: Multi-scalar discourses and practices

This paper develops a multi-scalar geography of youth volunteering in Uganda. A growing body of research has explored the geographies of volunteering in the global North and international volunteering and development. However, despite the mainstreaming of volunteers as development actors, less attention has been paid to the unique local and national geographies of volunteering in global South settings. This paper explores how and why different ideas and practices of volunteering take shape and prominence in Uganda and how this impacts patterns of youth inclusion, inequality and opportunity. Analysing data on volunteering by young refugees in Uganda, we develop a multi-scalar geography to situate volunteering at the interface of ‘global’ volunteering policy and knowledges, aid and development architectures, youth unemployment, community institutions and local socio-economic inequalities. Through this, we reveal how programmed and audited forms of youth volunteering oriented to youth skills and employability are privileged. We show how this articulates with local inequalities to create uneven access to volunteering opportunities and practices. Through our approach, we show how a multi-scalar geography of volunteering enables us to build richer, more nuanced conceptualisations of volunteering in the global South that address the different ways global discourses, local histories, community organisations and social inequalities come together across space and time to produce uneven geographies of volunteering in particular places.