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Way‐finding agendas through Transactions

November 2023
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 49(1)

Authors:

Queen Mary, University of London

This is the first in a series of occasional editorials in which we guide our readers through groups of papers that we consider to be ‘way‐finding’ contributions to geographical debates. Our emphasis on ‘way‐finding’ and navigating through scholarly work engages a tension we identified around Transactions ' remit of publishing so‐called ‘landmark’ papers which are likely to stimulate and shape research agendas in Geography. We use this editorial as an opportunity to refocus attention away from the landmark paper as a static object of high repute that people come to visit, and towards the active role of landmarks as way‐finders used to navigate and engage with a landscape. The papers spotlighted in the editorial provide noteworthy examples of recent efforts to understand non‐human lifeworlds and the legitimisation of concepts and experiences constructed in/by Majority World scholarship. The papers are also notable for their careful approach to shaping agendas, marked by an awareness of past and present geographical scholarship, while also envisioning the discipline's future.

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Trans Inst Br Geogr. 2023;00:1–8.

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/tran

We recently encouraged the journal's readership, and the discipline at large, to consider what it means to care for a jour-

nal as an intellectual space (Bailey etal.,2023). How might we, as an Editorial Board, work to shape Transactions into

a journal capable of fostering and supporting more caring kinds of scholarly transactions? One way we hope to achieve

this is by reflecting more deliberately, and carefully, about Transactions’ reputation for publishing papers that are likely

to stimulate and shape research agendas in Geography. Accordingly, this is the first in a series of occasional editorials

in which we guide our readers through groups of papers that we consider to be ‘way-finding’ contributions to various

debates and conversations within the discipline.

This emphasis on ‘way-finding’ and navigating through scholarly work engages a tension we identified around

Transactions’ remit of publishing so-called ‘landmark’ papers which are likely to stimulate and shape research agendas

Received: 29 September 2023

Accepted: 4 October 2023

DOI: 10.1111/tran.12651

COMMENTARY

Way-finding agendas through Transactions

JamesEsson1

MarkusBreines2

KatherineBrickell3

JessicaHope4

Sin YeeKoh5

Anna M.Lawrence6

ColinMcFarlane7

JessicaMcLean8

MattSparke9

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).

1Geography, Queen Mary University of

London, London, UK

2Fafo, Oslo, Norway

3Geography, King's College London,

London, UK

4School of Geography & Sustainable

Development, University of St

Andrews, Fife, UK

5Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti

Brunei Darussalam, Jalan Tungku Link

Gadong, Brunei Darussalam

6Royal Geographical Society, London,

7Geography, Science Laboratories,

University of Durham, Durham, UK

8Geography and Planning, Macquarie

University Faculty of Arts, Sydney,

North Ryde, New South Wales,

Australia

9Department of Politics, Merrill

Faculty Services, UCSC, University

of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz,

California, USA

Correspondence

James Esson, Geography, Queen Mary

University of London, London, UK.

Email: j.esson@qmul.ac.uk

Abstract

This is the first in a series of occasional editorials in which we guide our read-

ers through groups of papers that we consider to be ‘way-finding’ contributions

to geographical debates. Our emphasis on ‘way-finding’ and navigating through

scholarly work engages a tension we identified around Transactions' remit of

publishing so-called ‘landmark’ papers which are likely to stimulate and shape

research agendas in Geography. We use this editorial as an opportunity to refocus

attention away from the landmark paper as a static object of high repute that peo-

ple come to visit, and towards the active role of landmarks as way-finders used to

navigate and engage with a landscape. The papers spotlighted in the editorial pro-

vide noteworthy examples of recent efforts to understand non-human lifeworlds

and the legitimisation of concepts and experiences constructed in/by Majority

World scholarship. The papers are also notable for their careful approach to shap-

ing agendas, marked by an awareness of past and present geographical scholar-

ship, while also envisioning the discipline's future.

KEYWORDS

black geographies, collective geographies, critical geographies, more-than-human geographies,

political ecologies, sonic geographies

ESSON etal.

in Geography. Many factors are at play in determining papers that might be positioned as a ‘landmark’, from the en-

gagement of the broader subject community and the influence of the journal through the peer review process, to the

disciplinary reputation and institutional affiliation of the author(s). Also, as we raised in our previous editorial (Bailey

etal.,2023), the world of online publishing has changed how people find, read, and engage with academic papers. Online

editions can feel more open-ended than their printed counterparts, hindering an appreciation of individual papers as

interconnected components contributing to a wider body of disciplinary scholarship.

In curating this editorial, we are therefore keen to help readers navigate recent contributions in Transactions and

better comprehend individual papers as relational pieces of work that stimulate and shape geographical agendas. Rather

than seeking to have the definitive word on how the papers spotlighted here should be positioned within the discipline,

we want to draw attention to nascent and ongoing conversations, inviting active participation from our readers and

potential future authors. Put another way, we would like to refocus attention away from the landmark paper as a static

object of high repute that people come to visit, and towards the active role of landmarks as way-finders used to navigate

and engage with a landscape.

This editorial spotlights a selection of these ‘way-finding’ papers. We introduce them thematically and then signpost

their wider implications via short commentaries. It is worth noting two ways in which the papers spotlighted below

collectively speak to broader directions of travel within the discipline. First, the collection provides examples of re-

cent efforts to understand non-human lifeworlds and the legitimisation of concepts and experiences constructed in/by

Majority World scholarship. This matters because, as we noted in Bailey etal.(2023), there is a need to reveal and chal-

lenge the traditional whiteness, masculinism, and coloniality of Geography. Second, substantial theoretical, conceptual,

or empirical contributions that advance geographical understanding are unlikely to happen in intellectual isolation. The

papers below are indicative of a more careful approach to shaping agendas, with one of their defining characteristics

being an attentiveness to past and present geographical scholarship while simultaneously looking to the future shape of

the discipline.

COLLECTIVE GEOGRAPHIES

The intervention by Abdullah etal. (2023) exemplifies the transformative potential of collective scholarship for urban

geographies, and this emphasis on dynamic collaboration resonates with Yandaarra with Gumbaynggirr Country

etal.'s (2022) paper exploring how scholarship should be rooted in an ethical commitment to a wider array of actors.

Both contributions highlight the value of pluralising voices in geographical scholarship through collective inquiry, while

also noting the importance of taking the time and effort to undertake these collective endeavours carefully.

This intervention (Abdullah etal., 2023), collectively written by 12 scholars primarily based in urban Asia, is an apt

example of the kind of careful and collaborative scholarship that our recent editorial (Bailey etal.,2023) seeks to encour-

age. Acknowledging the diverse, complex, and rapidly shifting urban contexts within which each scholar is situated, op-

erates, and writes, the intervention does not aim to arrive at easy answers or practical solutions to the intellectual agenda

of urban geographies. Instead, it celebrates and attenuates – in fact, complexifies – the urban terrains under investiga-

tion and the tools of urban analysis that we may use. The intervention explains three interrelated dimensions of urban

re-arrangements which could be productive in advancing urban geographies. These are: (1) (im)permanences, which is

an awareness about the temporal instabilities that structure, shape, and inform urban processes, experiences, and out-

comes; (2) (trans)configurations, which is an understanding that well-intentioned plans and policies may morph and

mutate in unexpected ways, opening up or foreclosing opportunities and possibilities for diverse alternatives; and (3) (re)

enactments, which involves attention to the lived enactments of urban realities, in the fissures and gaps of in-between-

ness. This intervention can be read as a snapshot in time of the ongoing, collaborative conversations and insight-sharing

among members of the collective. It is this intentional effort of bringing together, ruminating together, and writing to-

gether that we would like to see as we advance our discipline and sub-disciplines.

In the conclusion to his 2017 commentary on the decolonial imperative in Anglophone Geography, Jazeel(2017) argued

that it is not enough for geographers to diversify the voices within the discipline. This pluralisation must be accompanied

by an ethical commitment to respect the people and places we collaborate with as part of geographical enquiry. The paper

by a Gumbaynggirr and non-Gumbaynggirr research collective, aka Yandaarra with Gumbaynggirr Country etal.(2022),

provides a captivating example of how this ethical commitment can be enacted and an illustration of what it can look like.

Yandaarra with Gumbaynggirr Country etal.(2022) draw inspiration from Indigenous researchers and collectives that rec-

ognise Country, land, ancestors, and more-than-human entities as co-authors with their own knowledge and Law/Lore

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ESSON etal.

(Country etal.,2016). The reference list therefore provides a rich repository of further reading for those working on, or in-

terested in learning more about, the ethics of consent in decolonising research that centres human and more-than-human

entities. The intervention also contains demonstrations of ethical praxis that reflect the guidance of Aunty Shaa, Uncle Bud,

and Neeyan, specifically that ‘caring for Country is researching well; researching well is caring for Country, and respecting the

knowledges and sovereignties of all who co-become there’(2022, p. 721). The collective offer several examples of how this is

realised, one such case being the collective including Country as a chief investigator in their university's ethics protocols and

showing in the paper how this simultaneously respects and elevates Gumbaynggirr Law/Lore, while subversively adhering

to mainstream ethical processes. Furthermore, and importantly, the intervention provides a much-needed reminder that the

Anglophone decolonial imperative in Geography should not lose sight of the need for Juungambala (setting things right).

Decolonisation is not a metaphor, and the collective ‘are trying to get land back, though it should never have been stolen in

the first place’ (Yandaarra with Gumbaynggirr Country etal., 2022, p. 721).

CRITICAL EPISTEMOLOGIES

Ulloa's (2022) exploration of destabilising geographies in Colombia resonates with de Lira's (2023) unravelling of

Brazilian geography's colonial legacies. These contributions exemplify a broader shift in geographical thought towards

recognising non-Western voices and decolonising geographical knowledge production. Collectively, they call for a reim-

agined geographical thought that is pluralistic, intersectional, and attuned to diverse contexts. These approaches prompt

the discipline to engage with global dynamics, fostering a richer, more inclusive Geography.

Ulloa's (2022) paper formed part of the ‘Geography in the World’ themed intervention (McFarlane,2022). While mak-

ing it clear that they are not speaking on behalf of Colombian geographers, Ulloa draws on almost two decades of expe-

rience in higher education to concisely reveal an emerging approach to critical geographies in Colombia. Ulloa terms

this approach ‘destabilising geographies’ and explains how it is the outcome of dialogue within and between an array

of epistemological and ontological perspectives, with a notable emphasis on the importance of amplifying insights from

Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities. The paper outlines the potential of destabilising geographiesas a praxis

that ‘articulates intersectional, anti-racist, anti-violence and anti-capitalist demands’ (Ulloa,2022, p. 2), and which offers

fresh perspectives for understanding human–non-human interactions. Destabilising geographies does this via four related

themes or lenses, namely: dissident feminist geographies, geographies of racialised extractivism, Black geographies, and

Indigenous relational spatialities. These themes are present in recent work on extractive logics (e.g., Çaylı,2021; Murrey

& Mollett,2023). For critical geographers especially, but geographers more broadly, these four themes are argued to be

significant at a disciplinary level because they help to ‘reveal the absences that have marked the production of institu-

tional geography and allow new theoretical and methodological critical proposals’ (Ulloa,2022, p. 5). Furthermore, and

uniquely for a paper in Transactions, Ulloa concludes by showing how destabilising geographies is not only a research

agenda, but an approach that can and should contribute to political movements and inform Geography curricula by re-

thinking core categories and concepts.

Questions around the plurality of geographical thought and traditions are prominent in critical discussions re-

garding the history and philosophy of the discipline (Ferretti,2021; Qian & Zhang,2022; Celata & Governa, 2023).

De Lira's (2023) paperholds significance for these debates because it serves to unravel and challenge colonial lega-

cies within Geography and contributes to a broader understanding of knowledge production and circulation in and

from the Global South. Drawing on insights from ‘geographical talks/gatherings’ involving the National Council of

Geography (CNG) and Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), de Lira(2023) explores the transition in

epistemological styles practised by Brazilian geographers during the first expeditions to the country's backcountry, aka

the sertão, during the 1940s. In doing so, de Lira uncovers the colonial legacy of Brazilian territories and the debates

over planning perspectives that sought to restructure them. By analysing the historical context and institutional dis-

cussions, the paper identifies the development of a hybrid geographical style and epistemological viewpoint. Notably,

the paper shows how this hybrid Brazilian Geography did not lean towards positivist planning, nor exclusively regional

or socialist geography, but rather a ‘geography of development’ partly informed by progressive and anti-colonialist

thinking. This geography of development underwent epistemological tensions and intellectual oppositions from vari-

ous parties, including proponents of French Geography. It is in thinking through these tensions that de Lira skilfully

articulates the need for geographers to appreciate and validate the epistemological and heuristic qualities of decolonial

and southern thought.

ESSON etal.

MORE-THAN-HUMAN AND MEDIATED LIFEWORLDS

Sonic and digital mediation of non-human lifeworlds is the focus of recent geographic scholarship that considers dy-

namic relations between societies and environments in Transactions. Kanngieser(2023), for example, argues that using

experimental sound methods when investigating non-human worlds has the potential to unearth enduring (but often

overlooked) sonic colonial practices. In a very different lifeworld setting, but with a similar focus on mediated more-

than-human and human relations, Searle etal.(2023) consider the possibilities that come from unpacking the urban

conviviality generated by the ‘digital peregrine’. Both papers invite us to think about researching mediated non-human

lifeworlds in generative ways.

Geographers have long been attentive to the importance of sound for understanding relationships within and between

societies, as well as relationships between societies and the environment (Matless,2005; Kong,1995). Recently, however,

there has been a renewed focus on sonic geographies, particularly among researchers engaged in more experimental

forms of praxis. Kanngieser(2023) uses an innovative methodology based on field recordings to explain why and how

experimental sound methods can be particularly informative when investigating non-human worlds. Significantly, the

paper explains why the insights that emerge from this methodological approach could and should be of interest beyond

geographers curious about sound, and sound artists working on environment. Kanngieser(2023) does so by revealing

and then outlining the enduring legacies of ‘sonic colonialities’. This novel concept conveys the ‘encultured ways of lis-

tening to, apprehending, and documenting environments that are derived from the Eurocentric fetish for pre-colonial

natures, which are imagined as discrete, unmediated, and possessable’ (Kanngieser, 2023, p. 1). Kanngieser's intervention

matters because it contributes to broader disciplinary debates regarding how nature and landscapes are captured, interro-

gated, and understood through geographical practice. Furthermore, the paper advances ethical questions concerning the

recent decolonial imperative. Kanngieser(2023) provocatively calls on geographers and sound artists to reflect on their

tendency to simultaneously centre Indigenous communities as a muse for their work, and yet render these communities

inaudible in the sonic creations that emerge from their praxis.

Common ground between more-than-human and digital geographic scholarship is growing thanks to compelling

contributions such as Searle etal.'s(2023) analysis of the ‘digital peregrine’. A predatory species that makes their homes

on skyscrapers in cities, peregrines were one of the first animals to have ‘nestcams’ share their daily lives with people

around the world. Searle etal. (2023) describe the ‘digital peregrines’ as an entanglement of digital technologies with

different beings that produces cyborg entities. By drawing on oral histories of people who were connected with the pere-

grines – including nestcam technicians, peregrine conservationists, ecologists, and activists – Searle etal.(2023) analyse

the forms of relationality that facilitated these digitally mediated relations. A powerful urban conviviality has been facil-

itated by the nestcams as they offer digital intimacies between humans and more-than-humans that otherwise would be

almost impossible. People continue to engage with and care for digital peregrines for some time after first encountering

them, leading Searle etal.(2023) to suggest that this instance of human/more-than-human digital mediation reflects

the broader productive possibilities of digital technologies. Additionally, Searle etal. (2023) point out that the digital

peregrine enables more people to engage with, and potentially understand, these animals, thereby increasing urban con-

viviality as a whole. Digitised more-than-human worlds are historically situated in this research that effectively builds

bridges between digital and more-than-human geographic research.

UNHEALTHY (IM)MOBILITIES

Banta and Pratt's (2022) examination of the treatment of Filipino domestic workers and seafarers in the time of

COVID-19 resonates with Hirsch's(2021) autoethnographic exploration of restricted mobility during the UK's first

COVID-19 lockdown. Both contributions, while distinct in their focus, converge on the theme of immobility and its

intricate connection to lived experiences during and beyond the pandemic. The papers collectively also emphasise the

ongoing need for geographers to engage with the spatiality of immobility, whether involuntary or voluntary, further-

ing critical insights on how spaces are imbued with socio-political dimensions that reproduce structural injustices.

Hirsch's (2021) commentary formed part of the Themed Intervention ‘Incontestable: Imagining possibilities through

intimate Black Geographies; Towards a Black British Geography?’. Hirsch(2021) uses an autoethnographic methodol-

ogy to explore the emotional and physical consequences of restricted mobility during the first government-mandated

COVID-19 lockdown in the UK. In doing so, she deftly places these restrictions in a wider temporal and spatial context to

offer insights on experiences of Black joy. These insights hold immense importance for geographical knowledge because

ESSON etal.

they shed light on the intricate interplay between race, space, and lived experiences (see also Elliott-Cooper,2021;

Mason,2023; Télémaque,2021). For example, recounting the atmosphere at an impromptu dance party, Hirsch reveals

how the historical and contemporary policing of Black bodies by state authorities significantly hampers the population's

capacity to experience joy in public spaces. With the emergence of COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdown restrictions, the

paper uses images and text to show how this policing became even more complex, further intensifying the challenges

faced by Black communities in their everyday pursuit of joy. Understanding how people interact with and are shaped by

their environment is a core tenet of geographical scholarship, and Hirsch's intervention provides a cogent contribution

to debates in this area.

‘Immobilised by the pandemic: Filipino domestic workers and seafarers in the time of COVID-19’ (Banta & Pratt,2022)

is relevant to everyone who lived through the pandemic as it sheds light on experiences of immobility. The restric-

tions on mobility affected people in different ways and this paper illustrates how precarious workers' lives transformed

when they became immobilised. Immobility is often understood as limited access to mobility due to resource constraints

(Massey,1994), and people who aspire to move but are unable to do so can be described as ‘involuntarily immobile’

(Carling,2002). On the other hand, those who avoid mobility rather than seeking to achieve it can be referred as engag-

ing in ‘voluntary immobility’ (de Haas,2021). When mobility politics intensified at the time of COVID-19 however, most

people experienced new forms of involuntary immobility. The new mobility regimes produced a range of social, financial,

and practical challenges, and Banta & Pratt's (2022) contribution demonstrates the consequences of these more immedi-

ate immobilities, both for workers on the move within cities and for those who relied on crossing international borders to

make a living. Although most of the restrictions associated with the pandemic have been lifted, there are still numerous

other bureaucratic and legal obstacles that continue to restrict the mobilities of precarious workers across the world. In

the coming years, continued exploration of both voluntary and involuntary immobilities will remain a geographical key

to identifying how hierarchies and inequalities are reproduced across space and territory.

INTERSECTIONAL POLITICAL ECOLOGIES

In overlapping ways with immobility regimes, inequalities embodied in spatial relations are also increasingly indexed

in the journal by papers addressing their intersectional political-ecologies with health and environmental concerns.

Senanayake(2022), Jokela-Pansini and Militz (2022), and Murrey and Mollett(2023) all give their attention to limi-

nality and intersectionality, resulting in nuanced approaches to understanding how identities intersect with ecological

challenges and environmental pollution. This nuance encapsulates more-than-human and affective political-ecologies.

Moreover, their use of ‘slower’ and long-term ethnographic methods helps to facilitate holistic, interdisciplinary perspec-

tives, which move geographical scholarship towards a deeper comprehension of complex challenges associated with

environmental justice.

In her path-making and lifeway-mapping contribution to this work, Nari Senanayake (2022) shows how geography

matters to the constitution of liminal states of health, mediating categorical distinctions between ‘healthy’, ‘at risk’, and

‘diseased’ in toxic landscapes. She locates her intervention at the intersection of political ecologies of toxicity and slow

violence (Davies, 2018; Mansfield, 2012), feminist geographies of geopolitical margins (McConnell, 2017), and critical

health geographies of chronic disease, pre-disease, and the pre-diagnosis of ‘disability’. She also thereby landmarks how

these literatures can together inform research into the intersectionality of both biopolitics and its diverse netherworlds

of necropolitical disenfranchisement from actionable health rights. Related work we have published in and on COVID-

19 has made allied arguments about health citizenship and biological sub-citizenship existing on a graduated spectrum

of inequalities that were at once exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic, but also mediated by intersecting conjunc-

tural conditions ranging from carcerality and ‘emergent’ vulnerability to mutuality, solidarity, and counter-hegemonic

agency (Clarke & Barnett,2023; Herrick etal.,2022; Mould etal.,2022; Schliehe etal.,2023; Sparke & Anguelov,2020;

Van Holstein etal.,2023). Addressing such influences in relation to the post-pandemic city, another recent contribution

points, like Senanayake, to the more-than-human political-ecologies that also condition bio(in)security and associated

health vulnerabilities (Marvin etal.,2023).

Environmental justice has long been a critical concern for geographers keen to examine how issues of space, place,

and inequality intersect, thereby influencing both human and environmental well-being (Bullard & Wright,1986;

Edwards etal., 2016; Pearce et al.,2010). Using a storytelling methodology, Jokela-Pansini and Militz(2022) ex-

plore how young people's capacity (or lack thereof) to breathe in the city of Taranto, Italy, exposes environmental

pollution's deeply personal and embodied dimensions. The role of geography in and for these dimensions is made

ESSON etal.

apparent through Jokela-Pansini and Militz's analysis, as it is the everyday experience of breathing and the tangible

quality of the air itself in Taranto that intimately connects the residents to the polluted urban environment, operating

at the most visceral scale. The authors’ attentiveness to the visceral and material is particularly insightful, because

it helps to convey how ‘everyday practices are embodied/material, entangled with (non-)human environments, and

emotional/affective’ (Jokela-Pansini & Militz,2022, p. 743), which can often be overlooked in conventional analyses.

This aligns with critical and feminist geography that has consistently emphasised that an individual's intimate en-

counters with polluted environments is important for comprehending the wider consequences of pollution beyond

health-related impacts (Pulido,1996, 2017). Jokela-Pansini and Militz(2022) are also keen to highlight the seemingly

mundane forms of resistance to this situation in Taranto. This is crucial, both intellectually and from an activist per-

spective, as it provides an opportunity to think through the complex interplay between environmental degradation,

social justice, and community mobilisation. Sharing these insights on various forms of resistance not only advances

geographical understanding of responses to environmental challenges, but also offers scope to empower local com-

munities to demand accountability, justice, and sustainable change.

Finally, Murrey and Mollett(2023) draw on over a decade of ethnographic research to investigate extractive logics in

multiple settings. The paper explores tourism and sexual exploitation in Panama's Bocas del Toro archipelago, revealing

how the confluence of land and body creates extractive landscapes that extend beyond traditional mineral extraction.

Shifting its focus to Central Africa, the paper examines development plans along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline,

where HIV burdens were relegated as an acceptable trade-off for capitalist growth. Through this analysis, Murrey and

Mollett(2023) introduce ‘extractive logics’, shedding light on often overlooked epistemic frameworks that underpin ex-

traction despite its detrimental consequences. Within the broader academic context of political ecology, this research

contributes to the ongoing dialogue surrounding the complexities of extractive practices and their implications for so-

cio-political and ecological processes (see also Gahman & Thongs,2020; Tilley,2021). Notably, by offering a longitudinal

perspective, the paper is better able to enrich our understanding of the enduring significance of racialised and gendered

dimensions within these geographies of extraction. Key to Murrey and Mollett's contribution is the application of a deco-

lonial feminist lens, which not only deepens our comprehension of the interplay between technology, race, gender, and

extraction but also advances discussions on the workings of capitalism. This comprehensive, patient, and sustained in-

quiry invites geographers to critically engage with the racist and gendered nature of extractive logics, thereby promoting

more progressive discussions and interventions in and beyond the contexts under study.

CONTRIBUTE TO THE CONVERSATION

It is our hope that these papers and our curated commentaries will encourage conversations – both oral and written –

around the potential of these themes to shape the discipline of Geography. In today's academic culture of ‘publish or

perish’ there is seldom space or time for a closer engagement with individual papers. We are therefore keen to encourage

more generous and care-full exchanges within Transactions around those papers which might generate such discussion.

After reading this editorial and the highlighted papers mentioned above, if readers have a perspective to add or reflec-

tions to share, we warmly invite them to contribute through a commentary or similar short-form piece. Please contact

our managing editor, Dr Anna Lawrence (journals@rgs.org), about these authorship opportunities.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

No new data.

ORCID

James Esson https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7076-5119

Markus Breines https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7570-9354

Katherine Brickell https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0638-6106

Jessica Hope https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8726-8880

Sin Yee Koh https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9350-1119

Anna M. Lawrence https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4998-8761

Colin McFarlane https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9209-4494

Jessica McLean https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0975-3925

Matt Sparke https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7253-7681

ESSON etal.

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Geoeconomics geohistoricised

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2023

Matthew Sparke

Introducing a special commentary section focused on geoeconomics, this paper reviews why such commentary is especially timely given current world events and the break‐down in neoliberal globalisation. It thereby points to the geo‐historical importance of the call for critical geoeconomics made by Mallin and Sidaway (2023a), and also introduces the backgrounds of the five commentators on their article's key contributions.

Reclaiming other geographical traditions: The hidden roots of Italian radical geography

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2023
Transactions

The article recalls the history of Geografia Democratica, a collective of scholars that during the second half of the 1970s sought to dismantle the old deterministic approach and promote a critical and radical turn in Italian academic geography. The aim is to contribute to the ongoing debate upon ‘other geographical traditions’ beyond the Anglo-American hegemony, to highlight the pluriversal roots of contemporary critical geographies and the influence that the transnational circulation of knowledge had in their unfolding, in light of recent quests for a more global geographical imagination. To do so, the article first engages with Geografia Democratica as a ‘rupture experience’ in the mainstream of Italian geography, and then discusses how it intersected or not similar turns occurred elsewhere, focusing on the mostly implicit dialogue between Italian and Anglo-American critical/radical geographies of the time. By following the controversial story of the collective during and after its short existence, we question its legacy for today’s geographical scholarship, and reflect more generally upon the significance of reviving other critical and radical traditions. To highlight the plurality of our disciplinary past, we suggest, is crucial not only to fill the ‘asymmetric ignorance’ between various traditions, but also to nurture and reposition the present ‘worlding’ practices of non-Anglophone critical geographers.

Post‐pandemic cities: An urban lexicon of accelerations/decelerations

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2023

Covid‐19 has stimulated renewed societal and academic debate about the future of cities and urban life. Future visons have veered from the ‘death of the city’ to visual renderings and limited experiments with novel 15 minute neighbourhoods. Within this context, we as a diverse group of urban scholars sought to examine the emergent ‘post’‐COVID city through the production of an urban lexicon that investigates its socio‐material contours. The urban lexicon makes three contributions. First, to explore how the pandemic has accelerated certain processes and agendas while at the same time, other processes, priorities and sites have been decelerated and put on hold. Second, to utilise this framing to examine the impacts of the pandemic on how cities are governed, on how urban geographies are managed and lived, and with how care emerged as a vital urban resource. Third, to tease out what might be temporary intensifications and what may become configurational in urban governance, platforming, density, technosolutionism, dwelling, crowds, respatialisation, reconcentration, care, improvisation, and atmosphere. The urban lexicon proposes a vocabulary for describing and understanding some of the key contours of the emergent post‐pandemic city.

Sonic colonialities: Listening, dispossession and the (re)making of Anglo‐European nature

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2023

A.M. Kanngieser

Creative and feminist geographers position listening as a way to build more responsive, ethical and reciprocal relations to people and environments. In this paper I argue that for geographers to situate listening ‐ in the broadest definition as “sensing, attuning and noticing” ‐ as part of a creative approach toward reparative practice, we must first understand how Anglo‐European modes of listening and interpreting the world through sound are shaped by “sonic colonialities”. These are encultured ways of apprehending and narrating environments that are derived from the Eurocentric fetish for pre‐colonial natures, imagined as discrete, unmediated, and possessable. Given the now prolific interest by geographers in sonic practices, this paper argues for a closer and more critical attention to how listening and sound methods are inherently determined by sonic colonialities. Using the example of field recordings, I show how such practices create and perpetuate divisive ideas of nature and place within contemporary ecological sound art.

Care for Transactions

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2023

In this editorial we ask key questions about what it means to publish ‘a journal’ in a world of publishing which is driven by individual article metrics and online access. Seeing the value of journals as venues for intellectual debate, we therefore set out a renewed vision as to how the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers can provide space for more collective and collaborative approaches to geographical debate. This approach revolves around the idea of ‘transactions’ itself and creating spaces in the journal for more commentary, debate and dialogue, alongside continuing to publish landmark papers. In this editorial we ask key questions about what it means to publish ‘a journal’ at the current moment, and set out a renewed vision as to how Transactions of the Insittute of British Geographers might provide space for more collective approaches to geographical debate. This approach revolves around the idea of ‘transactions’ itself and creating spaces in the journals for more commentary, debate and dialogue, alongside continuing to publish landmark papers.

Immobilized by the pandemic: Filipino domestic workers and seafarers in the time of COVID‐19

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2022

This essay documents the experiences of two different groups of 'essential' Filipino migrant workers: female domestic workers and male seafarers, each confined in new ways in their work/home situations and spaces. These two categories of workers make up a large proportion of migrants within the Philippines’ extensive export labor economy. For domestic workers, the Canadian government virtually stopped processing applications for permanent resident status. Held in limbo in their temporary work status, many domestic workers experienced increased employer control over their movements and their bodies. Seafarers have been no less immobilized, disallowed from leaving their workplace (their ship) when in port or within the normal and expected work period of 9 months at sea. Extended 'shifts' at sea for some seafarers have left other seafarers at home, waiting in the Philippines in precarious situations of loss of income and mounting debt. In the case of both domestic workers and seafarers, the pandemic and a range of state and international regulatory failures and/or gaps have placed temporary workers into new conditions of precarity and into intensified experiences of immobility. We also show how their immobilization as precarious workers reverberates throughout their families, and across the globe.

More‐than‐care: People with intellectual disability and emerging vulnerability during pandemic lockdown

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2022

This article offers more‐than‐care as a framework for analysing how vulnerability emerges in the lives of people with intellectual disability beyond relations of care. More‐than‐care detaches vulnerability from the identity category of disability. It provides a framework for conceptualising vulnerability in an unequal, neoliberalising and ableist world and sheds new light on the ever‐evolving constitution of vulnerability and disability. This intervention breaks with conceptions of vulnerability centred on care needs that leave other circumstances that inform vulnerabilities. Importantly, the framework shifts responsibility for managing vulnerabilities away from carers alone. The more‐than‐care framework is grounded in socio‐material conceptualisations of disability and advances a tripartite framing of vulnerability. First, it grounds studies of vulnerability in histories of spatially uneven investment in infrastructure and resources that shape how care and other practices can assemble to produce, challenge and manage vulnerability. Second, it recalibrates dominant conceptions of the temporality of vulnerability to ensure sensitivity to the unpredictability of emergent vulnerabilities. Third, in following a socio‐material conceptualisation of intellectual disability, more‐than‐care expands discussions about agency in the context of vulnerability. These concepts are empirically examined through an analysis of how vulnerability emerges in the lives of four self‐advocates with intellectual disability during Melbourne's first and second COVID‐19 lockdowns. The analysis shows that vulnerability was highly dynamic and unpredictable as it emerged in complex socio‐material assemblages that included care arrangements, embodied experiences and agencies, and past instances of neglect and exploitation.

Decolonial and Black Geographies against extractivism: Embodied violence and extractive logics in Cameroon and Panama

Article

Mar 2023

We are witnessing a proliferation of new critical scholarship on the manifold forms of extractivism. Yet, there are risks associated with extraction being rendered a broad metaphor for innumerable forms of removal and value‐making through exploitation and misappropriation. Theorising within decolonial Black feminisms, we respond to the metaphorization of extraction by (re)asserting the need for persistent analysis on the material and embodied effects and consequences of extractivisms. That is, the specific processes, logics, ideologies, and relations of extractivism recast lands, labours, ecosystems, and bodies, and particularly the bodies of women of colour. This helps to ensure the concept does not become figuratively empty and abstracted in politically and analytically debilitating ways. Drawing on more than a decade of research with three communities entangled within and targeted through extractivism along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline and the extractive‐tourist coastline of Panama, we mobilise a conception of 'extractive logics' to refer to the unnamed, unquestioned, often contradictory, foundational epistemic frameworks that permit the seemingly‐permanent structures and relations of removal, destruction, and dehumanization. We analyse documents from the Chad–Cameroon oil consortium, which projected and then calculated the economic ‘costs’ of the pipeline's triggering of an increase in rates of HIV/AIDS in adjacent towns and cities, alongside the entanglement of capitalist extraction with the medical neglect of Black labourers in Panama. Doing so demystefies the ways that racial and gendered violence are sanctioned (and even premeditated) within extractive logics. We hope that this work challenges some of the methodological nationalism so common within extractive scholarship, and brings extractive processes across disparate South–South and black geographies into conversation, activating a cross‐fertilisation of research across otherwise distinct geographies and geographical refrains. We reflect on the imperatives for and (im)possibilities of decolonial research against extractivism.

Re‐arranging the urban: Forms, rhythms, politics

Article

Feb 2023

This intervention is composed by a collective of scholars working on various facets of urbanization in Asia. Focusing on the notion of arrangements/re‐arrangements, it seeks to extend the consideration of urban politics as a matter of surges, a provisional consolidation of intensities, inhabitants and their practices, affiliations and orientations that gives rise to continuously mutating forms of sense, care, and collective action. Whereas the work and effects of institutions, with their genealogies, remits, and competencies, are to a large extent specifiable according to their operating norms and the various regulatory frameworks that govern their operations, the dispositions of arrangements—what they do, what they actually bring about—are not readily definable or clear, enacting a form of performative ambiguity. Involving workarounds, collaborations, exchanges, and agreements that exceed the familiar protocols of interaction among households, local authorities, markets, civil institutions, brokers, and service providers, arrangements entail the enactment of caring, provisioning, regulating, mapping, and steering as the purview of more provisional, incessantly mutating forms that fold in bits and pieces of discernible institutions. In this heuristic intervention we seek to further the "urbanization" of urban geography itself, in the sense of complexifying both the terrain and the methodological practices brought to bear. It attempts to open a way of speaking about urbanization processes that exceed binary formulations, countervailing scales or structural absences to encompass a broader range of processes at work in shaping dispositions that are materialized or simply potentiated. It proceeds from a process of collective composition whose objective is to diversify the working tools of urban analysis rather than simply offering new conceptual formulations.

Black resistance to British policing

Book

May 2021

Adam Elliott-Cooper

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

Article

Jan 2023

Olivia Mason

The past twenty 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 as 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.

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Abstract

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