Katherine Brickell’s research while affiliated with King's College London and other places

While legal geographers have considered the geography of legal processes, there has been less attention on how geographers are contributing to the making of law. By orientating attention to the experiences and attitudes of the geographical profession, this paper examines how specific forms of knowledge become legally useful and the ensuing ethical, legal, and disciplinary implications. We are interested in the situated nature of these productions, as scholars seek to advocate for specific communities, interests, or environments, practices that are set within and, at times, against personal or institutional priorities. We argue that geographical legal work involves transgressing established professional practices and locations of knowledge production. Through our interviews with geographers, we explore three aspects of transgression as a situated practice: the experiences of boundary crossing, the costs and benefits of entering new epistemic communities, and the lasting impacts of intervening in legal processes. In conclusion, we outline the mechanisms through which geographical legal work could be better accommodated within the work of professional geographers.

In this introduction to the collection of papers ‘Qualitative Longitudinal Methodologies for Crisis Times’, we argue that two main characteristics or ‘qualities’ of qualitative longitudinal methodologies (QLMs) can be identified for researching crisis. The first is that QLMs can function to repudiate crisis exceptionalism. The papers denounce the discrete and time‐limited, instead impressing the ongoingness of crisis from the past, the present, and into the future. The second overarching point made in the introduction is that QLMs protect against ‘helicopter’ research, a heightened risk when studying crisis times. Together the papers offer a close and complex introspection on the use and outcome of QLMs in spaces and times of crisis from the perspective of researchers undertaking the research, and in multiple instances, research participants enrolled in them.

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.

The operations of microfinance are exalted in mainstream development thinking as a key means of supporting smallholder farmers facing growing crises of agricultural productivity in the context of daily, ongoing, and often slow-onset climate disasters. Microfinance products and services are claimed to enhance coping and adap-tative capacity by facilitating both risk recovery and reduction. Challenging the status quo, this paper brings together original and mixed-method data collected between 2020 and 2022 in Cambodia to critically examine the "green finance" agenda by highlighting the ways in which microfinance contributes to reproducing and exacerbating climate precarity and harm for many. We evidence how credit-taking can lead to more dangerous and individualised efforts to cope with, and adapt to, existing conditions at home, often at the cost of emotional and bodily depletion. By doing so, we contribute to answering calls for connecting literatures and thinking on social reproduction , depletion, and climate change adaptation.

This paper is based on the ReFashion study which used mixed‐method longitudinal research to track and amplify the experiences and coping mechanisms of 200 women garment workers in Cambodia as they navigated the financial repercussions of the COVID‐19 pandemic. It develops the idea and practice of ‘feminist longitudinal research’ (FLR) through re‐centring the too often marginalised knowledges and ways of knowing of Cambodian researchers and research participants. Hearing and learning from their experiences reveal the labours and care‐work involved in the ‘doing’ of longitudinal research during a time of extraordinary crisis, and the potential for feminist consciousness raising and solidarity that can arise both within and beyond the confines of an academic study. The paper advocates for geographers and other social scientists to go beyond technically‐framed issues of participant ‘attrition’ and ‘retention’ in longitudinal studies to think more creatively and critically about the process of longitudinal research and what it means for those taking part in it. FLR not only evidences the temporally contingent gendered impacts of a phenomenon, but can be distinguished by its intentionality and/or potential to challenge the patriarchal status quo, both in the lives of researchers and participants.

This paper focuses on how stigma is constructed and deconstructed through linguistic and aesthetic dimensions of “Rapid Build” housing in Dublin, Ireland. Through analyses of in-depth interviews and focus groups with residents and stakeholders, we explore how the nomenclature and brick-clad modular construction of the builds influenced residents’ experiences of stigma. Emphasizing the importance of the symbolic dimensions of housing materialities in mediating stigma, we argue resident experiences reflect the importance of understanding relationships between social housing construction and stigma power in three interrelated ways. First, the nomenclature and materiality of housing has a profound effect on social imaginaries of residents and their self-perceptions. Second, stigmatized groups are not devoid of agency within constructions of stigma, and are both actors in the embedding of, and resistance to, its production. Third, engaging with residents’ experiences is integral to better understanding, and resisting, the role of architecture in the “stigma machine”.

This report is part of a larger research project funded by UK Research and Innovation's Global Challenges Research Fund entitled 'Depleted by Debt? Focusing a gendered lens on climate resilience, credit and nutrition in Cambodia and South India'. This Cambodia-focused report shows how microfinance loans are leading to an over-indebtedness emergency that undermines borrowers' long-term coping and adaptive capacity in a changing climate. A second Cambodia-focused report frames this debt crisis as a public health crisis, showing how both exacerbate each other and are leading to slow, chronic suffering over the longer term. Together, they offer new and compelling data on the multiple ways in which people's aspirations for transformative climate adaptation and good health are trapped by debt. Citation information