Across multiple academic disciplines and fields of policy, cities are now ascribed wide-ranging task responsibility for addressing a wide range of global issues. This paper elaborates a genealogical mode of analysis for understanding the ascription of causal and practical responsibility to urban processes. This analysis is developed through a case study of the revival of interest in the concept of

This paper is an attempt to develop a notion of violence based on the ability to wound slowly. It starts by exploring everyday events in a strangulated West Bank site struggling with Israel's colonisation and settlement policies, thus painting a nuanced picture on how slowness and slow proceedings wound through unspectacular events and mundane spatialisations. The spatially manifold picture of “slow

This paper seeks to better understand spatial mobility justice with reference to the bodily sensations of cycling, discerned here as different pedalling rhythms in emergent territories that our participants narrate as “love.” Differential or striated mobility is not just the result of gendered, classed, and racialised social norms but is productive of the frictions and affordances of these social hierarchies

Remittances are increasingly central to development discourses in Africa. The development sector seeks to leverage transnational migration and rapid innovations in financial technologies (fintech), to make remittance systems cheaper for end-users and less risky for states and companies. Critical scholarship, however, questions the techno-fix tendency, calling for grounded research on the intersections

Focusing on invasive plant species management issues, we propose an empirically based contribution to one of the main challenges of contemporary geography theory, that of materiality. In keeping with the aim of analysing how practitioners on the ground engage with invasive aquatic plants in the littoral lakes of Aquitaine (south-west France), we endorse a relational approach to categorisation, one

Geographical scholarship has done much to help us understand how we have arrived at the current juncture of socio-ecological disaster, but the discipline has been far less successful at imagining and enacting alternative systems and practices. In response, this paper examines the potentials and challenges for creative geographers to build critical projects that consider how socio-ecological alternatives

In recent years, geographers and related social scientists have worked intensively against the fetishization of ruins. The ruin fetish is widely considered as being problematic, because it does not allow us to face the complex reality of processes of ruination and instead turns the ruin into an object with a fixed meaning and transcendental value. This paper supplements this current state of research

The unipolar international order led by the United States has given way to a multipolar order with the emergence of China as a great power competitor. According to many commentators the deterioration of Sino-US relations in recent years heralds a ‘new Cold War.’ The new Cold War differs from its namesake in many respects, and in this article, we focus on its novel territorial logic. Containing the

The spread and growth of ubiquitous smart technology to deliver public health outcomes, particularly within/at home, urgently requires greater scholarly attention. This paper uses data from interviews with professionals in Scotland who are designing and implementing Technology Enabled Care (TEC) for current and future homes. Theoretically informed by both critical geographies of home and futures scholarship

In this short commentary, I explore some recent shifts in the landscape of South African higher education, from the vantage point of my particular location within Geography at the University of Cape Town. Although those of us working in this context have experienced multiple challenges in recent years, I argue here that we could usefully re‐frame the ongoing state of crisis as a moment of opportunity

The agency of interpreters has been kept out of view in human geography. This paper corrects this by focusing on embodied interpretation: bodies, freighted with their own relations, expectations, and experiences in the context of “emotionscapes,” settings for emotional communication. Conceptually, “emotionscapes” enable the exploration of the potentiality of an emotion in its spatial setting. Emotionally

In this paper, I examine the spatial politics of the Bermudian Black Power movement and its connections to Black Power political formations in the wider Caribbean and North America. This spatial politics is examined in detail through an engagement with the First Regional International Black Power Conference (BPC) held in Bermuda on 10–13 July 1969 and the subsequent Black Power political activity on

In contrast to their use in warfare and surveillance, there is growing interest in the potential of “drones for good” to deliver societal benefits, for example by delivering medical products and other essential goods. Yet development of medical and commercial delivery has been limited globally by restrictive regulation to protect airspace safety and security. In this paper we examine how certain African

The EU Referendum of 2016 was one of the most significant events in recent British political history. It is widely recognised that citizens engaged with the referendum through understandings of Britain, the EU, the world, and their place in it. This study complements existing research where such understandings have been inferred from citizens’ demographic characteristics, the characteristics of their

This paper analyses the anticolonialist commitment of a group of French geographers who variously criticised French colonialism or directly contributed to decolonisation movements in Africa in the central decades of the 20th century. Based on the analysis of works and unpublished archives of these scholars and activists, I argue that their work can be considered as a specific French contribution to

Observing trade flows at a Southern African border reveals that different commodities move differently, raising the question of why some commodities stop when others flow, and why some flows move faster when others experience speed reductions and stoppages. This paper is concerned with presenting a theoretical framework – the flow regime framework – to make sense of the uneven rhythms and manners of

The inclusion of Men who have Sex with Men (MSM) in global health policies has resulted in significant resource prioritisations in order to treat and prevent the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). MSM policy inclusions and health prioritisations, however, are primarily motivated by an epidemiological understanding of male same‐sex sexual behaviours, based

This Themed‐Intervention commentary provides a brief overview of the history of geography as a modern academic discipline in China, its development in the reform era (1979–), and the distinctive conventions and norms that distinguish it from paradigms and practices of geography in the Anglophone academia. We identify two tensions: between sciences and social sciences orientations, and between applied

By mapping examples of geographical portmanteau words, this paper aims to elucidate several interdisciplinary imaginative practices. It presents examples of verbal invention in the publications and rhetorical practices of three geographers, Francis Galton, John Frederick Heyes, and Halford Mackinder, which demonstrate individual words, especially neologisms and portmanteau words, can reflect concepts

The past decade has been a dynamic one for biodiversity offsetting policy. Efforts to incorporate offsetting into the Convention on Biological Diversity as a compliance mechanism did not succeed. The expansion of offsetting outside of the Natura 2000 network in the European Union (EU), which looked all but inevitable in the early 2010s, was withdrawn in the face of unexpectedly strong opposition from

Relational perspectives have become pre-eminent in geographical analysis of globalisation and its impacts in reshaping places, yet arguably leave unanswered questions about precisely how globalisation is reproduced through local places in practice. This paper seeks to extend and enhance the relational approach to globalisation and place by drawing on theoretical insights from assemblage thinking to

This paper expands our understanding of vertical urbanism, and specifically the experience of home in high-rise housing, by assessing and mobilising a “disorientated geographies” approach. It follows Bissell and Gorman-Murray's recent call for researchers to better account for the logics of disconnection and undoing in geographical inquiry. Building on their exploration of “disorientated geographies

In this paper I analyse the making and unmaking of amphibious urban modernity in Recife in the Northeast of Brazil between 1920 and 1950. I argue that the transformation of the city was predicated on an absorptive and eradicative notion of whiteness that necessitated the creation of dry, enclosed land. The process of urban transformation proceeded not only through a racial division of space, but through

This paper analyses and critically discusses experiences and narratives of sexuality disclosure and concealment of LGBTQ people from a Muslim background living in Brussels. It does so by presenting data collected over a year of ethnographic research in the city. The “closet/coming out” metaphor is central in western discourses around LGBTQ identities and sexualities, and its wide circulation resulted

Using a novel longitudinal qualitative approach of revisiting older men across an elongated period, this paper addresses the lack of geographical attention given to older age masculinities specifically, and the limited exploration of the temporal aspects of masculinity more generally. Situated within debates around intersectional and relational approaches to masculinity and the critical geographies

As a central component of the smart city, sensor infrastructures locate and measure a wide range of variables in order to characterise the urban environment. Perhaps the most visible expression of the smart city, sensor deployment is a key equity concern. As new sensor technologies and resultant data interact with social processes, they have the potential to reproduce well-documented spatial injustices

Health and care policy is increasingly promoted within visions of the competitive city-region. This paper examines the importance of policy boosterism within the political construction of city-regions in the context of English devolution. Based on a two-year case study of health and social care devolution in Greater Manchester, England, we trace the relational and territorial geographies of policy

Through the lens of assemblage theory, we conceptualise organic certification for agricultural products in Cuba as a “dispositif-assemblage,” through which we trace a multiple and conflicted “will to govern” the production and valuing of food qualities. We juxtapose the hierarchical third-party certification system for Cuban organic honey for export with a proposed horizontal participatory guarantee