This paper draws on evidence from debt bonded brick workers in Cambodia to explore how animism and formal religion are articulated to retain workers in dangerous and difficult conditions. The paper shows first how factory labourers, owners, and local religious figures actively articulate spiritual beliefs by legitimising workers’ confinement to the kiln through moral recourse to Buddhist notions of

Set against the attention given to animal‐agricultural geographies and animal agriculture's environmental impacts, proponents of cultured meat (i.e. biomass cultured from cells) and genetic modification‐based ‘cellular‐agricultural' technologies today promise that the production of animal products could become more sustainable if animals were taken out of the equation. Though future visions for such

Islands, long portrayed in the western imaginary as remote, static and bounded entities, have increasingly come to be viewed as places constantly in the making: as connected sites formed by complex and shifting relations and assemblages of people and things. This paper considers the role that waste plays in this process through exploration of how discarded and unwanted matter decays, moves and comes

Responding to claims in urban studies and epidemiology that modern urban living negatively affects the mental health of the poor and newcomers to the city, this paper offers a different account based on an ethnography of a neighbourhood in central Shanghai, where precarious rural migrant lives unfold. Drawing on the concept of “ecologies of experience” to recognise the making of everyday sensibilities

This paper offers a geographical framework for considering animal breeds as objects of knowledge and living entities, and uses it to explore how ideas of breed origin constitute breeds and affect interspecies relations, human relations and the making of value. It suggests how critical animal geographers could engage more fully with breeds and breeding through an expanded concept of breed wealth that

This editorial introduces a special virtual issue of Transactions [HTML LINK] aimed at providing online access to articles that can contribute to the work of coming to geographical terms with the COVID‐19 pandemic. It outlines seven sub‐themes of enquiry and analysis that appear especially useful for contextualizing coronavirus geographically. These are explored in turn as geographies of: (1) infection

Using a new modelling methodology known as “extreme event attribution”, or EEA, climate scientists can now connect extreme weather to anthropogenic forcings. This paper seeks to uncover the significance of extreme event attribution for the epistemology of climate change, nature, and culture in the Anthropocene. First, we examine how EEA is emblematic of a larger turn in climate modelling, one that

The idea and practice of going “into the field” to conduct research and gather data is a deeply rooted aspect of Geography as a discipline. For global North Development Geographers, among others, this usually entails travelling to, and spending periods of time in, often far‐flung parts of the global South. Forging a successful academic career as a Development Geographer in the UK is therefore to some

Feminist work on population governance has tracked its racial dynamics, its varied attempts to expunge the poor from the future, and its violent wresting of control over reproduction away from women. Attention has recently turned to “economized” understandings of possible and proto‐life that take the aggregate reproductivity of certain groups of women and girls as a means of shaping economic futures

Much recent work on climate justice and activism focuses on the broader socio‐political economic contexts in which contestation occurs. These contestatory spaces in neoliberalised economies are frequently depoliticised through a variety of processes, strategies, practices, and actors. Recently this has been framed as the post‐political – whereby dissent is legitimised as “democratic” only when it does

This paper critically engages with the implications of the “affect turn” in the geographies of development and volunteering. By way of considering “affective life” at a residential youth care centre in Peru through an ethnographic study, we aim to contribute to current discussions of “(self‐)transformation” taking place through affectivity in the experience of volunteering. Conceptually, our approach

This piece introduces the author's doctoral research, Roots: Establishing British Caribbean Diasporic Identity through Dance. The research identifies how choreographic and movement practices function to establish and affirm British Caribbean Diasporic identities, focussing on how this occurs within two generations of British Caribbean Diasporic artists who have been creating and performing work since

In this interview piece, Professor Emerita Carolyn Cooper speaks with Pat Noxolo about gender in Jamaican popular culture, about the classed and gendered geographies of Kingston, and about her own long career at the University of the West Indies.

This article introduces the collection of five African‐Caribbean academics, making the claim for the forum as an intervention that pushes towards the firmer establishment of a Black British Geography.

This short piece explores the concept of the Black archive in terms of an acceptance that 'everything is everything', a concept that Africans and their descendants in the 'new world' have accounted for in the development of their various cosmological frameworks.

This article will suggest that the cultural production made by Black (British) Feminist Millennial Creative Collectives during this period of Austerity and Brexit is informed by the Black British archive(s) but seeks to move beyond those borders. The forms of Black cultural content emerging from these collectives offer clues as to what the future of creative Black British culture may become.

Arising from seven months of auto/ethnographic research in an English city, this paper attends to the mundane practices through which we – “the homeless” – renegotiate ourselves to become more‐than‐homeless. The “we” through which these auto/biographies are writ denotes an inflection on the spectral presence of my own experiences of homelessness, spectral because they reflect a historic occurrence

In this paper I progress an emotional geography of diplomacy by considering emotions as part of calculative action on the part of diplomats. I seek to move the spotlight away from what emotion is to what emotion, as an embodied sociality, seeks to do to the alteration or reproduction of geopolitical relations. This unique focus on the calculative dimensions of emotional usage in diplomacy is a central

This paper proposes that “development justice” be taken up as an analytical concept and praxis‐driven framework for research on disasters, resilience, and climate change. The piece begins with a synopsis of the historical‐structural factors exacerbating risk in the Caribbean before reviewing the concepts of vulnerability, resilience, and development justice. Next, drawing from empirical data and via

Queer, feminist, and non‐representational geographies have highlighted the ways that a predetermined and self‐contained idea of the subject limits the options for theorising the politics of identity and resistance. Transgender lives speak to this problem in new and productive ways, alerting us to the constitutive vulnerability of individual bodies and ideas – a vulnerability that does not map neatly

This paper explores the proliferation of short‐term home rentals (STRs) in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, to consider how contemporary technologies of platform urbanism leverage the human infrastructure of emotional labour as a technique for value production. Bringing theories of emotional labour and gentrification together with recent writing on the spatialities of platforms, I argue that for the production

This paper traces the category “expatriate” in the Royal Dutch Shell Group of Companies, focusing on two key moments of corporate structural change in the 1950s and 1990s. The paper examines how the “expatriate” was materially and narratively produced by the corporation, by employees labelled expatriate and by spouses. It interrogates continuities and transformations, and their power effects, inquiring

This paper draws on ethnographic material to analyse how unemployed youth create work in the private educational sector. It shows how a set of educated young men, who moved from rural areas to a north Indian city to find work, are seeking to create jobs after an extended period of unemployment. Having attended coaching clinics and private tuition centres to prepare for white‐collar jobs, they draw

To better understand the range of possibilities and opportunities for (co)existence available to displacement‐affected people, attention must be given to the thick webs of sociality shaping interactions in situations of mass displacement. This paper makes the case that refugee squats in Athens are distinct spaces wherein different understandings of (co)existence converge – spaces whose production is

Emergency preparedness is a distinctive feature of contemporary anticipatory politics, yet “preppers,” a sub‐culture who prepare to survive a range of possible crisis events through practices including stockpiling and survival skill development, are subject to media ridicule and academic dismissal. If the hoarder is the symbolic deviant figure of the consumer society, the prepper is that of the security

One of the first industries developed in frontier regions, tourism opens new land and commodity frontiers through practices of primitive accumulation that can radically disrupt the reproduction of social relations of production. However, very little work explicitly addresses the role of tourism in frontier‐making practices. This paper brings political economy and critical geopolitics to bear on the

Analysing the affective geographies of digitally mediated payday loans in the UK, this paper advocates and exemplifies an approach to cultural economy that focuses on how economic worlds are affectively animated and lived. Supplementing the two versions of “culture” that cultural economy approaches have to date been organised around – culture as signifying system or culture as assembled effect – we

Geographers have long been concerned with the spaces, scales, and conceptual significance of volunteering. They have, however, been slower to engage with the global surge in medical volunteering, whether in times of everyday or acute emergency. Volunteering is a crucial component of the architectures of global health and humanitarianism, but it remains marginal to the concerns of both health and development

The discovery of a rare fly in a North London cemetery marks my entry point into a wider reflection on the value and significance of urban biodiversity. Using different indices of ecological endangerment, along with a critical reading of new materialist insights, this paper explores the cultural, political, and scientific significance of saproxylic (rotten wood) invertebrate communities in an urban

This paper develops the notion of "energy precarity" in order to uncover the governance practices and material conditions that drive and reproduce the inability of households to secure socially- and materially-necessitated levels of energy services in the home. The overarching aim is to foreground a geographical approach towards the study of domestic energy deprivation, by emphasizing the complex socio-spatial

Following the increasing availability of DNA-sequenced data, the genetic structure of populations can now be inferred and studied in unprecedented detail. Across social science, this innovation is shaping new bio-social research agendas, attracting substantial investment in the collection of genetic, biological and social data for large population samples. Yet genetic samples are special because the

The paper expands the conceptual framework within which we examine mortgage debt by reconceptualising mortgages as a biotechnology: a technology of power over life that forges an intimate relationship between global financial markets, everyday life and human labour. Taking seriously the materiality of mortgage contracts as a means of forging new embodied practices of financialisation, we urge for the

The extent to which socioeconomic (dis)advantage is transmitted between generations is receiving increasing attention from academics and policymakers. However, few studies have investigated whether there is a spatial dimension to this intergenerational transmission of (dis)advantage. Drawing on the concept of neighbourhood biographies, this study contends that there are links between the places individuals

"Military service in France during the nineteenth century removed many young men from their own localities for long periods. The widely accepted claim that few conscripts returned home after completing their period of service is based on little evidence. The paper examines the conscription classes of 1856 and 1891 in two cantons in the departement of Loir-et-Cher. In those cases, there was not a significant

"Bangladeshis are one of a wide variety of recently established immigrant groups in Italy, analysed here as an example of the interaction of geopolitics, employment and survival strategies, and the micropolitics of the community's organization in Italy. The geopolitics involves events in Bangladesh (change of government), Italy (the Martelli Law and other legislation), Europe (EU and other European

"The currently dominant element in the labour migration from the Caribbean to Britain and France is a return flow of migrants. This paper focuses on the migrations from the Commonwealth and the French Caribbean to Britain and France respectively. While these migrations are historically similar in origin, subsequent differences in the colonial and immigration policies of Britain and France have resulted

"This paper explores the development of a so-called asylum 'buffer zone' around the eastern frontiers of the west European region as a result of the Schengen, EU and EFTA member states' introduction of more restrictive asylum policies during the first half of the 1990s. Restrictive policies in western Europe are forcing central and east European states into a 'buffer role', obliging them to absorb

"Recent archaeological, ethnohistorical and ecological evidence has begun to challenge the view that 'civilizations' failed to develop in the Amazon basin due to limitations of the tropical forest environment. As a result, estimates of the native population in 1492 have become an issue of debate. These estimates are evaluated in the light of the ethnohistorical research on the Ecuadorian headwaters

"Stepping back from current debates over immigration in the new 'Fortress Europe', this paper examines moral and philosophical arguments for an alternative and more 'progressive' immigration policy. Despite recent interest within geography in principles of social justice, the extent to which such principles reach beyond particular societies or nations has rarely been considered explicitly. The notion

"Current research in migration is moving on from neo-classical and behavioural perspectives to a more structural approach relating to wider processes, issues of power and the particular role of employers. Within this programme a key issue for investigation is the interaction between spatial mobility and the structuring of labour markets. This paper focuses on the significance of labour market segmentation--in

"This paper has revealed a complex set of relationships between migration, place and ethnic identity [in Hong Kong]. On the one hand, ethnic identity is shaped by the places where people have lived, particularly the places where they have spent the early years of their life; on the other [hand], places--being the context for socialization--provide the milieux where people learn who and what they are

"The spread of HIV-1 in the United Kingdom is simulated by a model which integrates behavioural and epidemiological processes within a multi-regional population projection framework and represents the spatial heterogeneities in the distribution of HIV which have significant effects on transmission patterns. Analyses determine the significance of different parameters in contributing to prediction uncertainty

"A rarely utilized source of migration data from the 1981 [U.K.] Census is used to examine the mobility patterns of migrants resident in different [housing] tenures within England and Wales at the regional and county level. A Poisson regression approach is used to compare the effects of distance on migration propensities for those moving into owner-occupied housing, council housing and privately rented

"The decade between the 1981 and 1991 UK Censuses of Population has seen an enormous increase in the use of the postcode system for locational referencing. To date, no direct means have existed for linking postcoded data to census geography at the most detailed level, but the production of a new ED/postcode directory promises to offer a range of new opportunities for postcode applications following