In this article we develop a feminist political ecology of disaster colonialism. To do so, we center a series of fires that devastated Park Yard Market in Kampala, Uganda, one of the largest retail spaces in East Africa. Officially accidental, rumors suggest the fires were deliberately set to displace traders and make way for the lucrative (re)development of the city‐center land. Concerned less with

This paper explores the entanglements between urban and domestic temporalities in order to understand what it means to live in the city. Inspired by the film Estate: a reverie (Zimmerman, 2015a), and drawing on a series of home‐city biographies, this paper explores the ‘living of time’ through the memories, experiences, and narratives of residents living on different housing estates near Kingsland

Recent scholarship on smart cities and platform urbanism has explored the very wide range of data harvested from urban environments by digital devices of many kinds, analysing how not only efficiencies but also profits are sought through the extraction, circulation, transformation, commodification, integration, and re‐use of data. Much of that data is generated by smartphone applications. This paper

Human geography has experienced a burgeoning interest in care. Despite this, the more radical potentials of thinking with, and through, care remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we critically examine one such potential, asking how care might facilitate a substantial rethinking of practices of research and analysis within human geography. We argue that care does not simply name practices of social

This paper explores the relationship between human trafficking and geographies of stigma. We introduce post‐trafficking contexts as important settings for understanding how geographical imaginaries underpin the everyday occurrence of stigma for those who have experienced human trafficking. We show how a focus on trafficking can speak back to some of the core migration literatures in Geography, highlighting

Notions of “artfulness” are increasingly being used in the humanities and social sciences to nod towards ephemeral linkages between creativity and ecological sensitivity, but there has so far been little work to flesh out in detail what this term entails, both conceptually and in practice. This paper contributes to current understandings of “artfulness” through an in‐depth case study of conversations

There is an absence of absence in legal geography and materialist studies of the law. Drawing on a multi‐sited ethnography of European asylum appeal hearings, this paper illustrates the importance of absences for a fully‐fledged materiality of legal events. We show how absent materials impact hearings, that non‐attending participants profoundly influence them, and that even when participants are physically

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

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, focusing 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 paper introduces the collection of six African‐Caribbean academics, making the claim for the forum as an intervention that pushes towards the firmer establishment of a Black British Geography. This intervention forum arises out of a public event called “Urban roots of creative Black culture: gender, music, and the body,” which took place at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, UK, in 2019,

This short piece explores the concept of the Black Atlantic 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 paper 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