This article shares and reflects on Underwater Haiku Exquisite Corpse – a playful approach to writing and enquiry about rivers and their underwater environments. The Underwater Haiku Exquisite Corpse was an adaptation of the Surrealist exquisite corpse concept – a collaborative game in which each participant wrote or drew in response to a prompt and kept their contribution concealed until the end,

This paper stems from cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration between community music and human geography which sought to interrogate and understand claims of social sustainability and social change often cited in evaluation reports of community music projects. The lead authors (Parks and Cassidy) took this dialogue forward by organising a geography conference session which incorporated an instant

After being captured from the streets of Moscow, Laika was the first living creature to be sent into Earth’s orbit by the USSR in 1957. The 2019 film, Space Dogs, tells the story of Laika’s spectral return to Moscow, and searches for her ghosts in the city’s street dogs 60 years later. Combining archival material with contemporary documentary footage ‘filmed at dog’s level’, the film reanimates Laika’s

Post-representational cartography views maps as inherently unstable and unfinished, always in the making and thus singularly open for refolding and re-presentation. This perspective on maps calls for greater attention to the performances, negotiations, and contestations that occur during the ongoing production of maps, particularly in cases where maps are developed during collective, collaborative

This paper delves into the concept of relationality and pairs academic literature with stories and lessons from Country. Bringing together majority Indigenous scholarship on relationality, the paper describes three main ideas: (1) How does a relational reality operate? (2) Relationality as a living practice and, (3) Relationality as responsibilities with kin. Many examples are provided to explain relationality

Studying buildings can be a rich entry point into emerging cultural geographies. The archipelago of Chiloé in southern Chile is experiencing rapid change since the country’s extreme turn toward neoliberal governance in the 1970s. Once a rural, communal, and sea-faring region, it has been transformed by industrial aquaculture in recent decades which has driven a new urban landscapes and consumer-oriented

This article considers how cultural narratives of queer migration to urban centres are understood through media and cultural references that mark specific non-urban places and times. Through an analysis of queer migration narratives in Smalltown Boy (1984), a song and music video by UK band Bronski Beat, and Boytown (2012), its suburban Sydney reimagining by artist Daniel Mudie Cunningham and DJ Stephen

In this article we explore how the English post-industrial canal has gone from enclosed and abandoned urban ruin to thriving but contested urban landscape. We contend that canals deserve closer social scientific attention in and of themselves but also as a creative entry point for understanding the instabilities and ambivalences of contemporary urban life. We probe at three dynamics in the English

In this article we critique resilience’s oft-celebrated overcoming of modern liberal frameworks. We bring work on resilience in geography and cognate fields into conversation with explorations of the ‘asymmetrical Anthropocene’, an emerging body of thought which emphasizes human-nonhuman relational asymmetry. Despite their resonances, there has been little engagement between these two responses to

This paper argues that we need to challenge transcendent modes of evaluating creative practices in geography, both in order to question dominant ways of thinking about creativity and to cultivate a broader playing field on which to transform concepts and practices of aesthetics. This is important because the intervention of creative research must be coupled with a framework that can amplify it and

The Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 led many people to reassess their relationship to places. This article attempts, during this time of restricted movement, to imaginatively deep-map an island in the mouth of the Shannon in west Clare where my grandmother was born and raised. My deep-mapping of the island is by necessity virtual, assembled piecemeal from memories, daydreams, family recollections

A few years ago, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and decided to keep a sort of diary of my experiences and thoughts. This essay is a collection of what I call “episodes” and uses writing and drawing to try to capture something beyond the surface impressions of living with a chronic condition. I present several episodes drawn from the collection that I have been keeping since 2018. In presenting

In this conversation, we reflect on the development of a soundwalk produced by a theatre maker during her artistic residency in the Department of Geography at Swansea University. We discuss the approach taken to ‘place’ and the people in it, and the dynamics of an artist-geographer collaboration.

Balconies, windows and terraces have come to be identified as spaces with newfound meaning over the past year due to the Covid-19 pandemic and concomitant lockdowns. There was not only a marked increase in the use of these spaces, but more importantly a difference in the very nature of this use since March 2020. It is keeping this latter point in mind, that I make an attempt to understand the spatial

Representations of older age are often reductive in western societies, portrayed as a distinct period of life characterised by social disengagement and physiological decline. Through rich ethnographic accounts developed with older people from Greater Manchester UK, this paper is concerned with how the category of older age is made through representations, and the different ways people encounter and

Intimate Distances is an art project created in two parts – 6 months and 20,000 km apart. As a creative research project, it was conceived as a way to physically and conceptually explore distance through the intimate gesture of touch. It sought to visually communicate the spatial, temporal and embodied experiences of being on opposite sides of the world through the humble process of frottage. Grand

My response to Noxolo’s response to my 2019 lecture at the Royal Geographical Society.

What can memes teach us about shifting popular-cultural understandings of nature? While a certain form of environmentalism with proclivities for dour, self-righteous, sentimental, or apocalyptic tones is often taken to be hegemonic, Nicole Seymour argues that a more irreverent ‘low environmental culture’ should not be occluded. Humor and irony can serve as emotional registers for environmental media

This paper examines the role that light and dark play in how residents of Claremont Court, a modernist housing scheme in Edinburgh, Scotland, form a sense of atmosphere of place. Our findings show that the design of Claremont Court affords particular experiences of light and dark and of related warmth and cold that are meaningful to how residents experience and feel about the Court. While atmospheres

Filmmakers and scholars Christine Rogers, Catherine Gough-Brady, and Marsha Berry each find a connection with place through their video work. In this article, they share their experiences of creating short videos, focusing on their insider experiences of filming and the spatial relationships between themselves and place. Although each of them began with a proposition, they filmed unscripted, allowing

In the United States, Black cultural production is bound up with geographic containment, restrictions on mobility, and racial segregation. Jazz, hip-hop, house music, and the Minneapolis Sound (the music associated with late recording artist, Prince) were mid-wifed by some of the most repressive systems of geographic order. Indeed, containment and creativity, geographies of trouble and hope are hallmarks

In the spring of 2006 wild flamingos returned to Florida, though not to the places their kind had inhabited 100 years and more ago at the southern edge of the Everglades and the Florida Keys. Instead this group of flamingos alighted 80 miles northward in Palm Beach County’s Stormwater Treatment Area 2 (STA-2), a human-made facility for filtering anthropogenic pollutants from storm runoff. This paper

In the field of Deaf Geographies, one neglected area is that of the individual deaf body and how individual deaf bodies can produce deaf space in isolation from one another. Much of the work published in the field talks about collectively or socially produced deaf spaces through interaction between two or more deaf people. However, with deaf children increasingly being educated in mainstream schools

Mounted police units around the world have entered social media, with the aim of bringing the police closer to the public. In this paper, I analyze the Facebook page of the mounted police in the city of Helsinki, the capital of Finland. I ask how equine agency, animal work, interspecies care, and the relational networks of memory are interpreted, communicated, and performed on social media, contributing

This paper examines the curation of a month-long public exhibition titled #AanaJaana [#ComingGoing] in one of New Delhi’s busiest metro stations, as a form of self-authorship by young women from its digital and urban margins. #AanaJaana [#ComingGoing] is a metaphor for journeys, communications, connections, associations, interceptions, social networks and individual/collective behaviours, that is curated

The article analyzes the emergence of dog parks in Polandi, on the basis of stories from local media, with emphasis on how dog park proponents justify the need for establishing dog runs. Even though official arguments present dog parks as an amenity that offers training opportunities for dogs, the guardians’ activism is motivated by the recognition of their dogs’ needs for off-leash play and social

Affect theory suggests that imagining different futures for cities begins by feeling the present differently. This article considers the political potential of the affective register in the context of gentrifying Mexico City, where the 2017 earthquake, as a crisis-event, burst onto the ongoing crisis-ordinary of gentrification-based displacement. I argue that this convergence of crises opened an affective

In 2019, we collaborated with German theatre artists to co-create Between Worlds: Outsourcing Dementia Care, an immersive, multi-media piece performed in Newcastle and Berlin. This performance work animated and staged our interviews conducted with the owners of and caregivers working in private care facilities recently built in northern Thailand to provide dementia care for overseas guests from across

The time of COVID-19 lockdown has given us an opportunity to practice experimental methodologies of cultural geography. I use early-20th-century Polish guides to Rome, Italy, to provide exercises in auto-geography. The aim of these exercises is to enrich the practice of cultural geography by opening up to self-exploration and combining lectures and imagination with distanced spaces. These exercises

Women’s homelessness is a significant and increasing problem in the UK. Yet, much research on homelessness does not acknowledge the particular gendered issues homeless women face. Furthermore, the small amount of research available on the matter is often restricted to academic and professional audiences. Little Miss Homeless, a culture jammed children’s book, was produced with the intention of making

In lieu of material encounters, nonhuman spectres are made sense of through spectacles, imageries speculated upon with their own geographies and affects. This paper explores histories of trophy hunting in the Spanish Pyrenees, illustrating the emergence of the spectacular in relation to contemporary ideals of nature for hunters, in particular questioning the material implications of hunting for the

This article explores events in and around a supermarket with a middle-aged man with learning impairments. While documenting their particularities, this article also deploys these events as prisms through which to reflect upon how place is implicated in disabling practice and how the disabling geographies that such practice shapes and is shaped by may be un/re/made. These events are made subject to

This article examines the gendered service economy of bars and restaurants catering to ageing US military retirees in Olongapo City, Philippines. During the Cold War, Olongapo housed Subic Bay Naval Base, one of the largest overseas US military installations, and today thousands of former American service members have retired here. A focus on retiree bars reveals how Filipina bartenders and waitresses

Since 2000, the City of Dortmund has pursued an ambitious flagship project in the district of Hoerde. On the enormous site of a former steel plant, and in the middle of an impoverished working class district, a large new upper-middle class residential area (Phoenix) has been developed around an artificial lake. Qualitative fieldwork suggests that the project has generated mixed feelings among longtime

This article introduces inland waterway guidebooks as cultural objects that deserve further attention from cultural geographers who have begun to shed light on inland waterway cultures in recent years. It contributes to the wider disciplines long-standing interests in representations and representational objects, and more recently the interest in studying representations and their relations to everyday

Although ethical questions are at the core of more-than-human geographies, more attention needs to be paid on researchers’ ethical responsibilities to more-than-human research subjects in social scientific research. In this paper I critically analyze my empirical work on Finnish dairy farms from the perspective of multispecies research ethics. I suggest that the concept of care is useful in understanding

What do sonic, visual, and mediated forms of public gratitude for essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic tell us about the cultural politics of the category “essential worker”? What racial, gender, and class structures and processes shape the content, form, and composition of these collective practices of appreciation? In this paper, I draw on my participation in a nightly ritual of collective

Journalists and artists in the global North tend to amplify certain geographies as go-to scenes of post-industrial abandonment. But sometimes those who live in these geographies foreground hope against this dark imaginary. How do we make sense of a situation that seemingly calls for an analysis of precarious life when those who live in that situation does not want to be understood in precarious terms

In this essay, we propose to study three recent Australian landscape memoirs – Tim Winton’s Island Home (2015), Mark Tredinnick’s The Blue Plateau (2009) and Germaine Greer’s White Beech (2013) – all of which demonstrate the capacity of landscapes to act as perceptual conduits for the fundamental tension between world and self. Our main contention is that landscape memoir acts as a pre-eminent vehicle

Sustainable flood memories – defined as those formed of folk memories of flooding, flood heritage and other local, lay knowledges – have been identified as having great potential for increasing community resilience to floods. Focusing on the social and cultural aspects of flood and drought memory, we present the findings of archival research, interviews with residents of the Welsh colony in Argentine

In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant describes an impasse as “what it feels like to be in the middle of a shift.” This paper mobilizes that notion of impasse to critically analyze the position of Detroit’s “maker” community against the background of a rapidly changing city. Makers, who might crudely be described as small craft-manufacturers, have found themselves entangled in an emergent narrative of

This paper is an investigation into the psychological aspects of displacement, where displacement is understood as a form of un-homing that severs the connection between people and place. Extending the human-geographical discussion begun by Mark Davidson and Rowland Atkinson on the possibility of being displaced while staying put, I argue that words and narratives – here exemplified by the Swedish

Focusing on key mediators of knowledge-exchange in the Andes – known as kamayoq – we explore a recursive politics of translation (historicized, power-laden processes of hierarchically ordering language and meaning). Focusing on intercultural and bilingual education and development programs in the Peruvian Andes, and connecting cultural geographical, anthropological, and critical socio-linguistic scholarship

Presenting an inventory of discarded Adhesive Bandages (ABs) in the city, this visual essay reflects on the pervasive presence of human traces, using the figure of anthropo-scenes. The ABs become a visual metaphor – what used to be a momentary relief for pain, a protective layer, turns into a reminder of the active role humans are playing in the earth’s destruction, a reminder of the tension between

This paper initiates a new area of cultural geography – the geographies of puppets and puppetry – and makes both empirical and conceptual contributions by presenting an initial analysis of puppets ...

This paper reconstructs a fragment of psychiatric-psychoanalytical geography, interfacing it with the ‘new walking studies’, centring on a walk conducted in 1935 by a man experiencing mental health...

Human geography has become deeply interested in a range of research methods that focus on researchers’ corporeal engagement with their research sites. This interest has opened up an exciting set of...

This paper expands the notion of sacred space within the geographies of religion by arguing that spaces of religious praxis need to be understood in relation to the broader spatial logics within wh...

This article examines what I call ‘pulsing’ – visible surges of pedestrian activity. It applies a selection of Torsten Hagerstrand’s time-geographic vocabulary in an ethnographic case-study of Mitz...

Drawing on the ‘reparative turn’ in queer feminist scholarship, we situate a commemorative march that took place in late March 2018 in the Polk Gulch neighborhood of San Francisco as an entry point...

This paper offers an exploratory overview of different research literatures examining the relationship between urban nature or green space on the one hand, and marginalized, stigmatized, and illici...

This article looks at how Palestinian-Israeli middle-class mothers, who enjoy the advantages of the middle class yet belong to a geographically and socially marginalized minority, educate their chi...

This paper extends understanding of the underground city and the workings of the urban backstage through a critical analysis of water infrastructure maintenance and repair. It is based on analysis of ethnographic work undertaken with water maintenance operatives on-site at 11 water infrastructure repair jobs between 2015 and 2016 in Bristol, England. In this paper we argue that water infrastructure

The voluntary sector is playing an increasing role in responding to UK poverty, but there is a lack of attention in cultural geographies to understanding what motivates people to volunteer in this ...

Geography and the graphic image have a long, intertwined history of exchange. In recent scholarship, the graphic image plays an important role in geography’s creative (re)turn and geographers are e...

Black thought has long emphasized the vital importance of aesthetic politics to Black activism and community life. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of analyzing the aesthetic geogra...

Bravo makes this claim in part by arguing that these 19thand early 20th-century adventurers had at least somewhat inherited a sense of the Pole’s importance from early modern cartographers such as Peter Apian of Saxony, who produced a series of popular maps in the early 16th century that depicted the North Pole holding the Earth and universe together. Indeed, Bravo’s second and third chapters contend

Annabel Castro’s art installation ‘Outside in: exile at home’ (2018) problematizes indefinite detention at the Hacienda de Temixco, in Morelos, Mexico, a facility which functioned as a concentratio...

gloss on Hamlet as a play with ‘a set of spatial reductions’ (p. 43) is particularly astute. Elden’s work on several history plays (King John, Richard II, Henry V and Edward III) opens up a discussion of political, economic and legal concepts of territory, asking questions such as ‘What is the relation between political control of land and its possession? What does possession entail and allow?’ (p

Drawing on Marco Antonsich’s framework for analyzing belonging while also engaging critical legal geographies, this article applies a legal lens to Muslim belonging. It does so through discourse analysis of court, legislative, and political pronouncements regarding burkini bans that surfaced in France shortly after a terror attack by a self-identified Muslim, and with ‘burkini’ serving as a proxy for