Concise Encyclopedia of Human Geography 180088348X, 9781800883482

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Concise Encyclopedia of Human Geography

ELGAR ENCYCLOPEDIAS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Elgar Encyclopedias in the Social Sciences serve as the definitive reference works to their fields. Each Encyclopedia is overseen by an editor internationally recognised as a leading name within the field, and contain a multitude of entries written by key scholars, providing an accessible and condensed overview of the key topics within a given subject area. Volumes in the series are commissioned across the breadth of the social sciences, and cover areas including, but not limited to, Political Science, Sociology, Human Geography, Development Studies, Social Policy, Public Management and Public Policy. Individual entries present a concise and logical overview of a given subject, together with a list of references for further study. Each Encyclopedia will serve as an invaluable resource for practitioners, academics, and students, and should form an essential part of any research journey. Titles in the series include: Elgar Encyclopedia of Public Management Edited by Kuno Schedler Elgar Encyclopedia of Technology and Politics Edited by Andrea Ceron Elgar Encyclopedia of Services Edited by Faïz Gallouj, Camal Gallouj, Marie-Christine Monnoyer and Luis Rubalcaba Concise Encyclopedia of Human Geography Edited by Loretta Lees and David Demeritt

Concise Encyclopedia of Human Geography Edited by

Loretta Lees Initiative on Cities, Boston University, USA

David Demeritt Department of Geography, King’s College London, UK

ELGAR ENCYCLOPEDIAS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Loretta Lees and David Demeritt 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2022950285 This book is available electronically in the Geography, Planning and Tourism subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781800883499

ISBN 978 1 80088 348 2 (cased) ISBN 978 1 80088 349 9 (eBook)

EEP BoX

Contents

List of contributorsviii Introduction to the Concise Encyclopedia of Human Geography by Loretta Lees and David Demerittxii

13 Colonialism Satish Kumar

63

14 Comparative geographies Julie Ren

69 74

1 Activism Elise Lecomte

1

15 Crime Elizabeth Brown

79

2

7

16 Critical geographies Lawrence Berg

84

3 Affect Ben Anderson

12

17 Cultural geographies Andrew Lapworth

89

4

17

18 Development geographies Andrew McGregor 19 Diaspora Michael Rios

94

20 Digital geographies Andrew Dwyer

99

Actor network theory Kristian Ruming

Animal geographies Guillem Rubio-Ramon and Krithika Srinivasan

5 Anthropocene Noel Castree

22

6 Art Friederike Landau-Donnelly

27

7

32

Artificial intelligence Di Zhu and Yingjie Hu

8 Assemblages Pooya Ghoddousi

37

9

42

Big data Francisco Rowe

10 Bodies Carl Bonner-Thompson

48

11 Bordering Matthew Tillotson

53

12 Class Julie MacLeavy

58

v

21 Disability Rob Imrie

104

22 Displacement Emil Pull

109

23 Economic geographies Felicia Liu

114

24 Education Ellen Bishop

120

25 Emotional Katy Bennett and Jay Emery

125

26 Energy James Angel

131

27 Environmental geographies Mohammed Rafi Arefin

136

vi  Concise encyclopedia of human geography

28 Ethics Mara Ferreri

140

223

145

43 Legal geographies Caroline Griffith, Sarah Klosterkamp, Alida Cantor and Austin Kocher

29 Ethnography Sharda Rozena 30 Feminist geographies Kanchana N. Ruwanpura and Miriam Gay-Antaki

150

44 Marxist geographies Jamie Gough

229 235

31 Food geographies Benjamin Coles

156

45 Migration geographies Joris Schapendonk

32 Gender Anahid Shirkhodaee and Margaret Walton-Roberts

161

33 Geographic information systems (GIS) Victoria Houlden

167

46 Military geographies 240 Rachel Woodward and Alice Cree 47 Mobilities Cristina Temenos

245

48 Music Michelle Duffy

250

49 Nation-state Máiréad Dunne and Barbara Crossouard

255

34 Geopolitics Gavin Brown

175

35 Health geographies Niamh Shortt

180

50 Nature Franklin Ginn

260

36 Historical geographies Carry van Lieshout and Benjamin Newman

185

51 Neoliberalism Arnaud Brennetot

265

37 Humanistic geographies Casey D. Allen

190

52 Place Tone Huse

270

38 Identity Christabel Devadoss and Doug Allen

196

53 Political ecology Elia Apostolopoulou

275

54 Politics Rhys Jones

281

55 Population geographies Elin Charles-Edwards

286

56 Post-colonial geographies Eduardo Ascensão

292

39 Indigenous geographies 201 Christine Añonuevo, Sarah de Leeuw, Marion Erickson, Monika Krzywania, Laura McNab-Coombs, Omolara Odulaja and Onyx Sloan Morgan 40 Infrastructure Kathryn Furlong

208

57 Poverty Mark Fransham

297

41 Labour geographies Debolina Majumder

213

58 Power  Liza Griffin

302

42 Landscape Martin Phillips

217

59 Psychoanalytic geographies Lucas Pohl

307

Contents  vii

60 Public space Jason Luger

312

77 Urban geographies Mark Davidson

398

61 Race Archie Davies and Nadia Mosquera Muriel

317

78 Young people Lorraine van Blerk

403

62 Radical geographies Joe Penny

323

63 Realism (critical) Andy Pratt

328

64 Relational geographies Martin Jones

333

65 Religion Justin Tse and Lily Kong

338

66 Representation/al Amy Barron and Joe Blakey

343

67 Risk George Warren

348

68 Rural geographies Niamh McHugh

353

69 Scale Andrew P. Kythreotis and Andrew E.G. Jonas

358

70 Segregation Tia Ndu

362

71 Sexualities Mel Jones

367

72 Social geographies Michele Lobo

372

73 Space Peter Merriman

378

74 Time Clara Rivas-Alonso

383

75 Transport geographies Debbie Hopkins and Anna Plyushteva

388

76 Uneven development Hamish Kallin

393

Index408

Contributors

Casey D. Allen, Department of Biological and Chemical Sciences, The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados

Carl Bonner-Thompson, School of Environment and Technology, University of Brighton, UK

Doug Allen, Department of Global Studies and Human Geography, Middle Tennessee State University, USA

Arnaud Brennetot, Department of Geography, University de Rouen-Normandy, France

Ben Anderson, Department of Geography, Durham University, UK

Elizabeth Brown, Department of Criminal Justice Studies, San Francisco State University, USA

James Angel, Department of Geography, King’s College London, UK Christine Añonuevo, Health Arts Research Centre, University of Northern British Columbia, Canada Elia Apostolopoulou, Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, University of Cambridge, UK Mohammed Rafi Arefin, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Canada Eduardo Ascensão, Centro de Estudos Geográficos, University of Lisbon, Portugal Amy Barron, School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester, UK Katy Bennett, School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester, UK Lawrence Berg, Institute for Community Engaged Research, University of British Columbia, Canada Ellen Bishop, School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester, UK Joe Blakey, School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester, UK

Gavin Brown, Independent Scholar, UK Alida Cantor, Department of Geography, Portland State University, USA Noel Castree, Faculty of Arts and Social Science, University of Technology Sydney, Australia Elin Charles-Edwards, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Queensland, Australia Benjamin Coles, School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester, UK Alice Cree, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, UK Barbara Crossouard, School of Education and Social Work, University of Sussex, UK Mark Davidson, Graduate School Geography, Clark University, USA

of

Archie Davies, School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, UK Sarah de Leeuw, Health Arts Research Centre, University of Northern British Columbia, Canada Christabel Devadoss, Department of Global Studies and Human Geography, Middle Tennessee State University, USA Michelle Duffy, School of Environmental and Life Sciences, University of Newcastle, Australia

viii

Contributors  ix

Máiréad Dunne, School of Education and Social Work, University of Sussex, UK

Rob Imrie, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Andrew Dwyer, Department of Information Security, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Andrew E.G. Jonas, Department of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Hull, UK

Jay Emery, Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, UK

Martin Jones, Staffordshire University, UK

Marion Erickson, Health Arts Research Centre, University of Northern British Columbia, Canada Mara Ferreri, Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning, Polytechnic of Turin, Italy Mark Fransham, Department of Social Policy and Intervention, Oxford University, UK Kathryn Furlong, Department of Geography, University of Montreal, Canada Miriam Gay-Antaki, Latin American and Iberian Institute, University of New Mexico, USA Pooya Ghoddousi, Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK Franklin Ginn, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, UK Jamie Gough, Independent Scholar, UK Liza Griffin, The Bartlett Planning Development Unit, University College London, UK Caroline Griffith, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA Debbie Hopkins, Department for Continuing Education and School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, UK Victoria Houlden, School of Geography, University of Leeds, UK Yingjie Hu, Department of Geography, The State University of New York at Buffalo, USA Tone Huse, Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Studies and Theology, UiT, The Arctic University of Norway, Norway

Mel Jones, School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester, UK Rhys Jones, Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, UK Hamish Kallin, Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh, UK Sarah Klosterkamp, Department of Geography, University of Bonn, Germany Austin Kocher, Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, USA Lily Kong, Singapore University, Singapore

Management

Monika Krzywania, Health Arts Research Centre, University of Northern British Columbia, Canada Satish Kumar, School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast, UK Andrew P. Kythreotis, School of Geography, University of Lincoln, UK Friederike Landau-Donnelly, Department of Geography, Radboud University, the Netherlands Andrew Lapworth, School of Science, University of New South Wales Canberra, Australia Elise Lecomte, School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester, UK Felicia Liu, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford and Department of Environment and Geography, University of York, UK Michele Lobo, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Australia

x  Concise encyclopedia of human geography

Jason Luger, Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Northumbria University, UK

Julie Ren, Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Julie MacLeavy, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, UK

Michael Rios, Department of Human Ecology, University of California Davis, USA

Debolina Majumder, Department Geography, Cambridge University, UK

of

Clara Rivas-Alonso, Urban School, Sciences Po, France

Andrew McGregor, Discipline of Geography and Planning, Macquarie School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia

Francisco Rowe, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Liverpool, UK

Niamh McHugh, School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester, UK Laura McNab-Coombs, Health Arts Research Centre, University of Northern British Columbia, Canada

Sharda Rozena, School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester, UK Guillem Rubio-Ramon, Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh, UK Kristian Ruming, Department of Geography and Planning, Macquarie University, Australia

Peter Merriman, Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, UK

Kanchana Geography, Sweden

Nadia Mosquera Muriel, Department of Geography and the Environment, The University of Texas at Austin, USA

Joris Schapendonk, Geography, Radboud Netherlands

Tia Ndu, School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester, UK

Anahid Shirkhodaee, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Wilfred Laurier University, Canada

Benjamin Newman, Department Geography, Open University, UK

of

Omolara Odulaja, Health Arts Research Centre, University of Northern British Columbia, Canada Joe Penny, UCL Urban Laboratory, University College London, UK Martin Phillips, School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester, UK Anna Plyushteva, Transport Studies Unit, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, UK Lucas Pohl, Department of Geography, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany Andy Pratt, Department of Sociology, City University of London, UK Emil Pull, Department of Global Development and Planning, University of Agder, Norway

N. Ruwanpura, Human University of Gothenberg, Department University,

of the

Niamh Shortt, Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh, UK Onyx Sloan Morgan, Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies, University of British Columbia Krithika Srinivasan, Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh, UK Cristina Temenos, Department of Geography and Manchester Urban Institute, University of Manchester, UK Matthew Tillotson, Department of Geography, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK Justin Tse, Singapore University, Singapore

Management

Lorraine van Blerk, Geography and Environmental Science, University of Dundee, UK Carry van Lieshout, Department Geography, Open University, UK

of

Contributors  xi

Margaret Walton-Roberts, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Wilfred Laurier University, Canada George Warren, Department of Geography, King’s College London, UK

Rachel Woodward, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, UK Di Zhu, Department of Geography, Environment and Society, University of Minnesota, USA

Introduction to the Concise Encyclopedia of Human Geography by Loretta Lees and David Demeritt

we were attentive to the gender and ethnicity balance of our contributors, and succeeded in including authors at a range of career stages (from PhD researchers right through to distinguished professors), we struggled, as white, UK-based and English-speaking geographers of a certain age, to involve as many geographers as we would have liked working outside of the UK and North America and publishing in other languages. For a host of reasons, human geography is dominated by an Anglo-American core of authors, institutions and journal outlets (Imhof and Müller, 2020). Notwithstanding our significant international networks, the contributors to this Encyclopedia are still drawn predominantly from that Anglo-American bubble, and so, despite their demographic diversity in terms of gender, ethnicity and career stage, the map of human geography provided by contributors reflects the prevailing biases and intellectual proclivities of that institutional setting. So what is ‘geography’, and ‘human geography’ in particular? That is a question that geographers have argued about since the very dawn of the discipline. At its most basic, human geography is concerned with the interrelationships between people, place and the environment, and human geographers are especially focused on how this varies spatially and temporally (across space and time). Human geography is more connected (philosophically, theoretically and methodologically) with other disciplinary work in the social sciences and the humanities, in comparison to ‘physical geography’, which is more connected to the natural, mathematical and physical sciences. Human geography is a ‘spatial science’, distinguishing itself from, for example, sociology or anthropology. It is interested in spatial organization and the spatial processes that organize the world around us, and the people (humans) and non-humans in it. Human geographers draw on a set of concepts through which they study the world spatially and temporally; these include space, place, scale, landscape, nature and mobility (all of which have their own entries in this Encyclopedia). Human geography is made up of numerous subdisciplinary fields and specialities, spanning from the longer-standing ones like economic geography, urban geography, rural geography, development geography, political geography, social geography, cultural geography, transport geography, historical geography and

When approached to edit this Concise Encyclopedia of Human Geography we hesitated to get involved, given the number of similar volumes out there and the work involved in such a venture. But in the end we decided to take this on, partly out of genuine curiosity about ‘the state of human geography’ today, but also in recognition of how valuable such reference volumes can be, particularly for students or those encountering human geography from other disciplines. Having leaned heavily on similar reference volumes as we learned the ropes and established ourselves as geographers, we hope that this Encyclopedia will help light the way for future generations of geographers. As joint editors of this Encyclopedia, we come from different subdisciplinary traditions, which in turn face outwards from human geography in different directions. Loretta has long identified as an urban geographer, but sees herself, more broadly, as an urbanist and urban studies scholar working at the interface of human geography with sociology, architecture, planning and policy. By contrast, David has long identified as an environmental geographer, working across the internal divides between human and physical geography, and increasingly making forays well outside of geography into applied policymaking and public administration. We are white geographers trained in the ‘Anglo-American tradition’ (although this is often the term used, we would argue it should be Anglo-American traditions – there is no singular tradition) who have worked in British geography departments for most of our careers to date. We are in the later stages of our academic careers. We have only worked together before on three publications and the last of these was well over a decade ago, so working together again triggered interesting debates between us about the state of human geography. It must be noted that our positionality is consequential for the map of the discipline provided by this Encyclopedia. While xii

Introduction  xiii

health geography and so on, to newer specialities like sexualities geographies, young people’s geographies, emotional geographies, Indigenous geographies, geographies of race, decolonial geographies, geographic information science (GIScience), and so on. The premier human geography journal Progress in Human Geography often reviews these fields and suggests future trajectories for research. It is worth our readers looking at these reviews. Boyle (2021) argues that ‘human geography’ is best understood as both an intellectual endeavour and a historical, political and institutional project – we agree. There is a long and complex history to Anglo-American human geography, as it moved through different paradigm shifts, from regionalism, to environmental determinism to behavioural geography, humanistic geography, radical geography, feminist geography, the ‘new’ cultural geography and so on. There is no need to recount that fascinating history here – we refer interested readers instead to Livingstone (1992), Johnston and Sidaway (2004), Nayak and Jeffrey (2011) and Cresswell (2013). Yet, at the same time, our readers should be looking at, and thinking about, those histories of human geography outside of Anglo-America. Öhman and Simonsen (2003), for example, zoom in on Nordic human geography. Others have been more international in their horizon – for example, Barnes and Sheppard’s (2019) section on radical geography beyond North America or Berg et al.’s (2021) foray into the international histories of the subdiscipline of critical geography. Most recently, human geography has seen the growth of critical geographies (and this Encyclopedia reflects that), which both reject but also draw on and extend earlier work and approaches. There are no clean breaks – the formation of human geography has been and will likely continue to be cumulative. For example, shoots from the discipline’s quantitative turn of the 1950s and 1960s can be seen sprouting today in the flowering of GIScience. Another noteworthy flowering can be traced back to the continued influence of post-structural ideas (and especially the cultural turn and in that practices of deconstruction) that first swept through the discipline in the 1990s. Indeed, when we were both located in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, we attended the 1995 Inaugural Critical Geography Conference that it hosted. Looking through the entries in this

Encyclopedia, we are struck by how many still reflect the energies unleased by those cultural and critical turns, like the emergence of new materialist, more-than-human and non-representational geographies, which in various ways seek to move beyond the focus of the cultural turn with language, meaning and the interpretation of wilful human action. The ongoing impact of the ‘cultural turn’ in human geography can also be seen in the growth in so-called ‘critical geographies’, initially feminist and/or materialist, and now critical race and post-colonial theories, which are gaining real traction in the discipline as we try desperately and belatedly to decolonize it. Despite these interventions, human geography is still a predominantly white and masculine discipline (see Oswin, 2020). Yet, as we write, there is some evidence that things are changing. For example, British and North American geography departments are starting to decolonize their curriculums and to be more attentive to gender and ethnicity in their hiring processes. But, as Sheppard (2022, p. 20) argues, we need to be ‘particularly attentive to spatial exclusions: the danger of marginalizing southern and non-Anglophone scholarship and non-academic expertise even as we work to diversify Anglophone geography’s internal makeup. Putting it bluntly, decolonizing geographical thinking means challenging the presumption that Anglophone scholarship is the go-to place for cutting-edge thought’. In thinking about what to include in this Encyclopedia, we noted that theoretical work in human geography is more highly cited than empirical work, and that intellectual prestige and prowess is often associated with the former not the latter, and it is usually male. We would argue that this is a real issue that needs both discussion in the discipline and to be addressed. In response, we made a real effort to include as many female (and indeed, non-white) contributors as was possible and the result is a reasonably good gender (and ethnicity) balance. The 78 entries we finally agreed on, after reviewing other human geography encyclopedias, text books and review articles, are limited by the overall word count we had to work within – after all, this is a concise encyclopedia. There are, of course, many more entries we could have included, but the entries cover the breadth and depth of human geography and provide a good ‘state of the art of human geography’ at a ready glance. Encyclopedias are supposed to

xiv  Concise encyclopedia of human geography

produce legitimate information from expert and scholarly sources that we as the editors are supposed to check over and verify, which we did. Nevertheless, we must recognize that none of the entries are unbiased; contributors have their own takes on the entries they were asked to write. We did not interfere with their takes, as they represent the field. The word cloud below (see Figure 0.1), which was developed from all the entries in the Encyclopedia, was an interesting exercise in terms of getting an overall picture of the key or popular words that dominate at different levels in the contributions (see Jackson et al., 2006 for earlier work on this). Putting the focus on (human) geography and geographers to one side, it is notable that social dominates, followed by space and political. Space is used more frequently than place, perhaps reflecting a move away from 1990s’ work on geography, place and representation. It is also notable that political is used more than say economic, cultural or urban. We speculate that this reflects a new politicization in human geography involving a renewed focus on power and struggle around issues of social justice and a new interest in Indigenous knowledge and approaches as we begin to decolonize the discipline. The other notable thing is how pluralized human geography is: contributors prefer plural, more open terms, like geographies, spaces, forms, relations and so on. They look across and beyond. They are interested in the world around them, in the global. Human geography is avowedly research (led), critical and spatial; theory floats further down the hierarchy. Human geography is also very actively focused on doing: approaches, processes, practices; it seeks and investigates understanding, the continuance of an interest in Verstehen perhaps from the cultural turn. Data is impor-

tant. Time is another key concern but one notably subordinate to space and the spatial. But beyond the word cloud, what trends in human geography did we uncover in the process of editing this Encyclopedia? We have already mentioned the continued impact of the ‘cultural turn’, but we also noted the growing impact of big data, even on historical geography; the renewed and much more committed focus on decolonization of the discipline away from white, Anglo-American, colonial lenses; and increased work on the Anthropocene, which is opening the door to new conversations between human and physical geographers, and with other disciplines. Big data refers to the voluminous information being generated by people in an increasingly digital world, from mobile phone data to Twitter or Facebook data, to credit card or supermarket club card transactions. Harvested and analysed computationally, big data offers human geography scholars the possibility of finding new patterns and correlations, and even to seeing geographical processes digitally before they are seen on the ground (see Kitchin, 2021). Graham and Shelton (2013) were right to be concerned about ‘whether or how it might be integrated into pre-existing structures of scholarly knowledge production’ (p. 256) in geography, but also right that critical GIS and radical approaches to quantitative geography offered hope that geographers would be well placed to do justice to big data – indeed, big data is even being used to reflect on Anglo-American hegemony in urban geography through publication and citation patterns (see Kong and Qian, 2019). Another emergent theme from the entries is real sensitivity to the colonial hegemony of Anglo-American human geography, along with a commitment to starting the process of systematically decolonizing geography. As Radcliffe (2022) notes, this decolonizing

Source: Created by Sharda Rozena.

Figure 0.1

A human geography word cloud from all the entries

Introduction  xv

approach must be applied to how geographers look at space, place, nature, global–local relations, the Anthropocene and much more. Such a decolonization will of course change how human geographers understand people, place and the environment, as it rethinks through the lenses of Indigenous thinking and decolonizing ideas. This will, no doubt, be one of the most radical paradigm shifts to happen in the ongoing development of human geography, but it is only just beginning to gain traction. One measure of its success down the line will be in what does not appear in a future encyclopedia of human geography, as much as what is included. Human geographers’ engagement with ideas of the Anthropocene is a final theme that builds on, but in other ways challenges the discipline’s longstanding human–environment tradition and its status as an ‘integrative’ field (Grove and Rickards, 2022). Of course, the discipline of geography more broadly has long sought to integrate, or at the very least hold in productive tension, physical and human geography, and in that the natural and social sciences (Demeritt, 2009). Indeed, geography as a discipline is incredibly well positioned to ‘do’ interdisciplinary research, but what is notable is that those who choose to go down this path struggle, and are sidelined, as they leave their disciplinary identity home base behind or to one side. As Ellis (2017, p. 525) has noted, the engagement of physical geographers with the Anthropocene has been ‘lukewarm at best’, and progress will require both ‘sides’ of geography, physical and human, to engage. What this all means for the future of work on the Anthropocene or problem-orientated work on global challenges, is hard to say. Sheppard (2022, p. 14) suggests five priorities: We must be more historical in our thinking (integrating the temporal with the spatial). We must pay more attention to the macro-scale: to how local events are complexly bound-up in spatially differentiated planetary processes? We must be socio-ecological: incentivizing productive collaboration across earth science, social science, and humanities sub-fields. We must deconstruct our disabling quantitative– qualitative methodological divide, incentivizing training in multi-methods. We must work harder to diversify the perspectives and socio-spatial positionalities incorporated into geographical thinking to decenter White male, Anglophone, and settler geographies.

Excitingly, the potential for all this exists within Geography today.

This can only enrich human geography and we look forwards to the outcomes, in what will no doubt be an engaged, pluralist future.

References and selected further reading Barnes, T. and Sheppard, E. (eds) (2019). Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and Beyond. Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Berg, L., Best, U., Gilmartin, M. and Gutzon, H. (eds) (2021). Placing Critical Geography: Historical Geographies of Critical Geography. London: Routledge. Boyle, M. (2021). Human Geography: An Essential Introduction (2nd edition). Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Cresswell, T. (2013). Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction. Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, UK: Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Demeritt, D. (2009). From externality to inputs and interference: framing environmental research in geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34 (1), 3–11. Ellis, E. (2017). Physical geography in the Anthropocene. Progress in Physical Geography, 41 (5), 525–32. Graham, M. and Shelton, T. (2013). Geography and the future of big data, big data and the future of geography. Dialogues in Human Geography, 3 (3), 255–61. Grove, K. and Rickards, L. (2022). Contextualizing narratives of geography’s past, present, and future: synthesis, difference, and cybernetic control. Environment and Planning F, 1 (1), https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​26349825221082166. Imhof, N. and Müller, M. (2020). How international are geography journals? Not international enough. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 52 (7), 1246–9. Jackson, A., Harris, R. and Hepple, L. et al. (2006). Geography’s changing lexicon: measuring disciplinary change in Anglophone human geography through journal content analysis. Geoforum, 37 (4), 447–54. Johnston, R. and Sidaway, J. (2004). Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Human Geography Since 1945 (6th edition). London: Hodder Arnold. Kitchin, R. (2021). The Data Revolution: Critical Analysis of Big Data, Open Data and Data Infrastructures. London: SAGE. Kong, L. and Qian, J. (2019). Knowledge circulation in urban geography/urban studies, 1990–2010: testing the discourse of Anglo-American hegemony through publica-

xvi  Concise encyclopedia of human geography tion and citation patterns. Urban Studies, 56 (1), 44–80. Livingstone, D. (1992). The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Nayak, A. and Jeffrey, A. (2011). Geographical Thought: An Introduction to Ideas in Human Geography. London: Routledge. Öhman, J. and Simonsen, K. (eds) (2003). Voices

from the North: New Trends in Nordic Human Geography. London: Routledge. Oswin, N. (2020). An other geography. Dialogues in Human Geography, 10 (1), 9–18. Radcliffe, S. (2022). Decolonizing Geography: An Introduction. Oxford: Polity Press. Sheppard, E. (2022). Geography and the present conjuncture. Environment and Planning F, 1 (1), https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​26349825221082164.

1. Activism

and gained traction throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The questioning and critique of the imperialist roots of geography slowly became more generalized in the second half of the twentieth century, with one main critique stemming in the 1960s and 1970s from Marxist geographers influenced by the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s work – for example, The Right to the City (1968), The Urban Revolution (1970), and The Production of Space (1974). Marxist geographers developed more critical approaches, and human geography became a social science at the service of social change. The study of power relations between different social classes became one focus of geography, with urban geographers such as David Harvey (1979) and Edward Soja (2010) developing the idea of spatial justice. Another notable example of that shift was the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI) co-founded by geographer William Bunge and community organizer and activist Gwendolyn Warren in 1968. Their aim was to ‘reorient geographical research in directions of direct human concern…and instituting a developmental rather than an extractive program of geographical exploration’ (Bunge, 1969, p. 6). They wanted to make geographical research and education accessible and relevant to everyone and helped many, mainly African American students, access higher education. Many of the researchers involved in these new approaches were involved in politics in parallel to their academic careers. Influenced by Marxist geography, but also an influence on it, feminist geography (Massey, 1994; Nast, 1994), queer theory (Browne and Nash, 2010; Butler, 1990) and post-colonialism (Noxolo, 2006; Spivak, 1988) began to question power relations in knowledge production and the research process and its associated methodologies. In addition to focusing research on under-represented groups and topics, these new critiques questioned several aspects of knowledge production, reimagining who produces knowledge, whose voices are (made) heard, and who benefits from academic research. Under the influence of post-modernism and the increasing criticism of Marxism, a new critical human geography emerged in the 1990s, debated at the Inaugural Critical Geography Conference in Vancouver,

Activism is the use of a variety of means to achieve a political or social goal. It can be practised both individually and collectively and at a variety of sites. It is something geographers both study and sometimes engage in. Within geography, activism is generally considered a part of political geography, with links to radical and critical geography. It is studied through a wide variety of themes, forms and scales. Beyond those, scholar-activism and activist research emphasizes the need to bring activism and research together and challenge traditional representations of academics as neutral and impartial. While geography is historically linked to the imperialist and colonialist endeavours of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, those approaches and goals were critiqued very early in the history of the discipline, among others by anarchist geographers such as Elisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin. Both Reclus and Kropotkin criticized colonial geography and were instead strong proponents of teaching geography in schools, not for imperialist purposes, but for the education of the masses. Kropotkin’s essay ‘What geography ought to be’ (Kropotkin, 1885) set out these goals, while Reclus’s Géographie Universelle (Reclus, 1876) was intentionally made accessible to the lower classes. They were also both very active in anarchist circles outside their academic work. Those anarchist roots have been studied by Simon Springer (2016), Philippe Pelletier (2013) and Federico Ferretti (2019), among others. Political geography and geopolitics have a long history in the discipline of geography, touching on, but not always related to activism: they traditionally focus/ed on the study of power relations and political relations, mainly between states and big power entities with links to imperialism and colonialism. Thus, political geography can be seen to fall into two categories: mainstream, often state-centric political geography; and a critical political geography more interested in social movements, popular politics and propositional alternatives to capital and the state. The latter draws attention to the limits and blind spots of the former. This undercurrent of activist geography within political geography started early in the history of the discipline, as seen in Kropotkin and Reclus, 1

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Canada, in 1997. In critical geography, research and disciplinary practice are at the service of social change. At first, there were strong ideological tensions between radical and critical scholars, but Peet (2000) notes that by the late 1990s, this antagonism seemed to be resolved. While both terms are still used to describe leftist geographies, ‘critical geography’ seems to have become the preferred term in academia, which Castree (2000, p. 955) mourns as a ‘“professionalisation” and “academicisation” of Left geography’. Since the mid-2000s, renewed calls for activist research or scholar-activism have emerged. These have been calls for an even clearer and more obvious involvement of the researcher in social movements and change, beyond just research topics and methods. Some human geographers actively participated in social movements, using methods such as participant observation and participatory action research. Scholar-activism pushed activism beyond just research, with reflections and debates about access to higher education and research, as well as modes of teaching. Activism in critical human geography has now become a daily and constant activity, merging into all aspects of life and work. Such work questions the power relations beyond the research object, accepting, encouraging and valuing knowledge production from outside, and beyond, academia. Radical and critical geographers look at activism in a variety of themes and forms, with the focus being on either the form of political action or its object. Within the broader field of social movement studies, geographers draw particular attention to the spatialities of social and protest movements and activism, whether it is their spaces and places, their networks, their locations, or their claims. They also mobilize a wide range of analytical concepts such as ‘autonomous geographies’ (Pickerill and Chatterton, 2006), ‘temporary autonomous zones’ (Bey, 1985), ‘convergence spaces’ (Routledge, 2000), ‘terrains of resistance’ (Routledge, 1996) and ‘spaces of contention’ (Miller, Beaumont and Nicholls, 2013). These are used by geographers to frame their research in a spatial way. When focusing on forms of political action, geographers often study a specific type of political action through different movements, or through a movement with several aims. They focus primarily on the means of action Elise Lecomte

and their geographies, not the object of contention. In Space Invaders, Routledge (2017) took an auto-ethnographic approach and leads the reader through his experiences with social movement and protest. He distinguishes ‘two distinct yet interrelated geographical logics… to the prosecution of protest: a primary logic of spatial strategies…; and a secondary logic concerning key sites of intervention’ (p. 2; original emphasis). The former are the geographical contexts of the protests, the latter are its targets. Routledge structures the different chapters of the book around different forms of protest such as barricades, camps, flash mobs, testimonies, conferences and guerrilla performances, which he links to the certain actions or goals they are best suited for. In other words, he sets out a typology of sites and modalities of protest. Means of political action include (among others) forms of occupation such as squatting (Vasudevan, 2015) or protest camps. The latter have gained visibility since the Arab Springs and the Occupy movement, but have an older history as well – for instance, the Greenham Common occupation (Cresswell, 1994). More recently, online presence, and in particular the use of social media, has gained importance within activist communities, and has become both a source and a research object for geographers (Pickerill, 2003). The focus on means and forms of political action allows researchers and activists to encompass intersectional struggles as well as social movements with more than one aim. The claims of many recent social movements cover a broad spectrum of themes, the Occupy movement, for instance, used methods such as occupation, civil disobedience, demonstrations and social media to assert its place in the political landscape. These intervene in space in different ways: occupations and demonstrations claim public space for various amounts of time, while social media helps form networks of activists. Occupy’s goals and claims were intentionally vague, and even non-existent for the most part. When studying a movement such as Occupy, it can be argued that a focus on means of action is the most relevant one. Within the study of protest camps, geographers have encouraged analysis of the spatiality of protest camps: how and where they form, and how they are maintained. This includes tactical choices about location (finding the balance between visibility and shelter), as well as implement-

Activism  3

ing and organizing infrastructure for daily life within the camps. Spatial relationships and boundary making have also been highlighted (see Halvorsen, 2015). A focus on the forms of political action within specific movements can also open the door to interdisciplinary work, as these are studied in other disciplines as well. For example, geographical literature on protest camps (Brown et al., 2017; Feigenbaum, Frenzel and McCurdy, 2013) is often interdisciplinary. This allows researchers to study one form through a variety of perspectives, both thematically and through different disciplinary approaches. The claims of those social movements studied cover a broad spectrum of themes, which are also individual research objects within geography: electoral geography (Brennetot, 2020) falls into this category, as well as LGBT activism (Lim and Browne, 2016), unionism and labour geographies (Herod, 1998), housing activism (often related to gentrification, see Herzfeld and Lees, 2021), environmentalism (Hayes and Ollitrault, 2011), decolonial approaches (Radcliffe, 2017) and Indigenous movements (Barker and Ross, 2017), feminism (McLean, Maalsen and Prebble, 2019), community activism (Barbosa Jr. and Burns, 2021) and anti-austerity movements (Featherstone, 2021). These social movements use the methods and means discussed earlier. A focus on the object of political actions offers the opportunity to study that issue in particular, as well as activist responses to it. It has the potential to give a more important place to the community involved in the protest in question. However, the distinction between a focus on the form or the object of political action is not always clear-cut. There are approaches within each of these themes that focus on one form of action. Housing activism, for example, can be studied through the lens of squatting (Vasudevan, 2017), or studies of labour activism can be focused on picket lines (Kelliher, 2021). Inversely, studies on forms of action can focus on the theme of the protest. For instance, ZADs (zones à défendre, French self-organized autonomous zones, i.e., protest camps) are often studied through the lens of resisting planning projects (Pailloux, 2015). Other approaches fall into neither category: some research lies at the intersection of political geography with other subdisciplines of human

geography, such as children’s geographies (Burridge, 2010), feminist geography (Datta, 2016), geography of sexualities (Misgav, 2016) or emotional geography (Brown and Pickerill, 2009). Others are at the intersection between two or more previously mentioned themes (Smith, 2015). Work on subjects not directly related to political and social movements can also fall under the umbrella of activist research through their approach to the research process: while research topics such as austerity and gentrification are frequently quite militant in their nature, their focus is not always political action in an obvious or explicit way. For instance, some academics act as expert witnesses and their work has a direct impact on urban planning and policy debates (Hubbard and Lees, 2018). Activist and critical approaches to research methods are also part of this trend, as shown in the emergence of critical geographic information science (GIS) (Harvey, Kwan and Pavlovskaya, 2005; Warren, Sauders and Dvorak, 2020). In this sense, any human geography research topic can be approached from an activist perspective. This activist perspective aims at having a positive impact on the research subject and the world in general and resonates with the broader ideas of critical human geography and scholar-activism. Broadening the scope of what activism can be and going beyond traditional, quite macho images of political activism (see Lees’s 1999 reflection on the Inaugural Critical Geography Conference) can also bring a wider variety of forms of activism to light: concepts such as everyday resistance, first coined by the anthropologist James C. Scott (1985), highlights the importance of small, everyday actions to push political change (see Lees and Robinson, 2021 on survivability as resistance). In a similar way, social movements often subvert the everyday and create viable alternatives to everyday actions perceived as harmful, and they question ‘how labour and struggle are socially reproduced’ within a protest camp and in that sense can be considered ‘re-creational infrastructure’ (Feigenbaum et al., 2013, p. 183). Throughout the history of the discipline, activism has become more than a research subject in human geography: from studying and critiquing power imbalances in the nineteenth century to subverting them in Elise Lecomte

4  Concise encyclopedia of human geography

the twentieth century, activism has become increasingly embedded within certain subfields of geography. As understandings of activism and political action broaden, they have become a research method and philosophy as well as a research object. And some even argue for geographers to have everyday involvement with activism through more than just their research (Autonomous Geographies Collective, 2010). As mentioned earlier, there has long been an undercurrent of anarchist geography that has maintained itself from the time of Reclus and Kropotkin into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with journals such as ACME and Antipode in the anglophone sphere, or, for instance, Hérodote in French-language geography. This undercurrent has grown and gained importance through a process that could be described as mainstreaming critical work. Geographers such as Richard J. White, Ophélie Véron (Véron and White, 2021) or Simon Springer (Springer, 2014, 2016) are keeping the anarchist roots of geography alive through their research. A recent special issue of ACME on ‘Anarchist geographies and epistemologies of the state’ also shows that this anarchist tradition is still alive (Barrera, 2021). Elise Lecomte

References and selected further reading Autonomous Geographies Collective. 2010. Beyond scholar activism: making strategic interventions inside and outside the neoliberal university. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographers, 9, 245–74. Barbosa Jr., R. and Burns, R. 2021. A community farm maps back! Disputes over public urban farmland in Calgary, Alberta. Journal of Maps, 17, 46–54. Barker, A.J. and Ross, R.M. 2017. Reoccupations and resurgence: Indigenous protest camps in Canada. In G. Brown, A. Feigenbaum, F. Frenzel and P. McCurdy (eds), Protest Camps in International Context: Spaces, Infrastructures and Media of Resistance. Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 199–220. Barrera, G. 2021. Introduction: anarchist geographies and epistemologies of the state.

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ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographers, 20, 142–50. Bey, H. 1985. T.A.Z: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Brennetot, A. 2020. The rise of the AfD: the improvised construction of an ordoliberal chauvinism. Political Geography, 81, Article 102228. Brown, G., Feigenbaum, A., Frenzel, F. and McCurdy, P. (eds) 2017. Protest Camps in International Context: Spaces, Infrastructures and Media of Resistance. Bristol: Policy Press. Brown, G. and Pickerill, J. 2009. Space for emotion in the spaces of activism. Emotion, Space and Society, 2, 24–35. Browne, K. and Nash, C.J. (eds) 2010. Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Bunge, W. 1969. The first years of the Detroit Geographical Expedition: a personal report. In R.J. Howarth and E.J. Vander Velde (eds), Discussion Paper No. 1: The Detroit Geographical Expedition. Detroit, MI: The Society for Human Exploration, pp. 1–60. Burridge, A. 2010. Youth on the line and the No Borders movement. Children’s Geographies, 8, 401–11. Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Castree, N. 2000. Professionalisation, activism, and the university: whither ‘critical geography’? Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 32, 955–70. Cresswell, T. 1994. Putting women in their place: the carnival at Greenham Common. Antipode, 26, 35–58. Datta, A. 2016. Yeh Bhoogol shastra nahi hai: on (in)visibilizing gendered geographies of resistance and agency in India. Social & Cultural Geography, 17, 768–72. Featherstone, D. 2021. From Out of Apathy to the post-political: the spatial politics of austerity, the geographies of politicisation and the trajectories of the Scottish left(s). Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 39, 469–90. Feigenbaum, A., Frenzel, F. and McCurdy, P. 2013. Protest Camps. London: Zed Books. Ferretti, F. 2019. Anarchy and Geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK. London: Routledge. Halvorsen, S. 2015. Encountering Occupy London: boundary making and the territoriality of urban activism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33, 314–30. Harvey, D. 1979. Social Justice and the City. London: Edward Arnold. Harvey, F., Kwan, M.-P. and Pavlovskaya, M. 2005. Introduction: critical GIS. Cartographica:

Activism  5 The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 40, 1–4. Hayes, G. and Ollitrault, S. 2011. The French environmental movement in the era of climate change: the case of Notre Dame des Landes. Paper presented in the Green Politics section, Panel on the National Politics of Climate Change, ECPR General Conference, Reykjavik. Herod, A. 1998. Organizing the Landscape: Geographical Perspectives on Labor Unionism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Herzfeld, M. and Lees, L. 2021. Responsibility and commitment in urban scholar-activism. Radical Housing Journal, 3, 291–300. Hubbard, P. and Lees, L. 2018. The right to community: legal geographies of resistance on London’s final gentrification frontier. City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory Action, 22, 8–25. Kelliher, D. 2021. Class struggle and the spatial politics of violence: the picket line in 1970s Britain. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 46, 15–28. Kropotkin, P.A. 1885. What geography ought to be. In J. Knowles (ed.), The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 18: A Monthly Review. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., pp. 940–56. Lees, L. 1999. Critical geography and the opening up of the academy: lessons from ‘real life’ attempts. AREA, 31, 377–83. Lees, L. and Robinson, B. 2021. Beverley’s story: survivability on one of London’s newest gentrification frontiers. City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory Action, 25, 590–613. Lefebvre, H. 1968. La droit à la ville. Paris: Anthropos. Lefebvre, H. 1970. La révolution urbaine. Paris: Gallimard. Lefebvre, H. 1974. La production de l’espace. Paris: Anthropos. Lim, J. and Browne, K. 2016. Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practices and Politics. London: Routledge. Massey, D. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. McLean, J., Maalsen, S. and Prebble, S. 2019. A feminist perspective on digital geographies: activism, affect and emotion, and gendered human–technology relations in Australia. Gender, Place & Culture, 26, 740–61. Miller, D.B., Beaumont, D.J. and Nicholls, D.W. (eds) 2013. Spaces of Contention: Spatialities and Social Movements. Farnham: Ashgate. Misgav, C. 2016. Gay-riatrics: spatial politics and activism of gay seniors in Tel-Aviv’s gay community centre. Gender, Place & Culture, 23, 1519–34.

Nast, H.J. 1994. Women in the field: critical feminist methodologies and theoretical perspectives: opening remarks on ‘women in the field’. Professional Geographer, 46, 54–66. Noxolo, P. 2006. Claims: a postcolonial geographical critique of ‘partnership’ in Britain’s development discourse. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 27, 254–69. Pailloux, A.-L. 2015. Deferred Development Zone (ZAD) versus ‘Zone to be protected’. Analysis of a struggle for autonomy in/of rural space. Justice Spatiale/Spatial Justice, No. 7 (January). Peet, R. 2000. Celebrating thirty years of radical geography. Environmental and Planning A: Economy and Space, 32, 951–3. Pelletier, P. 2013. Géographie et anarchie: Reclus, Kropotkine, Metchnikoff. Paris: Monde Libertaire. Pickerill, J. 2003. Cyberprotest: Environmental Activism Online. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pickerill, J. and Chatterton, P. 2006. Notes towards autonomous geographies: creation, resistance and self-management as survival tactics. Progress in Human Geography, 30, 730–46. Radcliffe, S.A. 2017. Decolonising geographical knowledges. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42, 329–33. Reclus, E. 1876. Nouvelle géographie universelle: la terre et les hommes. Paris: Hachette et Cie. Routledge, P. 1996. Critical geopolitics and terrains of resistance. Political Geography, 15, 509–31. Routledge, P. 2000. ‘Our resistance will be as transnational as capital’: convergence space and strategy in globalising resistance. GeoJournal, 52, 25–33. Routledge, P. 2017. Space Invaders: Radical Geographies of Protest. London: Pluto Press. Scott, J.C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Smith, B.E. 2015. Another place is possible? Labor geography, spatial dispossession, and gendered resistance in Central Appalachia. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 105, 567–82. Soja, E.W. 2010. Seeking Spatial Justice: Volume 16 (Globalization and Community). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Spivak, G.C. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? London: Macmillan. Springer, S. 2014. Why a radical geography must be anarchist. Dialogues in Human Geography, 4, 249–70. Springer, S. 2016. The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation.

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6  Concise encyclopedia of human geography Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Vasudevan, A. 2015. The autonomous city: towards a critical geography of occupation. Progress in Human Geography, 39, 316–37. Vasudevan, A. 2017. The Autonomous City: A History of Urban Squatting. London: Verso. Véron, O. and White, R.J. 2021. Anarchism, feminism and veganism: a convergence of struggles.

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In S. Springer, J. Mateer, M. Locret-Collet and M. Acker (eds), Undoing Human Supremacy: Anarchist Political Ecology in the Face of Anthroparchy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 65–88. Warren, S., Sauders, R. and Dvorak, A. 2020. For Anna: after critical GIS, what next? The Canadian Geographer, 64, 529–41.

2. Actor network theory

capacities. ANT is semiotic in nature (and is sometimes known as material semiotics), as it is only through the connections with neighbouring others that an actor comes into being and through these relationships that it has the capacity to act or exert influence. ANT is a commitment to ‘uncovering and tracing the many connections and relations among a variety of actors (human, non-human, material, discursive) that allow particular actors, events, and processes to become what they are’ (Bosco, 2015, p. 151). Despite diverse interpretations and usage, at the core of ANT is a commitment to acknowledging that non-human material ‘things’ have agency similar to human actors. ANT is critical of research that focuses solely on social relations, arguing that social relations mean little if they are not held together by durable and resilient materials (Murdoch, 1998). At the centre of ANT is the symmetry principle, which argues that there is no difference between human and non-human actors and that their influence should be analysed equally, recognizing that both have the capacity to influence network structure and functioning. ANT has a commitment to hybridity, recognizing that the world is made up of complex ‘imbroglios’ of human and non-human/inanimate/material actors. Actor networks are ‘hybrid collectifs’ of human and non-human actors. Agency in ANT is the ability of an actor to cause an effect. Agency is, therefore, the collective capacity of heterogeneous networks, in which the activities of non-humans may count for as much as, or more than, the activities of humans. Indeed, Latour (2005) has used the term actant (rather than actor) to emphasize the fact that all actors are the product of both the human and non-human and to overcome overly human-centred interpretations of the term actor. Actors do not exist in and of themselves. Rather, they are constituted in networks of which they form a part, where actors are sets of relations or sets of relations between relations (Law and Mol, 1995). The actor comes to represent the network (hence the use of a hyphen between the actor and network in some versions of ANT), where the actor is able to draw together and represent diverse heterogeneous associations. Actors are ‘heterogeneous engineers’. Thus, ANT recognizes that there are many possible modes of ordering, not just one.

Actor network theory (ANT) has its theoretical roots in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and science and technologies studies (STS), both of which challenge claims that knowledge creation is objective, and that scientific method uncovers clear and universal ‘facts’. While SSK falls within a wider social constructionist turn of the 1980s to emphasize how scientific facts are produced in specific social environments/contexts, STS places more emphasis on the agency of non-human actors in the creation of scientific knowledge – a form of socio-material constructivism. This STS tradition informed the development of ANT. ANT emerged from the work of a core set of theorists, including Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law. Key work explored scientific practices associated with scallop fishing (Callon, 1986) and Pasteur’s ‘discovery’ of bacteria (Latour, 1993), revealing the influence of non-human, material actors in shaping practices and knowledge creation. For ANT, there is no separation of social/ cultural from material/non-human – they are deeply intertwined. In human geography, ANT has been mobilized for the past 30 years, with early adopters like Jonathon Murdoch and Sarah Whatmore setting the foundation for how ANT might be used in the discipline. The work of Donna Haraway on hybridity and cybergenetic organisms also revealed the potential of relational, material and non-human/more-than-human understandings of the world, and influenced early geographical work. ANT offers a very different interpretation of the network compared with other forms of network analysis, such as social network analysis or network governance. Rather than fixed network graphs of connections or relations between nodes, within ANT the network works as a metaphor for the association of heterogeneous elements, where connections are fluid and changeable. In ANT, the network acts not as a noun but as a verb. Networks are not free-standing entities, but the sites of struggle, relational effects that ‘recursively generate and reproduce’ themselves (Law, 1992, p. 4). ANT mobilizes a relational ontology, where all actors are constituted by their relationships with others, with no actor having inherent qualities or 7

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Actors are not stable, and ANT embraces the ‘radical indeterminacy’ of the actor (Callon, 1999, p. 181). It is this relational interpretation, where agency is a network achievement, that reveals non-human actors as agentive, as network configuration and capacities are only possible due to their involvement in the network. ANT acknowledges that the tendency of non-human and material actors to interact in certain ways has significant impacts on the apparent structure of the social (Law, 1992). ANT works to dissolve the nature/society dualism and has influenced new geographical subdisciplines that focus on complex nature/society relations, such as animal geographies and more-than-human geographies. The process of translation lies at the centre of ANT. It is a process that brings together actor networks, but also works to generate actors, their identities and capacities. It is the process that allows some actors to speak for, act on behalf of, and represent others through defining network roles. It links actors together and to establish provisionally stable relationships (Rydin, 2017). As Murdoch (1997, p. 741) notes: ‘as entities come to be enrolled, combined, and disciplined within networks so they gain shape and function’. Translation is the site of negotiation where identities are fought over, roles are ascribed, and power relations fixed. Translators are network builders as they draw actors together. Sometimes referred to as ANT’s analytical toolkit, the four-stage translation process has emerged as a central technique for analysing network dynamics and power. The four stages of the translation process identified by Callon (1986) are problematization (where the focal problem is identified), interessement (where actors are identified as potential network elements and drawn together), enrolment (where intermediators/mediators persuade actors that coming together in association is the best way to serve their interest) and mobilization (where more distant actors are made active through their network associations). Given the emphasis on relationality at the core of ANT thinking, order and stability emerge as temporary and precarious achievements. Relationships can break down as actors shift and relationships change, disrupting network configuration. However, for actor networks to exert influence, network stability (which is always temporary) is required. This stabilizing is achieved by interKristian Ruming

mediaries or mediators. These intermediaries or mediators work to bring network elements together (the process of enrolment), thereby giving the network agency. Callon (1991, p. 135) defines four types of intermediary: ‘texts or more generally literary inscriptions (books, articles, patents, notes); technical artefacts (scientific instruments, machines, robots, consumer goods); human beings and the skills, knowledge and know-how that they incorporate; and money in all its different forms’. Two concepts emerge as important for the translation process, both of which seek to emphasize (temporary) network stability: the black box and immutable mobiles. The idea of a black box works to simplify or conceal complex network relationships. They are relations that no longer need to be considered as their constitutive facts and artefacts have achieved temporary stability (Hinchliffe, 1996). Within ANT, some network relationships can be ‘black boxed’ so that internal relationships and dynamics are not questioned. Given the complexity of network associations, the concept of black boxing allows some elements of the network to be viewed as stable, with analytical emphasis placed on the outputs or influence of these stable relationships. However, like all network configurations, black boxes are the product of relational associations that can break down. An immutable mobile is a stable artefact that is also mobile. Immutable mobiles can move between locations. They have the ability to act at a distance, traversing topologies to maintain order. Immutable mobiles hold their shape in time and space and make networks last. The chances of the translation process being successful increases through the enrolment of actors that are relatively mobile and can order network construction through space. They enable long-distance control and facilitate network expansion. Examples include policy documents that circulate key ideas, methods or approaches. While black boxes and immutable mobiles emphasize stability, a degree of mutability is also required (Bylund, 2013), which responds to the fluid nature of networks and acknowledges that actors can change in response to specific network circumstances. Here mediators work to transform, distort and modify associations and meanings, thereby shaping network configurations (Latour, 2005).

Actor network theory  9

Mediators affect change. Actors that operate as mediators, rather than passive intermediaries, allow networks to develop in unexpected ways. The difference between actors and intermediaries is the capacity to act as an author: ‘an [actor] is an intermediary that puts other intermediaries into circulation’ (Callon, 1991, p. 141). Within ANT, power is not a resource that can be held or exerted by individual actors (or groups/types of actors), it is not something exclusively the domain of human actors, nor is it bestowed by a structural position. Rather, power is a network product. It arises from the relationships between human and non-human actors and is enacted through the process of translation, where some actors are able to exert influence over the network. The powerful are those who enrol, convince and enlist others into networks on terms that allow the enrolling actor to represent others; the stronger the network the stronger the translating actor (Murdoch, 1995). These powerful actors speak on behalf of others. ANT also focuses on the ability of actors to act at a distance by enrolling actors/immutable mobiles, such as material objects, codes, discourses and procedural frameworks, to affect the activation of power. However, this power is precarious and only lasts while network associations remain intact. The relational nature of actor networks means that these associations can break down, undermining powerful actors and opening up spaces for dissent. ANT is not concerned with Euclidean space, and challenges concepts of hierarchy and scale. ANT adopts a flat ontology where relationships between network elements can be spatially near or far. This is a topological (rather than topographical) reading of the world where actors, rather than being on different scales, are more or less connected. Geometric space is folded, so close network connections might appear to be spatially far away and vice versa. The topological emphasis of ANT ‘opens up space–time to the coexistence of multiple cross-cutting networks of varied length and durability’ (Whatmore and Thorne, 1997, p. 302). ANT offers geography a relational understanding of space, where spatiality is embedded within, or the product of, actor networks. Murdoch (1998) argues that networks draw together materials that have their own space–time, into new and different associations. Therefore, each

network traces its own unique space–time that reflects not only the myriad of materials linked in the construction of that network, but also the relationships established between the combined elements. Space is a network effect. In terms of scale, ANT rejects the idea of a hierarchy of layered scales where so-called higher scales influence lower ones. Rather, network connections are seen to extend across all these scales simultaneously, each influencing network configuration and functioning. There is no difference between macro and micro or global and local, but rather that longer networks can simply reach further than others (Latour, 1993). Despite being labelled as a ‘theory’, some, including some of its foundational theorists (Latour, 2005), have argued that ANT is perhaps best viewed more as a method for tracing the complex and multiple relationships between actors. Latour (1999) has argued that from its very conception ANT has been a method to learn from the actors themselves, while Law (2004) suggests that ANT presents a methodology where we are required to follow the actors and trace their network influence. ANT advances a methodological approach centred on thick description of actors, their relationships with others, how associations become stabilized or break down, and how network associations exert influence. The value of this approach is the fine-grained detail revealed through a form of very detailed ethnography, where researchers are able ‘to “pick-and-mix” from different methodological jars’ (Cowan, Morgan and McDermont, 2009, p. 282). This approach relies on the skills and capacities of the researcher to both enter and trace network associations, but also communicate network relationships. It has been argued that the research process is, itself, a form of translation where the researcher identifies, draws together and follows certain actors/associations (Ruming, 2009). ANT is not a single theoretical or methodological approach, but a commitment to tracing and describing network associations. Parallels have been drawn between ANT and assemblage thinking, as both have a commitment to recognizing the influence of material and non-human agents. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari’s work on assemblage (agencement) informed early ANT thinking. It has been suggested that the biological Kristian Ruming

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metaphor of ‘rhizomes’ (drawing on Deleuze and Guattari) might be a more accurate representation of the relational connections emphasized in ANT, rather than the idea of a network. The rhizome metaphor emphasizes the multiple, complex and intertwined nature of connections, doing away with the idea that there is a clear direction or logic of network operations. Nevertheless, some differences are observed between ANT and assemblage thinking. First, assemblage thinking adopts a more fluid or loose conceptual framework, which is concerned with explaining particular processes and practices. Assemblages can be more unruly and spontaneous, without a clear logic or objective. Second, and related, assemblage lacks the analytical toolkit (centred on translation) used in ANT, doing away with some of the terminology and processes. Despite widespread use within the social sciences, and geography in particular, ANT as a conceptual framework has been the subject of considerable debate. A number of critiques have emerged. First, concerns have been raised over the inability of ANT to account for human intentionality and motivation. While ANT argues that human and non-human actors should be analysed equally, this does not suggest that human and non-human actors are the same. There is scope within ANT for human geographers acknowledging that humans can have intentions in a social setting. Second, the ANT understanding of power has been criticized, particularly those coming from Marxist or political economy backgrounds, for its perceived inability to account for power inequalities and structures within society. It is argued that there is limited scope within ANT to understand the political. Power within an ANT framework is a network product. This, however, does not preclude the possibility that there are powerful actors or power inequalities, but rather explains these positions as the outcome of network associations rather than fixed hierarchies or social structures. As Latour (2005, p. 64) notes, ‘power and domination have to be produced, made up and composed’, while Law (1992, p. 5) argues that structure is the site of struggle, a relational effect that ‘recursively generates and reproduced itself’. For ANT, scale and structure can exist; however, they are a product of network connections rather than existing a priori. Apparent structures are Kristian Ruming

built and maintained through complex and heterogeneous network associations. Further, the relational and unpredictable nature of the translation process means that each enrolment is potentially different from the last, perhaps opening up a small space for forms of resistance (Murdoch, 1997). Third, the ANT methodological approach has been critiqued as being overly descriptive and detached from theory, testable hypotheses and generalizations. However, the analytical focus of ANT is not on generalizable observations, rules or laws, but on the contingent and temporarily stable relations that create the world (Callon, 1991). Explanation does not take the form of simplified and standardized description, but the in-depth and detailed analysis of networks and actors. This is not to say that concerns about the inability of ANT research to inform or influence change are completely unfounded. There is a need to better understand how ANT can lead to positive change. ANT has been mobilized in diverse ways in human geography; however, given its commitment to the relational nature of reality, its dedication to affording non-human and material actors their role in creating and maintaining the world, and its toolkit of ideas and approaches for investigating the configuration and influences of complex network connections, it is likely to continue to inform geographical scholarship long into the future. Kristian Ruming

References and selected further reading Bosco, F. (2015). Actor-network theory, networks, and relational geographies in human geography. In S. Aitken and G. Valentine (eds), Approaches to Human Geography: Philosophies, Theories, People and Practices (2nd edition, pp. 150–62). London: SAGE. Bylund, J. (2013). Plassein: on the fluid mobility of place and urban qualities in planning. Planning Theory, 12 (3), 244–66. Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (ed.), Power, Action, Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (pp. 196–223). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Callon, M. (1991). Techno-economics networks and irreversibility. In J. Law (ed.), A Sociology

Actor network theory  11 of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination (pp. 132–63). London: Routledge. Callon, M. (1999). Actor-network theory – the market test. In J. Law and J. Hassard (eds), Actor Network Theory and After (pp. 181–195). Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Cowan, D., Morgan, K. and McDermont, M. (2009). Nominations: an actor-network approach. Housing Studies, 24 (3), 281–300. Hinchliffe, S. (1996). Technology, power, and space – the means and ends of geographies of technology. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 14 (6), 659–82. Latour, B. (1993). The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (1999). On recalling ANT. In J. Law and J. Hassard (eds), Actor Network Theory and After (pp. 15–25). Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, J. (1992). Notes on the theory of the actor network: ordering, strategy and heterogeneity. Lancaster University online papers. Accessed www​ .lancaster​ 28 September 2022 at https://​ .ac​.uk/​fass/​resources/​sociology​-online​-papers/​ papers/​law​-notes​-on​-ant​.pdf. Law, J. (2004). And if the global were small and noncoherent? Method, complexity, and the

baroque. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22 (1), 13–26. Law, J. and Mol, A. (1995). Notes on materiality and sociality. The Sociological Review, 43 (2), 274–94. Murdoch, J. (1995). Actor-networks and the evolution of economic forms. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 27 (5), 731–57. Murdoch, J. (1997). Inhuman/nonhuman/human: actor-network theory and the prospects for a nondualist and symmetrical perspective on nature and society. Environment and Planning D, 15 (6), 731–56. Murdoch, J. (1998). The spaces of actor-network theory. Geoforum, 29 (4), 357–74. Ruming, K. (2009). Following the actors: mobilising an actor-network theory methodology in geography. Australian Geographer, 40 (4), 451–69. Rydin, Y. (2017). Actor-network theory. In M. Gunder, A. Madanipour and V. Watson (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Planning Theory (pp. 302–13). London: Routledge. Whatmore, S. and Thorne, L. (1997). Nourishing networks: alternative geographies of food. In D. Goodman and M. Watts (eds), Globalizing Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring (pp. 287–304). London: Routledge.

Kristian Ruming

3. Affect

and contestation about what affect is, what affects do, and how to connect affective life to the ongoing dynamics of social-spatial formations and their constitutive relations. In the first section, I identify three definitions of the term affect in human geography, and show how they open onto different ways of connecting affective life to social-spatial formations. The second section then explores questions of how to research affective life, highlighting the proliferation of modes of inquiry and methods in response to the problems affect poses to social-spatial inquiry.

Introduction In the past 15 years, geographers have demonstrated the importance of affects – from exhaustion to fun, optimism to boredom, fear to love – to numerous social-spatial forms and relations; the hostilities and joys that compose nationalisms (Closs-Stephens, 2015); the operations of an experience economy that extracts value from fun, enjoyment and other intensities (Thrift, 2004); the constitution of subjectivities and interpersonal dynamics (Morrison, Johnston and Longhurst, 2013); the everyday dynamics of race and sexuality (Lim, 2010); responses to events and global change (Hitchen, 2021; Wilkinson and Ortega-Alcázar, 2019); and work and mobilities (Bissell, 2014), amongst many other topics. The simple first lesson of this ever-growing body of research is that every area of life is, in some way, affective. All geographies are affective geographies. As such, affect is not the sole property of the ‘cultural’, ‘economic’ or any other domain of life, nor the sole concern of any one subdiscipline. As the queer theorist, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick puts: ‘Affects can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other affects’ (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 19). Across diverse topics, work shares a conviction that affects matter profoundly to how spaces and places are (dis)organized, inhabited and felt. Affects connect or disconnect people to or from forms of life, proximate and distant others, and the persistence of inequalities. They are central to the work of representations, always already imbricated with discourses and ideologies, whilst also orientating inquiry towards the dynamics of human and non-human life. They are sources of value in contemporary capitalism, and object-targets for modes of power. It is through affects that forms of global change and associated events are lived and felt. However, perhaps because of the newness of the term, there is no unanimity about how to conceptualize and research ‘affect’. As in the wider social sciences and humanities (see Gregg and Seigworth, 2010), human geography has witnessed intense deliberation

Conceptualizing affect An interest in affect was initially associated with the emergence of non-representational theories in the early to mid-2000s (Dewsbury, 2000; McCormack, 2003; Thrift, 2004). Whilst the term ‘affect’ has a complex lineage in social psychology and psychoanalysis, the main route into geography was through Gilles Deleuze’s (1988) definition of affect, via Spinoza, as the ‘capacity of a body to affect and be affected’. As a capacity, affect is two-sided. It refers to both what a body can do and the affectability of a body by that which is outside of it. Massumi explains how these two capacities always go together: ‘When you affect something, you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn, and in a slightly different way than you might have been the moment before’ (Massumi, 2002b, p. 212). Critical here is that, for Massumi, affect is a matter of transitions in what a body can do (where a body is always made in and through relations). The result is that everybody has a ‘charge of affect’ or ‘force of existing’. That ‘charge’ or ‘force’ is felt as a bodily intensity, and is connected to but importantly not equivalent to emotions, where emotions are defined, in this tradition, as a secondary ‘capture’ or ‘closure’ of affect, the insertion of intensity into signifying systems and forms (Massumi, 2002a). Whilst initially an interest in affect was synonymous with non-representational theories, it is important to pause and stress that the concern with affect would not have emerged without feminist geographical scholarship that argued for the importance of emotions for understanding social-spatial relations. 12

Affect  13

This work countered the dismissal or downplaying of emotion, and linked states such as feeling, mood and so on, in geographic scholarship (Anderson and Smith, 2001; Thien, 2005). It also stressed the relationality of emotions, that they happened as and emerged in and through relations, rather than solely being the property of the individual subject (e.g., Bondi, 2005). In the context of this parallel but partially connected interest in emotions, initial debates around affect in geography centred on whether and how to conceptualize affect as ‘non-representational’ (see Papoulias and Callard, 2010), and the relation between affect and the operation and force of gender, class, race and other forms of social difference (see Colls, 2012). In response, recent work has emphasized how a body’s ‘capacity to affect and be affected’ is mediated (Anderson, 2014). Affect is not, then, somehow outside of representation. It never exists ‘in itself’ or ‘as such’. Rather, it is mediated through much more than representations. The result has been a range of work attentive to social differences that shows how a body’s ‘capacity to affect and be affected’ emerges from encounters, and is mediated by apparatuses that insert differently positioned and articulated bodies into unequal hierarchies of value and worth (see Tolia-Kelly, 2016 on race or Emery, 2022 on class, for example). The Deleuzian version of affect now coexists with other versions of affect, whilst itself now being multiple. Other tendencies indebted to cultural Marxism, queer theory and black studies offer different definitions of what affect is, and open out onto other ways of conceptualizing the relation between affective life and the force and persistence of social differences. They retain the emphasis, though, on affect as a distinctive modality of life that is always connected to but irreducible to representational apparatuses and forms. On the one hand, work has attempted to discern and diagnose the collective affects that mediate how spaces and places are felt and inhabited. Given names such as structures of feeling (Williams, 1977) or infrastructures of (un)feeling (Berlant, 2016; Gilmore, 2017), affect is understood here as an identifiable affective quality shared by some form of collective. Key is the claim that collective affects mediate how things appear and come to matter, whether that be an object, a space

such as a city, another person, idea, or group of people. For example, drawing on and developing Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘structures of feeling’, Harris (2020) discerns precarity as a common experience of a newly disorganized, dissonant present in which anxiety becomes a dominant affect. The most well-developed concept in this family of terms is ‘atmosphere’, with work focusing on the ‘atmosphere of’ a wide range of phenomena (see, for example, Closs-Stephens, 2015 on nationalist atmospheres or Fregonese, 2017 on atmospheres of conflict). Naming the shared affective quality of a specific site, atmosphere has become a way to understand how the feel of a space or place becomes a participant in ongoing action, orientating bodies and disclosing how things appear and are felt (Bille and Simonsen, 2019). Entangled with this second definition of affect, a third is emerging in work that focuses on the attachments through which people build, or attempt to build, meaningful lives. In work influenced by queer theory – in particular, Lauren Berlant’s work (2011) – research has stayed with how people remain attached to problematic objects/scenes, and the difficulty with which detachments happen. Cockrayne (2016), for example, demonstrates how entrepreneurs in tech start-ups in San Francisco remain attached to their work despite its harms. A fragile form of optimism is infrastructural to the tech sector, reproducing precarious employment relations. Much of this work has focused on the forms of optimism, cruel and otherwise, through which people are tethered to promises of a good or better life. Raynor (2021), for example, details the optimisms through which women in precarity just about stay attached to better futures, or live within a futureless present. Overall, this work tracks relations between changing affective-material conditions and what people attach and aspire to.

Researching affect In summary, three pragmatic-contextual definitions of ‘affect’ coexist in contemporary human geography: affect as a body’s ‘capacity to affect and be affected’, affect as a collective affective quality, and affect as the feel of attachments. Not necessarily mutually exclusive, the three definitions allow differBen Anderson

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ent aspects of the present to be discerned, orientating inquiry to particular ways in which affects are part of social-spatial formations and their associated power-geometries. They also pose different problems for researching affective life. In response, human geography has experimented with a wide range of methods for researching affective life. Initially, this began from a dissatisfaction with the dominance of talk-based methods, based on the claim that they risked reducing affective life to what can be verbally expressed. In part, the response was to valorize a kind of involved participation in the processes that (de)compose affective life (see, for example, McCormack, 2014). More recently, though, talk-based methods have been re-evaluated, not simply as occasions where affect is felt through tone and gesture, but also as a way of staying with and amplifying affective moments (see Bissell, 2014). At the same time, there has been a proliferation of self-styled creative methods that expand what counts as research technique and material, bringing into geography drawing, theatre, painting, dance and other artful practices (see Hawkins, 2020 for a summary). Alongside this expansion of methods has been a more fundamental rethinking of the dominant modes and moods of inquiry through which affective life is related to and understood. Whilst not solely driven by the interest in affect, work in geography (and the wider social sciences and humanities) has experimented with an expanded set of modes for relating to and making sense of worlds, the rationale being that now-dominant modes of inquiry – in particular, critique as a combination of a hermeneutics of suspicion and an explanatory logic – not only miss important parts of life, but reproduce Euro-modern assumptions about knowledge generation and circulation (Felski, 2015). For some, this has involved a continued deployment of critique as practice and disposition, in order to trace the connections between affective life and the operation of existing and new forms and modes of power (see Anderson, 2021 on ‘diagnostic critique’). This has been particularly the case for work that focuses on how affects are object-targets of apparatuses – for example, in relation to how particular affects, say fear or anxiety

Ben Anderson

of the other or resentments, are mobilized in elite projects. Here critique names a practice of immanent or transcendent judgement that centres the unequal distribution of harms, damages, loss and suffering. Other work, echoing a wider dissatisfaction in the social sciences and humanities with critique (e.g., Felski, 2015; Sedgwick, 2003), has attempted to unsettle, a little, the hold that critique and associated explanatory logics have held over inquiry, whilst continuing to affirm the ethical and political motivation and goal of critique. This has involved experimenting with other, affirmative modes of inquiry (Roberts and Dewsbury, 2021). One example is the proliferation of descriptive modes of inquiry that attempt to stay with the situated dynamics of particular scenes and situations (often influenced by Stewart, 2007). Avoiding the too easy invocation of catch-all explanatory terms such as neoliberalism or globalization, this work cultivates dispositions and techniques that enable compelling descriptions of the (re/de)composition of a range of different forces. Resonating with other tendencies – for example, a now buoyant tradition of place-writing in cultural geography (e.g., Lorimer, 2019) – descriptive practices and dispositions stay with the openness of encounters – the sometimes barely present, often heavily curtailed, margin for manoeuvrability in a situation. If description offers an alternative to critique, a second disposition is more explicitly affirmative (Woodyer and Geoghegan, 2013). Emerging from a mix of queer theory and Marxist utopianism (e.g., Muñoz, 2009), this minor thread in affect-related work attempts to stay with the desire for something better that lingers within everyday spaces and places. It is dedicated to discerning something more and better within an always multiple present. More than other modes of inquiry, utopian modes of inquiry are self-consciously affirmative, and animated by a wider range of moods and tones – hope, presumptive generosity and enchantment, for example. This proliferation of modes of inquiry raises questions that are only recently being addressed: how might modes of inquiry coexist? How to relate what can loosely be termed the affirmative and the critical without seeing them as opposites (see Ruez and Cockrayne, 2021)?

Affect  15

Concluding comments Modes of inquiry and methods for researching affective life have proliferated alongside the recent acknowledgement of the centrality of affect to a range of substantive geographies. Current work departs from the principle that affect never exists ‘in itself’ or ‘as such’. Rather, affects are always already imbricated, entangled in social-spatial relations and forms. Beyond this starting position and the claim that all geographies are affective geographies, there is no agreement about how affective life is mediated and organized. Is affect an object-target of apparatuses that condition and determine what to feel, when and how? Are affects products of the harmonious and disharmonious encounters that make up everyday life? Is affect that which binds us to, or unbinds us from, harmful or damaging forms of life and their particular relations of difference and non-belonging? Or perhaps affects are mediated in all these ways, whilst also themselves mediating life in the form of shared atmospheres or structures of feeling? These questions matter, in part, because they go to the heart of a how to connect affective life to non-affective events, forces and processes. Ben Anderson

References and selected further reading Anderson, B. (2014). Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions. London: Routledge. Anderson, B. (2021). Affect and critique: a politics of boredom. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39 (2), 197–217. Anderson, K. and Smith, S. (2001). Emotional geographies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 26, 7–10. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berlant, L. (2016). The commons: infrastructures for troubling times. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34 (3), 393–419. Bille, M. and Simonsen, K. (2019). Atmospheric practices: on affecting and being affected. Space and Culture, 24 (2), 295–309. Bissell, D. (2014). Encountering stressed bodies: slow creep transformations and tipping points of commuting mobilities. Geoforum, 54, 191–201. Bondi, L. (2005). Making connections and thinking through emotions: between geography and psychotherapy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30 (4), 433–48. Closs-Stephens, A. (2015). The affective atmospheres of nationalism. Cultural Geographies, 23 (2), 181–98. Cockrayne, D. (2016). Entrepreneurial affect: attachment to work practice in San Francisco’s digital media sector. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34 (3), 456–73. Colls, R. (2012). Feminism, bodily differences and non-representational geographies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37, 430–45. Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers. Dewsbury, J.-D. (2000). Performativity and the event. Environment and Planning: Society and Space, 18 (4), 473–97. Emery, J. (2022). Urban trauma in the ruins of industrial culture. Social & Cultural Geography, 23 (5), 639–59. Felski, R. (2015). The Limits of Critique. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fregonese, S. (2017). Affective atmospheres, urban geo-politics, and conflict (de)escalation in Beirut. Political Geography, 61, 1–10. Gilmore, R.W. (2017). Abolition geography and the problem of innocence. In G. Johnson and

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16  Concise encyclopedia of human geography A. Lubin (eds), Futures of Black Radicalism (pp. 225–40). London: Verso. Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G. (eds) (2010). The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harris, E. (2020). Rebranding Precarity: Pop-up as the Seductive New Normal. London: Zed Books. Hawkins, H. (2020). Geography, Art, Research: Artistic Research in the Geohumanities. London: Routledge. Hitchen, E. (2021). The affective life of austerity: uncanny atmospheres and paranoid temporalities. Social & Cultural Geography, 22 (3), 295–318. Lim, J. (2010). Immanent politics: thinking race and ethnicity through affect and machinism. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 42 (10), 2393–409. Lorimer, H. (2019). Dear departed: writing the lifeworlds of place. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44 (2), 331–45. Massumi, B. (2002a). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2002b). Navigating movements. In M. Zournazi (ed.), Hope: New Philosophies for Change (pp. 210–44). London: Pluto Press. McCormack, D. (2003). An event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 4, 488–507. McCormack, D. (2014). Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morrison, C., Johnston, C. and Longhurst, R. (2013). Critical geographies of love as spatial, relational and political. Progress in Human Geography, 37 (4), 505–21. Muñoz, J. (2009). Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Papoulias, C. and Callard, F. (2010). Biology’s gift: interrogating the turn to affect. Body & Society, 16 (1), 29–56. Raynor, R. (2021). Hopes multiplied amidst decline: understanding gendered precarity in

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times of austerity. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39 (3), 553–70. Roberts, T. and Dewsbury, J.D. (2021). Vital aspirations for geography in an era of negativity: valuing life differently with Deleuze. Progress in Human Geography, 45 (6), 1512–30. Ruez, D. and Cockrayne, D. (2021). Feeling otherwise: ambivalent affects and the politics of critique in geography. Dialogues in Human Geography, 11 (1), 88–107. Sedgwick, E. (2003). Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thien, D. (2005). After or beyond feeling? A consideration of affect and emotion in geography. Area, 37 (4), 450–54. Thrift, N. (2004). Intensities of feeling: towards a spatial politics of affect. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86, 57–78. Tolia-Kelly, D. (2016). Feeling and being at the (postcolonial) museum: presencing the affective politics of ‘race’ and culture. Sociology, 50 (5), 896–912. Wilkinson, E. and Ortega-Alcázar, I. (2019). The right to be weary? Endurance and exhaustion in austere times. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44 (1), 155–67. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Woodyer, T. and Geoghegan, H. (2013). (Re) enchanting geography? The nature of being critical and the character of critique in human geography. Progress in Human Geography, 37 (2), 195–214.

4. Animal geographies

conceptualized as objects of research within a human-centred world, human geography and cognate disciplines started to engage with animals as integral parts of broader human socio-cultural systems. In contrast with the more naturalistic zoögeography, we can find here an emerging interest in ‘cultural animal geography’ (Philo and Wolch, 1998, p. 106; Urbanik, 2012, p. 34). It was not until the 1990s that an understanding of animals as agentive beings and more critical accounts of their relationships with humans started to emerge. Wolch and Emel’s (1995, p. 632) manifesto to bring ‘animals back in’ to our understandings of space and place sparked a renewed interest in non-human animals beyond cultural landscapes. This third wave of animal geographies started to question the ethics and ontologies of the prevailing ways in which animals had been presented in geographical scholarship, and moved beyond understandings of animals as mere objects around which human social relations unfold. Moreover, there was a shift beyond the rural and cultural landscapes that had been the focus of the second wave, opening up the subfield to the complex entanglements of non-human animals and people in a wider range of places, spaces and locations (Philo and Wilbert, 2000, p. 4). For instance, animals kept as pets (Fox, 2006), those subject to wildlife conservation (Lorimer, 2015; Srinivasan, 2014), those inhabiting rivers and oceans (Miller, 2018), or even those within human bodies (Greenhough, 2012), became entities of interest in animal geography. Within each of these spaces, a diversity of human–animal relations have been investigated by animal geographers, as illustrated by urban animal geographies. Urbanization’s impacts on animals’ behaviours, knowledge and mobilities (Barua and Sinha, 2019) – often resulting in human– animal conflict and animal resistance (see Narayanan and Bindumadhav, 2019; Palmer, 2003) – has been one area of scholarship in urban animal geographies. While ‘wild’ or domesticated animals (Hinchliffe et al., 2005; Oliver, 2021) form the bulk of urban animal geographies, there has also been work that has examined animals not seen as ‘authentic’ nature (Srinivasan, 2019), those animals that remain hidden and unseen, such as those in research laboratories, circuses and slaughterhouses (Arcari, Probyn-Rapsey and Singer,

The study of animals and their interactions with human societies and imaginaries has been a prominent part of research within the social sciences. However, Western academia has spent a lot of time thinking about animals but much less thinking with them. Human geographies have not been an exception to this trend, with animals initially featuring in geographical scholarship as resources, symbols or biocultural backgrounds to human activity. In what follows, we offer a brief overview of the evolution of animal geographies, highlighting the breadth and diversity of issues that geographers have worked on until today. This diversity includes engagements with animal agency and subjectivity seen in recent work within the subfield. Last, we propose to include animals as full political and ethical subjects and their lived experiences as a reorganizing principle for navigating past, present and future research on non-human animals from more-than-human perspectives.

Charting animals in geography Following Julie Urbanik’s (2012) account of the evolution of animal geography, by the time of geography’s institutionalization in the late nineteenth century, a first wave of geographers had begun studying non-human animals in their natural environment, as well as their global geographical distribution, in what was referred to as zoögeography. Most work within this first wave of animal geographies can be considered as a cataloguing endeavour centred on native and exoticized wildlife (Ogden, Hall and Tanita, 2013, p. 6). However, in reaction to this naturalistic focus, and aiming to bring animals closer to the endeavours of human geography, during the first half of the twentieth century a second wave of animal geographies emerged. Inspired by Carl Sauer’s (1972) work on cultural landscapes and with a clear interest in the relationship between non-human animals, humans and their environments, an essential feature of this wave was the inclusion of animals as parts of the human social sphere and a move beyond naturalistic understandings. Even if animals were still 17

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2021; Narayanan, 2019), and those that become part of city infrastructures (Doherty, 2019; Zhang, 2020). It is in the context of this third wave in animal geographies that we can find Philo and Wilbert’s (2000) renowned diagnosis of the field, distinguishing between work that focused on how animals were placed within human worlds – animal spaces – and work that attended to how animals were ‘performing their specific forms of agency’, creating their ‘own world, their own beastly places, without reference to us’ (p. 19; emphasis added).

Beyond animal spaces and beastly places Since Philo and Wilbert (2000) first proposed it, the classification between animal spaces and beastly places has been widely used within the subfield as a call to explore the role of animals’ agencies within social worlds, as opposed to a focus on human placings of animals or as purely biological entities within ecosystems. A substantial corpus of geographical work now examines how animals are active agents in their interactions with human society, and the different ways in which animal agency shapes more-than-human relations in a variety of domains from scientific laboratories to urban landscapes (Collard, 2012; Greenhough and Roe, 2019), and in a variety of processes, ranging from conservation to domestication (Anderson, 1997; Jepson, Barua and Buckingham, 2011). In presenting animals as actors in social relations, these works collectively develop fresh understandings of society as co-constituted by both people and animals. This has also been accompanied by an emphasis on the ‘relation’ as the focus of analysis (as opposed to individual entities, whether human or animal), and by the articulation of forms of relational ethics and politics that are grounded in the contingencies of human–animal relationships and encounters (Whatmore, 2002). Philo and Wilbert (2000, p. 5) suggest that the idea of animal spaces can be identified with research centred on the human gaze on the animal. By contrast, work on ‘beastly places’ could be considered an attempt to develop a ‘“real” geography of animals…

rather than an anthropocentric geography of humans in relation to animals’ (original emphasis). In other words, one of their aims in developing this schema was to disturb the centring of human perspectives and priorities in geographical research on animals, as was that of another seminal publication from that time (Wolch and Emel, 1998). These post-anthropocentric objectives of the subdiscipline, however, have only been partially fulfilled. Many animal geographers, responding to Philo and Wilbert’s call for beastly places research, have focused on non-human agency, embodied encounters and relational ethics. While this work has definitely shifted understandings of the role of animals in human society and generated richer accounts of the relational, more-than-human, character of the world, this has not automatically produced non-anthropocentric perspectives. Furthermore, recent developments in the field make the distinction between animal spaces and beastly places blurred and increasingly inoperative. For instance, studies of animal agencies and human–animal encounters might not treat animals as subjects with specific interests, such as Bear and Eden’s (2011) depiction of anglers thinking like or becoming fish, or examine their lived experiences in much depth (Braverman, 2011). Conversely, the place of non-human animals in human societies – animal spaces – has been studied beyond the symbolic and cultural place of animals, paying attention to how human systems shape and materially impact animals’ lives (Gillespie, 2018; Narayanan, 2018). For instance, Collard (2018), attentive to the political-economic relations of different historical events like petrocapitalist oil spills, describes how these have impacted sea otter lives and, at the same time, how these systems have limited their agencies. To further problematize the animal spaces/ beastly places division, there is research combining both aspects of Philo and Wilbert’s (2000) classification: animals’ places within human political systems and imaginaries, but also their agencies. An example of this would be Wadiwel’s (2016) analysis of the ways humans have adapted their capturing tools to the fish’s resistance and, at the same time, the framing of this resistance – which is further exploited by humans – as an indicator of fish agency and subjectivity.

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Animal geographies  19

The borderlines between animal spaces and beastly places have also been unsettled by emergent methodologies, like multispecies ethnography, aiming to transcend those inherited from humanist traditions (Gillespie, 2019). These include methods inspired by ethology (Barua and Sinha, 2019) and even genetic analysis (Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2014). Nonetheless, despite their focus on animal agencies and ‘atmospheres’, these methods are not necessarily free from human-dominated knowledge frameworks. In this sense, they can still be the re-producers of dominant hegemonies and common senses such as human exceptionalism. Ultimately, regardless of whether the focus is on animal agencies or something different, we are always studying animals overwhelmingly inserted in human worlds, and by drawing on languages, concepts, schema and normative frameworks that are undeniably human. In consequence, we argue that all knowledge produced on non-human animals, being human-mediated, is always political (Rubio-Ramon and Srinivasan, 2023). By engaging with the contradictions in the classification of animal spaces and beastly places, however, new understandings of the subfield emerge that might be better suited to navigating the scope and character of animal geographies.

Animal subjects The third wave’s ‘beastly places’ emphasis on non-human agencies and animals as actors has generated exciting lines of research as discussed above. It has also thrown up new questions and concerns. For one, some of this work has been called out for not adequately distinguishing between life and non-life (Risan, 2005). Non-human animals, for instance, have life experiences and interests that might not coincide with non-sentient beings like rivers or mushrooms. In this sense, a focus on agency might ‘flatten out forms of nonhuman difference…between sentient and non-sentient nonhumans’ and be inadequate to ‘engage with specific animal competencies’ (Lorimer and Srinivasan, 2013, p. 336). There has also been a tendency to (incorrectly) assume that paying attention to animal agency and the relational character of society is sufficient to correct the ethical and political

concerns that afflict contemporary human– non-human animal interactions. Scholars have pointed out that an uncritical reliance on relational frameworks and on analysing non-human agency can reinforce and normalize existing injustices, and not take adequate account of the broader socio-political structures within which specific human– animal relationships unfold (Giraud, 2019; Srinivasan, 2016). A key question for animal geographies going forward then is, how to retain the analytical insights offered by relational approaches and the concept of animal agency, even while adequately considering the ways in which socio-political systems impinge on the lives of animals and their relations with humans. For this, an explicit engagement with non-human animals as subjects might be useful. Understanding animals as subjects entails serious consideration of their interests and lived experiences both within and beyond particular interactions that are found in existing ethical and socio-political conditions. An example of how this might work can be found in the context of farmed animals, where relationships of care and engagement with animal subjectivity can be seen over the course of everyday husbandry (Blanchette, 2020, p. 157). These relations have often been framed under the terms of an implicit contract between farmers’ care and animal sacrifice (Syse and Bjørkdahl, 2013, p. 225): the farmer satisfies basic needs of the farmed animals such as shelter, feeding and protection, with the latter sacrificing themselves in exchange. Such an analysis follows from a focus on animal agencies (e.g., the narrative that cows ‘choose’ to return to the milking shed) and on the specificities of everyday relationships. Following recent work in critical animal studies and from a multispecies justice perspective, in the above analysis not only are the interests of the animals not considered beyond what is possible within the political economic and normative framework of farming, but also their adverse life experiences are underplayed. The resistance that animals might pose to farming practices (Colling, 2018), the consequences of such resistance (usually culling) (Holloway, Bear and Wilkinson, 2014), or the captivity structures within which this positive care relation-

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ship is embedded, are some dimensions of this inattention. A comprehensive treatment of animals as subjects would mean taking into account their lived experiences, needs and interests including those that are independent of and exceed their entanglements with humans. This unavoidably leads to the consideration of the systemic conditions in which non-human animals get to live and enact their agency, as well as the histories of negative human– animal entanglement that might be fostering specific kinds of subjectivity such as the case of the farmed animal contract. In effect, a political and relational account of animal subjectivity has the potential to become an effective navigation tool to cut across both past and recent developments in animal geographies. If we turn the attention to the future, this political and relational account of animal subjectivity has the potential to open up new horizons for research in animal geographies. By acknowledging both animals’ agencies embedded in human systems but also their lived experiences as full moral and political subjects, non-human animals and our political and ethical relationship with them can come into the foreground. Guillem Rubio-Ramon and Krithika Srinivasan

References and selected further reading Anderson, K. (1997), ‘A walk on the wild side: a critical geography of domestication’, Progress in Human Geography, 21 (4), 463–85. Arcari, P., Probyn-Rapsey, F. and Singer, H. (2021), ‘Where species don’t meet: invisibilized animals, urban nature and city limits’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4 (3), 940–65. Barua, M. and Sinha, A. (2019), ‘Animating the urban: an ethological and geographical conversation’, Social & Cultural Geography, 20 (8), 1160–80. Bear, C. and Eden, S. (2011), ‘Thinking like a fish? Engaging with nonhuman difference through recreational angling’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29 (2), 336–52. Blanchette, A. (2020), Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braverman, I. (2011), ‘States of exemption: the legal and animal geographies of American

zoos’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 43 (7), 1693–706. Collard, R.-C. (2012), ‘Cougar–human entanglements and the biopolitical un/making of safe space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30, 123–42. Collard, R.-C. (2018), ‘Disaster capitalism and the quick, quick, slow unravelling of animal life’, Antipode, 50 (4), 910–28. Colling, S. (2018), ‘Animal agency, resistance and escape’, in A. Matsuoka and J. Sorenson (eds), Critical Animal Studies: Towards Trans-species Social Justice, London: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 21–44. Doherty, J. (2019), ‘Filthy flourishing: para-sites, animal infrastructure, and the waste frontier in Kampala’, Current Anthropology, 60 (S20), S321–S332. Fox, R. (2006), ‘Animal behaviours, post-human lives: everyday negotiations of the animal– human divide in pet-keeping’, Social & Cultural Geography, 7 (4), 525–37. Gillespie, K. (2018), The Cow with Ear Tag #1389, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gillespie, K. (2019), ‘For a politicized multispecies ethnography’, Politics and Animals, 5, 1–16. Giraud, E.H. (2019), What Comes after Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Greenhough, B. (2012), ‘Where species meet and mingle: endemic human–virus relations, embodied communication and more-than-human agency at the Common Cold Unit 1946–90’, Cultural Geographies, 19 (3), 281–301. Greenhough, B. and Roe, E. (2019), ‘Attuning to laboratory animals and telling stories: learning animal geography research skills from animal technologists’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37 (2), 367–84. Hinchliffe, S., Kearnes, M.B., Degen, M. and Whatmore, S. (2005), ‘Urban wild things: a cosmopolitical experiment’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23 (5), 643–58. Hodgetts, T. and Lorimer, J. (2014), ‘Methodologies for animals’ geographies: cultures, communication and genomics’, Cultural Geographies, 22 (2), 285–95. Holloway, L., Bear, C. and Wilkinson, K. (2014), ‘Re-capturing bovine life: robot–cow relationships, freedom and control in dairy farming’, Journal of Rural Studies, 33, 131–40. Jepson, P., Barua, M. and Buckingham, K. (2011), ‘What is a conservation actor?’, Conservation and Society, 9 (3), 229–35. Lorimer, J. (2015), Wildlife in the Anthropocene, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Lorimer, J. and Srinivasan, K. (2013), ‘Animal geographies’, in N.C. Johnson, R.H. Schein and J. Winders (eds), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography, Hoboken,

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Animal geographies  21 NJ and Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 332–54. Miller, J. (2018), ‘No fish, no mall. Industrial fish produce new subjectivities in Southern Chile’, Geoforum, 92, 125–33. Narayanan, Y. (2018), ‘Cow protectionism and bovine frozen-semen farms in India: analyzing cruelty, speciesism, and climate change’, Society & Animals, 26 (1), 13–33. Narayanan, Y. (2019), ‘Jugaad and informality as drivers of India’s cow slaughter economy’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 51 (7), 1516–35. Narayanan, Y. and Bindumadhav, S. (2019), ‘“Posthuman cosmopolitanism” for the Anthropocene in India: urbanism and human– snake relations in the Kali Yuga’, Geoforum, 106, 402–10. Ogden, L.A., Hall, B. and Tanita, K. (2013), ‘Animals, plants, people, and things: a review of multispecies ethnography’, Environment and Society, 4 (1), 5–25. Oliver, C. (2021), ‘Returning to “the good life”? Chickens and chicken-keeping during Covid-19 in Britain’, Animal Studies Journal, 10 (1), 114–39. Palmer, C. (2003), ‘Animals, colonization and urbanization’, Philosophy and Geography, 6 (1), 47–58. Philo, C. and Wilbert, C. (2000), Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human– Animal Relations, London: Routledge. Philo, C. and Wolch, J. (1998), ‘Through the geographical looking glass: space, place, and society–animal relations’, Society and Animals, 6 (2), 103–18. Risan, L.C. (2005), ‘The boundary of animality’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23, 787–93. Rubio-Ramon, G. and Srinivasan, K. (2023), ‘Methodologies for animal geographies:

approaches within and beyond the human’, in S.A. Lovell, S.E. Coen and M.W. Rosenberg (eds), Routledge Handbook of Methodologies in Human Geography, London: Routledge. Sauer, C.O. (1972), Seeds, Spades, Hearths, and Herds: The Domestication of Animals and Foodstuffs, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Srinivasan, K. (2014), ‘Caring for the collective: biopower and agential subjectification in wildlife conservation’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32 (3), 501–17. Srinivasan, K. (2016), ‘Towards a political animal geography?’, Political Geography, 50, 76–8. Srinivasan, K. (2019), ‘Remaking more‐than‐ human society: thought experiments on street dogs as “nature”’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44 (2), 376–91. Syse, K.V.L. and Bjørkdahl, K. (2013), ‘Death and meatereality’, in R. Willersev and D.R. Christensen (eds), Taming Time, Timing Death: Death, Materiality and the Origin of Time, London: Routledge, pp. 213–31. Urbanik, J. (2012), Placing Animals: An Introduction to the Geography of Human– Animal Relations, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Wadiwel, D.J. (2016), ‘Do fish resist?’, Cultural Studies Review, 22 (1), 196–242. Whatmore, S. (2002), Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces, London: SAGE. Wolch, J. and Emel, J. (1995), ‘Guest editorial’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13 (6), 632–6. Wolch, J. and Emel, J. (eds) (1998), Animal Geographies: Place, Politics and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands, London: Verso. Zhang, A. (2020), ‘Circularity and enclosures: metabolizing waste with the black soldier fly’, Cultural Anthropology, 35 (1), 74–103.

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5. Anthropocene

that is, the interactions between the biosphere, cryosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, pedosphere and the role that human activities were playing over time in all this. They focused on the recent period of Earth history, the so-called Holocene (starting approximately 10 500 years ago). While they were not geologists, the IGBP team began to use the Anthropocene concept to characterize the present-day Earth System – most notably, in a 2004 book entitled Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure (Steffen et al., 2004). Shortly after, because of the suffix ‘cene’, widely used in geology, stratigraphers (i.e., geologists who study rock layers as evidence of major previous changes to the Earth’s environment) began to take notice. In 2008, an Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was formed as a component body of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), which is a constituent body of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). The ICS oversees the geological timescale, the scientifically validated chronology of the main periods of Earth’s long and dynamic history. Chaired by British geologist Jan Zalasiewicz for several years, the Group brought stratigraphers together with IGBP scientists, other geoscientists and several social scientists. For well over a decade, the Group has systematically assessed various criteria and bodies of evidence that might provide a suitable stratigraphic case for new ‘anthropogenic strata’ that would be perceptible in ten, 50 or 100 000 years into the future. At the time of writing, the AWG has proposed to the SQS that the Anthropocene be considered a new geological epoch beginning around 1950. That year marks the start of what IGBP scientists have called the Great Acceleration in human affairs. This acceleration in commodity production, commodity consumption, population numbers, trade, overseas investment, and so on has led not only to climate change but also to huge losses of biodiversity, the denaturalization of global chemical cycles, enormous freshwater diversions, the massive expansion of farmed land, and so on. In other words, the human impact on Earth has increased manifold since the first Earth Day in 1970, when some scientists and environmentalists initially sounded the alarm. While the Anthropocene remains an informal term in geology, Earth System scientists studying the present-day planet now use it

The Anthropocene means ‘the human epoch’. It describes a period in which the sheer scale, scope and magnitude of people’s combined impacts on the planet are having global and long-term (virtually irreversible) effects. The term originates in the geosciences, including the various branches of physical geography. While there is not yet a scientific consensus about its descriptive validity, the term proposes that the Earth has entered a new phase in its 4.5 billion year history: a phase with anthropogenic rather than natural causes. This is unprecedented. Until now, humans have only been able to transform the natural environment at a local or regional scale. Since it was coined in 2000 – by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and freshwater biologist Eugene Stoermer (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000) – ‘the Anthropocene’ has attracted significant interest beyond the geosciences as well as within them (notably, across the social sciences and the humanities). Because it is sandwiched topically between these three broad fields of research and teaching, the Anthropocene has been especially relevant to geography as a discipline. Among other things, the idea that we now live on ‘a human planet’ highlights the futility of studying human and physical geography in isolation from each other at any scale. However, as we will see below, the hypothesis that humans have entered a new planetary epoch of their own making has not – for good reason – led to a grand new alliance between specialists working in each of geography’s two metaphorical territories. Instead, different geographers are making a wide range of contributions to our understanding of the Anthropocene. Whether this variety is fruitful or a dismal failure of geographers to coordinate their activities during a planetary emergency remains an open question. Though it sounds like a geological term, the Anthropocene concept was initially formulated by researchers in the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP, 1987–2015). This investigative programme brought together geoscientists from around the world, including Nobel Prize-winning chemist Crutzen. Using greatly improved remote sensing and measurement technologies, the IGBP researchers sought to understand what they called ‘the Earth System’: 22

Anthropocene  23

routinely. Some of these scientists have also linked the Anthropocene idea to two other relatively novel concepts. One is ‘planetary boundaries’. These are elements of the Earth System beyond which humanity may enter an ‘unsafe operating space’ for civilization (see Rockström et al., 2009). The other idea is ‘planetary tipping points’ (see Lenton et al., 2019). These are moments of rapid and momentous change to the Earth System that, in the deep past, have been caused by things like a meteorite striking the planet’s surface. In the present day, the deliberate destruction of the Amazon ecosystem and the inadvertent release of huge methane stores into the atmosphere (as permafrost melts in Northern Canada and elsewhere) may push the Earth into a ‘hot house’ condition not seen for millions of years (Steffen et al., 2018). What this means is that while humans have the power to instigate Earth System change, they will lack the power to control the nature and rate of future change to that system. For this reason, many scientists using the Anthropocene, planetary boundaries and global tipping points ideas are deeply alarmed by the risks that human recklessness is posing to life on Earth – including human life. Unsurprisingly, their many publications have inspired a literature (and some TV and film documentaries) targeted at the general public, politicians and business leaders. There are now a plethora of books urging a Great Deceleration authored by scientists (like the late Harvard University entomologist Edward Wilson), philosophers (like Australian Clive Hamilton), journalists (such as American Elizabeth Kolbert) and political campaigners (such as Canadian Naomi Klein). Likewise, the Netflix series Our Planet (2019) highlights the extraordinarily large negative impacts humans are having, implying a need to apply the emergency handbrake. Clearly, the Anthropocene concept and affiliated ideas are deeply geographical. If geography is the study of how diverse phenomena behave, and are arranged, on the surface of the Earth, then the Anthropocene describes ‘game-changing’ alterations to the world’s physical and human geography. During the Holocene epoch, during which humans have multiplied and developed various civilizations, the Earth System has been very stable. However, as people have created various ‘human environments’, such

as cities and farmed landscapes, they have progressively remade the world’s local and regional physical geography. Over time, and unintentionally, this sequence of significant subglobal changes has had a cumulative global impact. In turn, global-scale environmental changes are now reacting back at the local and regional levels on the artificial and natural environments people depend on. The world’s geography has become more fluid, and large future changes will occur even if humans stopped all activity tomorrow. This is because positive feedbacks, like ice-sheet melting due to atmospheric warming (already 1°C above pre-industrial levels), are now irreversible on decades-to-centuries timescales. In short, the Anthropocene idea implies the need for a holistic, integrated approach to research and teaching in geography. It calls for the virtual elimination of ‘pure’ human and physical geography and an expansion of the area between (sometimes called environmental geography). This is challenging because, in many parts of the world, university-level geography is a quite diverse (fragmented?) discipline chock-full of specialists (e.g., economic geographers and geomorphologists). Many of these specialists do not collaborate often or at all, usually favouring deep focus in a niche area over a shared focus on how complex human societies interact with equally complex built and natural environments. As a challenge to this, the Anthropocene implies a geographical research agenda moving forward as follows: ● Place and region: how are different parts of the world being impacted by powerful global environmental processes such as atmospheric warming and ocean acidification? How can these places and regions best mitigate, and adapt to, the predicted impacts of these anthropogenic changes? How can they do so while meeting the needs of around 9 billion people? How can they learn from other parts of the globe while retaining their distinctive qualities, including heritage features? ● Scale: how are decisions, events and initiatives occurring at small scales (e.g., in Sydney, Australia) going to complement national and global ambitions for planetary safety (e.g., to keep global warming at less than 2°C above preindustrial levels or to ‘rewild’ Noel Castree

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one-third of the Earth’s surface)? What scalar contradictions might arise? How might they be resolved? What sorts of incentives, goals and rules will enable a world of over 190 countries and thousands of cities to move forward cooperatively to avoid a ‘bad Anthropocene’? What geopolitical rivalries and opportunities exist to both prohibit and enable a collective human response to the threats of an Anthropocene epoch? ● Geographies of geoengineering: in all three cases above, it is highly likely that various geoengineering technologies will be relevant. These are interventions that seek to keep the Earth close to a Holocene state (e.g., large-scale carbon capture and underground storage; mass planting of new quick-growth forests). There are costs, risks and benefits to these (largely untested) technologies, and questions about when, where and at what scale to deploy them. ● Geographies of socio-environmental reform and transformation: in all three cases above questions arise about the nature and pace of reform (incremental change to present human practices) and, more radically, of transformation (systemic change to ways of living). Reform and transformation involve different sorts of planned change to all manner of current norms, habits, organizations, infrastructures and so on. They involve various technologies designed to realize the declared goals of reform and of transformation. Questions about the how and why of reform and transformation at different scales require not only analytical-technical expertise among geographers and others. They also require moral and normative expertise about what the reasons for, and goals of, reform and transformation ought to be. For instance, can and should humanity transition to a post-capitalist society funded on post-materialist values that elevate respect for nature? Moderate and more radical socio-ecological change can take many possible forms. As yet, the Anthropocene idea has not inspired geographers to converge around a research and teaching agenda like this one. The reasons why will be explained below. So how, thus far, have geographers Noel Castree

contributed to the unfolding research into the Anthropocene? By geographers here I mean (1) people trained as geographers (and working in geography departments), but also (2) people whose research is geographical (regardless of their training or current departmental location). A number of relatively discreet contributions have been made in the following three areas. Human geographers with interests in environmental change feature in the second and third of them: ● Proposing, evidencing and testing the Anthropocene hypothesis: A number of physical geographers have been part of the various geoscience teams researching whether the Holocene is, in fact, ending. Among them are Frank Oldfield (Liverpool University) and Billie Lee Turner (Arizona State University) – both involved in the IGBP – and American biogeographer Erle Ellis (who has been part of the AWG). Then there’s Exeter University’s Tim Lenton (who has studied tipping points closely) and British-American Diana Liverman, who (with Lenton and many others) has authored key articles about planetary boundaries. ● Criticizing the Anthropocene concept: Because the Anthropocene originated in the geosciences, it enjoys the public authority that most scientific discoveries and propositions enjoy. This authority can help to alert humans to serious danger ahead on Earth. But a number of human geographers have pointed to three problems with the Anthropocene concept as presented to us by geoscientists. One is the suggestion that humans, in general, have driven the Earth out of its Holocene state. As Anders Malm and Alf Hornborg (2014) pointed out, it is in fact only a wealthy section of humanity (past and present) that has imposed such widespread change on the totality of humanity (present and future) and the Earth. A second problem is that the Anthropocene concept risks making global environmental problems seem more important than the huge local-scale challenges many people face (e.g., food scarcity). As Cambridge University geographer Mike Hulme (2010) argued, general scientific goals – such as temperate targets and carbon dioxide budgets – can tend to

Anthropocene  25

subordinate goals, and ways of knowing the world, at lower levels. Third, geoscientists have not provided explanations of the specific causes of the Anthropocene. Understanding these causes is essential if we are to devise appropriate responses to the Anthropocene challenge, including assigning responsibility for liabilities and injustices in the present. American Jason Moore is among those who have proposed one of several explanations. In his book Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015), he argues that the globalization of a profit-seeking economic system – originally based in Europe in the seventeenth century – has wreaked ecological havoc (especially by using stored energy in fossil fuels to power the Great Acceleration since around 1950). This led him to propose the term Capitalocene as a more accurate neologism than the Anthropocene. For Moore, eliminating fossil fuel use in capitalism is essential, better still replacing it with an economic system whose goals are to steward the Earth and share its resources more equitably among people. ● Identifying the implications of the Anthropocene’s onset: it was mentioned above that the Anthropocene idea has inspired new thinking across the social sciences and the humanities. This includes human geography. If the Anthropocene hypothesis is taken seriously, its implications are truly profound. Elemental issues arise about how we define a ‘good life’ and what our obligations are to the non-human world locally and globally. Many human and environmental geographers have been exploring these issues intensively. I will pick out two examples from many. First, New Zealand geographer Nigel Clark (e.g., 2010) has argued for a new humility in the face of a planet likely to be more hostile to humanity in the future. Rather than hubristically try to ‘green’ current economic and consumption practices, Clark calls for a mind-shift towards respect for the non-human world and full acknowledgement of our vulnerability to the Earth’s power. Second, some geographers are scrutinizing emerging geoengineering technologies. Among them is Mike Hulme. In his book, Can Science Fix Climate Change? (2014) he

focuses on stratospheric aerosol injection. Though only at a testing stage, Hulme opposes this technology strongly because (1) it is environmentally risky (intervening in the complex ‘open system’ that is the atmosphere) and (2) likely to create serious geopolitical tensions through its unanticipated trans-border impacts. The examples above illustrate the range of valuable anthropocenic research that geographers are conducting. They speak to the intellectual diversity of the discipline and the numerous specialists arrayed across it. But is this diversity a problem? Why are geographers not converging on the four-part research agenda sketched above? Some geographers understandably see the Anthropocene as a golden opportunity to unify the branches of physical geography and to bring human geographers into a shared focus on the ‘wicked problems’ thrown up by the post-Holocene epoch. But others point out that a grand project to orchestrate geographers presumes – incorrectly – that there is but one metaphorical tune to play. They suggest, instead, that there are many geographies to be understood in the Anthropocene, not one super-complex, multi-scalar Earth System awaiting a ‘correct’ understanding by teams of experts. The disagreements are largely epistemological (pertaining to different ways of knowing reality). A scientific approach to environment and society presumes a single reality amenable to objective analysis. However, so-called post-positivist approaches focus on how different people make the material world meaningful symbolically and practically. They regard science as but one legitimate way to comprehend the world, and highlight different ways of knowing, and being affected by, reality. From a post-positivist perspective, geoscientists depicting the planet as a ‘system’ imply that it is but a set of processes, flows and phenomena that can – in theory – be managed rationally for everyone’s benefit (just as a mechanic fixes an engine). Contrast this with how, for example, aboriginal Australians view the world: as Country, as a sentient and intricate web of things, where past bleeds into the present and where people (living and deceased) are a part of nature not set apart from it as observers or managers. In this aboriginal view, it’s Noel Castree

26  Concise encyclopedia of human geography

important to respect Country, not see it as a resource or something to be managed. The two different ‘worldviews’ are equally legitimate – so argue post-positivists – even though we often think that the scientific one is somehow superior. One way in which the aspiration towards synthetic analysis has been expressed by some geographers is in ‘sustainability science’. This is a vibrant transdisciplinary field where specialists interact with each other and real-world actors (e.g., local communities) to address the challenges of the Anthropocene. Geographers are among these specialists, especially in the United States. But post-positivists like Mike Hulme (2009) argue that we also need to promote other ways of knowing, and acting in, the Anthropocene. For Hulme, this not only respects humans’ capacity for creativity and experimentation as they engage with a differentiated world, but also the democratic right of people to express their diverse outlooks on the actual and the desirable. To summarize, the Anthropocene describes a process of deep and wide geographical change. Geographers are contributing richly to our understanding of this process, even though the discipline lacks a unified approach. While some geographers seek to overcome the lack of unity, others caution against the temptation to assume there is one universally ‘correct’ approach to tackling the wicked problems of the Anthropocene. Human geographers fall into both camps. Noel Castree

Noel Castree

References and selected further reading Clark, N. (2010). Inhuman Nature: Life on a Sociable Planet. London: SAGE. Crutzen, P.J. and Stoermer, E. (2000). ‘The “Anthropocene”’. Global Change Newsletter, No. 41, 17–18. Hulme, M. (2009). Why We Disagree About Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hulme, M. (2010). ‘Problems with making and governing global kinds of knowledge’. Global Environmental Change, 20 (4), 558–64. Hulme, M. (2014). Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case Against Climate Engineering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lenton, T., Rockström, J. and Gaffney, O. et al. (2019). ‘Climate tipping points – too risky to bet against’. Nature, 575, 592–5. Malm, A. and Hornborg, A. (2014). ‘The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative’. The Anthropocene Review, 1 (1), 62–9. Moore, J. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso. Rockström, J., Steffen, W. and Noone, K. et al. (2009). ‘A safe operating space for humanity’. Nature, 461, 472–5. Steffen, W., Sanderson, A. and Tyson, P.D. et al. (2004). Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure. Berlin: Springer. Steffen, W. (2011). ‘The Anthropocene: from global change to planetary stewardship’. Ambio, 40, 739–61. Steffen, W., Rockström, J. and Richardson, K. et al. (2018). ‘Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 115 (33), 8252–9.

6. Art

human geographies and art, and their conceptually rewarding engagements towards forward-looking research agendas for geographic scholarship. Entanglements between geography and art can be broad, deep, serious, superficial, strategic, instrumental, temporary, performative, playful, exploitative, restorative. Artistic approaches are increasingly deployed in empirical human geographic research (e.g., von Benzon et al., 2021; Hawkins, 2021), while notions of space have long influenced artistic practice, research and theory-building (e.g., Hawkins and Straughan, 2018; Kwon, 2003). In addition, the trope of artistic research – research not only about, but also for and via the arts – has gained traction in the past years (e.g., Biggs and Karlsson, 2012; Frayling, 1993). Encounters between art and space/place have brought about empirical and theoretical knowledge on the crucial influence of spatial implications of processes of art-making across various geographic, theoretical and methodological terrains. By taking into account how place matters when art is made and exhibited – yet considerably also when art is displaced, vandalized or disinvited from certain places – connections between art and placemaking have been established (Courage et al., 2021). Relatedly, art has been discussed as a crucial medium through which to affect a sense of place (Barnes, 2019; Butler, 2007). Such sense of place attends to the unique spatial and affective characteristics of places, which are, however, differently experienced by different bodies and subjectivities. Artistic media in the public space, such as sculptures, memorials, monuments, murals and street art thus concretely affect how people navigate urban space, and more broadly, how they sense the city. Via creative methods such as sound-walks, photo-elicitation or storytelling, existing urban spaces can be explored from different angles, unlocking new ways of seeing and encountering cities (Pinder, 2005). Art can also reshuffle a trans-local affiliation and sense of belonging to places filled with art (Luger and Ren, 2017). In sum, the interpenetration of spatial concerns and aesthetic and artistic approaches has opened up new avenues for methodological and conceptual experimentation for both disciplines. In her influential article ‘Geography and art: an expanding field’, almost a decade ago, cultural geographer Harriet Hawkins (2013,

Art is an inherently spatial phenomenon. Art always takes place somewhere, and in various ways – for example, by colouring walls with acrylic paint, vinyl sheets, stickers, by covering buildings with ornaments or cloth, by constructing entirely new buildings, dismantling monuments, occupying public squares with performing bodies, protest placards, flash mobs, dance. In addition, art is a moving matter as it travels across physical spaces (e.g., via exhibitions, art fairs, biennials) and as physical objects (e.g., international lending of artefacts, travelling exhibitions and collections, art paraphernalia such as coffee mugs, socks, keychains etc.). Besides the physical mobility of artistic objects, subjects and ideas, art traverses digital spaces and infrastructures, and thus stretches our understanding of where and how art can take place in global circuits of new (social) media, technologies and diverse audiences (e.g., Zebracki and Luger, 2019). Ultimately, art also moves affectively – eliciting a myriad of feelings and memories about past, present and future imaginaries of this planet, and possibly beyond. In other words, the plasticity, materiality and hapticity of artistic media – including but not limited to artefacts, dance, installations, interventions, sculpture, music, painting, performance, photographs, smellscapes, soundscapes – are utterly connected with notions of space, place and placemaking. As it is a nearly impossible task to portray a state of the art across the field of human geography, this entry points to a variety of interconnections between art, and artists as political agents in particular, and the socio-political production of space. This endeavour proceeds without the promise to cover all the mental and physical territories these two polyvalent disciplines have co-created over the past decades. This entry amplifies the Encyclopedia’s future-oriented outlook on geography, rather than looking backwards, with the objective to sketch some of the key conceptual imports of the arts and artistic practices for critical human geographic research. ‘Creative geographies’ remain multiple (Bernardes de Souza Júnior and Geralda de Almeida, 2020; de Leeuw and Hawkins, 2017), thus this entry conveys a partial perspective into both the empirically rich connections between critical 27

28  Concise encyclopedia of human geography

p. 60) underscored that the ‘subversive force of art is often located in its promotion of an aesthetic engagement with space that is other than the normative apprehensions and uses of that space’. Hence, art can affect how people perceive places, whether they feel like they belong (or not), whether they matter, feel safe, are welcome (or not) – ranging from interventions into existing, concrete systems of political power to broadening the very notion of what and where ‘politics’ is. As art affects how humans interact in, and with each other, in space, these political implications of artistic agency and practice need to be distinguished. There has been a lacuna of critical accounts on participatory and/or political and/or collaborative art from contemporary discourses from art history, curatorial studies and art criticism (Bishop, 2004, 2012; Kester, 2011; Klanten, Dexter and Servert, 2021; Marchart, 2019; Mouffe, 2008; Sachs Olsen, 2018). Within these debates, the concrete political effects of artist-led protest and critique are hugely controversial (e.g., Groys, 2014). The differing opinions about the political effects, or affects, of art range from providing analytical frameworks with which to outline art’s æffective potential (Duncombe, 2016) to the claim that art is always already political and radically transforms conceptions of thematics such as the nation, the people or democracy at large (de Cauter, de Roo and Vanhaesebrouck, 2011). To differentiate, while artists and artist collectives have built a myriad of political artworks with the help of creative tactics (Boyd and Mitchell, 2014), artists have also concretely become involved in local decision-making and planning initiatives (e.g., Bain and Landau, 2017; Kovacs and Biggar, 2018) as well as local cultural governance processes (Gugu and Dal Molin, 2016; Landau and Merkel, 2018). In addition, artists appear as political activists in local cultural politics (Landau, 2019; Woddis, 2013). Artists’ creative interventions in urban politics, protest and space (de Cauter et al., 2011; Fırat and Kuryel, 2011; Reed, 2005) continue to shape and challenge existing modalities of political representation, collectivization, accountability and participation. From these diverse formations of artistic political agency, meandering between art, aesthetics and politics in the larger sense of that term, the potential of art to unlearn and rearticulate hegemonic structures towards Friederike Landau-Donnelly

more equitable positions of power and meaning shines through. Altogether, artists are not only empirically engaged in political processes, both individually and collectively, they also push to redefine the very notions of routinized politics, and political agency towards a broader conception of ‘the political’ that holds space for a variety of political expressions (Landau, 2019). By stirring political discourses in various ways, by means of prestigious commissions or unsolicited street art interventions, artists contribute to broadening our understanding of what politics actually means, and where it comes to the fore (e.g., Waldner and Dobratz, 2013). Artists, as well as cultural and creative workers (as much as the boundaries between these categories of professionalization are often blurred) are diversely involved in processes of city- and placemaking. They populate urban and not-so-urban places with artistic projects, studios, galleries, workshops, public art installations. Artists have been at the forefront of fighting against socio-spatial displacement, but also individually and collectively affected by gentrification (Bain and McLean, 2013; Deutsche, 2002; Rich, 2019; Zukin, 2014). While artists are sometimes seen as the culprits, or at least co-opted accelerators, of gentrification and upscaling dynamics, they often also become victims of their own success in creatively embellishing or aestheticizing space (e.g., Ley, 2003; Markusen and Gadwa, 2010; Mathews, 2010). Human geographers have examined the spatial impacts of artistic production in contexts of spatial clustering (e.g., Mommaas, 2009) or their various forms of embeddedness in the urban cultural fabric (e.g., Bain and Landau, 2021). Here, the connection between geography and artistic production is taken quite literally to understand where and how artists gather in urban contexts, and how their work can be mapped across diverse cities. With regard to the trend of adjectivizing cities along the lines of policy norms and priorities – leading to propositions such as the ‘smart’, ‘global’ or ‘green’ city – the trope of the ‘creative’ city received overwhelming attention from both researchers and local policymakers in the early 2000s when Richard Florida introduced his ‘theory’ of the creative class (Florida, 2002; Landry, 2008). The creative city is specifically assumed to spur economic growth from diverse forms

Art  29

of presence of art in the city (e.g., artistic production in studios, but also spaces of cultural presentation and consumption such as galleries, temporary installations, exhibitions and biennials; Ren, 2021). Since then, the policy paradigm of creative cities has travelled around the globe, and found entry into a host of creative city strategies, plans, policy briefs, presentations and agendas in the post-industrial European cities, as well as in North America (Grodach, 2013), Africa (Booyens, 2012; Nkula-Wenz, 2019) and Asia (de Beukelaer, 2021; Kim, 2017). Despite the initial, widespread excitement about the announcement of the ‘creativity fix’ as a solution to post-industrial shrinkage and unemployment (Peck, 2007), the trajectory of the creative city is implemented with hugely different financial resources, and political will for taking substantial precautions to maintain and support cultural infrastructures in creative cities. As a result, critical geographic scholarship around the creative city has reinforced how creativity-oriented policies might, in the worst case, reinforce existing socio-spatial as well as gendered and racialized inequalities (Colomb, 2012; Hutton et al., 2009; Landau, 2019; McLean, 2014; Mould, 2015; Parker, 2009). This brief entry has unpacked a variety of geographic and urban discourses that demonstrate how art and artists shape imaginaries, senses and meanings of places. In light of the discussed ‘art–science collaborations’, in the specific realm of spatial thought and practice, alliances between creative practitioners and researchers are occurring in areas such as environmental humanities (Heise, Christensen and Niemann, 2021; Turpin and Davis, 2015), geo-humanities (Hawkins, 2021) or geo-poetics (Magrane, 2020). These transdisciplinary dialogues reinforce the multiple affordances, and potentials of art to ‘transform the field on which it is working, creating the possibilities for different kinds of subjects, knowledge, and worlds’ (Hawkins, 2014, p. 12). Art projects straddle issues such as anthropogenically polluted soil, water and air, as well as multi-species and multi-scalar forms of solidarity, endurance and survival. For example, Amy Balkin’s ‘Public Smog’, an atmospheric park, interconnects international emission trading data with artful installations in public space (Landau and Toland,

2022). Geographically attuned art, and artistically minded geographies resulting from this, can together push boundaries of how, where and between whom knowledge is produced. This aligned thinking and doing of geography can train senses, sensibilities and attunements to specific places, but also geographic consciousness at large – to ultimately practise the discipline of geography as art of the future. Friederike Landau-Donnelly

References and selected further reading Bain, Alison L. and Landau, Friederike (2017). Artists, temporality, and the governance of collaborative place-making. Urban Affairs Review, 55 (2), 405–27. Bain, Alison L. and Landau, Friederike (2021). Generationing cultural quarters: the temporal embeddedness of relational places. Urban Geography, 23, 1–28. Bain, Alison and McLean, Heather (2013). The artistic precariat. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 6 (1), 93–111. Barnes, Alison (2019). Creative Representations of Place. New York: Routledge. Bernardes de Souza Júnior, Carlos Roberto and Geralda de Almeida, Maria (2020). Geografias criativas: afinidades experienciais na relação arte-geografia. Sociedade & Natureza, 32, 484–93. Biggs, Michael A.R. and Karlsson, Henrik (eds) (2012). The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts. London: Routledge. Bishop, Claire (2004). Antagonism and relational aesthetics. OCTOBER Magazine, No. 110, 51–79. Bishop, Claire (2012). Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. New York: Verso. Booyens, Irma (2012). Creative industries, inequality and social development: developments, impacts and challenges in Cape Town. Urban Forum, 23 (1), 43–60. Boyd, Andrew and Mitchell, Dave Oswald (eds) (2014). Beautiful Trouble: Handbuch für eine unwiderstehliche Revolution. Freiburg im Breisgau: Orange-Press. Butler, Toby (2007). Memoryscape: how audio walks can deepen our sense of place by integrating art, oral history and cultural geography. Geography Compass, 1 (3), 360–72. Colomb, Claire (2012). Pushing the urban frontier: temporary uses of space, city marketing, and the

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30  Concise encyclopedia of human geography creative city discourse in 2000s Berlin. Journal of Urban Affairs, 34 (2), 131–52. Courage, Cara, Borrup, Tom and Rosario Jackson, Maria et al. (eds) (2021). The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking. London: Routledge. de Beukelaer, Christiaan (2021). Friction in the creative city. Open Cultural Studies, 5 (1), 40–53. de Cauter, Lieven, de Roo, Ruben and Vanhaesebrouck, Karel (2011). Reflect No. 8: Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization. Rotterdam: NAI Publishers. de Leeuw, Sarah and Hawkins, Harriet (2017). Critical geographies and geography’s creative re/turn: poetics and practices for new disciplinary spaces. Gender, Place & Culture, 24 (3), 303–24. Deutsche, Rosalyn (2002). Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Duncombe, Stephen (2016). Does it work? The æffect of activist art. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 83 (1), 115–34. Fırat, Begüm Özden and Kuryel, Aylin (2011). Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas, and Possibilities. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Florida, Richard L. (2002). The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. Frayling, Christopher (1993). Research in art and design. Royal College of Art Research Papers, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1993/4. Accessed 30 September 2022 at https://​researchonline​.rca​.ac​.uk/​384/​ 3/​frayling​_research​_in​_art​_and​_design​_1993​ .pdf. Grodach, Carl (2013). Cultural economy planning in creative cities: discourse and practice. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37 (5), 1747–65. Groys, Boris (2014). On art activism. e-flux Journal, 56, 1–14. Gugu, Silvia and Dal Molin, Martina (2016). Collaborative local cultural governance. Administration & Society, 48 (2), 237–62. Hawkins, Harriet (2013). Geography and art: an expanding field: site, the body and practice. Progress in Human Geography, 37 (1), 52–71. Hawkins, Harriet (2014). For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds. New York: Routledge. Hawkins, Harriet (2021). Geography, Art, Research: Artistic Research in the GeoHumanities. London: Routledge. Hawkins, Harriet and Straughan, Elizabeth (2018). Geographical Aesthetics: Imagining Space, Staging Encounters. New York: Routledge. Heise, Ursula, Christensen, Jon and Niemann, Michelle (eds) (2021). The Routledge

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Companion to the Environmental Humanities. New York: Routledge. Hutton, Thomas A., Catungal, John Paul, Leslie, Deborah and Hii, Yvonne (2009). Geographies of displacement in the creative city: the case of Liberty Village, Toronto. Urban Studies, 46 (5–6), 1095–114. Kester, Grant H. (2011). The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kim, Changwook (2017). Locating creative city policy in East Asia: neoliberalism, developmental state and assemblage of East Asian cities. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 23 (3), 312–30. Klanten, Robert, Dexter, Lincoln and Servert, Andrea (eds) (2021). The Art of Protest: Political Art and Activism. Berlin: Gestalten. Kovacs, Jason F. and Biggar, Jeff (2018). Embedding artists within planning: Calgary’s Watershed+ initiative. Planning Practice & Research, 33 (1), 51–69. Kwon, Miwon (2003). One Place after Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Landau, Friederike (2019). Agonistic Articulations in the ‘Creative’ City: On New Actors and Activism in Berlin’s Cultural Politics. London: Routledge. Landau, Friederike and Merkel, Janet (2018). Mobilizing alternative modes of cultural governance in Berlin. In Jens Kaae Fiskar, Letizia Chiappini, Lee Pugalis and Antonella Bruzzese (eds) (2018), Enabling Urban Alternatives: Crises, Contestation, and Cooperation. Singapore: Springer Nature, pp. 109–32. Landau, Friederike and Toland, Alexandra (2022). Towards a sensory politics of the Anthropocene: exploring activist-artistic approaches to politicizing air pollution. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 40 (3), 629–47. Landry, Charles (2008). The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators (2nd edition). London and New York: Comedia/Earthscan. Ley, David (2003). Artists, aestheticisation and the field of gentrification. Urban Studies, 40 (12), 2527–44. Luger, Jason and Ren, Julie (eds) (2017). Art and the City: Worlding the Discussion Through a Critical Artscape. New York: Routledge. Magrane, Eric (ed.) (2020). Geopoetics in Practice. London: Routledge. Marchart, Oliver (2019). Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Markusen, Ann and Gadwa, Anne (2010). Arts and culture in urban or regional planning: a review

Art  31 and research agenda. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 29 (3), 379–91. Mathews, Vanessa (2010). Aestheticizing space: art, gentrification and the city. Geography Compass, 4 (6), 660–75. McLean, Heather (2014). Digging into the creative city: a feminist critique. Antipode, 46 (3), 669–90. Mommaas, Hans (2009). Spaces of culture and economy: mapping the cultural-creative cluster landscape. In Lily Kong and Justin O’Connor (eds), Creative Economies, Creative Cities. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 45–59. Mouffe, Chantal (2008). Art as an agonistic intervention in public space. In Liesbeth Melis and Jorinde Seijdel (eds), Open 14. Art as a Public Issue: How Art and its Institutions Reinvent the Public Dimension. Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, pp. 1–7. Mould, Oliver (2015). Urban Subversion and the Creative City. New York: Routledge. Nkula-Wenz, Laura (2019). Worlding Cape Town by design: encounters with creative cityness. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 51 (3), 581–97. Parker, Brenda (2009). Beyond the class act: gender and race in the ‘creative city’ discourse. In Judith N. DeSena and Ray Hutchison (eds) (2009), Gender in an Urban World. Bingley: Emerald, pp. 201–32. Peck, Jamie (2007). The creativity fix. Fronesis, No. 24. Accessed 30 September 2022 at https://​ www​.eurozine​.com/​the​-creativity​-fix/​. Pinder, David (2005). Arts of urban exploration. Cultural Geographies, 12 (4), 383–411. Reed, T.V. (2005). The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the

Streets of Seattle. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ren, Julie (2021). Obscuring representation: contemporary art biennials in Dakar and Taipei. Geographica Helvetica, 76 (2), 103–13. Rich, Meghan Ashlin (2019). ‘Artists are a tool for gentrification’: maintaining artists and creative production in arts districts. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 25 (6), 727–42. Sachs Olsen, Cecilie (2018). Collaborative challenges: negotiating the complicities of socially engaged art within an era of neoliberal urbanism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36 (2), 273–93. Turpin, Etienne and Davis, Heather (eds) (2015). Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Press. von Benzon, Nadia, Holton, Mark, Wilkinson, Catherine and Wilkinson, Samantha (eds) (2021). Creative Methods for Human Geographers. London: SAGE. Waldner, Lisa K. and Dobratz, Betty A. (2013). Graffiti as a form of contentious political participation. Sociology Compass, 7 (5), 377–89. Woddis, Jane (2013). Arts practitioners in the cultural policy process: spear-carriers or speaking parts? International Journal of Cultural Policy, 20 (4), 496–512. Zebracki, Martin and Luger, Jason (2019). Digital geographies of public art: new global politics. Progress in Human Geography, 43 (5), 890–909. Zukin, Sharon (2014). Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (25th anniversary edition). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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7.

Artificial intelligence

the deep neural networks (DNN) and thereafter a series of DNN architectures (LeCun, Bengio and Hinton, 2015), such as the various forms of convolutional neural networks (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN) proposed for image classification and natural language understanding tasks. More recently, novel AI models, such as generative adversarial networks (GAN) (Goodfellow et al., 2014) and deep reinforcement learning (Mnih et al., 2015), have pushed the frontiers of solving challenging problems in more complex systems with rich sources of data observations.

What is AI? The idea of ‘a machine that thinks’ dates back to ancient Greece. However, machinery intelligence was not in discussion until the famous ‘Turing Test’ proposed by Alan Turing. In that test, a human interrogator tried to distinguish between a machine and a person based on their textual responses to questions (Turing, 1950). In 1956, John McCarthy coined the term ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI), and from then on, a number of definitions of AI have surfaced over the past decades (Russell and Norvig, 2021). Many now regard AI as ‘the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs’ (McCarthy, 2004, n.p.). But AI research is not limited to designing intelligent machines; it also includes studies that utilize intelligent computational methods to advance knowledge in a variety of domains and to address the most challenging problems facing societies.

The integration of AI and human geographic research The integration of AI and human geographic research is not completely new. Early studies back in the 1980s explored how AI and geographic research could be brought together regarding their theories, epistemologies, scientific methods and applications (Couclelis, 1986; Openshaw, 1997). In 1998, Manfred M. Fischer proposed a computational neural network that was a prototype that combined spatial analysis and models with AI techniques (Fischer, 1998). These early studies found that neural networks could offer greater representational flexibility and provide new insights for solving key geographic problems such as spatial pattern classification, spatial clustering, spatial function approximation, spatio-temporal prediction, and spatial optimization. In the past two decades, various types of big geo data that describe the locational nature of physical and human phenomena have become available. Geographers now have the opportunity to scrutinize the Earth in a more systematic and data-driven manner (Reichstein et al., 2019). In this context, and along with the fast advancements of AI methods, geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) has emerged as an interdisciplinary research area where AI techniques are developed and utilized for geographic knowledge discovery and beyond (Gao, 2020; Janowicz et al., 2020; Zhu et al., 2021). Among the big geo data available nowadays, a large amount is related to human geography and captures various aspects of human activities. Examples include GPS trajectories, geotagged social media, mobile phone location data, traffic

The evolution of AI methods Despite the recent boom, AI has experienced rises and falls since its inception. Following early interest in the 1960s and 1970s, AI research went through the ‘AI winter’ due to the bottleneck of addressing real-world problems. Methodologically, past decades have witnessed three waves of neural network development – cybernetics from the 1940s to the 1960s, connectionism from the 1980s to the 1990s, and the deep learning era beginning in 2006. More specifically, the first perception model was proposed in the 1950s to derive weights by learning input samples in a way of imitating neural activities in the brain (Rosenblatt, 1958). The second wave came with connectionism in cognitive science, in which key concepts for modeling intelligent systems based on neural networks were proposed, such as distributed representations (Hinton, McClelland and Rumelhart, 1984), back-propagation (Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams, 1986), long short-term memory (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber, 1997), and convolutional networks (Yann, Léon and Yoshua, 1998). The third wave began with 32

Artificial intelligence  33

flows, points of interest (POIs), street view images, and spatial epidemiological data. By combining these human activity-related geo data and novel AI methods, we can explore a wide range of human geography topics such as place perception, human mobility, public health, disaster response, and geodemographics. Due to the complexity of many human geographic phenomena, their diverse representational modes, and data incompleteness issues, specialized methods, especially those based on AI models, are needed to overcome key challenges in geographic research. In the following section, we discuss existing studies that have integrated AI and human geography research.

AI for human geography research AI for place studies Place is an important concept in human geography, and it has been considered as space filled with human experience (Tuan, 1977). Machine learning and deep learning models, coupled with various types of big geo data, enable us to understand places from spatial, temporal, and thematic perspectives (Janowicz et al., 2019). Gao et al. (2017) synthesized multiple types of geotagged social media data and used an unsupervised clustering method to identify the spatial boundaries of vague place names such as ‘NorCal’

Figure 7.1

and ‘SoCal’ (Figure 7.1(a)). McKenzie et al. (2015) trained a support vector machine (SVM) model to classify the type of places based on the temporal patterns (an example is shown in Figure 7.1(b)) in which people interact with POIs. Hu, Deng and Zhou (2019) used an unsupervised topic model, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), to extract thematic topics (Figure 7.1(c)) from online neighborhood reviews to understand the perceptions of people toward their living environments. Researchers also used AI models to examine the spatial interactions among places. Zhu et al. (2020) employed a graph convolutional neural network (GCNN) to model the connections of places in order to understand and predict their characteristics. Existing research also applied deep learning models to street view images and geotagged photos to extract various types of information about places, such as demographics (Gebru et al., 2017), perceived safety (Zhang et al., 2018), place emotions (Kang et al., 2019), and playability (Kruse et al., 2021). AI for human mobility and human dynamics. Human mobility and human dynamics are another important topic in human geography (Shaw and Sui, 2020). The availability of GPS data from vehicles and mobile phones, location-based social media check-ins, subway smart card data, and other datasets enables us to quantitatively measure

Using AI methods to study place. (a) Spatial boundaries of ‘NorCal’ and ‘SoCal’ identified from geotagged social media data; (b) temporal patterns of two different types of places; (c) thematic topics extracted from online neighborhood reviews

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and predict how people move around in geographic space (Liu et al., 2015). Noticing the limitation of low-frequently sampled mobile phone location data, Li et al. (2019) proposed a machine learning-based method to interpolate and reconstruct human movement trajectories. Zhao et al. (2020) proposed a temporal graph convolutional network model that improves traffic forecasting by capturing spatial and temporal dependencies simultaneously. Ren et al. (2020) introduced a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network into the ST-ResNet to form a hybrid integrated-DL model that improved the prediction of citywide spatio-temporal flow volumes. Liu et al. (2017) proposed the Road2Vec model, which utilized the embedding technique to capture the implicit spatial interactions among road segments for short-term traffic forecasting. There are many other studies that use AI methods to perform better spatio-temporal predictions of human movements (Deng et al., 2016; Zhang et al., 2019). AI for public health, disaster response, population studies, and other areas AI methods have been developed and used to address many other problems related to human geography. In public health, AI methods have been employed to understand the environmental factors and social determinants that may impact the health of the general public (Boulos, Peng and VoPham, 2019). Various machine learning and deep learning methods were utilized to tackle challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic (Hou et al., 2021; Mbunge et al., 2021). In disaster response, AI models were developed to collect real-time information on the ground and to locate the people who need help (Wang, Hu and Joseph, 2020; Yu et al., 2019). In population studies, Xing et al. (2020) demonstrated how remote sensing imagery can be used for reliable estimation of human activity volumes by adding neighborhood effects into a raster-based CNN model. Huang et al. (2021) systematically compared four deep learning models in estimating population distribution from remote sensing images as well as the bias in the trained models. AI methods were also used in studies on crime prediction (Kang and Kang, 2017) and geoprivacy protection (Rao et al., 2021). Di Zhu and Yingjie Hu

Summary and future directions Artificial intelligence and big geo data enable us to study human geography from new perspectives and to discover new knowledge. While we have reviewed some of the recent advancements, various challenges exist that may need to be addressed in future research. First, AI models often need to be trained with labeled data. While many geospatial datasets exist, there is still a lack of high-quality labeled data due to the required manual effort for data annotation. Thus, one direction is to study possible approaches that can facilitate the creation of labeled training datasets. Second, geospatial datasets are always collected in certain geographic regions, making the trained model difficult to be generalized to other regions. Therefore, another possible direction is to study methods that allow the trained AI models to be transferred from one geographic area to another so that we can facilitate the examination of human geography phenomena across regions. Third, while AI models often have outstanding performance in prediction and classification, it is difficult to explain their internal processes to researchers and decision-makers (Gahegan, 2020). Enhancing the explainability of AI models is another direction that could promote their usage in human geography research. Di Zhu and Yingjie Hu

References and selected further reading Boulos, M.N.K., Peng, G. and VoPham, T. (2019). An overview of GeoAI applications in health and healthcare. International Journal of Health Geographics, 18 (1), 1–9. Couclelis, H. (1986). Artificial intelligence in geography: conjectures on the shape of things to come. The Professional Geographer, 38 (1), 1–11. Deng, D., Shahabi, C. and Demiryurek, U. et al. (2016). Latent space model for road networks to predict time-varying traffic. In Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International

Artificial intelligence  35 Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (pp. 1525–34). New York: ACM. Fischer, M.M. (1998). Computational neural networks: a new paradigm for spatial analysis. Environment and Planning A, 30 (10), 1873–91. Gahegan, M. (2020). Fourth paradigm GIScience? Prospects for automated discovery and explanation from data. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 34 (1), 1–21. Gao, S. (2020). A review of researches and reflections on geospatial artificial intelligence. Geomatics and Information Science of Wuhan University, 45 (12), 1865–74. Gao, S., Janowicz, K. and Montello, D.R. et al. (2017). A data-synthesis-driven method for detecting and extracting vague cognitive regions. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 31 (6), 1245–71. Gebru, T., Krause, J. and Wang, Y. et al. (2017). Using deep learning and Google Street View to estimate the demographic makeup of neighborhoods across the United States. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114 (50), 13108–13. Goodfellow, I., Pouget-Abadie, J. and Mirza, M. et al. (2014). Generative adversarial nets. In Z. Ghahramani, M. Welling and C. Cortes et al. (eds), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 27 (NIPS 2014). Accessed papers​ .nips​ .cc/​ 30 September 2022 at https://​ paper/​2014/​hash/​5c​a3e9b122f6​1f8f06494c​ 97b1afccf3​-Abstract​.html. Hinton, G.E., McClelland, J.L. and Rumelhart, D.E. (1984). Distributed Representations. Technical report, Carnegie-Mellon University. Hochreiter, S. and Schmidhuber, J. (1997). Long short-term memory. Neural Computation, 9 (8), 1735–80. Hou, X., Gao, S. and Li, Q. et al. (2021). Intracounty modeling of COVID-19 infection with human mobility: assessing spatial heterogeneity with business traffic, age, and race. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118 (24), Article e2020524118. Hu, Y., Deng, C. and Zhou, Z. (2019). A semantic and sentiment analysis on online neighborhood reviews for understanding the perceptions of people toward their living environments. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109 (4), 1052–73. Huang, X., Zhu, D. and Zhang, F. et al. (2021). Sensing population distribution from satellite imagery via deep learning: model selection, neighboring effects, and systematic biases. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 14, 5137–51. Janowicz, K., Gao, S. and McKenzie, G. et al. (2020). GeoAI: spatially explicit artificial intel-

ligence techniques for geographic knowledge discovery and beyond. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 34 (4), 625–36. Janowicz, K., McKenzie, G. and Hu, Y. et al. (2019). Using semantic signatures for social sensing in urban environments. In C. Antoniou, L. Dimitriou and F. Pereira (eds), Mobility Patterns, Big Data and Transport Analytics (pp. 31–54). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Kang, H.-W. and Kang, H.-B. (2017). Prediction of crime occurrence from multi-modal data using deep learning. PLOS ONE, 12(4), Article e0176244. Kang, Y., Jia, Q. and Gao, S. et al. (2019). Extracting human emotions at different places based on facial expressions and spatial clustering analysis. Transactions in GIS, 23 (3), 450–80. Kruse, J., Kang, Y. and Liu, Y.-N. et al. (2021). Places for play: understanding human perception of playability in cities using street view images and deep learning. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 90, Article 101693. LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y. and Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. Nature, 521 (7553), 436–44. Li, M., Gao, S., Lu, F. and Zhang, H. (2019). Reconstruction of human movement trajectories from large-scale low-frequency mobile phone data. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 77, Article 101346. Liu, K., Gao, S. and Qiu, P. et al. (2017). Road2Vec: measuring traffic interactions in urban road system from massive travel routes. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 6 (11), Article 321. Liu, Y., Liu, X. and Gao, S. et al. (2015). Social sensing: a new approach to understanding our socioeconomic environments. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 105 (3), 512–30. Mbunge, E., Akinnuwesi, B. and Fashoto, S.G. et al. (2021). A critical review of emerging technologies for tackling COVID‐19 pandemic. Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 3 (1), 25–39. McCarthy, J. (2004). What is AI?/Basic questions. Accessed 16 October 2022 at http://​jmc​ .stanford​.edu/​artificial​-intelligence/​what​-is​-ai/​ index​.html. McKenzie, G., Janowicz, K. and Gao, S. et al. (2015). POI pulse: a multi-granular, semantic signature–based information observatory for the interactive visualization of big geosocial data. Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 50 (2), 71–85. Mnih, V., Kavukcuoglu, K. and Silver, D. et al. (2015). Human-level control through deep

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36  Concise encyclopedia of human geography reinforcement learning. Nature, 518 (7540), 529–33. Openshaw, S. (1997). Artificial Intelligence in Geography. Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Rao, J., Gao, S., Kang, Y. and Huang, Q. (2021). LSTM-TrajGAN: a deep learning approach to trajectory privacy protection. In K. Janowicz and J.A. Verstegen (eds), Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Geographic Information Science, Article 12, 12.1–12.17. Reichstein, M., Camps-Valls, G. and Stevens, B. et al. (2019). Deep learning and process understanding for data-driven Earth system science. Nature, 566 (7743), 195–204. Ren, Y., Chen, H. and Han, Y. et al. (2020). A hybrid integrated deep learning model for the prediction of citywide spatio-temporal flow volumes. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 34 (4), 802–23. Rosenblatt, F. (1958). The perceptron: a probabilistic model for information storage and organization in the brain. Psychological Review, 65 (6), 386–408. Rumelhart, D.E., Hinton, G.E. and Williams, R.J. (1986). Learning representations by back-propagating errors. Nature, 323, 533–6. Russell, S.J. and Norvig, P. (2021). Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (4th edition). Hoboken, NJ: Pearson. Shaw, S.-L. and Sui, D. (2020). Understanding the new human dynamics in smart spaces and places: toward a splatial framework. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 110 (2), 339–48. Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Turing, A.M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Minds, 49, 433–60. Wang, J., Hu, Y. and Joseph, K. (2020). NeuroTPR: a neuro‐net toponym recognition model for

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extracting locations from social media messages. Transactions in GIS, 24 (3), 719–35. Xing, X., Huang, Z. and Cheng, X. et al. (2020). Mapping human activity volumes through remote sensing imagery. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 13, 5652–68. Yann, L., Léon, B. and Yoshua, B. (1998). Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition. Proceedings of the IEEE, 86 (11), 2278–324. Yu, M., Huang, Q. and Qin, H. et al. (2019). Deep learning for real-time social media text classification for situation awareness – using Hurricanes Sandy, Harvey, and Irma as case studies. International Journal of Digital Earth, 12 (11), 1230–47. Zhang, F., Wu, L., Zhu, D. and Liu, Y. (2019). Social sensing from street-level imagery: a case study in learning spatio-temporal urban mobility patterns. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 153, 48–58. Zhang, F., Zhou, B. and Liu, L. et al. (2018). Measuring human perceptions of a large-scale urban region using machine learning. Landscape and Urban Planning, 180, 148–60. Zhao, L., Song, Y. and Zhang, C. et al. (2020). T-GCN: a temporal graph convolutional network for traffic prediction. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 21 (9), 3848–58. Zhu, D., Liu, Y., Yao, X. and Fischer, M.M. (2021). Spatial regression graph convolutional neural networks: a deep learning paradigm for spatial multivariate distributions. GeoInformatica, 1–32, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​ s10707​-021​-00454​-x. Zhu, D., Zhang, F. and Wang, S. et al. (2020). Understanding place characteristics in geographic contexts through graph convolutional neural networks. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 110 (2), 408–20.

8. Assemblages

component, his bow and arrow as inorganic artefacts and the horse as the animal/ organic mode of transport (Figure 8.1). The coming-together of these components creates an assemblage with emergent properties: a formidable ‘war machine’ that can achieve more than the sum of what the three components could do without benefitting from the special ties between the Mongolian, his tool and his animal. Following the same logic, one can extend this idea of assemblage to include other Mongolians in the tribe and locate larger assemblages that arise out of the reciprocal ties of tribal solidarity; these assemblages have emergent properties that are not the same as the sum of their parts, but they are immanent and do not transcend into a higher entity because they remain decomposable. As a result, an assemblagist would not take any entities (e.g., subjects, organisms, institutions, societies) for granted and would always need to explain their constitution and agencies emerging out of heterogeneous segments. Assemblage theory belongs to a wave of post-humanist, relational and vitalist ontologies that emphasize the importance of human/ non-human relations in shaping the world (Braidotti, 2011; Ingold, 2000; Lash, 2006; Latour, 2005; Schatzki, 2002). A vitalist ontology explains ‘anything of interest in human culture – from the rise and fall of civilisations to patterns of interpersonal attraction – as the manifestation of a “life-force” that penetrates the universe’ (Crook, 1998, p. 535). It is also more attuned to the idea of becoming rather than being, movement rather than stasis, and action rather than structure; in other words, it sees the world in flow and flux (Lash, 2006, p. 323). According to Lash (ibid.), the revival of the work of vitalist thinkers (e.g., Nietzsche, Bergson, Tarde and Simmel) in the form of neo-vitalism (e.g., Deleuze and Foucault) and complexity science is becoming increasingly accepted in various disciplines of human and natural sciences (Urry, 2007, p. 26; cf. Bennett, 2010). These approaches recognize complexity and uncertainty in the material world and believe that it is the relations within and among self-organized multiplicities that need to be studied (Lash, 2006). This belief in indeterminacy in all fields of historical and natural science has led to ‘a commonplace structure of intelligibility’ and a ‘structure of feeling’ that sees the world as ‘complex,

Assemblages are co-functioning unities resulting from the coming-together of human and non-human elements. As an ontological concept, an assemblage is broadly ‘a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons [and] relations between them’ (Deleuze and Parnet, [1977] 2007, p. 69). Agency is the ‘emergent capacity…the action or the force that leads to one particular enactment’ of an assemblage (Farías, 2009, p. 15). Other concepts that have also been explained as emergent capacities of assemblages include individual or collective subjectivity (i.e., ‘community’), individuality, and identity (Dittmer, 2013; McFarlane, 2011; Sutherland, 2014). An assemblage approach has been used in a variety of fields of study, from political geography (Dittmer, 2017; Ghoddousi and Page, 2020) to urban planning and architecture (Farías, 2009; Guggenheim, 2010; Jacobs, 2012; Rydin and Tate, 2016). The word ‘assemblage’ is Massumi’s translation of two French terms, bricolage and agencement, used by Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Bricolage emphasizes the purposeful mix and match, ad hoc and do-it-yourself nature of these coming-togethers (cf. Lévi-Strauss, 1966), while agencement (lit. arrangement, layout and hinting at agency-ing) emphasizes the processual nature of these arrangements and the emergence of self-organizing agency within these entanglements of human/non-human ‘unformed elements’, ‘partial objects’ or ‘segments’ (De Landa, 2006; Deleuze, 1988; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Law, 2004). According to De Landa (2006), assemblages are the coming-together of human/ non-human ‘things’, forming combinations with emergent properties that are different from the sum of their parts. These dynamic assemblages are immanent to their composing materials: they are always decomposable and should not be analysed as transcendent wholes, closed systems or fixed entities (e.g., individuals, nation-states, cultures or diaspora groups) (De Landa, 2006; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). An archetypal example of an assemblage for Deleuze and Guattari (1987) is the Mongolian mounted archer. This assemblage is a combination of the nomad as the human 37

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Figure 8.1

The Mongolian mounted archer as the archetypal nomadic assemblage of human, artefact and animal. These relations can also be extended to other members of the tribe

irreducible, anti-closural’ and promises a ‘much greater sense of openness and possibility about the future’ (Thrift, 1999, p. 34, in Massey, 2005, p. 126). This is one of the reasons for the transformative potentials of assemblages: to allow us to hear the voice of ‘a people to come’, the possibility of ‘another life, always pushing against its limits’ (Biehl and Locke, 2010, p. 335). The most puritanical versions of these ontologies (e.g., flat ontologies) reject the existence of all high-order, scalar or transcendent concepts/entities in favour of an immanent and non-hierarchical view of the material world (Marston, Jones and Woodward, 2005); however, not all relational approaches go to such extremes as they allow for some level of hierarchy starting from humans, with the highest level of agency and self-organization, to organic matter such as animals and plants, to artefacts, and finally to other inanimate things at the bottom (Latour, 2005; Schatzki, 2002). Even Deleuze and Guattari (1987) – the contemporary progenitors of these approaches – identify three strata where ‘partial objects’ are spread: anthropomorphic (including or resembling humans), organic, and non-organic. It is the shifting relations within or across these strata that create emergent assemblages (ibid.). Assemblage theory also adheres to the realist strand of materialism (De Landa and Harman, 2017). Realist materialism not only contradicts the transcendental idealism of Hegel, it also goes beyond the materialPooya Ghoddousi

ist dialectics of Marx. Assemblages postulate immanent multiplicities in place of the dialectical transcendence of dualities – the constant process of negation of negation. Assemblage theory instead postulates intensive fields of interaction, flux and tension among heterogeneous forces and materials (De Landa, 2006; Lash, 2006). This level of complexity does not prevent Deleuze and Guattari from introducing multiple binaries and continuums in an abstract (de jure) way to explain these forces (e.g., hierarchical vs egalitarian, state vs nomad, and territorialized vs deterritorialized); but they also warn that in the actual (de facto) mixes, these binaries are not only transient and blurred but are also not parts of closed totalities. The result is an ontology of ‘pure exteriority’ where ‘relations are external to their terms’ (Deleuze and Parnet, [1977] 2007, p. 55). Furthermore, they warn that we should not conflate various abstract binaries with one another because in reality the ‘successive terms of opposition fail to coincide entirely’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 524). When reading the works of Deleuze and Guattari, one must constantly resist the temptation to collapse the binary continuums onto one another as a way of simplifying complexities. Some adherents of the Marxist schools of dialectical thinking claim that assemblages unnecessarily complicate matters, and blur the dialectical lines of antagonism required for emancipatory/revolutionary mobilizations (Brenner, Madden and Wachsmuth, 2011; Halvorsen, 2017). As

Assemblages  39

part of a year-long debate between assemblagists and critical urbanists in the City journal, human geographer Colin McFarlane identified a ‘broad synergy’ and ‘ostensible similarities’ between assemblage thinking and dialectical thinking, although he highlights great differences between them in terms of exteriority, openness and transformative potentials (2011, p. 211): Dialectics seeks to uncover shifting relations in the opposing forces and contradictions of capitalist development…objects remain within the whole, and in isolation in terms of their specificity and differences even while they alter through interactions… The interaction of assemblages in contrast, is a symbiosis defined less by conflict and contradiction and more by the lines of flight that run through them, where ‘line of flight’ means the possibility of creating something new. Assemblage is a latent possibility of new politics and movements based on desire and becoming that can both emerge through and exceed capitalism.

Actor network theory (ANT) has contributed to assemblage theory in terms of a ‘sensibility’ towards the active role of non-humans in the assemblage of the world (McFarlane, 2011, p. 207); however, the theoretical foundations of these theories are different: although Buchanan agrees that they are compatible in acknowledging the agential power of materials, he finds ANT’s attribution of a ‘distributive causality’ to the ‘whole network of interacting elements’ problematic (2015, p. 385). He finds similar problems with De Landa’s treatment of assemblage as a ‘complex aggregate’ of parts forming ‘wholes whose properties emerge from the interactions between parts’ (De Landa, 2006, pp. 5–6, in Buchanan, 2015, p. 385). He adds that ‘if everything is or must be an assemblage then the term loses precision, indeed it loses its analytical power altogether’ (Buchanan, 2015, p. 391). Buchanan believes that studying the what of an assemblage is more important than searching for how it has come about or how it changes. Following Arnold Toynbee, Buchanan calls this ‘history in the mode of one damn thing after another’, which just states the obvious and does not even need a concept to explain (ibid., p. 388). Buchanan claims that if we only focus on the contingency and singularity of the assemblages, there would be no point in trying to

understand how they have come to be as they are (i.e., how they emerge) because the next time would be a different experience. He instead argues for the creation of concepts that explain what they are, how they are constituted, or what patterns are repeating in all the difference (i.e., the diagram or concept of the assemblage; for a similar approach to generating concepts in [the new] comparative urbanism, see Robinson, 2015). According to Buchanan (2015, p. 382), assemblage in Deleuze and Guattari ‘was always concerned about questions of power’ and not ‘merely another way of saying something is complicated’. Deleuze had, however, emphasized ‘the primacy of desire over power’ (Deleuze, 2007, p. 126, in Biehl and Locke, 2010, p. 322). Desire, or ‘appetite together with consciousness of the appetite’ (Deleuze, 1988, p. 20) is the force or energy that draws different human, non-human and symbolic elements ‘into relation with each other and in the process generates social forms and affects’ (Collins, 2018, p. 966). Desire is the affirmative force helping assemblages persevere in their life form and generate new connections between subjects. This is why Deleuze and Guattari (1987) sometimes call assemblages ‘desiring machines’. Deleuze and Guattari use the term ‘territorialization’ for the process through which ‘segments’ (e.g., subjects, institutions, powers, practices, or desires) concretize into assemblages; while ‘deterritorialization’ refers to the process that ‘makes the segments melt and…liberates desire from all its concretizations in order to dissolve them’ on a ‘line of escape’ (Biehl and Locke, 2010, p. 323). This ontological notion of blurred bodies or semi-concretized assemblages creates practical problems with locating the ‘field’ when conducting an ethnography. An example of this impracticality is Latour’s suggestion that ANT should start from ‘a matter of concern’ and map the causal networks of ties outwards until the researcher runs out of time or out of space on the paper (cf. ‘butterfly effect’ in complexity science). Buchanan’s suggestion for identifying the abstract diagrams or concepts that bring about certain machinic forms of agency (e.g., the state apparatus or the nomadic war machine) before getting lost in the complexity of the actual state of things is one way of avoiding a blind tracing of every link in perpetuity. Instead – since tracing Pooya Ghoddousi

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the flows of desire in an assemblage may be impractical – one can map the flows of affects as one manifestation of the flows of desire. Interest in affects, or ‘the capacities to affect and be affected of human and non-human materialities’, is closely associated with non-representational theory, which belongs to the same family of theories as that of assemblages (Anderson, 2006 and Thrift, 2004, in Anderson and Harrison, 2010, p. 16). Anderson and Harrison remind us that ‘the social is affective, and it is often through affect that relations are interrupted, changed or solidified’ (ibid., pp. 16–17). In other words, ‘affect is the relational connections among participants in an assemblage, literally the capacity of a body or object to engage with, and be engaged by, the world around it’ (Pile, 2010, p. 5). For example, when two people laugh at the same joke it creates a deep connection between them, enabling ‘an assemblage to emerge as something with more agency than the components that compose it’ (Dittmer, 2013, p. 511). Affects can be seen as both the glue that holds assemblages together and the vital forces that drive the process of becoming in assemblages: in this sense, every relation is a ‘doubled becoming’ that blurs the boundaries between the two terms in an ‘a-parallel evolution’, where desire is the ‘energy of connectivity’ (Grossberg, 2014). This double becoming is ‘asymmetrical’, meaning that one side forces the other to become more like itself (Deleuze and Parnet, [1977] 2007, p. 7). These double becomings therefore institute power relations that could be subjected to micropolitical analyses. In facing these asymmetrical power relations, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) advocate an ethics of ‘becoming-minoritarian’ to avoid reproducing and entrenching hierarchies. An analysis of assemblages can find the necessary ‘assemblage convertors’ (Buchanan, 2015, p. 391) that help us intervene in or interrupt their material combinations, constitutive relations and conceptual expressions, and thereby convert their agencies into more progressive ones. In the words of Biehl and Locke (2010, p. 335), assemblage theory allows the researcher to take ‘the additional step beyond explaining dark realities to the work of imagining, in collaboration with its interlocutors, concrete ways in which things could be otherwise’. Some proposed modes Pooya Ghoddousi

of political organization that draw on assemblages include ‘the commons’ (Amin, 2012; Hardt and Negri, 2009), ‘publics’ (Amin and Thrift, 2002; Farías, 2011), ‘groupuscules’ (Foucault and Deleuze, 1977), ‘left assemblages’ (Tampio, 2009) and ‘assembly’ (Hardt and Negri, 2017). Using assemblage theory therefore allows researchers to not only analyse the minute power dynamics within these everchanging assemblages (cf. Massey’s 1993 relational power-geometry), it also allows them to intervene in these assemblages and mobilize their political potentials in ways that are life affirming: to create new forms of organization and becoming, rather than negating what we find wrong with the world (Ghoddousi and Page, 2020, p. 5). Future assemblagists may continue to blur the boundaries of the ‘field’, the lines between researcher and researched, between research and activism, between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and between humans and non-humans. Such research and activism holds progressive potential in line with both the ‘red’ egalitarian agenda and the ‘green’ environmental one. Pooya Ghoddousi

References and selected further reading Amin, A. (2012). Land of Strangers. Cambridge: Polity Press. Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2002). Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Cambridge: Polity Press. Anderson, B. (2006). Becoming and being hopeful: towards a theory of affect. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35 (5), 733–52. Anderson, B. and Harrison, P. (2010). The promise of non-representational theories. In B. Anderson and P. Harrison (eds), Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography (pp. 1–36). Farnham: Ashgate. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Biehl, J. and Locke, P. (2010). Deleuze and the anthropology of becoming. Current Anthropology, 51 (3), 317–51. Braidotti, R. (2011). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (2nd edition). New York: Columbia University Press. Brenner, N., Madden, D.J. and Wachsmuth, D. (2011). Assemblage urbanism and the chal-

Assemblages  41 lenges of critical urban theory. City, 15 (2), 225–40. Buchanan, I. (2015). Assemblage theory and its discontents. Deleuze Studies, 9 (3), 382–92. Collins, F.L. (2018). Desire as a theory for migration studies: temporality, assemblage and becoming in the narratives of migrants. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44 (6), 964–80. Crook, S. (1998). Minotaurs and other monsters: ‘everyday life’ in recent social theory. Sociology, 32 (3), 523–40. De Landa, M. (2006). A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum. De Landa, M. and Harman, G. (2017). The Rise of Realism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers. Deleuze, G. (2007). Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975–1995 (D. Lapoujade, ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, trans., new edition). London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and Parnet, C. ([1977] 2007). Dialogues II (B. Habberjam, E.R. Albert and H. Tomlinson, trans.) New York: Columbia University Press. Dittmer, J. (2013). Humour at the Model United Nations: the role of laughter in constituting geopolitical assemblages. Geopolitics, 18 (3), 493–513. Dittmer, J. (2017). Diplomatic Material: Affect, Assemblage, and Foreign Policy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Farías, I. (2009). Introduction: decentering the object of urban studies. In I. Farías and T. Bender (eds), Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies (pp. 1–24). London: Routledge. Farías, I. (2011). The politics of urban assemblages. City, 15 (3–4), 365–74. Foucault, M. and Deleuze, G. (1977). Intellectuals and power. In D.F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Interviews (pp. 205–17). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ghoddousi, P. and Page, S. (2020). Using ethnography and assemblage theory in political geography. Geography Compass, 14 (10), 1–13. Grossberg, L. (2014). Cultural studies and Deleuze-Guattari, part 1: a polemic on projects and possibilities. Cultural Studies, 28 (1), 1–28. Guggenheim, M. (2010). The laws of foreign buildings: flat roofs and minarets. Social and Legal Studies, 19 (4), 441–60. Halvorsen, S. (2017). Spatial dialectics and the geography of social movements: the case of

Occupy London. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42 (3), 455–57. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2017). Assembly. New York: Oxford University Press. Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Jacobs, J.M. (2012). Urban geographies I: still thinking cities relationally. Progress in Human Geography, 36 (3), 412–22. Lash, S. (2006). Life (vitalism). Theory, Culture & Society, 23 (2–3), 323–9. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966). The Savage Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marston, S.A., Jones III, J.P. and Woodward, K. (2005). Human geography without scale. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30 (4), 416–32. Massey, D. (1993). Power‐geometry and a progressive sense of place. In J. Bird, B. Curtis and T. Putnam et al. (eds), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change (pp. 60–70). London: Routledge. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: SAGE. McFarlane, C. (2011). Assemblage and critical urbanism. City, 15 (2), 204–24. Pile, S. (2010). Emotions and affect in recent human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35 (1), 5–20. Robinson, J. (2015). Thinking cities through elsewhere: comparative tactics for a more global urban studies. Progress in Human Geography, 40 (1), 3–29. Rydin, Y. and Tate, L. (2016). Actor Networks of Planning: Exploring the Influence of Actor Network Theory. London: Routledge. Schatzki, T. (2002). The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Sutherland, T. (2014). Intensive mobilities: figurations of the nomad in contemporary theory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32 (5), 935–50. Tampio, N. (2009). Assemblages and the multitude: Deleuze, Hardt, Negri, and the postmodern left. European Journal of Political Theory, 8 (3), 383–400. Thrift, N. (1999). The place of complexity. Theory, Culture & Society, 16 (3), 31–69. Thrift, N. (2004). Driving in the city. Theory, Culture & Society, 21 (5), 41–59. Urry, J. (2007). Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Pooya Ghoddousi

9.

Big data

enabled the emergence of big data. These technological innovations have facilitated the production, processing, analysis and storage of large volumes of digital footprint data. Information that previously could not be stored, or used to be captured using analogue devices, can now be recorded digitally. We can now digitally generate, store, manage and analyse data that was previously very challenging to access, such as books, newspapers, photographs and artwork. An unprecedented amount of social data is also now available and generated continuously through interactions on digital devices and platforms. Kitchin (2013) identified three broad systems as key sources of big data: directed, automated and volunteered systems. Directed systems involve digital administrative platforms operated directly by a human recording data on places or people – for example, closed-circuit television, digital school registers, immigration control, biometric scanning and health records. Automated systems include digital technologies that automatically and autonomously record and process data with little human intervention – for example, mobile phone, electronic smart card ticketing, energy smart meter sensors, satellite, email, banking and retail networks. Volunteered systems involve platforms in which humans contribute data through interactions on social media networks (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) or crowdsourcing projects (e.g., OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia).

Defining big data The term big data can be traced back to the mid-1990s, used to describe the manipulation and analysis of very large data sets. Big data is often formally defined in reference to distinctive traits. Seven key attributes are used to characterize big data (Kitchin, 2021). In the late 2000s, three traits (‘the 3Vs’) were typically used, describing big data as: large in volume, encompassing terabytes or petabytes of data; high in velocity, being generated in real or near-real time; and, diverse in variety of types. More recently, four attributes have been added to this representation, with big data being characterized as: exhaustive in scope, seeking to capture complete populations or systems; fine-grained in resolution; relational, containing common fields that enable fusion with other data sets; and, flexible, enabling data sets to be expanded. Traditional ‘small data’ is typically constrained across these attributes. It is produced in highly controlled settings employing statistical sampling techniques in ways that constrain its size, resolution, scope, velocity, variety and flexibility. Most big data sources contain locational information. Not surprisingly big data has thus become instrumental in human geography over the last decade, revolutionizing many areas of the discipline (Kitchin, 2014). Studies unleashing the attributes of big data have contributed to expanding existing theories, developing new explanations, adopting new analytical tools and infrastructures, and advancing new areas of research, such as urban science, online harm and misinformation. These studies have also greatly improved our understanding of key societal issues, ranging from socio-economic inequality to the spread of infectious diseases. More fundamentally, they have influenced policy practice and governance to tackle real-world challenges, notably during the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic.

Opportunities of big data Big data offers extraordinary potential for research in human geography. Compared with traditional data sources, big data can provide much more sophisticated, wider-scale, finer-grained understandings about our social and economic systems. Data sets of larger size now means that we have a greater ability to zoom into smaller populations and infrequent data points. Yet, the most notable promises of big data are probably the greater breadth, depth, scale and timeliness it offers. Big data offers higher geographic and temporal granularity. Much big data is spatially and temporally referenced, offering great opportunities for enhancing our geographic understanding of social processes and their changes in short time intervals. Mobile phone

Sources and forms of big data Technological advances in computational power, storage and network platforms have 42

Big data  43

data is a key example. Mobile phones are continuously collecting and storing locational information with timestamps. Such information has been key to expanding our understanding of human mobility and migration flows over space and time (Rowe et al., 2022). We now have the ability to observe exact locations and times. For example, theoretical ideas formulated in the context of time–space geography can now be explored and tested, based on daily individual-level data for entire population systems and cities. Big data also provides extensive coverage. Traditionally, random sampling has been used to gather data because collecting data on entire populations is normally unfeasible due to logistical and financial challenges. National censuses are a rare exception. Big data can potentially provide information to study entire systems of populations or geographical areas. For instance, Twitter posts offer complete population coverage at a global scale to enhance our understanding of differences across populations and geographic areas in sentiment expressions on the site (Rowe et al., 2021a). Real- or near-real time availability is also a key feature of big data. Traditionally, data is often collected through analogue devices such as surveys and questionnaires, processed and made available weeks, month or even years after collection. Digital footprint data can now be streamed uninterruptedly in real or near-real time. Google and Apple mobility data are notable examples of this feature. Google and Apple have continuously released data on mobility. This information is frequently updated as new data is made available, and has been key to evaluating public health interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as lockdowns and social-distancing measures, and monitor natural disasters or wars to support humanitarian assistance responses (Rowe, 2022; Rowe, Neville and González-Leonardo, 2022b).

Challenges of big data Big data also, however, poses major epistemological, methodological and ethical challenges. Understanding these challenges is important as they are likely to shape the future of human geography. In this section,

I therefore elaborate on the key challenges around the use of big data. Epistemological challenges Big data has raised fundamental questions about the positioning of human geography in science. Big data has pushed us to rethink the discipline in the context of the rise of new forms of positivist and empiricist reasoning outside social sciences (Kitchin, 2014). Efforts have been made to rethink, integrate and position human geography as a key actor in the development of principles and practices that can guide the use of big data in the study of social, political and spatial issues. Valuable critical reflections have proposed ways in which human geography could be reconfigured to leverage on data-driven thinking (Miller and Goodchild, 2015). Arguments have also been made for human geography to become a key player in integrating quantitative geography thinking with data science in the development of explicitly spatial analytical approaches (Singleton and Arribas-Bel, 2021). However, human geography has been relatively slow to crystallize these propositions. Other disciplines and fields have begun to undertake spatial analysis, and new areas of study have emerged integrating social sciences with computer science and engineering. Computational social science is a key emerging area that has been influential in setting the research agenda on the application of computational approaches to social science questions. Unfortunately, human geography has remained underrepresented within this emerging research area (Springer Nature Labs, 2021). Such developments are key to attracting research funding, securing exclusive data access, and influencing the business and policy space. Yet, human geography can still occupy a primary role in shaping the research agenda. Naivety has existed outside human geography, believing that big data can provide new insights for itself and does not require domain-specific knowledge. Social processes have been assumed to follow laws of physics, often ignoring decades of social science scholarship and resulting in reductionist analyses that fail to take into account cultural, political, policy, demographic and economic factors. The challenge for human geography Francisco Rowe

44  Concise encyclopedia of human geography

is to shape the research agenda. The complexities in the use of big data require strengthening multidisciplinary collaboration. Drawing on a long history of interdisciplinary experience attracting scholars and epistemologies from various fields, human geography provides an ideal environment to foster such collaboration. Big data has also sparked a need for the elaboration of existing theories and development of new ones. Human geography theories have traditionally and largely been static and prescriptive, often neglecting the evolving and specific local nature of human behaviour and social interactions. Big data now provides detailed spatial and temporal information to capture these dynamic processes. Theorization is needed to generate relevant hypotheses and constructs that can appropriately be measured using big data. Additionally, existing questions often focus on the middle of the population distribution but now big data offers an opportunity to expand our line of enquiry and focus on marginalized, smaller populations. New theories are also needed to understand new interactions between human behaviour and digital technology. Digital technologies are shaping human behaviour in new ways. For instance, Twitter and Facebook influence our behaviour by shaping our social network – that is, suggesting who to follow and what to read – with Google recommending search terms and, Netflix suggesting movies and TV shows. Additionally, digital traces encode our behaviour and our awareness of surveillance practices feeds into what is measured, creating a human–technology interaction loop. People can now deliberately influence what data is collected by using virtual private networks to hide locational information, or avatars to avoid facial recognition. The data altered by these processes is not affected at random across the population. Only certain individuals have the knowledge and skills to intervene in digital platforms in this way. Theories are needed to better understand these interactions and differences across populations. Methodological challenges Big data also poses methodological challenges. Human geographers require new methods to handle, analyse and store data sets Francisco Rowe

of millions or billions of observations that are continuously being generated in a variety of forms. Traditional statistical methods were designed to identify significant relationships in small sample sizes with known properties – for example, p-values to assess statistical significance have become less relevant. Big data is not collected for research purposes. It is an unintended consequence of administrative processes or social interactions and needs to be reengineered for research. Handling big data requires a wider and new digital skills set, largely based on machine learning, artificial intelligence and coding, in addition to greater knowledge of computing technology (e.g., Jupyter Notebook, GitHub and Docker). Except for a few centres, current university geography programmes and infrastructures are largely unprepared to deliver the required training. A multidisciplinary approach is needed to integrate computational training into human geography. Inference and causality are an additional methodological challenge. A dimension of these issues is confounding, which relates to the capacity to identify typical human behaviour from those resulting from rules governing a digital ecosystem. Individuals may express their own genuine opinions on social media, but digital platforms can also influence these views through algorithmic decisions. Digital platforms influence how, where and why we move, consume, act and interact. Algorithmic decisions may operate in pervasive and opposite ways across the population, reinforcing social polarization and political leanings. Drawing inferences about attitudes and opinions from images and human expressions is a further challenge (Rowe et al., 2021b). Computers have difficulty in accurately decoding this information as expressions and images contain sarcasm, irony and hyperbole. Approaches on how to address these issues are needed. Biases are also a major obstacle to generalizing findings from big data because they may only represent a subset of the population of interest; or, reflect systematic differences in access to technology. Digital traces tend to be left by relatively wealthy people in high-income countries, biasing attempts to draw global conclusions. Equally, research on Twitter, the most widely cited emerging data source, should be critically assessed before generalizing any findings. For example, it is only used by 26 per cent of the UK popula-

Big data  45

tion and much less in most other countries. Undermining generalization is also the existence of silos, as different platforms elicit systematically different behaviours. Individual interactions on Twitter are likely to differ from those on Instagram or Zoom and these systematic biases are captured in the data. Generalization is further complicated as technological sensors may introduce biases by recording behaviour divided between humans (two people using the same email account) or between sensors (the same individual watching Apple TV on a smartphone and a desktop). Lack of standards to guide data analysis remains a major issue. First, identifying the demographic characteristics of individual users is challenging. Developing robust approaches to infer these attributes from digital trace data, or extract and fusion them from other sources is a key challenge. Second, while progress has been made, distinguishing human from non-human activity, particularly identifying bots, remains difficult. Third, there is a need to establish standards on how to label data, and train and validate models, particularly given the fact that this is becoming a prominent market (e.g., Amazon Web Services [AWS] Marketplace). Data and models are often labelled and trained with limited validation and metadata based on specific populations or geographical areas in a single language – that is, typically white, male individuals from industrialized countries using English. These practices have raised concerns around discrimination and applicability of such models to the wider society, particularly non-white female populations and other geographic settings in less developed countries due to poor predictive performance and large-scale societal implications. Additionally, validation standards are also needed to assess new ways of measuring existing concepts using big data. Often, traditional ways of measuring concepts are seen as the gold standard. Yet, by doing this, we may simply replicate their shortcomings (Lazer et al., 2021).

better understand their inner workings; on the other, we want to ensure privacy. The challenge is how to securely access big data – which is complicated by the fact that most data is generated by private corporations who have no obligation to freely share it. Access to big data is thus rarely available to academics, and current practices are largely unregulated. When data is accessible, raw data is often unavailable owing to privacy and intellectual property concerns, or may become unavailable in the future. This impedes reproducibility and replication of the results. When this happens, accessibility is typically granted through a patchwork system, with some data available through public application programming interfaces (APIs); other data only by working with and often physically in the company; and still other data through personal connections and one-off arrangements. Innovative partnerships have emerged providing secure data access – for example, the Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC) in the UK. Yet, no platform provides access to information on the extensive randomized control experiment that it conducts, which could lead to inferences of the influences of their algorithms on human behaviour. BOX 9.1

Restructuring practices and standards in human geography: • • • • •

More actively seek to shape the research agenda on the application of computational approaches to social science questions. Embrace a new era of data-driven thinking. Infuse quantitative geography thinking into data science to develop spatially explicit machine learning and AI approaches. Adapt university training programmes and computing infrastructure for social scientists. Produce new theories of human behaviour and elaborate on existing explanations.

Expanding the toolkit for human geography research: •

Ethical challenges Big data has also raised a number of ethical questions. A major issue is the transparency paradox. On the one hand, we want to access the data collected by digital platforms and

OUTLOOK

•

Expand training in coding, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the basics of computing technology. Reorganize academic structures to enable connections between researchers sharing interests in computational approaches and multidisciplinary collaboration.

Francisco Rowe

46  Concise encyclopedia of human geography • •

Address causality and bias issues present in digital trace data before making inferences. Establish data analysis standards to guide data integration, labelling, training and validation.

Ensuring privacy and enabling data access: •

• • •

Expand existing secure data centres for granting access, monitoring outputs, and enforcing compliance with privacy and ethics rules. Develop enforceable guidelines around research ethics, transparency, researcher autonomy, and replicability. Design anonymization approaches that enable research on small and marginalized populations. Establish ethical guidelines on the use of data capturing publicly visible behaviours and network information.

Numerous ethical considerations remain, particularly about privacy. While general agreement exists about a need to anonymize individual records so that they are not identifiable, robust approaches to achieving this are lacking. Differential privacy approaches have been developed to add noise to the data and thus ensure some level of anonymity. Yet, a trade-off exists because adding noise to enhance privacy diminishes the utility of the data. This is particularly a problem for research based on small, marginalized populations as they are disproportionally affected by this procedure. Recently, the concept of open data products was proposed as a way to access and produce insights from highly sensitive, controlled and/or secure data that may be otherwise inaccessible (Arribas-Bel et al., 2021). Additionally, there is a lack of clarity about privacy expectations for data capturing publicly visible behaviours – for example, tweets. Some universities require ethics approval to work with such data, but this approach varies greatly across institutions, and there is no clear guidance on, for example, whether public information, such as user screen names and posted messages, can be displayed in publications. Even if ethical procedures exist, they do not consider the network structure of digital platforms, and when users disclose information, they are generally sharing information about their social network contacts – for example,

Francisco Rowe

friends, followers and users they interact with. Guidance is needed to ensure the appropriate use of this information.

Human geography and big data Big data presents unprecedented opportunities for human geography to transform our understanding of the social world and human behaviour, as well as having societal implications shaping politics, behaviours, elections, policy and the economy. During the COVID-19 pandemic alone, researchers have been able to access large streams of mobile phone, satellite imagery, credit card and social media data to understand the social, health and economic implications of the SARS–CoV–2 spread in near-real time across the globe. Human geographers have made significant contributions to the mapping, modelling and understanding of these ramifications using digital trace data. Nonetheless, big data also poses major epistemological, methodological and ethical challenges for the discipline to effectively unleash its full potential. While some progress has been made, three broad challenges remain: reorganizing standards and practices in our discipline; expanding the research skill set and institutional structures; and enabling data access while ensuring privacy. Box 9.1 identifies the key challenges and actions to tackle going forward. Francisco Rowe

References and selected further reading Arribas-Bel, D., Green, M., Rowe, F. and Singleton, A. (2021). Open data products – a framework for creating valuable analysis ready data. Journal of Geographical Systems, 23, 497–514. Athey, S. (2017). Beyond prediction: using big data for policy problems. Science, 355 (6324), 483–5. Batty, M. (2013). Big data, smart cities and city planning. Dialogues in Human Geography, 3 (3), 274–9. Blazquez, D. and Domenech, J. (2018). Big Data sources and methods for social and economic

Big data  47 analyses. Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 130, 99–113. Boyd, D. and Crawford, K. (2012). Critical questions for big data: provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. Information, Communication & Society, 15 (5), 662–79. Chen, C., Ma, J. and Susilo, Y. et al. (2018). The promises of big data and small data for travel behavior (aka human mobility) analysis. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 68, 285–99. Green, M., Pollock, F.D. and Rowe, F. (2021). New forms of data and new forms of opportunities to monitor and tackle a pandemic. In G.J. Andrews, V.A. Crooks, J.R. Pearce and J.P. Messina (eds), COVID-19 and Similar Futures (pp. 423–9). Cham: Springer. Hilbert, M. (2016). Big data for development: a review of promises and challenges. Development Policy Review, 34 (1), 135–74. Kandt, J. and Batty, M. (2021). Smart cities, big data and urban policy: towards urban analytics for the long run. Cities, 109, Article 102992. Kitchin, R. (2013). Big data and human geography: opportunities, challenges and risks. Dialogues in Human Geography, 3 (3), 262–7. Kitchin, R. (2014). Big data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts. Big Data & Society, 1 (1), https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​2053951714528481. Kitchin, R. (2021). The Data Revolution: A Critical Analysis of Big Data, Open Data and Data Infrastructures. London: SAGE. Lazer, D., Hargittai, E. and Freelon, D. et al. (2021). Meaningful measures of human society in the twenty-first century. Nature, 595 (7866), 189–96.

Lazer, D., Pentland, A. and Watts, D. et al. (2020). Computational social science: obstacles and opportunities. Science, 369 (6507), 1060–62. Miller, H.J. and Goodchild, M.F. (2015). Data-driven geography. GeoJournal, 80 (4), 449–61. Rowe, F., 2022. Using digital footprint data to monitor human mobility and support rapid humanitarian responses. Regional Studies, Regional Science, 9(1), pp.665-668. Rowe, F., Calafiore, A., Arribas-Bel, D., Samardzhiev, K. and Fleischmann, M., 2022. Urban Exodus? Understanding Human Mobility in Britain During the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Facebook Data. arXiv Preprint arXiv:​ 2206​.03272. Rowe, F., Mahony, M. and Graells-Garrido, E. et al. (2021a). Using Twitter to track immigration sentiment during early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Data & Policy, 3, E36. Rowe, F., Mahony, M. and Graells-Garrido, E. et al. (2021b). Using Twitter data to monitor immigration sentiment. OSF Preprints. Accessed 16 October 2022 at https://​osf​.io/​sf7u4. Rowe, F., Neville, R. and González-Leonardo, M. (2022). Sensing population displacement from Ukraine using Facebook data: Potential impacts and settlement areas. OSF Preprints. https://​osf​ .io/​7n6wm. Singleton, A. and Arribas-Bel, D. (2021). Geographic data science. Geographical Analysis, 53 (1), 61–75. Springer Nature Labs (2021, 30 June). Data page: explore computational social science using our experimental app. Accessed 2 October 2022 at https://​www​.nature​.com/​articles/​d42859​-021​ -00054​-7.

Francisco Rowe

10. Bodies

arguing that space is not just a backdrop for where bodies exist and live, but space and bodies are always emerging in relation to one another, both being remade in the process. For example, the ways that bodies can be racialized, gendered and sexualized is dependent on the home, the work place or the cities that bodies are located in, which means there is no one way to be, as understandings of identity and difference emerge differently across different places. Feminist, queer and postcolonial and critical race geographers have long researched bodies to understand how lives are regulated and controlled, but also to complicate understandings of social and spatial relations that do not consider the body. By ignoring bodies, researchers might ‘miss’ the everyday struggles and emotional experiences that vary between different people – along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, class and (dis)ability. For example, researching, writing and conceptualizing bodies was a way for feminist geographers to disrupt masculinist ways of thinking and researching. So often, knowledge, theory and thinking are kept separate from flesh, corporeality and emotions, where rational academic research was somehow an objective ‘thing’ that was in no way related to our bodies – this is often called the mind/body dualism. This Cartesian division or dualism was – and arguably still is – the way knowledge production was/is organized, meaning that bodies could easily be known and controlled by the mind. Of course, this idea has long since been troubled by feminist, queer and postcolonial researchers, who argue that this way of thinking is part of masculinist, heteronormative and colonial projects (Longhurst, 1995), and that knowledge production is always partial, incomplete and embodied. It was not until the 1990s that bodies became a focus in geographical research, after these feminist critiques of the disembodied nature of the geographical knowledge. Since the introduction of bodies into geographical research there has been a huge growth in research on bodies across different types of geography – social, cultural, economic, political, gender and sexual, digital and so on. Geographers have drawn on feminist and queer theory, cultural studies, gender studies and sociology in their attempt to grapple with the bodily. By way of resisting medical and scientific ideas, which would

Introducing bodies Bodies are not just one thing – they are multiple, incomplete, open to change and always in the process of becoming. This is even the case for geographical understandings of bodies – the ways bodies are deployed in research is not uniform. There is no universal agreed understanding of what bodies are, how they are made or where they might begin and end. Some geographers argue that bodies are performative and discursive, others might argue that they are corporeal and material, others might claim that they are assembled, whilst others might explore how they are made by human and more-than-human relations. Geographers engage with diverse disciplines to understand bodily relations – cultural studies, sociology, digital and new media studies, gender studies, and feminist and queer theory, among others. Understanding bodies can be messy – and it is this very messiness that we should hold on to in research on and with bodies. Those who work on bodies often agree that they are critical sites for the ways identities are formed and negotiated, power relations are enacted and resisted, and knowledge is produced. For example, bodies are sites through which social differences – like gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, (dis) ability, size and class – emerge, which means that bodies become entangled in the ways inclusion, exclusion and violence play out but are also contested (Krishnan, 2019). Bodies are therefore sites, spaces, places and scales through which socio-spatial relations emerge in, and across, different scales, and provide useful insights into the ways national and international relations are negotiated and contested at the bodily scale (Pratt and Rosner, 2006). In exploring bodies then, we see the moments where chaos, unpredictability and possibility emerge alongside relations of power and oppression (McKittrick, 2000). At the same time, we must not forget that bodies also feel joy, pleasure, pain and fear and encompass a set of physiological processes that produce fluids, grow hair and change in size and shape. Geographers who work on the body usually attempt to examine how bodies and places co-constitute one another, 48

Bodies  49

state that difference is ‘natural’, researchers adopted constructionist approaches that argue that bodies do not exist outside of culture and only come into being through discourse. However, such an approach separates out the material and discursive (for example, separating out sex and gender) and may not enable a disruption of masculine and Western thought. Trans and gender-variant geographies have called for attention to be paid to the corporeality of bodies, as too often trans people have been ‘used’ to exemplify the instability of gender, often denying gender-variant people experiences of material forms of subjectivities (Hines, 2007). Arguably, trans studies have challenged post-structural feminist thinking that jettisoned anything material and fleshy from the discipline in favour of discourse and language. Therefore, as I explore later, there is a move to consider the materiality of bodies to further challenge what is considered legitimate knowledge. Some scholars, however, remain ambivalent about the extent to which the discussion of bodies and embodiment have disrupted Western, white and masculinist ways of thinking (Longhurst and Johnston, 2014). Longhurst and Johnston’s (2014) concern is that the concept of embodiment has become accepted in mainstream geographic thought, but in very ‘incorporeal’ ways, meaning that either bodies become a marker of difference or become ways to talk about performance or affect, but rarely about the messy, fleshy and wet bits of bodies – there are, of course, exceptions, where geographers are interested in, for example, the fluids that bodies make and the ways that skin, hair and flesh take up spaces (Waitt and Stanes, 2015). Work that explores fluids, flesh and hair is often referred to as taking a ‘materialist’ or ‘corporeal’ approach to their study. This entry is not a complete guide to the body – to claim so would present a disembodied account of the research area. It attempts to provide an overview of what it means to do research and teaching on/with/about bodies, providing ideas of where geographers might take research on and with bodies. You will notice that I often refer to bodies, rather than the body, to indicate their multiplicity. What I would like to offer here are some questions and ideas to continue feminist, queer and postcolonial projects of complicating

and decentring a rational and disembodied subject. By doing so, I would argue that we need to decentre bodies themselves, thinking about the ways bodies are always remade in and across space and time rather than being a neatly bounded thing that can be claimed as known. What follows are three different ways that geographers are grappling with the bodies – the corporeal, the more-than-human and embodied methodologies.

Corporeal bodies Thinking corporeally about bodies involves paying attention to the material body and its fleshiness. As discussed earlier, bodies were once considered to be ‘blank canvases’ that would only become meaningful when written on by discourse. However, others have argued that bodies are more than surfaces that only come into being through language (Longhurst, 2001). For those writers, flesh, hair, skin, fluids and bodily processes have agency themselves, and reducing them to discourse fails to acknowledge their roles in shaping social life. Some feminist and queer geographers have commented on the lack of discussion of messy, fleshy and material bodies in the discipline, some claiming that mainstream geography is too ‘squeamish’ to think critically about the fluids bodies produce, the messiness of having sex or folds and creases of fat. These are bodily processes and capacities that are often deemed too ‘Other’ for mainstream geographical knowledge. To challenge the incorporeality of geographical knowledge, some geographers are researching these very bodily processes, often turning to work in cultural studies and feminist theory (for example, Probyn, 2005) to grapple with the complexity of materiality, discourse and power. Geographers are exploring how bodily fluids, and how we regulate them, might both confirm and disrupt gendered, sexed and racialized identities in and across the places they appear. For example, using a visceral framework, Waitt and Stanes (2015) explore how sweat emerges differently across different places for men living in Wollongong, Australia, during a heatwave. Misgav and Johnston (2014) highlight how sweat becomes a source of collective eroticism for gay men on a nightclub dance floor Carl Bonner-Thompson

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in Tel Aviv, yet is something to be regulated by trans women. They make an important claim that whilst, as academics, we claim that gender identities are fluid, body fluids themselves might alert us to the moments when we attempt to stabilize gendered bodies. In these examples, fluids are understood as a physiological response to environments that take on different capacities before and after they appear on bodies in different places. Other geographers are paying attention to the size and shape of material bodies, examining how the weightiness of fatness, and how its presence in certain places becomes constructed as ‘disgusting’ or pleasurable. Additionally, some geographers are interested in hair and how it is regulated or even becomes embedded in global supply chains as part of spatially uneven geographies of equalities. Another aspect of corporeal geographies examines the constitution of senses and spaces. Here we see geographers explore how we experience the world through multiple senses – taste, touch, smell, sound and sight – and what this informs us about how identities are made and remade and the power relations involved. Such approaches attempt to challenge the importance of the visual in geographical knowledge, understanding that experiences of spaces and places are made through multisensory sensation. For example, some geographers are interested in using haptic geographical frameworks to explore what touch (both touching and not touching) tells us about formations of self and Other (Bonner-Thompson, 2021). Other geographers are interested in the smells and tastes of foods to explore how eating is a complicated set of practices that is an assemblage of digestion and social forces that emerge through spatial power relations (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2010). In a lot of this work, geographers urge us to consider internal bodily processes and to question the corporeal boundaries of the body. Whilst the skin is often understood as a material and discursive boundary between the body and the outside world, the skin is also porous and the body has places where fluids are released and other materials enter. Exploring these relations helps geographers understand how our internal bodies become connected/disconnected to social life, but also help in disrupting the body as a complete bounded thing. In the following section, I explore emerging work that thinks about Carl Bonner-Thompson

bodies as incomplete processes that are always being remade by more-than-human things.

Remaking bodies Some geographers are turning to more-than-human perspectives to further disrupt the idea that bodies are discrete and bounded entities. Following more-than-human agendas, bodies are always being remade by objects, data, animals and environments, which allows us to question what the ‘human’ is, or what we might call the post-human. This work is part of those projects that seek to decentre the human subject and understand bodies – as assemblages of material and discourses – as always being made by the more-than-human things that they encounter. Some geographers are interested in the ways that bodies are enmeshed or entangled with ‘natural’ environments as people surf, garden, hike, live with animals or even engage in conservation activities. For example, gardening practices can create unique relations between bodies and plants or how urban natures have become key sites through which health and well-being are understood and practised. Thinking with more-than-human frameworks can encourage geographers to question how bodies relate to the more-than-human, especially as we try to care for and conserve these worlds (Pitt, 2018). Questions are also emerging now about where bodies end and begin in a world where everyday and bodily processes and practices are being datafied – where embodied experiences such as sleep, menstrual cycles, breath and calories are being tracked by devices and turned into digital data that we then use to monitor ourselves. Much of this work focuses on apps/devices that track data on health and well-being – for example, running, cycling and heart rates. Such work highlights how quantified data on the body is not disembodied, but a lively process where data is constituted by bodies, spaces and tracking devices that create different ways for people to sense and understand their bodily capacities. These approaches alert us to the ways bodies are made of multiple ongoing processes that operate outside the corporeal (skin) boundaries. Geographers interested in

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this line of thought find the ongoing work in digital and new media studies, cultural studies and anthropology useful, where ideas of corporeality are being used to understand what digital data and algorithms mean for our bodies, and vice versa (see Lupton, 2019, for example).

Embodied methodologies In attempting to examine all these bodily experiences, some geographers are ‘fleshing out’ their methodologies, where bodily processes are not just discussed or observed but also become part of the research process. Thinking about research as an embodied process is also a disruptive tool, shifting importance from observable data to the felt and sensed experiences of space and place. They might ask participants to engage in creative practices or methods to understand emotional and affective experiences; they might also accompany participants on go-along interviews to ask them to discuss the sensory experiences of places or provide wearable technologies so participants can reflect on how they engaged in social and spatial life. Such an approach may also call for researchers to reflect on and write about their emotions, desires and bodily intensities that can disrupt the all-knowing and disembodied academic position. Some geographers engage in queer theory to write about the uncomfortable ways that desire is negotiated in the field, whilst other geographers reflect on the multisensory experience of eating or cooking when doing fieldwork. In this work, however, there are anxieties surrounding how much we reveal and give to our work, and who might be enabled to be revealing. As De Craene (2017) argued, for some, this self-reflexive process might seek to reinforce their white masculine subject position, while for others it may not be a safe and easy admission in societies where heteronormative, white, ableist and sexist structures shape how people are understood and discriminated against. This creates uneasy terrains for engaging in embodied methodologies, despite their disruptive potential.

Bodily futures We can never fully know bodies as there is no singular body, and therefore no singular understanding. The messiness in understanding bodies is both frustrating and exciting – a tension we should embrace. I would like geographers to embrace alternative ways of understanding the relations between places and bodies, to keep the discussion lively. However, I believe we should do so in ways that seek to challenge, undermine and disrupt masculine, colonial and heteronormative forms of knowledge. For me, this means continuing to challenge what bodies and bodily things are included in the discipline, whilst continuing to explore how power relations shape how bodies are organized and embodied experiences are shaped – always sensitive to issues of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, (dis)ability, size and class. I also would advocate for a decentring of the bodily, so the body does not occupy a centre, but is understood as part of ongoing processes. As explored in this entry, geographers are critically examining bodies as more than a bounded unit and are exploring the different ways that bodies are constituted, from examining the inside and outside, their leaky and messy zones and the environments and digital technologies that may force us to question where bodies end and begin. Such approaches can continue to disrupt the masculinist, heteronormative and colonial forms of knowledge production that are privileged in geography and therefore can help to continue to resist the processes of ‘Othering’ that work to marginalize and oppress particular bodies. These are clearly important and exciting avenues of research in geographies of the body, which researchers should look forward to. Carl Bonner-Thompson

References and selected further reading Bonner-Thompson, C. 2021. Anticipating touch: haptic geographies of Grindr encounters in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 46 (2), 449–63. De Craene, V. 2017. Fucking geographers! Or the epistemological consequences of neglecting

Carl Bonner-Thompson

52  Concise encyclopedia of human geography the lusty researcher’s body. Gender, Place & Culture, 24 (3), 449–64. Hayes-Conroy, A. and Hayes-Conroy, J. 2010. Visceral difference: variations in feeling (slow) food. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 42, 2956–71. Hines, S. 2007. TransForming Gender: Transgender Practices of Identity, Intimacy and Care. Bristol: Policy Press. Krishnan, S. 2019. Killing us slowly: pre-empting suicide at a women’s hostel in Chennai. Antipode, 51, 1515–33. Longhurst, R. 1995. VIEWPOINT: The body and geography. Gender, Place & Culture, 2, 97–106. Longhurst, R. 2001. Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries. London: Routledge. Longhurst, R. and Johnston, L. 2014. Bodies, gender, place and culture: 21 years on. Gender, Place & Culture, 21, 267–78. Lupton, D. 2019. The thing-power of the human-app health assemblage: thinking with

Carl Bonner-Thompson

vital materialism. Social Theory & Health, 17, 125–39. McKittrick, K. 2000. ‘Who do you talk to, when a body’s in trouble?’ M. Nourbese Philip’s (un) silencing of black bodies in the diaspora. Social & Cultural Geography, 1, 223–36. Misgav, C. and Johnston, L. 2014. Dirty dancing: the (non)fluid embodied geographies of a queer nightclub in Tel Aviv. Social & Cultural Geography, 15, 730–46. Pitt, H. 2018. Questioning care cultivated through connecting with more-than-human communities. Social & Cultural Geography, 19, 253–74. Pratt, G. and Rosner, V. 2006. Introduction: the global & the intimate. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 34, 13–24. Probyn, E. 2005. Blush: Faces of Shame. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Waitt, G. and Stanes, E. 2015. Sweating bodies: men, masculinities, affect, emotion. Geoforum, 59, 30–38.

11. Bordering

ities of capital and labour issued challenges to borders in the 1990s, this was nothing particularly novel, and borders’ destruction was less tangible than the ongoing transformation of their forms and functions. The now-superseded North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (1994) supported capital mobility while simultaneously constraining migrant labour’s access to the US and, in Europe, the EU Schengen Area (1995) was border-free. Still, Schengen borders rematerialized in 2020 to suspend mobilities in a viral pandemic, and ‘deterritorialization’ is most useful when it connotes borders’ dispersal, diffusion and uneven reterritorializations at and beyond the state scale. So borders remain a central concern of political geography. Border securitization discourses, particularly after 2001, have folded migrants and terror networks into geopolitical scripts as threats to states and their centralizing, bounded and static geometries. Borders, too, have become focal points for discourses on identity, belonging and the dangers of ‘invasion’ by the ‘illegal’ and undocumented. Their reification as static lines has, however, been long critiqued (Agnew, 1994) and injunctions to ‘see like a border’ (Rumford, 2012), or like a migrant’s vehicle or route (Walters, 2014), have built on a contention that ‘borders are everywhere’ (Balibar, 2002). Here, borders are not solely linear markers of territorial sovereignty but fluid, mobile and often hidden spaces. If this ‘borderscapes’ (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, 2008) approach challenges a usual (Eurocentric) ‘territorialist’ epistemology it also draws attention to the violence and ‘ethical and normative issues of in/exclusion’ (Brambilla, 2015, p. 18) neglected by overemphasis of the state’s territorial limits. Borderscapes also illuminate bordering’s non-state actors and scales, from macro-scale EU expansion to the surveillance of migrant bodies (Krichker, 2021). Accordingly, De Carli and Frediani (2016) interpret a building in São Paulo as a ‘device for advancing alternative formulations of citizenship’ (p. 331) beyond the usual state-territorial scale of geopolitics, a choice informed by current methodological approaches drawing on ethnography and phenomenology (Faxon, 2021; Strüver, 2019). Attention has also turned to how social and cultural practices constitute bordering processes that are ontologically multiple and diffused across scales. Cassidy, Yuval-Davis

Political geography’s recent study of limits, margins and edges has undergone a marked change. Geographers still study boundaries (Schofield, 2018; Tillotson, 2020) but ‘attention has moved away from the study of the evolution and changes of [this] territorial line to the border, more complexly understood as a site at and through which socio-spatial differences are communicated’ (van Houtum, 2005, p. 672). But if boundaries and borders, as defined in/by their recent study, are not synonymous, the terms are regularly conflated. Further, those who incline towards critical studies of either boundaries or borders do so with similar intentions. Schaffter, Fall and Debarbieux (2010) argued, for instance, that ‘boundary studies should focus more on the construction of objects and discontinuities instead of on the objects and boundaries themselves’ before discussing ‘bordering’ processes (p. 259). And although Megoran (2012) arguably slips between the terms, he valuably distinguishes boundaries (‘invisible vertical planes delimiting the horizontal extent of states’) from borders (‘institutional paraphernalia and practices associated with managing and policing boundaries’) (p. 465). Perhaps a circular logic lies behind the boundary’s recent neglect: a boundary drives bordering practices, including those that support the vertical plane’s bounding functions. It happens, however, that epistemological and methodological developments have drawn researchers’ attention to practice and process and to the socio-spatial, historical, public policy and everyday/embodied contexts of bordering (Scott, 2020; Vaughan-Williams and Pisani, 2020) over and above empirical studies of boundary lines. In this chapter, I recognize the boundary’s recent omission in border studies alongside the new directions enriching and complicating border studies. These trajectories have supported a ‘re-evaluation of the relationship between states, societies and the borders they create’ (Scott, 2020, p. 10). The state, however, controls no monopoly on bordering: its decline in this regard was signalled infamously in the 1990s by a borderless world thesis predicated – hopefully – on an intensifying neoliberal globalization (Ohmae, 1990), itself equated with deterritorialization and borders’ disappearance. Although mobil53

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and Wemyss (2018) consider the displacement of border functions in a border town, Dover, and the ‘borderwork’ of multiple social agents including police officers, shop workers and cross-border traders. Elsewhere, Deiana (2019) considers the Sarajevo Film Festival as a border politics site, recognizing the possibilities of a ‘kaleidoscopic’ borderscape epistemology to interpret borders as resources for intercultural dialogue, economic exchange and conflict amelioration. These everyday borderscape negotiations are markedly different from the EU’s technocratic state- and capacity-building initiatives, as social and cultural practices that actively produce borders. That scholars now focus on these bordering practices, and bordering’s heterogeneous spaces, underlines the compression of epistemology and ontology: what borders may be is contingent on how we try to work out what they are (van Houtum, 2005, p. 674). Nonetheless, ontological challenges made in/to border studies have followed from recent relational ‘turns’ in geography and which support interpretations of borders as processes, networks, topologies and assemblages. Accordingly, borderscape approaches rethink borders ‘as something enabling, rather than as confining’ (Brambilla, 2021, p. 11) and in terms of a processual ontology and the possibilities of becoming. This invokes a ‘bordering-ordering-othering’ or ‘b/ordering’ approach (van Houtum and van Naerssen, 2002) focused on understanding how the ‘territorial fixing of order’ (p. 134) produces ‘others’. But these approaches may say little about othering’s own ‘generative potential’ (Brambilla, 2021, p. 14); they may denounce violent bordering and migration regimes but are less attuned to the competing claims of actors including the citizens who would challenge states’ ‘repressive border regimes’ (ibid.). Considering these actors a little further, arguably the ‘b/ordering’ approach (van Houtum and van Naerssen, 2002) conflates bordering with the territory processes through which state authorities and other actors besides – for example, grassroots territorial movements practising resistance to oil extraction in Ecuador (Halvorsen, 2019) – enact claims in/to space. So, conscious of ‘overextended metaphors’ (O’Dowd, 2010, p. 1038), perhaps bordering is a more meaningful category when either disaggregated from a range of territorial, Matthew Tillotson

state surveillance and social control practices, or comprehensively extended to processes at a range of scales to challenge border studies’ state-centricism. But, setting aside these uncertainties, processual interpretations question the border’s status as a material product to also focus on the everyday, on identity and borders’ production in practice and discourse. Relational thinking also depicts borders as displaced, mobile networks. Mountz (2011) has shown how state mobilities become apparent at detention facilities and transport hubs. To these locations, borders are displaced, often to circumscribe migration mobilities. In 2021, migrant boat interceptions by the UK Border Force in the English Channel – plus the subsequent detentions and deportations – have therefore emphasized the capacity of the state’s mobilities to shrink asylum spaces. Further, borders move within the sovereign/biopolitical state to border forces’ work locations – international rail hubs, postal depots, buses moving through city streets – and to regulate the everyday routines of migrants who are customers and workers in, for instance, garages and launderettes. The UK border’s mobility is emphasized by reports of Border Force operations in French waters (Merrick, 2021) and of the migrant ‘processing’ facilities in Africa proposed in discussions surrounding the Nationality and Borders Bill (UK Home Office, 2021). These offshore or extraterritorial dynamics are prefigured by existing externalization policies – for example, the supranational Seahorse operations – enacted by the EU to ‘manage’ European borders, paradoxically, within African state territories (Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias and Pickles, 2016). Relational thinking suggests that borders are not only crossed by topological intersections but also constituted by them. As above, borders are not confined to border zones but structure societies and global space, social practice and discourse, and connect as much as they divide. Bremner (2016), then, notes maritime borders’ production of connections between land and sea, between reefs, sandbanks and invertebrates (etc.). Kothari’s (2020) work on migration and maritime border surveillance interprets coastlines as zones, the sea producing mobilities, connections across scales and coastal identities. Nonetheless, for refugees, maritime borders

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are, where they must be crossed, ‘a line between safety and uncertainty, between being invited or repelled, and between life on land and death at sea’ (p. 68). So what a border is depends on who you are and a danger of overextending bordering metaphors (O’Dowd, 2010) is the simplistic reduction of borders’ multiple, coexisting dynamics to singular traits, however apt they seem for a given empirical bordering context. An approach admitting the complexity of bordering dynamics is assemblage theory. Sohn (2016) emphasizes borders’ fluidity and multiplicity but characterizes this in terms of manifold potentials to divide and connect (etc.). In this interpretation, assemblages of bodies and enunciation correspond to a loose, heterogeneous notion of bordering. Here, ‘bodies’ are human and non-human (and their actions), and include borders’ physical locations, securitization practices and ‘networks of public, private and supranational organizations including…transportation systems,…machines, algorithms and databanks’ (p. 186). Besides this, assemblages of enunciation entail symbolic and linguistic roles: flags and anthems, border and mobility legislation, beliefs and narratives. But if the components of bordering assemblages have been regularly studied, assemblage’s specific utility lies in directing attention to the relations, or perhaps intra-actions, between borders’ varied and multiple components that, being neither stable nor fixed, are replaced as a border’s assemblages constantly reterritorialize. Besides assemblage, however, the focus on symbols, discourse and representation characterizes well-established critical or post-modern geopolitical perspectives on borders (Newman and Paasi, 1998). Concerned with bordering’s communication of socio-spatial differences, critical scholars remain ‘[focused] on how political actors articulate self and other, how they articulate threats to security and link [them] to identity’ (Reinke de Buitrago, 2017, p. 146). The 2016 UK ‘Brexit’ referendum campaign, for example, coincided with a refugee ‘crisis’ in Europe. ‘Vote Leave’ depicted migration to Europe as ungoverned and unmanageable, justifying a drive to ‘take back control’ of borders and repatriate sovereignty from Brussels through invocations of a ‘territorialized and self-reliant’ (Agnew, 2020, p. 266)

past. Amongst many texts and representations, an infamous anti-migrant ‘breaking point’ campaign poster – an image of non-white migrants at the Croatia–Slovenia border – set UK inhabitants against migrants and the EU. If this typified ‘discursive constructions of superiority and inferiority, and the creation of otherness’ (Reinke de Buitrago, 2017, p. 153), it was an enunciation to strengthen the state as an entity that could be bounded. Simultaneously, Brexit’s bordering debates also pointed to connections, mobilities and forms of citizenship realized beyond the state (Ferbrache, 2019), lost when the UK left the EU – and a border in the Irish Sea. Similarly, assemblage’s concern with bodies extends border studies scholars’ existing interests in bordering’s materialities and, for example, the material relations between people, public and commercial organizations that often concern exchanges of money and data. In this sense, forms of spatial organization that realize a disciplinary form of surveillance over individuals are perhaps less important within contemporary bordering regimes than biopower and non-disciplinary technologies of population management (Foucault, 2004). Border studies therefore negotiates a tension between geopolitics and biopolitics. In considering the ‘virtual border’, Amoore (in Johnson et al., 2011, p. 64) notes that ‘[disciplinary] techniques position mobility and security in a fraught relation, where the prevention of infraction is achieved precisely by stopping, halting, prohibiting at the border line’. But contemporary bordering is predicated on the possibilities of mobility to underscore security. Commercial data – ‘transactions with airlines, travel agencies, banks and credit card companies’ – map and secure ‘a world in movement’ (ibid.). Importantly, biopolitical borderwork does not simply regulate individual mobilities in a sovereign mode; it is ‘massifying’ rather than ‘individualizing’ (Foucault, 2004) and is practised precisely to open up (rather than circumscribe) the economic possibilities of space and depends on the interrelations of a range of human and technological (e.g., biometric) bodies. These perspectives on bordering may multiply should border studies engage further with science and technology studies. (Equally, more-than-human perspectives may add depth to bordering’s integration Matthew Tillotson

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with ecological worlds.) But the significance of recent bordering literature is revealed most clearly in connection to (still) fundamental concerns of political geography, not least relationships between power and space, and the exclusionary dynamics associated with, for example, class and race (Johnson et al., 2011). Reminding us that bordering occurs not only at territory’s edges, Ramírez’s (2020) work on gentrification in California centres on people enduring displacement to examine the ‘relational co-existence of a city’s “legitimate” and “illegitimate” inhabitants, [as]…defined by residents’ access to power and capital’ and the ‘friction’ between social worlds (p. 149). For those who feel border studies should resharpen its focus on state territory – its edges above all – this may be too diffuse. For others, it will emphasize how bordering is productive of social life to an extent that the image of territorial line/ plane cannot convey. Border studies will likely continue to assume borders’ ubiquity and renew an emphasis of bordering practices’ production in/of everyday space. The contexts in which this focus develops will be critical. Intensifying migration, racist/racializing border enforcement and the extraterritorial/ neo-colonial logics of Europe’s ‘neighbourhood’ will remain research priorities. But so too should ethical criticism of the securitizations promised by fences or walls, as demonstrated in late 2021 by European states hardening their borders against migrants with reterritorializing assemblages of enunciation (legislation) and bodies (rolls of razor wire). This is a ‘spatial fetishism’ (Katz, 2007), an appeal to those for whom the reality of porous territorial lines justifies cynical forms of borderwork against the most marginal and disenfranchised. Geographers, already attuned to the exclusions and inequalities driving migration, are those who must resist, for we also know that a fetishized border is an offering made to populations for whom fear and hopelessness has become normalized. Matthew Tillotson

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References and selected further reading Agnew, J. (1994). The territorial trap: the geographical assumptions of international relations theory. Review of International Political Economy, 1, 53–80. Agnew, J. (2020). Taking back control? The myth of territorial sovereignty and the Brexit fiasco. Territory, Politics, Governance, 8, 259–72. Balibar, E. (2002). Politics and the Other Scene. London: Verso. Brambilla, C. (2015). Exploring the critical potential of the borderscapes concept. Geopolitics, 20, 14–34. Brambilla, C. (2021). Revisiting ‘Bordering, Ordering and Othering’: an invitation to ‘migrate’ towards a politics of hope. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 112, 11–17. Bremner, L. (2016). Thinking architecture with an Indian Ocean aquapelago. GeoHumanities, 2, 284–310. Casas-Cortes, M., Cobarrubias, S. and Pickles, J. (2016). ‘Good neighbours make good fences’: Seahorse Operations, border externalization and extra-territoriality. European Urban and Regional Studies, 23, 231–51. Cassidy, K., Yuval-Davis, N. and Wemyss, G. (2018). Debordering and everyday (re)bordering in and of Dover: post-borderland borderscapes. Political Geography, 66, 171–9. De Carli, B. and Frediani, A. (2016). Insurgent regeneration: spatial practices of citizenship in the rehabilitation of inner-city São Paulo. GeoHumanities, 2, 331–53. Deiana, M. (2019). Re-thinking border politics at the Sarajevo Film Festival: alternative imaginaries of conflict transformation and cross-border encounters. Geopolitics, 24, 670–90. Faxon, H. (2021). After the rice frontier: producing state and ethnic territory in Northwest Myanmar. Geopolitics, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 14650045​.2020​.1845658. Ferbrache, F. (2019). Acts of European citizenship: how Britons resident in France have been negotiating post-Brexit futures. Geography, 104, 81–8. Foucault, M. (2004). Society Must be Defended. London: Penguin. Halvorsen, S. (2019). Decolonising territory: dialogues with Latin American knowledges and grassroots strategies. Progress in Human Geography, 43, 790–814. Johnson, C., Jones, R. and Paasi, A. et al. (2011). Interventions on rethinking ‘the border’ in border studies. Political Geography, 30, 61–9. Katz, C. (2007). Banal terrorism: spatial fetishism and everyday insecurity. In D. Gregory and A. Pred (eds), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror,

Bordering  57 and Political Violence (pp. 349–61). London: Routledge. Kothari, U. (2020). Between the land and the sea: refugee experiences of the lighthouse as a real and symbolic border. Borderlands, 19, 63–87. Krichker, D. (2021). Making sense of borderscapes: space, imagination and experience. Geopolitics, 26 (4), 1224–42. Megoran, N. (2012). Rethinking the study of international boundaries: a biography of the Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan boundary. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102, 464–81. Merrick, R. (2021, 5 June). Home Office launches investigation after migrants picked up in French waters and brought to UK. Independent. www​ Accessed 2 October 2022 at https://​ .independent​.co​.uk/​news/​uk/​politics/​migrants​ -channel​-illegal​-priti​-patel​-b1860174​.html. Mountz, A. (2011). Specters at the port of entry: understanding state mobilities through an ontology of exclusion. Mobilities, 6, 317–34. Newman, D. and Paasi, A. (1998). Fences and neighbours in the postmodern world: boundary narratives in political geography. Progress in Human Geography, 22, 186–207. O’Dowd, L. (2010). From a ‘borderless world’ to a ‘world of borders’: ‘bringing history back in’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28, 1031–50. Ohmae, K. (1990). The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Global Marketplace. New York: Harper Collins. Rajaram, P. and Grundy-Warr, C. (eds) (2008). Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ramírez, M. (2020). City as borderland: gentrification and the policing of Black and Latinx geographies in Oakland. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38, 147–66. Reinke de Buitrago, S. (2017). The meaning of borders for national identity and state authority. In C. Günay and N. Witjes (eds), Border Politics: Defining Spaces of Governance and

Forms of Transgressions (pp. 143–58). Cham: Springer. Rumford, C. (2012). Towards a multiperspectival study of borders. Geopolitics, 17, 887–902. Schaffter, M., Fall, J. and Debarbieux, B. (2010). Unbounded boundary studies and collapsed categories: rethinking spatial objects. Progress in Human Geography, 34, 254–62. Schofield, R. (2018). International boundaries and borderlands in the Middle East: balancing context, exceptionalism and representation. Geopolitics, 23, 608–31. Scott, J. (2020). Introduction. In J. Scott (ed.), A Research Agenda for Border Studies (pp. 3–24). Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Sohn, C. (2016). Navigating borders’ multiplicity: the critical potential of assemblage. Area, 48, 183–9. Strüver, A. (2019). Europeanization in Cypriot borderscapes: experiencing the Green Line in everyday life. Geopolitics, 25, 609–32. Tillotson, M. (2020). Nature, space and distances in an imperial boundary network: the delimitation of the Nyasa-Tanganyika plateau boundary. Political Geography, 76, Article 102081. UK Home Office (2021, 6 July). Nationality and Borders Bill: factsheet. Accessed 2 October 2022 at https://​www​.gov​.uk/​government/​ publications/​the​-nationality​-and​-borders​ -bill​-factsheet/​nationality​-and​-borders​-bill​ -factsheet. van Houtum, H. (2005). The geopolitics of borders and boundaries. Geopolitics, 10, 672–9. van Houtum, H. and van Naerssen, T. (2002). Bordering, ordering and othering. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 93, 125–36. Vaughan-Williams, N. and Pisani, M. (2020). Migrating borders, bordering lives: everyday geographies of ontological security and insecurity in Malta. Social & Cultural Geography, 21, 651–73. Walters, W. (2014). Migration, vehicles, and politics: three theses on viapolitics. European Journal of Social Theory, 18, 469–88.

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12. Class

are excluded from rights and powers over resources as the only thing they own is their labour power (Marx [1867] 1906; Marx and Engels [1848] 1972). The conceptualization of an antagonistic relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was foundational to the definition of class proposed by the late American sociologist Erik Olin Wright, taken up in geographical studies of social structures during the era of deindustrialization (for example, Massey, 1984). Wright extended the two-classes model of capitalism by delineating several ‘positions within the social relations of production derived from these relations of exploitation’ (1998, p. 13; see also Wright, 2015). In doing so, he raised awareness of groupings in the middle of the social hierarchy, ranging from small-scale agricultural producers and shop owners (the petit bourgeoisie) to managers and supervisors in firms who control economic resources (like capitalists) but are bound by employment relations (like the proletariat). For Wright, class structure in contemporary capitalist societies was a function of the power and autonomy that emerges from the use of assets as tools of exploitation, or commodities to be exploited. In contrast with Marx who focused on possession of the physical inputs used in the (industrial) production of goods and services, Wright saw assets as also encompassing education, training and the ‘soft skills’ that enable individuals to gain and maintain control over capital and labour. In this respect, his theory of class was quite Weberian in nature. It followed Weber in viewing classes as at least partly based on status and prestige. In Weber’s work, class referenced more than differences in material wealth; it also denoted the respect, honour or recognition an individual is conferred, which can be transformed into advantage and power (see Weber, 1948). Eminent geographer Doreen Massey’s Spatial Divisions of Labour thesis extended this through exploration of the relations between space, class and gender. Her analysis highlighted that people are not only stratified by class, but also gender and ethnicity, which intersect according to specific spatial and temporal circumstances. Massey’s work signalled the value in pursuing a conjunctural analysis that locates class in relation to a series of historical trends, tendencies and intellectual and political movements. By implication, if we are to understand

Class is one of the most important social cleavages. It refers to differences in wealth, material possessions, power, authority and status. Class has long featured in geographical writings because such differences in wealth, power and status provide a means of understanding capitalism and other political economic systems. Conventionally, class has been understood as resultant from work and employment – that is, a person’s position in the labour market. However, asset ownership – whether one is a homeowner, has investment properties and/or income from stocks and shares – increasingly impacts their socio-economic situation, leading to suggestions that employment alone is insufficient for understanding class, nor the related dynamics of inequality and social stratification. Focusing on the ‘asset economy’ has the effect of illuminating both how income over and above wages bolsters life chances by enabling access to quality education, secure housing and private healthcare, as well as the way economic precariousness can restrict opportunities for individuals to enter this economy of assets and so benefit from income generated from assets or their appreciation over time. Class can be observed through a range of phenomena. Fundamentally, it is a means of referencing a group of people with a common set of economic or cultural characteristics. For historical materialists, these characteristics are the outgrowth of collective productive activity, or more specifically capitalist activity that generates classes through processes of exploitation. Unequal ownership or possession of rent-producing assets (including raw materials, technologies, buildings and related infrastructure needed to make a commodity or provide a service) creates the conditions under which owners – those with the rights and powers over productive resources – can appropriate the labour effort of those whose only possession is their capacity to turn these assets into goods or services. This dynamic of inequality between owners and workers gives rise to (at least) two strata of society: the capitalists (or bourgeoisie) who are sometimes conceived as pure rentiers, investing their capital in assets and receiving a return that may allow them to live without working, and the wage labourers (or proletariat), who 58

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class divides in the asset economy – where economic security and economic advancement are typically achieved by ‘taking’ (value-extraction) rather than ‘making’ (value-creation) activities (Mazzucato, 2017) – we need to do so in geographical context. Of particular concern within human geography at present are the processes differentiating life courses, life chances and social mobility rates in capitalist societies, including the demise of Keynesian welfarism and shift towards free market deregulation and policies of privatization. Since the 1970s, the neoliberal emphasis on minimal state intervention in economic affairs has led to growing inequality and the concentration of wealth among a small part of the population (Piketty, 2014). Characteristic of capitalist development globally, neoliberalism has facilitated economic reforms that boost capital profits to the detriment of workers’ wages and restricted their access to housing, education and healthcare, as well as leisure pursuits (Harvey, 2005). As a consequence, those reliant on income from wages have become relatively poorer, while those that have or can generate income from material assets, like housing or shares of a company or investment fund, have obtained a financial advantage that not only improves their individual life course, but increases inequality and uneven development because of the propensity for divergent economic fortunes to become entrenched by intergenerational transfers of wealth, and the transmission of cultural knowledge that serves as currency when having to navigate the financialized structures that shape economic opportunities today (Christophers, 2018; MacLeavy and Manley, 2018). Recognizing that class is (re)produced in line with broader patterns of (dis)advantage, geographical work on intergenerational inequality provides insight into the role of families in determining whether an individual achieves financial stability and/or mobility. Using evidence that those at the top of the social structure use their economic resources for asset accumulation, which functions ‘as a source of welfare and security over the life course’ (Allon, 2010, p. 379), scholars detail how those with affluent, knowledgeable or well-connected parents are buoyed by the dynamic of rising asset prices, while wage depreciation leads to spiralling household

debt and increasingly risky financial speculation from others keen to ensure they are not locked out of ownership. The significance of asset holdings is self-reinforcing because it encourages investment that leads to further wealth concentration. Sustained asset appreciation means ‘the entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labour’ (Piketty, 2014, p. 571). Not only is this detrimental to the overall economic growth, which relies upon a large proportion of the populace having the capacity to consume, but in reshaping material interests it also induces greater levels of political support for reforms that boost capital profits at the expense of employment income, perpetuating inequality and reducing aggregate demand yet further. The widening chasm between the ‘rentier class’ – comprising individuals whose income partly or wholly derives from rents, interest on investments and other assets – and those within the ‘precariat’ (Standing, 2011) who depend upon (increasing) unreliable and stagnating wages is often noted. Central to this is a sharp, unequalizing tenure divide, which powerfully shapes the fortunes of individuals and, in turn, the social structure by creating pathways towards different amounts and types of economic capital (income and asset ownership) for those with means to buy into property markets. From the perspective of the asset economy, homeownership has turned many of those in the middle of occupation categorizations (ranging from engineers, accountants, lawyers and architects through to blue collar workers in skilled trades) into investors – as concerned about capital gains as wage payments, and willing to take on debt in order to purchase housing to safeguard themselves against rising shelter costs, and ensure their long-term financial security by expanding opportunities for leveraging. For this reason, homeownership is recognized within electoral geography for changing the way in which class interests (and conflicts) feature (or not) within politics. Left-wing parties increasingly promote homeownership, while right-wing parties garner support as rising asset prices create a wealth effect that reduces reliance on, and preference for, the welfare state (Hadziabdic and Kohl, 2021). The trend towards mortgaged house purchases in Western countries is, from this Julie MacLeavy

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perspective, fundamental to the modification of class over the last 50 years. In contrast to the post-war period, when Western governments sought to intervene in the economy to reduce unemployment and ensure the general welfare of all society, the current neoliberal era has seen speculation prioritized over both investments in production and state regulation to ensure the stable reproduction of social relations. In the main, governments have sought to sustain capitalism by protecting and growing the value of assets, rather than wages, benefiting those who are able to gain income from capital and rent. If asset prices grow, those in possession of assets tend to feel more financially secure and spend more, stimulating economic production. This regime of ‘privatized Keynesianism’ (Crouch, 2009), in which increases in asset prices help to compensate for stagnant wages, has fuelled an expansion of private debt, increasing inequalities and divisions between social classes. At the top end, those in possession of assets are incentivized to use borrowed capital or debt to purchase further assets and increase their assets-based capital gains. At the bottom end, those who lack the capital or creditworthiness for asset ownership must deploy debt to make ends meet, as wages are increasingly insufficient for daily needs – and concordant reforms to public services, social security benefits and taxation trap people in situations where they not only have an inadequate income but are unable to gain entry to tertiary education, work and training opportunities that might otherwise help to reduce class differentiation by promoting social mobility. The accumulative potential of housing, the expansion of consumer credit and the reduction of social spending are theorized to give rise to structural constraints that inhibit opportunities for social ascent and make it progressively more difficult for those anchored in property markets to move down to positions of economic precarity through ill-health, unemployment, or the loss of a partner. To parse out more fully the class structure, society is depicted as ‘onion-shaped’ with a small super-rich group at the top, a minority group of asset holders below, and a majority that have been disadvantaged by the transition from an employment-driven society to one dominated by assets in a ‘bulge’ below the middle (Lansley, 2010). Observing that wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated Julie MacLeavy

among an elite few, one important stream of work details how the rich are availing themselves of resources accumulated by their elders to maintain their privileged class position. Across many countries, evidence of ‘opportunity hoarding’, which negatively impacts and excludes underprivileged groups from mobility, disproves the idea that asset wealth will ‘trickle down’ and bring broader benefits to the economy. A second stream of work views the relatively widespread accumulation of housing-as-asset as part of a new culture of finance that prompts all households towards calculative investments. This suggests that even beyond the 1 per cent elite, asset ownership is viewed as a means to help children (in particular) ‘succeed in life’. Attention to the cultural and affective impacts of the asset economy is important in demonstrating that investments in assets are not only driven by financial logics, but also the aspiration or hope of a better future. In terms of the relationship between assets and class, such work suggests that it is not simply the holding of assets that determines class position, but how present actions become orientated around assets that stratifies contemporary society. For example, upfront investments of (often borrowed) funds are made in the anticipation of future returns that might never be obtained, but which serve to foster different norms and understandings – virtuous investment, credit acceptability – within the present that influence how households deploy debt. While those at the top use debt to make financial investments (and in some instances to engage in status-based, positional consumption), those at the bottom of the social hierarchy acquire debt to ‘make ends meet’. In this regard, a new class scheme is proposed that distinguishes between asset owners (investors, outright homeowners and those with secured loans or mortgages) and ‘churners’ (renters and the homeless) who are seen to occupy a liminal zone below the ownership threshold where available credit is employed to satisfy daily rather than long-term needs (see Adkins, Cooper and Konings, 2020). By some readings, this is a zone imbued with potentiality: churners are positioned on the edges of ownership with the possibility of transitioning to the ‘mainstream’. Elsewhere, however, churners are seen as stuck in a perpetual stasis of insecure housing, precarious work and diminished opportunities, where

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credit is not (and never can be) a pathway to wealth, but always a constraint that prevents members of this group from advancing to(wards) asset-driven wealth and security. Building on studies of capitalist social formations, historical materialist geographers consider the different modes of access to wealth (assets versus wages) above and below the threshold to be indicative of the continued salience of capital–labour relations. In short, the tenure status of those in private rentals, social housing or other lodging arrangements does not fully account for their slipping steadily behind in the prosperity stakes. It is the twin dynamics of wage stagnation and welfare retrenchment that means ‘capital today exploits labour more ruthlessly than it did 30 or 40 years ago’, with the relative exposure of different groups to this being a cause of growing class inequality (Christophers, 2018, p. 107). The positioning of asset ownership as a secondary phenomenon that determines class position alongside or in parallel with the primary phenomenon of employment is politically important insofar as it encourages a return to relations of production at the heart of the neoliberalization process. By spotlighting how the rise of the asset economy is linked to the neoliberal development of capitalism, the specificities of class are situated in relation to a long trajectory of reforms that have benefited asset holders and devalued workers. This enables a contestation of claims that the dispossession of the ‘residuum’ (a term used to reference the class of society that is unemployed and without privileges or opportunities) is primarily their own fault, by capturing how political economic developments have ensured that assets appreciate at rates much faster than wages, with churner households carrying the risk through increased indebtedness. As such, it serves to highlight how growing inequality is far from inevitable but the result of political choices that mean those without assets are likely to remain marginalized. At the same time, however, post-colonial geography shows how the transformation of property (and people) into assets that can be valued, borrowed against and monetized was foundational to the development of a privileged class of capitalists during the period of European expansion and slavery. From this

perspective, the dire material effects of assetization that have long denied members of oppressed groups equal access to wealth are not new, but simply becoming more evident within countries once active in colonization (Bhambra, 2021). Having escaped the brunt of imperialism, these nations are the only places where employment-based understandings of class are said to have been able to take hold. This is not to say that there is nothing new about the contemporary asset economy, but that to exclude the histories and legacies of global capitalism risks occluding both how racism permeates the organization and development of class and embedding a view from (industrial) Europe. Reading across this geographical literature yields a revised understanding. Neoliberal capitalism, which sees greater proportions of value derived from the control of assets and the harvesting of rent, interest or capital gains, transforms class by fragmenting capitalist and worker groups. In such a system, as within the days of empire, earned income is superseded by unearned income and refracted through other forms of social difference. The interlocking oppressions of racism, patriarchy and heteronormativity reverberate in discriminatory practices that draw attention to ‘continuities in capitalism’s racialized exploitation and expropriation dialectic’ (Issar, 2021, p. 50). Although not always acknowledged in the literature, regimes of unfree labour (gendered social reproduction, modern slavery) through to discriminatory practices (redlining, neighbourhood segregation predicated on non-normative sexual orientation) drive unequal economic outcomes and opportunities, which are passed on intergenerationally, and demand that neoliberal modalities of dispossession and debt are mapped onto and married with long-established practices that extract and appropriate labour and resources from subordinated groups. As such, class under neoliberalism cannot be prized apart from the operations of gender, race, sexuality and other ‘identity categories’ that are rooted in and condition the material functioning of capitalism. Moreover, while it may be theoretically possible to separate class from ‘extra economic’ forms of domination, in the manner demonstrated above, it is politically untenable to do so. In practice, the contestation of class necessitates a contestation of Julie MacLeavy

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extant social relations that embed inequality and injustice across the globe. Julie MacLeavy

References and selected further reading Adkins, L., Cooper, M. and Konings, M. (2020). The Asset Economy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Allon, F. (2010). Speculating on everyday life: the cultural economy of the quotidian. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 34 (4), 366–81. Bhambra, G. (2021). Colonial global economy: towards a theoretical reorientation of political economy. Review of International Political Economy, 21 (2), 307–22. Christophers, B. (2018). Intergenerational inequality? Labour, capital, and housing through the ages. Antipode, 50 (1), 101–21. Crouch, D. (2009). Privatised Keynesianism: an unacknowledged policy regime. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 11 (3), 382–99. Hadziabdic, A. and Kohl, S. (2021). Is the left right? The creeping embourgeoisement of social democracy through homeownership. European Journal of Political Research, https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1111/​1475​-6765​.12479. Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Issar, S. (2021). Listening to Black Lives Matter: racial capitalism and the critique of neoliberalism. Contemporary Political Theory, 20, 48–71. Lansley, S. (2010). TUC Touchstone Extras: Unfair to Middling. Accessed 2 October 2022

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at https://​www​.tuc​.org​.uk/​sites/​default/​files/​ extras/​unfairtomiddling​.pdf. MacLeavy, J. and Manley, D. (2018). (Re)discovering the lost middle: intergenerational inheritances and economic inequality in urban and regional research. Regional Studies, 52 (10), 1435–46. Marx, K. ([1867] 1906). Capital, Volume 1. Translated from the 3rd German edition by S. Moore and E. Aveling. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. and Engels, F. ([1848] 1972). The Communist Manifesto. Translated from the 1972 German edition by S. Moore with F. Engels. Marxist Internet Archive. Massey. D. (1984). Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production. London: Routledge. Mazzucato, M. (2017). The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. London: Penguin. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Standing, S. (2011). The Precariat. London: Bloomsbury. Weber, M. (1948). Class, status, party. In H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, (pp. 180–95). London: Routledge. Wright, E.O. (1998). A general framework for the analysis of class structure. In E.O. Wright (ed.), The Debate on Classes (pp. 3–46). London: Verso. Wright, E.O. (2015). Understanding Class. London: Verso.

13. Colonialism

while empires. The distinction was between those works that put imperialism at the heart of the debate and those that unpacked the impact of colonialism on the ground. So, while imperialism is an ideologically driven enterprise from the centre towards the peripheries, colonialism is more a set of spatial practices that are effectively based and rooted in the places of dispossession in the peripheries. Those geographers who have brought together imperialism and its colonial manifestation in specific geographical sites include Clayton (2003), Lambert and Lester (2004), Lester (2002), Proudfoot and Roche (2005) and Whelan (2002). From focusing on the geographies of spatial ordering and practices of colonialism and empire, to postcolonial pursuits around interpretations, it became apparent that there was a lack of distinct political positioning in scholarship that highlighted the brutality and demeaning nature of colonialism and imperialism. Following on from the influential work of Edward Said (1978), Gregory, Kearns, Harris and Duncan were among a handful of geographers who first offered a reinterpretation of colonialism. Others provided an overview of geographies of colonialism and empires in the tropics (Duncan, 2002, 2007; Gregory, 1995, 1998, 2004). As Kearns (2017, p. 224) notes, colonialism thus became a context that provided the framework for a ‘specific territorial form of imperial sovereignty’. Indeed, the failure of the colonial state was manifested in the neglect of the subaltern population in colonies and in transplanting class systems on them (Kumar, 2002a, 2002b, 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2010). There was also an engagement with how colonial spaces were constructed and represented from the salubrious hill stations of the Raj to brothels in the colony (Duncan, 2002, 2007; Howell, 2009; Kenny, 1997; Kumar, 2005; Legg, 2007; Yeoh, 1996). In these constructions, the focus has been on modern Western civilization, with an emphasis on the British Empire. One can therefore make a distinction between ‘geography’s empire’ (Driver, 1992) and ‘colonizing geographies’ (Clayton, 2003; Gregory, 2001). The former focused more on the metropolitan-disciplinary spectrum of the debate, while the latter engaged with the historical-cultural diversity of colonialism and empire. Suffice to say the narratives under ‘geography’s empire’ were an uncritical acceptance of the discipline’s

Introduction More than half a century ago, major portions of the globe were struggling under the oppressive shackles of colonialism. As Mbembe (2021, p. 1) notes, ‘colonialism was itself but one dimension of a long history of imperialism, the ruthless drive for dominance, which periodically seized metropolitan states, leading them to trample over the sovereignty of other political communities’. Thus, colonization was never seen as a destiny nor as a necessity for the majority of independent nation-states before they succumbed to the pressures of imperial regimes through time and space. This entry provides a decolonized framework for understanding how colonialism as a category dominated our worldview and its relevance today.

Historicity of colonialism – myths and reality Invariably, colonialism has always been associated with Western states in the temperate zone of the Global North – namely, Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, Britain, and the USA to a more limited extent. Such an approach ignores the historical reality of empires and colonies that existed before the eighteenth century. What changed? Well, the key change was ushered in by the Industrial Revolution, which was propelled by France and Britain before engulfing the rest of the world. First, empires existed throughout human history and, by extension, colonies too existed in diverse geographical regions. Invariably, distinction can be made between the French and British or Dutch and Spanish, Chinese and Incas, or Gupta and Mongol empires. There is vast heterogeneity in the singular entity of empires, imperial and colonial. Geography as a discipline has courted imperialism and colonialism with varying interest and ambivalence. These relate to the materiality of colonialism and its representations embedded in discourses. Such an engagement was circumscribed by interpretations both at the core and margins of the erst63

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rather Eurocentric hegemonic assessment of complicity with imperialism (Godlewska and Smith, 1994). Geography became deeply embroiled with the enterprise of the empire and, by extension, colonialism. Driver’s (1992) work started the tradition of challenging the master narratives of imperial historiography, of Orientalism, and culminated in his work on hidden histories of the empire (Driver, 2009, 2013). Then works by Butlin (2009) demonstrated the need for a reassessment of ‘empire’. Later works focused on spaces of knowledge and the reordering of colonial spaces and their representations (Blunt, 2002; Blunt and McEwan, 2002; Duncan, 2007; Kumar, 2002b, 2006a; Yeoh, 1996). Derek Gregory’s colonizing geographies (1995), on the other hand, reverted the gaze back to the spatial semiotics of political power and their recurrent expressions as normalized knowledge. The ideas of spatiality and tropicality of colonial discourse and their contingent representations were made visible by Livingstone (2002) and further advanced by Kearns (2017), Kumar (2002b, 2006a) and Legg (2007). Moral and spatial ordering of the colonies was as potent as the rise of paternalism and trusteeship. The gendering of colonial geographies that was led by Blunt and Rose (1994), then Blunt (2005), was extended to Asia and Southeast Asia (Duncan, 2002; Howell, 2009; Kumar, 2006b; Lambert and Lester, 2004; Legg, 2007; Lester, 2002; Yeoh and Huang, 2000). More recently, ideas on the rise of humanitarianism and of indigeneity from the demise of slavery traditions have animated debates in the Global North and South (Lambert and Lester, 2004). Colonialism was thus seen as an unequal relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. The moot question is, can colonialism and empire be generalized in geographical terms? We can all agree that issues of dispossession and displacement that are seminal to settler colonies are also predominant in civilizational colonies. Decentring these discourses and allowing space for polyvalent voices from the margins will help recoup the diversity of narratives from the margins and enable the decolonizing of the narratives in geography. The production of situated knowledge needs to be challenged if we are to seriously consider the relevance of colonialism in this century. That in a sense begs the question of whether ‘colonial past’ has any future in comparison to the ‘colonial Satish Kumar

present’? The colonial past remains a contentious terrain, with discontinuity and breaks forever elusive of being placed in a knowable category of form, content and context. Where do human geographers stand in the study of colonialism today? The theme of ‘colonialism’ has remained a key focus as one of the most influential processes in human history. Today colonialism evokes anger, frustration, a deep sense of guilt and of injustice perpetrated on largely servile populations, whose histories were erased, whose identity was subverted and whose land and resources were surreptitiously usurped to optimize individual and collective profits during the making of the ‘empire’. This can be seen across the Global South. Colonialism was presented as a matter of fact, as a ‘noble and worthy’ enterprise for saving the ‘wretched savages’ (Horvath, 1972, p. 45) and continues to elide with ‘imperialism – old and new’ for better or worse. The bottom line is that both imperialism and colonialism were founded on the premise of aggression, exploitation, devaluation, erasure and subversion. Antiquated colonial policies still continue to be used to suppress dissent and democracy across the world.

Definitions, characteristics and attributes Colonialism can be defined in its most rudimentary form as that of ‘domination’, control or power by a numerically small group of individuals over land or territory. It is also seen as a form of legitimizing exploitation geographically, economically, politically, culturally and socially. Thus, we can ascribe to inter-group domination such as between Britain and India or intra-group, between the English and the Irish or English and Scots or Welsh or indeed between China and Tibet or Myanmar and the Rohingyas. Colony precisely means a collection of people (Adas, 1998). Colonialism is also closely affiliated to the term ‘possession’, which while being a conscious enterprise, may not necessarily be legitimate. Most colonies were thereby designated as ‘dominion’ and used interchangeably with the word ‘colony’ in British constitutional documents. Thus, the Colonial Laws Validity Act of 1865 defined a ‘colony’ as ‘all of Her Majesty’s

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Possessions Abroad in which there shall exist a legislature” (Finlay, 1976, p. 167; original emphasis). ‘Colonial’ is derived from the Latin colere (to cultivate, to till), and colonia (a landed estate, or farm) and was confirmed as an entity depending on whether the migrants retained their citizenship with the mother country and was simpler than the Victorian one regarding foreign possessions having their own legislature (Finlay, 1976, p. 168). At times, the idea of free trade became a key principle for the designation of a colony, without necessarily being burdened with the challenges of governance (Semmel, 1970, p. 8). By the end of World War II, one-third of the land surface was designated as a colony. There has been an uninterrupted continuity of European colonization throughout history. According to Finlay (1976), we have the choice to retain a limited definition of a ‘colony’ or adopt a broader term – a ‘dependency’ – which was in vogue during the late nineteenth century. ‘Colony’ as a term also had another popular synonym of ‘plantation’. This term has changed to depict a large estate in tropical and semi-tropical locales. Thus both ‘dominion’ and colonies were used interchangeably with the term plantations (Beer, 1913). Today, the term ‘plantation’ remains a major heartache for Irish (Catholic) communities in Northern Ireland. Adam Smith (1776) too followed the very same designation of plantation to define a ‘colony’ (Finlay, 1976, p. 171). Today, geographers recalibrate the term ‘colony’ to mean not only a ‘plantation’, but also a ‘dependency’ of the metropole – Britain or France or Spain from which emigration originated. Geographers have ‘militantly’ navigated, ceded and conquered territories in terms of ‘race, climate, and resources’. At the same time, increasing utility of maps in the Age of Reconnaissance assisted and gave way to ‘sternly practical pursuit’ to help reaffirm social and moral commitments in erstwhile colonies (Livingstone, 1992, p. 313). Colonialism therefore provided a history of displacement, or impoverishment and discrimination, which is also balanced with ideas of prestige, power and profits for the rulers. Colonialism over time is a term heavily imbued with historical and ideological baggage.

Settler versus civilizational colonies In studies of the British Empire, Seeley (1883) makes a clear distinction between ‘settler colonies’ or ‘white dominions’ such as Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and other parts of the British Empire where Europeans remained a small minority. These were in ‘civilizational colonies’ – for example, India, China or Egypt. Over the past decade, the concept of ‘settler colonialism’, a distinct form of colonization, has become increasingly prominent, and work by geographers has provided a nuanced interpretation of what this entailed in space (Pulido, 2018). Inwood and Bonds (2016) note that settler colonialism extended the project of empire enabled through racial configurations and geographies of ‘white supremacy’. What makes settler colonialism unique is the desire to ‘replace’ and dispossess Indigenous peoples (Byrd, 2011; De Leeuw et al., 2012; Kobayashi and De Leeuw, 2010; Pulido, 2018). It also highlighted the extreme forms of institutionalized and embedded racism as a consequence of colonial impositions over the years, particularly visible in Canada (Harris, 2004; Inwood and Bonds, 2016). Human geographers further distinguish between ‘civilizational’ versus ‘settler’ colonies. In the former, the focus has been on maintaining ‘equilibrium’ – for example, India, China or Sri Lanka – while in the latter, emphasis was more towards ‘assimilation’ and at times extermination, as witnessed in colonies of Tasmania, the Caribbean islands, Americas, Australia and Canada (Baczkowski, 1958). Settler colonialism is thus ‘characterised by a determination to displace and eliminate rather than dominate’ (Veracini, 2018, p. 196). The opposite was the intention in engaging with ‘civilizational’ colonies. Geography, with a few exceptions (Bauder, 2011; Kobayashi and De Leeuw, 2010) has only considered whites in relation to settler colonialism (Bonds and Inwood, 2016; Radcliffe, 2015). Despite this new interpretation, discourses still vacillate between white/ non-white binaries. ‘Geography simply lacks the racial diversity, scholarly expertise and comfort to explore such questions’ (Pulido, 2018, p. 310). ‘Settler colonialism is theoretSatish Kumar

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ically, politically and geographically distinct from colonialism’; it focuses on the ‘permanent occupation of a territory and the removal of Indigenous peoples with the express purpose of building an ethnically distinct national community’ (Bonds and Inwood, 2016, p. 716).

Internal colonialism Internal colonialism on the other hand, is a ‘geographically-based pattern of subordination of a differentiated population, located within the dominant power or country’ (Pinderhughes, 2011, p. 236; see also Hechter, 1975). This reinforces systematic forms of group inequality, as seen for blacks in the USA and South Africa, Dalits in India, the Roma community in Northern Ireland, the Catalans of Spain, Christians in Pakistan, the First Nations community in Australia and Canada. What is common between external and internal colonialism is systemic marginalization, subordination, oppression and discrimination. The historical roots of internal colonialism can be traced as residual effects of empire building where the dominance of one group over the other resulted in subversion of culture, language, politics, and identity. This is a feature common across ‘civilizational’ and ‘settler’ colonies across the world (Fanon, 1963). Colonialism is therefore a geographically based pattern of subordination of a largely heterogenous population being carved out as a spatially distinct colony. Internal colonialism therefore sustains itself within the contiguous territory of a nation-state.

Future of colonialism and its relevance One cannot deny the uniqueness of European-based imperialism and its subsequent transition to established colonialism both among the settler and civilizational entities. Planting always led to displacement – conquering and at times erasure. Colonization ended up as a project to organize human communities into hierarchies of geographies, Satish Kumar

of regions, and of territories. ‘Colonialism had trapped significant parts of the globe in an immense web of dependence’ (Mbembe, 2021, p. 226) and took on planetary dimensions to end it after 1947. Colonialism radically transformed and rationalized the ways in which the state and society were organized. In a way, this was a key part of rationalizing and justifying the project of Western exceptionalism (Adas, 1998, p. 381; Said, 1978). Shorn of its triumphalism, colonialism by stealth and deception created long-lasting challenges because of the interrupted process of incomplete and fractured processes of modernity. Here race came to supplant culture as a key marker of difference, of superiority and dominance. Representing such forms of difference became part and parcel of a colonialist mindset through time, resulting in fragmented subjects under imperialism, colonialism and racism (Hall, 2002). As Gregory (2004, p. 7) noted: ‘What has come to be called postcolonialism is part of this optical shift. Its commitment to the future free of colonial power and disposition is sustained in part by the critique of the continuities between the colonial past and the colonial present. While they may be displaced, distorted and (most often) denied, the capacities that inhere within the colonial past are routinely reaffirmed and reactivated in the colonial present’ (emphasis added). The challenge that remains is how to counter the ‘amnesiac histories of colonialism’ (p. 9). Satish Kumar

References and selected further reading Adas, M. (1998), ‘Imperialism and colonialism in comparative perspective’, The International History Review, 20 (2), 371–88. Baczkowski, W. (1958), Russian Colonialism: The Tsarist and Soviet Empires, New York: Praeger. Bauder, H. (2011), ‘Closing the immigration– Aboriginal parallax gap’, Geoforum, 42 (5), 517–19. Beer, G.L. (1913), The Old Colonial System (2 vols), New York: Macmillan. Blunt, A. (2002), ‘“Land of our mothers”: home, identity and nationality for Anglo-Indians in

Colonialism  67 British India’, History Workshop Journal, 54, 49–72. Blunt, A. (2005), Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Blunt, A. and McEwan, C. (eds) (2002), Postcolonial Geographies, London: Continuum. Blunt, A. and Rose, G. (eds) (1994), Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, New York: The Guilford Press. Bonds, A. and Inwood, J. (2016), ‘Beyond white privilege: geographies of white supremacy and settler colonialism’, Progress in Human Geography, 40 (6), 715–33. Butlin, R.A. (2009), Geographies of Empire: European Empires and Colonies, c. 1880–1960, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Byrd, J. (2011), Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Clayton, D. (2003), ‘Critical imperial and colonial geographies’, in K. Anderson, M. Domosh, S. Pile and N. Thrift (eds), Handbook of Cultural Geography, London: SAGE, pp. 354–68. De Leeuw, S., Maurice, S. and Holyk, T. et al. (2012), ‘With reserves: colonial geographies and first nations health’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102 (5), 904–11. Driver, F. (1992), ‘Geography’s empire: histories of geographical knowledge’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 10, 23–40. Driver, F. (2009), Hidden Histories of Exploration: Researching the RGS-IBG Collections. London: Royal Geographical Society. Driver, F. (2013), ‘Hidden histories made visible? Reflections on a geographical exhibition’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38 (3), 420–35. Duncan, J.S. (2002), ‘Embodying colonialism? Domination and resistance in 19th century Ceylonese coffee plantations’, Journal of Historical Geography, 28, 317–38. Duncan, J.S. (2007), In the Shadow of the Tropics: Climate, Race and Biopower in Nineteenth Century Ceylon, Farnham: Ashgate. Fanon, F. (1963), Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press. Finlay, M.I. (1976), ‘Colonies: an attempt at a typology’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 26, 167–88. Godlewska, A. and Smith, N. (eds) (1994), Geography and Empire, Oxford: Blackwell. Gregory, D. (1995), ‘Imaginative geographies’, Progress in Human Geography, 19 (4), 447–85. Gregory, D. (1998), ‘Power, knowledge and geography: the Hettner Lecture in Human

Geography’, Geographische Zeitschrift, 86, 70–93. Gregory, D. (2001), ‘Colonial nostalgia and cultures of travel: spaces of constructed visibility in Egypt’, in N. AlSayyad (ed.), Consuming Traditions, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism. London: Routledge, pp. 111–51. Gregory, D. (2004), The Colonial Present: Afghanistan. Palestine. Iraq, Oxford: Blackwell. Hall, C. (2002), Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867, Cambridge: Polity. Harris, C. (2004), ‘How did colonialism dispossess? Comments from an edge of empire’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94 (1), 165–82. Hechter, M. (1975), Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Horvath, R.J. (1972), ‘A definition of colonialism’, Current Anthropology, 13 (1), 45–7. Howell, P. (2009), Geographies of Regulation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inwood, J. and Bonds, A. (2016), ‘Confronting white supremacy and a militaristic pedagogy in the US settler colonial state’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 106 (3), 521–9. Kearns, G. (2017), ‘The territory of colonialism’, Territory, Politics, Governance, 5 (2), 222–38. Kenny, J.T. (1997), ‘Claiming the high ground: theories of imperial authority and the British hill stations in India’, Political Geography, 16, 117–39. Kobayashi, A. and De Leeuw, S. (2010), ‘Colonialism and the tensioned landscapes of indigeneity’, in S. Smith, R. Pain, S. Marston and J.P. Jones II (eds), The Handbook of Social Geography, London: SAGE, pp. 118–39. Kumar, M.S. (with S. Naj) (2002a), ‘Noble savage to gentlemen: discourses of civilisation and missionary modernity in Northeast India’, Contemporary India, 1 (4), 113–28. Kumar, M.S. (2002b), ‘The evolution of spatial ordering in colonial Madras’, in A. Blunt and C. McEwan (eds), Postcolonial Geographies, London: Continuum, pp. 85–98. Kumar, M.S. (2005), ‘“Oriental sore” or “public nuisance”: the regulation of prostitution in colonial India, 1865–1889’, in L. Proudfoot and M. Roche (eds), (Dis)Placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 155–73. Kumar, M.S. (2006a), ‘Idioms, symbolism and divisions: beyond the black and white towns in Madras, 1652–1790’, in S. Raju, M.S. Kumar and S. Corbridge (eds), Colonial and

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68  Concise encyclopedia of human geography Postcolonial Geographies of India, Delhi: SAGE, pp. 23–48. Kumar, M.S. (2006b), ‘The census and women’s work in Rangoon, 1872–1931’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32, 377–97. Kumar, M.S. (with D.V. Zou) (2010), ‘Mapping a colonial borderland: objectifying the “geo-body” of India’s Northeast’, Journal of Asian Studies, 70 (1), 141–70. Lambert, A. and Lester, A. (2004), ‘Geographies of colonial philanthropy’, Progress in Human Geography, 28 (3), 320–41. Legg, S. (2007), Spaces of Colonialism: Discipline and Governmentality in Delhi, India’s New Capital, Oxford: Blackwell. Lester, A. (2002), ‘Constituting colonial discourse’, in A. Blunt and C. McEwan (eds), Post-Colonial Geographies, New York: Continuum, pp. 29–45. Livingstone, D.N. (1992), The Geographical Tradition, Oxford: Blackwell. Livingstone, D.N. (2002), ‘Race, space and moral climatology: notes towards a genealogy’, Journal of Historical Geography, 28, 159–80. Mbembe, A. (2021), Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (trans. D. Ginsburg), New York: Columbia University Press. Pinderhughes, C. (2011), ‘Towards a new theory of internal colonialism’, Socialism and Democracy, 25 (1), 235–56. Proudfoot, L. and Roche, M. (2005), (Dis)Placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies, Farnham: Ashgate. Pulido, L. (2018), ‘Geographies of race and ethnicity III: settler colonialism and non-native people

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of colour’, Progress in Human Geography, 42 (2), 309–18. Radcliffe, S.A. (2015), Dilemmas of Difference: Indigenous Women and the Limits of Postcolonial Development Policy, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Said, E. (1978), Orientalism, New York: Penguin Books. Seeley, J.R. (1883), The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures, London: Macmillan & Co, p. 55. Semmel, B. (1970), The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, A. (1776), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell. Thompson, A. (2013), Writing Imperial Histories, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Veracini, L. (2018), ‘Where does colonialism come from?’, Rethinking History, 22 (2), 184–202. Whelan, Y. (2002), ‘The construction and destruction of a colonial landscape: commemorating British monarchs in Dublin before and after Independence’, Journal of Historical Geography, 28 (4), 508–33. Yeoh, B.S.A. (1996), Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yeoh, B.S.A. and Huang, S. (2000), ‘“Home” and “away”: foreign domestic workers and negotiations of diasporic identity in Singapore’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 23, 413–29.

14. Comparative geographies

from cities elsewhere based on its unique historical, scalar, social, political or other contextual qualities (Ren, 2021). The individualizing comparative approach illustrates the exceptional nature of cities in China, though this simultaneously functions to reduce the theoretical relevance of research about urban China for other places. The basis for site selection for individualizing strategies is quite broad, as any other case can potentially help to illustrate the specificity of a place. This is particularly a productive approach, however, for more under-researched cases because it is able to highlight how existing scholarship might be limited in explaining different cases. The causal explanation with individualizing comparison is about the single case, and the contextual, isolating factors that determine a particularly unique outcome. In contrast to individualizing comparative approaches that begin with a primary, single case, the universalizing approach begins with a general rule and relies on multiple, different cases to defend the applicability of the rule. By starting with a universal or general rule, the selection of comparative sites is ideally to show how a range of different cases support a rule. This can often take the form of quantitative, statistical comparative research that generate large-scale data sets. The outcome of this form of comparison might look like rankings, and one prominent example of this is the Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC), which compares variables of international connectedness. They position cities in globalization processes by ranking their integration in networks through specific parameters like accounting or legal services. While the GaWC statistical rankings of cities into alpha, beta, gamma categories are inclusive in the sense of being able to account for many comparative sites, they are also narrow in the sense of what they are able to explain. Universalizing comparative approaches are in a sense necessarily reductive, measuring globalization in terms of the location of financial firms, for instance. Moreover, statistical comparability is a perennial issue of concern for comparative researchers, particularly for cities where data is less reliable or available. For the example of the GaWC, this implies that not all cities are able to provide data on the preset parameters, which can put these universalizing conclusions into question. Related to the universal approach, but offering a specification that facilitates greater

Comparison is generally understood as the analysis of similarities and differences between two or more things. An approach is comparative when some version of this kind of analysis is undertaken. Comparative research and methods have been an important part of empirical and theoretical work across disciplines and in both human and physical geography. Due to its epistemological purchase, it transcends specific schools of thought and positivist/constructivist divides, which is why comparative work is a cornerstone of human geography, for post-colonial scholars and demographers alike. Indeed, the connotation of comparative is to describe something that exceeds the singularity of one site, an adjective that suggests a gesture of relation. In human geography, as well as adjacent disciplines like area studies and political geography, comparative approaches are often based on comparative sites and thus reliant on a precondition of commensurability. That is, a distinction of what can be compared in order to meet requirements of causal explanation as the basis for analyzing two or more places. This can pertain to variables, for instance, like scale (selecting cities or countries) or size (measured in population or economic productivity). Some primary forms of comparative strategies with the aim to determine causal explanation are individualizing, universalizing, encompassing or variation-finding (Brenner, 2001; Lijphart, 1971; Pickvance, 1986; Robinson, 2011; Tilly, 1984). These strategies remain central to understanding the traditional logic of comparative work, often implicitly taken to be definitive requirements of what even counts as comparative. Individualizing comparison is based on a detailed case study that shows the distinguishing properties of a particular case. It can highlight how one case is different from several other cases, or represents a primary model of something. This approach has strengths in its ability to capture extensive historical and contextual details, and relies on these factors to draw distinctions. For instance, comparative research on urban China often frames Chinese cities as different 69

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theoretical exploration, is the encompassing approach to comparison. The encompassing approach assumes that cases are part of broader systemic processes, and comparative cases serve to also explain the nature of these processes. Exemplary of this area of research is the work investigating urbanization processes under capitalism, which has inspired the debates around planetary urbanization (Brenner and Schmid, 2015). The comparative cases serve as a means to explain urbanization patterns globally. Though these patterns might be increasingly complicated and uneven, the encompassing approach operates with the assumption of a shared process that is systemic, thus affecting an understanding of cities in general. The encompassing comparative approach is therefore often conflated with a universal approach, and thus provokes criticism that it is an approach that produces an ‘all-encompassing, transcontextual, and neocolonial metanarrative that, it is claimed, ignores the power-laden realities of difference, place-specificity, everyday life, struggle, and experience’ (Brenner, 2018, p. 570). Indeed, the encompassing approach to comparative work seemingly comes into conflict with comparison as a means to redress the parochial origins of theory (Robinson, 2003) given its totalizing tendencies (Goonewardena, 2018; Oswin, 2020). To better parse out the implications, it helps to distinguish between the comparative methodological approach that relies on an encompassing logic and the encompassing logics that reinscribe epistemological universalisms. The former would render viable the study of urbanization under capitalism as a basis for comparative site selection, and facilitates the ability to draw conclusions about systemic processes based on multiple cases. The latter would argue that the logic of capitalism is universally the same, which would preclude the empirical justification for comparative work at all. This is perhaps best captured by the encompassing approach towards understanding urbanization processes based on a comparative approach, which is theoretically generative rather than only validating pre-existing concepts (Schmid et al., 2018). The question of the particular and the universal is also at the heart of the variation-finding approach to comparison. Variation-finding takes a different direction than encompassing comparison in terms of its logic. Rather than taking comparative cases Julie Ren

to explain a broad process, variation-finding comparison begins with an existing theory and selects comparative cases to find different experiences or manifestations of that theory. This often implies that variation-finding comparison focuses on similar cases to control for as many variables as possible in order to make a convincing causal case. This lends itself well to regional comparisons, for instance, such as the work of Janet Abu-Lughod comparing North African cities. She makes a case for setting ‘more precise limits’ in order to ‘distinguish legitimate comparisons from illegitimate comparisons’ (Abu-Lughod, 1975, p. 17). Her determination of legitimate comparisons requires that the comparison begins with specific parameters, first establishing the common variables before looking at how they vary in order to seek out an explanation or a shared process for these divergences. As Jennifer Robinson has pointed out, however, this has resulted in two major tendencies: (1) the reliance on existing knowledge and theory in order to formulate the hypotheses; and (2) the comparison of only similar sites (Robinson, 2011, p. 10). Ultimately, one conclusion that can be drawn is that the traditional modes of designing comparative research that counts as legitimate has resulted in a theoretical landscape that (especially in the case of urban geography) remains quite parochial. Comparative approaches therefore should not be conflated prima facie with a more global or cosmopolitan research. These traditional modes of comparative research and their presumptions of similarity and difference, the reliance on pre-existing theories, categories, variables imply a rather limited landscape of comparative research. The task to balance context, the epistemological legacies of social science theories or concepts, and the problem of pre-established, often outdated categories as the basis for comparative site selection is a particular challenge for area studies. For instance, area studies has suffered from a declining relevance since the end of the Cold War, dismissed as being overly descriptive and not theoretical enough (Ahram, Köllner and Sil, 2018), and turned into a demeaning ascription that was enough to consign researchers to ‘the margins of the discipline’ (Jazeel, 2015, p. 662). Yet, specifically, comparative area studies has been suggested as a potential strategy to balance between the descriptive particularism of area studies and the reductive generalizations of

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universalizing approaches (Berg-Schlösser, 2018). Still a great deal of disciplinary attention has dealt with the ways that geography and area studies in particular represent ‘imperial projects of classification, ordering, and power’ (Sidaway, 2013, p. 986). Indeed, questioning the categories of comparison can itself also be a means to recalibrate the limits of comparative approaches. Comparisons that rely on economic, political or regional categories for establishing a shared basis of comparison in the aforementioned approaches are often not neutral but elide various biases (Ren and Luger, 2015). De-naturalizing categories for comparison, particularly the national category (Comstock, 2012) can itself be a starting point for novel comparative approaches. This marks a shift in human geography, from the more traditional modes of comparative research that rely on presumed categories of similarity or difference, towards approaches to comparison that gesture at a more critical stance towards the comparative imagination. In Robinson’s terms of ‘understanding comparison as thinking through elsewhere’, she takes ‘genetic’ and ‘generative’ comparative tactics as methodological starting points (Robinson, 2016a, p. 19). Robinson explains these as possible new grounds for urban comparisons that conceptualize the production of specific urban outcomes (genetic) and conceptualize through bringing singularities into the conversation (generative) (Robinson, 2022). The evident need for more experimental and novel approaches to comparison is in part a driver for the effort behind relational comparison – to shift from the strictures of ‘law-like explanation’ (Nijman, 2007, p. 5) that delimited the site selection of traditional comparative work towards relational comparison, in the legacy of Doreen Massey. Rather than bounded containers of separate comparative sites, Massey conceptualized places as always being made in relation to other places (Massey, 2011). Building on this, Gillian Hart explains her approach to relational comparison: ‘Instead of comparing pre-existing objects, events, places, or identities – or asserting a general process like globalization and comparing its “impacts” – I argued that the focus of relational comparison is on how key processes are constituted in relation to one another through power-laden practices

in the multiple, interconnected arenas of everyday life’ (Hart, 2018, pp. 374–5). The distinction here between relational comparison and variation-finding comparison lies in the direction of how concepts are produced. While variation-finding comparison begins with an existing theory to see how it might vary across different cases for comparative sights, relational comparison considers the ways that theory itself is constituted by places in relation to one another. Engaging in this approach to comparison advocates moving beyond fixed theorizations of place, space and scale and towards understanding comparative sites like cities as bundles of relations always being formed, and entangled in relations with elsewhere (Ward, 2010). Similarly, Aamir Mufti’s reflections on post-colonial scholarship point out the ways that ‘societies on either side of the imperial divide now live deeply imbricated lives that cannot be understood without reference to each other’ (Mufti, 2005, p. 478). This shifts the approach from searching for similarities and differences between two mutually exclusive contexts and instead towards relational comparisons that use different cities to pose questions of one another (Edensor and Jayne, 2012). Beyond the methodological and empirical issues of a comparative approach that is more relational, the relationality of places also posits an epistemological issue at the center about how places are understood in relation to one another. The debates about the imbalance of some comparative sites as the dominant sites of theory and others as merely empirical cases functioning as variants, circumscribed to the shadows of theory-building, have resulted in a kind of bifurcation whereby ‘the south is considered exemplar or exception rather than a source of urban geographical theory’ (Lawhon and Roux, 2019, p. 1261). The comparative possibilities that engage with global comparativism are not just about comparing more, different places, but also about how the canon itself is taught (Mufti, 2005). Indeed, Robinson points out the ways that a comparative approach attuned to a ‘more global’ theorizing agenda would also necessarily be ready to revise theory itself (Robinson, 2016b). In this way, the comparative gesture is an invitation to approach sites, cases and theory itself from a position predisposed to experimentation. Julie Ren

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For human geography, the advancement of comparative approaches will therefore likely have various impacts on theorization, methodology and the positioning of the researcher. The theoretical and conceptual starting points for comparative research will likely demand that new sites are brought into comparative relation, and, in turn, these new comparative sites will likely force the discipline to revise existing theoretical starting points and potentially formulate new theoretical directions (see, e.g., Qian and Lu, 2019; Ren, 2020; Robinson et al., 2020; Wood, 2020). While human geography often expects area specialization of its researchers, these new comparative approaches will likely demand new positionings and collaborative predispositions. Emerging work about a posteriori comparisons, to compare the work of other researchers (Montero and Baiocchi, 2022), or a translational turn, to identify the space of theorization between concepts emerging from different linguistic settings (Zhao, 2020), point to the way the comparative researcher in human geography is increasingly situated in a liminal space. Julie Ren

References and selected further reading Abu-Lughod, J. (1975). The legitimacy of comparisons in comparative urban studies: a theoretical position and an application to North African cities. Urban Affairs Quarterly, 11 (1), 13–35. Ahram, A.I., Köllner, P. and Sil, R. (eds) (2018). Comparative Area Studies: Methodological Rationales and Cross-regional Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berg-Schlösser, D. (2018). Comparative area studies: the golden mean between area studies and universalist approaches? In A.I. Ahram, P. Köllner and R. Sil (eds), Comparative Area Studies: Methodological Rationales and Cross-regional Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 29–44. Brenner, N. (2001). World city theory, globalization and the comparative-historical method: reflections on Janet Abu-Lughod’s interpretation of contemporary urban restructuring. Urban Affairs Review, 36 (6), 124–47. Brenner, N. (2018). Debating planetary urbanization: for an engaged pluralism. Environment

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and Planning D: Society and Space, 36 (3), 570–90. Brenner, N. and Schmid, C. (2015). Towards a new epistemology of the urban? City, 19 (2–3), 151–82. Comstock, S.C. (2012). Incorporating comparisons in the rift: making use of cross-place events and histories in moments of world historical change. In A. Pataczek, D. Nergiz, T. Faist and N. Glick Schiller (eds), Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Research Methodologies for Cross-border Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 176–98. Edensor, T. and Jayne, M. (2012). Introduction: urban theory beyond the West. In T. Edensor and M. Jayne (eds), Urban Theory Beyond the West: A World of Cities. London: Routledge, pp. 1–28. Goonewardena, K. (2018). Planetary urbanization and totality. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36 (3), 456–73. Hart, G. (2018). Relational comparison revisited: Marxist postcolonial geographies in practice. Progress in Human Geography, 42 (3), 371–94. Jazeel, T. (2015). Between area and discipline: progress, knowledge production and the geographies of geography. Progress in Human Geography, 40 (5), 649–67. Lawhon, M. and Roux, L.L. (2019). Southern urbanism or a world of cities? Modes of enacting a more global urban geography in textbooks, teaching and research. Urban Geography, 40 (9), 1251–69. Lijphart, A. (1971). Comparative politics and the comparative method. The American Political Science Review, LXV, 682–93. Massey, D. (2011). A counterhegemonic relationality of place. In E. McCann and K. Ward (eds), Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–14. Montero, S. and Baiocchi, G. (2022). A posteriori comparisons, repeated instances and urban policy mobilities: what ‘best practices’ leave behind. Urban Studies, 59 (8), 1536–55. Mufti, A.R. (2005). Global comparativism. Critical Inquiry, 31 (2), 472–89. Nijman, J. (2007). Introduction – comparative urbanism. Urban Geography, 28, 1–6. Oswin, N. (2020). An other geography. Dialogues in Human Geography, 10 (1), 9–18. Pickvance, C. (1986). Comparative urban analysis and assumptions about causality. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 10, 162–84. Qian, J. and Lu, Y. (2019). On the trail of comparative urbanism: square dance and public space

Comparative geographies  73 in China. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 44 (4), 692–706. Ren, J. (2020). Engaging Comparative Urbanism: Art Spaces in Beijing and Berlin. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Ren, J. (2021). Exceptionalism and theorizing spatial inequality: segregation research on cities in China. Journal of Urban Affairs, https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1080/​07352166​.2021​.1921592. Ren, J. and Luger, J. (2015). Comparative urbanism and the ‘Asian city’: implications for research and theory. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (1), 145–56. Robinson, J. (2003). Postcolonialising geography: tactics and pitfalls. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24 (3), 273–89. Robinson, J. (2011). Cities in a world of cities: the comparative gesture. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35 (1), 1–23. Robinson, J. (2016a). Thinking cities through elsewhere: comparative tactics for a more global urban studies. Progress in Human Geography, 40 (1), 3–29. Robinson, J. (2016b). Comparative urbanism: new geographies and cultures of theorizing the urban. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40 (1), 187–99. Robinson, J. (2022). Comparative Urbanism: Tactics for Global Urban Studies. Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Robinson, J., Harrison, P., Shen, J. and Wu, F. (2020). Financing urban development, three

business models: Johannesburg, Shanghai and London. Progress in Planning, 154, Article 100513. Schmid, C., Karaman, O. and Hanakata, N.C. et al. (2018). Towards a new vocabulary of urbanisation processes: a comparative approach. Urban Studies, 55 (1), 19–52. Sidaway, J.D. (2013). Geography, globalization, and the problematic of area studies. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103 (4), 984–1002. Tilly, C. (1984). Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Ward, K. (2010). Towards a relational comparative approach to the study of cities. Progress in Human Geography, 34 (4), 471–87. Wood, A. (2020). Tracing urbanism: methods of actually doing comparative studies in Johannesburg. Urban Geography, 41 (2), 293–311. Zhao, Y. (2020). Jiehebu or suburb? Towards a translational turn in urban studies. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 13 (3), 527–42.

Julie Ren

15. Crime

Professional geographers built on this tradition beginning in the 1970s. David Ley and Roman Cybriwsky (1996), for instance, examined what they called the ‘spatial ecology of stripped cars’ asking whether there are specific ecologies that might be more ‘amenable to crime’. Alice Coleman (1985) argued yes, and mapped how design elements, such as block size or number of stories in a building correlated with behaviors considered problematic, such as delinquency or vandalism. While critiqued for its insufficient focus on other features of the urban environment – such as poverty – this work was used in the UK to shape urban planning and urban regeneration programs, especially in London (Lees and Warwick, 2022; Simpson, Jensen and Rubing, 2017). In this ecological vein, crime mapping is often used to target policing interventions, such as in the case of predictive and ‘hot spots’ policing or can even form the basis for the transformation of the physical environment, such as in crime prevention through environmental design (e.g., Evans and Herbert, [1989] 2014; Fitterer, Nelson and Nathoo, 2015; Wortley and Townsley, 2016). Concern for the ecological manifestations of crime led some geographers in the 1970s to embrace humanistic understandings of crime mapping. For instance, David Ley and Roman Cybriwsky (1974) moved beyond mapping spatial elements related to crime to a humanistic interpretation of crime in the urban environment. Focused on urban graffiti, Ley and Cybriwsky (1974) argued that graffiti was an indicator of broader social processes and could even reveal spatial tensions within communities. Geographers have also shifted attention from measures of crime rates to focus on geographies created by those who commit crimes, or ‘geographies of the illicit’ (Hall, 2013). This attention to the broader manifestation of geographies of crime led to a burgeoning literature concerned with how crime maps are produced in the first place. David Herbert (1977), for instance, argued that paying attention to sociological developments in criminology was a fruitful way for geographers to understand the social geographies of crime. David Evans and David Herbert ([1989] 2014) further added these insights to one of the seminal books on the geography of crime, an edited volume that examined everything from the positivist mapping of crime, such as residen-

Geography of crime has been defined as ‘the study of the spatial manifestations of criminal acts. It is the study of the social and cultural organization of criminal behavior from a spatial perspective’ (Georges, 1978, p. 2). In its most nascent iterations, geographies of crime are most visibly demonstrated in the mapping of crime rates. Mapping crime rates, however, does not attend to the socio-political, historical, and geographically constructed way that the definition of crime is constituted. Thus, geographies of crime are also concerned with how crime maps emerge in the first instance and thus, the spatial interrogation of crime has positivist, humanist, and post-structural iterations. Positivist social scientific iterations of the geographies of crime are focused on the mapping and spatial analysis of crime rates (e.g., Goldsmith et al., 1999; LeBeau and Leitner, 2011; Ratcliffe, 2010). For instance, Keith Harries (1993, 1995) mapped the distribution of crime rates in US cities and states, showing that homicide rates dominated the Southern United States and that Western states and cities dominated property crime rates. Harries found that places without metropolitan centers tended to have lower rates of crime, while places with highly concentrated populations tended to have higher crime rates. Building on this work, mapping crime is now a ubiquitous project, often forming the basis of not just scholarly projects but also constituting entire divisions of policing and other organizations. Beyond crime mapping, geographers of crime have also centered socio-ecological understandings of crime. Crime maps often share similarities with maps of other kinds, such as maps of the distribution of poverty. The earliest work in this vein emerged from sociologists associated with the Chicago school. Theorists such as Shaw and McKay (1942) conducted mapping and ethnographic projects centered on central city neighborhoods, often with high rates of poverty, non-white and/or immigrant communities, measures of social disorganization, and crime and delinquency. These studies articulated a geography of crime that centered crime within central city, immigrant, non-white, and/or impoverished neighborhoods (Brown, 2017). 74

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tial burglary, to concern for the behavioral and environmental aspects of the geography of crime, to consideration of elements of social control, such as policing. Concern for the ecology of crime has also been studied in places outside the US and the UK, such as in Brazil, where Nogueira de Melo, Andresen and Fonseca Matias (2017) studied whether social disorganization theory applied to geographies of crime in Campinas, Brazil. Finding some support for social disorganization theory, but not as strong as studies done in the US and the UK, they conclude that in fact the local social ecology of crime is of utmost importance to the study of crime’s geographies. Likewise, Oteng-Ababio et al. (2017) examine urban Ghana to understand how the characteristics of urban neighborhoods impact crime rates, with particular attention to the role of collective efficacy. Oteng-Ababio and colleagues (2017, p. 459) found that though crime can be mapped, its spatial distribution is neither ‘uniformly nor randomly organized’ and that higher levels of collective efficacy led to lower levels of violent crime. Increasingly, geographers are looking to the Global South to understand how state policies – such as community policing – are shifted and transformed as they are exported from places like the United States to neighborhoods in Kingston, Jamaica (Méndez Beck and Jaffe, 2019). Crime, at its essence, however, is a socially constructed concept, and thus, many geographers of crime have in recent years turned to more post-structuralist accounts of crime geographies that often focus on both what we define as crime and how crime is enforced. In this vein, John Lowman (1986) argued that the focus on mapping crime presented an important conceptual issue, as crime maps often failed to account for how crime control – such as policing and punishment – impacts the geographies of crime, and instead ‘abstracts crime from its sociolegal context’ (1986, p. 81). This is particularly important in the case of the geographical concept of jurisdiction. Chandra Lekha Sriram and Amy Ross (2007) show in an African context that the socio-political construction of crime leads to ‘zones of impunity’, where people are exempted from prosecution because of geographical borders. Geographers have also shown that in fact enforcement, such as immigration enforcement, can act as

a force of criminalization, and that ‘exposure to nonstate violence in Mexico has slowly become a more integral part of enforcement plans’ (Slack and Martínez, 2021, p. 1062). Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) writes: ‘While common sense suggests a natural connection between “crime” and “prison,” what counts as crime in fact changes, and what happens to people convicted of crimes does not, in all times and places, result in prison sentences’ (p. 13). Post-structuralist-oriented geographies of crime foreground the social construction of crime and its enforcement. Brian Jordan Jefferson (2017, 2018) demonstrates this in the case of crime mapping by showing how predictive policing is, in reality, ‘predictable policing’. Far from being an apolitical interpretation of the world, predictive crime mapping instead ‘works to further entrench and legitimize the geographic knowledge and practice of racialized policing’ (Jefferson, 2018, p. 2). Police make decisions about where to locate their resources, such as surveillance and arrests. These arrests are then directly translated into crime rates. The geographical basis of police activity is then reproduced into maps that ‘reciprocally legitimize those data sets through their ostensibly scientific presentation’ (ibid.). Crime, then, is not an objectively scientific category, but one that is produced through a range of geographical effects. Perceptions of crime, for instance, are not predicated on witnessing actual behavior that might constitute crime and instead they interpret spatial cues – such as racial segregation in housing, the distribution of police activity, and/or the presence of ‘disorder’ (Sampson, 2012). Smith and Patterson (1980) detail how people create images of crime as they move through space, cognitively mapping places of safety and insecurity. Rachel Pain (1997) has drawn attention to the ways that ‘women’s experience of social class, age, disability and motherhood can determine their experience of, and reactions to fear of, violent crime’ (p. 231). Crime maps in this context then highlight ‘constraints on the use of urban space, the distinction between public and private space in perceptions of danger, the social construction of space into “safe” and “dangerous” place, and the social control of women’s spaces’ (ibid.). Fear of crime is not limited to urban communities, and women Elizabeth Brown

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in rural places, such as in Aotearoa/New Zealand, must often negotiate complex geographies of fear and safety even in seemingly idyllic places (Panelli, Little and Kraack, 2004). Racism and economic marginalization further exacerbate geographies of fear, when men are often taken to be ‘fearless’ in public space, but in fact experience a ‘chronic fear of violent crime victimization’ that is predicated on the geographies of race and racism that shape many men’s lives (Brownlow, 2005, p. 581). Cognitive maps of insecurity can also lead to their own geographies of crime, especially when nostalgia intertwines with racist ideas and thus leads to racist violence perpetuated in the name of reclaiming space (Webster, 2003). Considered more expansively than crime mapping, then, geographies of crime are concerned with the various ways that differentiations in crime are produced through a range of factors, including police activity, residential segregation, definitions of crime, historical state policies, colonialism, slavery, and the continuation of white supremacy (e.g., Brown and Barganier, 2018; Holloway and McNulty, 2003; Shabazz, 2015; Squires and Kubrin, 2005; Theodore, Martin and Hollon, 2006). Squires and Kubrin (2005), for instance, attend to how geographies of crime are produced by ‘privileged places’ that are undue recipients of metropolitan development, infrastructure investment, and other publicly funded benefits. Further, geographies of crime are also used to mark and identify racialized others, such as Renisa Mawani’s (2010) work that examines how discourses of crime and immorality in early twentieth-century British Columbia served to mark ambiguous and mixed-race people as outsiders. In Barbados, the local geographies of crime and punishment in the late 1800s and early 1900s resulted in an unusual occurrence – the gendered criminalization that resulted in women making up the majority of those imprisoned for almost all years studied (Green, 2012). Further, Ndungu Kungu and Njiru Gichobi (2021) show that in colonial Kenya, colonial rule was not only maintained through brute political power, but also through legal codes, penal practices and the discursive production of prostitution.

Elizabeth Brown

Shereen Fernandez (2018) similarly shows how today counter-extremism tactics in the UK are used to criminalize the Muslim home as a ‘pre-crime space’, thus legitimating and extending surveillance over the lives of marginalized communities, even prior to any actual criminal behavior. Geographers also understand the role of different spatial formations in the creation of crime geographies, especially as they relate to urban, suburban and rural manifestations (e.g., Pain, 2000; Petruželka and Barták, 2020; York Cornwell and Hall, 2017). Importantly, criminologists and geographers alike have sought to understand the role of urban neighborhoods in the manifestation of crime, often pointing to the roles of racial residential segregation, hyperpolicing of urban neighborhoods, and long-held assumptions about neighborhood organization, or ‘collective efficacy’, and its impact on the geographical distribution of crime rates (Cahill and Mulligan, 2003; Sampson, 2012; Shabazz, 2015). Brown (2007) shows how the definition of ‘urban living itself’ is often the basis for policies of criminalization that define one as criminal even in the absence of extensive criminal history or serious crime. Geographers are then concerned not just with mapping crime, but also with the practices that lead to these geographies. With this burgeoning attention, it is likely that in the next few decades, a new era in geographies of crime will be birthed, which moves away from the mapping of police activity and towards a deeper understanding of how geographies of crime are themselves produced by broader geographies of colonial conquest, knowledge production, and racial capitalism. Elizabeth Brown

References and selected further reading Brown, E. (2007). ‘It’s urban living, not ethnicity itself’: race, crime and the urban geography of high‐risk youth. Geography Compass, 1 (2), 222–45. Brown, E. (2017). ‘A community gets the delinquents it deserves’: crime mapping, race and the

Crime  77 juvenile court. British Journal of Criminology, 57 (5), 1249–69. Brown, E. and Barganier, G. (2018). Race and Crime: Geographies of Injustice. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Brownlow, A. (2005). A geography of men’s fear. Geoforum, 36 (5), 581–92. Cahill, M.E. and Mulligan, G.F. (2003). The determinants of crime in Tucson, Arizona. Urban Geography, 24 (7), 582–610. Coleman, A. (1985). Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing. London: Hilary Shipman. Evans, D. and Herbert, D. ([1989] 2014). The Geography of Crime (RLE Social & Cultural Geography). New York: Routledge. Fernandez, S. (2018). The geographies of prevent: the transformation of the Muslim home into a pre-crime space. Journal of Muslims in Europe, 7 (2), 167–89. Fitterer, J., Nelson, T.A. and Nathoo, F. (2015). Predictive crime mapping. Police Practice and Research, 16 (2), 121–35. Georges, D.E. (1978). The Geography of Crime and Violence. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers. Gilmore, R.W. (2007). Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Goldsmith, V., McGuire, P.G., Mollenkopf, J.B. and Ross, T.A. (eds) (1999). Analyzing Crime Patterns: Frontiers of Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Green, C.A. (2012). Local geographies of crime and punishment in a plantation colony: gender and incarceration in Barbados, 1878–1928. New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 86 (3–4), 263–90. Hall, T. (2013). Geographies of the illicit: globalization and organized crime. Progress in Human Geography, 37 (3), 366–85. Harries, K. (1993). Geography, homicide and execution: the United States Experience, 1930–1987. Geoforum, 24 (2), 205–13. Harries, K. (1995). Mapping Crime: Principle and Practice. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice. Herbert, D. (1977). Crime, delinquency and the urban environment. Progress in Human Geography, 1 (2), 208–39. Holloway, S.R. and McNulty, T.L. (2003). Contingent urban geographies of violent crime: racial segregation and the impact of public housing in Atlanta. Urban Geography, 24 (3), 187–211. Jefferson, B.J. (2017). Digitize and punish: computerized crime mapping and racialized carceral

power in Chicago. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35 (5), 775–96. Jefferson, B.J. (2018). Predictable policing: predictive crime mapping and geographies of policing and race. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108 (1), 1–16. LeBeau, J.L. and Leitner, M. (2011). Introduction: progress in research on the geography of crime. The Professional Geographer, 63 (2), 161–73. Lees, L. and Warwick, E. (2022). Defensible Space: Mobilisation in English Housing Policy and Practice. Chichester: RGS-IBG and Wiley. Ley, D. and Cybriwsky, R. (1974). Urban graffiti as territorial markers. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 64 (4), 491–505. Ley, D. and Cybriwsky, R. (1996). The spatial ecology of stripped cars. In A.P. Goldstein (ed.), The Psychology of Vandalism (pp. 235–44). Boston, MA: Springer. Lowman, J. (1986). Conceptual issues in the geography of crime: toward a geography of social control. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 76 (1), 81–94. Mawani, R. (2010). ‘Half-breeds,’ racial opacity, and geographies of crime: law’s search for the ‘original’ Indian. Cultural Geographies, 17 (4), 487–506. Méndez Beck, M. and Jaffe, R. (2019). Community policing goes south: policy mobilities and new geographies of criminological theory. The British Journal of Criminology, 59 (4), 823–41. Ndungu Kungu, J. and Njiru Gichobi, T. (2021). Nationalism, pimping law and local geographies of crime and punishment in colonial Kenya, 1895–1963. Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 26 (1), 21–30. Nogueira de Melo, S., Andresen, M.A. and Fonseca Matias, L. (2017). Geography of crime in a Brazilian context: an application of social disorganization theory. Urban Geography, 38 (10), 1550–72. Oteng-Ababio, M., Owusu, A.Y., Owusu, G. and Wrigley-Asante, C. (2017). Geographies of crime and collective efficacy in urban Ghana. Territory, Politics, Governance, 5 (4), 459–77. Pain, R. (1997). Social geographies of women’s fear of crime. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 22 (2), 231–44. Pain, R. (2000). Place, social relations and the fear of crime: a review. Progress in Human Geography, 24 (3), 365–87. Panelli, R., Little, J. and Kraack, A. (2004). A community issue? Rural women’s feelings of safety and fear in New Zealand. Gender, Place & Culture, 11 (3), 445–67. Petruželka, B. and Barták, M. (2020). Primary drug-related crime in the Czech Republic from a geographical perspective: study of urban,

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78  Concise encyclopedia of human geography suburban and rural differences. GeoScape, 14 (2), 134–42. Ratcliffe, J. (2010). Crime mapping: spatial and temporal challenges. In A.R. Piqueri and D. Weisburd (eds), Handbook of Quantitative Criminology (pp. 5–24). New York: Springer. Sampson, R.J. (2012). Great American City. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shabazz, R. (2015). Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Shaw, C.R. and McKay, H.D. (1942). Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Simpson, D., Jensen, V. and Rubing, A. (eds) (2017). The City Between Freedom and Security: Contested Public Spaces in the 21st Century. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Slack, J. and Martínez, D.E. (2021). Postremoval geographies: immigration enforcement and organized crime on the U.S.–Mexico Border. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111 (4), 1062–78. Smith, C.J. and Patterson, G.E. (1980). Cognitive mapping and the subjective geography of crime. In D.E. Georges-Abeyie and K.D. Harries (eds),

Elizabeth Brown

Crime: A Spatial Perspective (pp. 205–18). New York: Columbia University Press. Squires, G.D. and Kubrin, C.E. (2005). Privileged places: race, uneven development and the geography of opportunity in urban America. Urban Studies, 42 (1), 47–68. Sriram, C.L. and Ross, A. (2007). Geographies of crime and justice: contemporary transitional justice and the creation of ‘zones of impunity’. International Journal of Transitional Violence, 1 (1), 45–65. Theodore, N., Martin, N. and Hollon, R. (2006). Securing the city: emerging markets in the private provision of security services in Chicago. Social Justice, 33 (105), 85–100. Webster, C. (2003). Race, space and fear: imagined geographies of racism, crime, violence and disorder in Northern England. Capital & Class, 27 (2), 95–122. Wortley, R. and Townsley, M. (eds) (2016). Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis. London: Routledge. York Cornwell, E. and Hall, M. (2017). Neighborhood problems across the rural–urban continuum: geographic trends and racial and ethnic disparities. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 672 (1), 238–56.

16. Critical geographies

them to maintain coalitions at the larger scale, while recognizing that there will be significant disagreements regarding the specifics of any local level. Critical geography arose in places like the UK, USA, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada in the 1990s as a term that could allow a broad coalition of progressive approaches in human geography to come together in a coalition to try to transform both the discipline of geography and the world that its practitioners worked in and on (Berg, 2010; Berg et al., 2022). While those who started to use the term ‘critical’ in trying to build a new coalition of progressive geographers (partly out of the older tradition of radical geography) might not have been thinking explicitly that it could operate as a boundary object, the fact that it is a boundary object is important to its success as a term that progressive geographers drawing on a range of epistemic and theoretical approaches could adopt. Critical geography also developed at various times in a wide range of places around the world, sometimes with strong links to anglophone geography, but also with singular and independent developments (Berg et al., 2022). Nordic geographers had, for example, held an annual Symposium of Nordic Critical Geography since 1979, 18 years prior to the first International Conference of Critical Geography held in 1997 in Vancouver, Canada (Lehtinen and Simonsen, 2022, p. 223). Critical geographers followed in the footsteps of radical geographers and the New Left of the late 1960s (Peet, 1969) – at least in Anglo-American contexts – thus they shared a commitment to emancipatory politics, progressive social change, and a broad range of critical social theories. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, significant tensions developed between Marxist geographers on the one hand and feminist, post-structuralist (often mistakenly labelled post-modernist in the 1980s), and cultural geographers, on the other hand. At the risk of oversimplifying things, it might be safe to say that the tension played out between ‘materialists’ and those they often termed in an overly broad characterization of such folks as ‘idealists’ (who, according to materialists, ignored the material conditions that dictated the important aspects of the geographies we study; see Harvey, 1989; also see the discussion in Berg, 1993; Lees, 1994; Pile and Rose,

The term ‘critical’ has a complex and complicated history in human geography. Currently, it is a term used in conjunction with geography (i.e., ‘critical geography’) to denote a way of practising human geography that draws on a range of progressive social theories (including, but not limited to anarchism, feminism(s), Marxism, post-structuralism, political economy, political ecology, etc.) to both understand and change the unequal and inequitable world we live in. Like many other conceptual terms in the discipline (concepts like ‘sustainability’ and ‘diversity’, for example), ‘critical’ operates as a boundary object in human geography. As such, ‘critical’ can thus be seen to inhabit a range of intersecting social geographies, but at the same time it manages to satisfy the specific informational requirements found in each local space that it inhabits (Star and Griesemer, 1989): Boundary objects are objects that are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual site use. (Star and Griesemer, 1989, p. 393)

In human geography, the concept of critical operates as a boundary object in two registers. In the first register, critical is used by two often opposing camps. Geographers that consider themselves to be critical geographers are drawing on critical theory of various sorts when they speak of what it means to be critical. Their concept of critical thinking would accord somewhat with the Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘critical theory’ as: ‘a dialectical critique of society (esp. of the theoretical bases of its organization)’. Those that do not think of themselves as critical geographers tend to draw on the more general concept of ‘critical thinking’ when they discuss what critical means to them. In the second register, critical operates as a boundary object within and between critical geographers as a means of dealing with the tensions and disagreements that critical geographers of various theoretical stripes have with each other. It allows 79

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1992). The debate between materialists and idealists became quite heated over time, but it should be noted that the debate was limited to a select portion of geographers, mainly concentrated in Canada, the UK and USA. Many geographers in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, for example, avoided this debate by developing an ‘anti-essentialist Marxism’ (see Gibson-Graham, 1996), the beginnings of what would eventually come to be known as ‘Antipodean post-structuralist political economy’ (see, e.g., Larner, 1997; Le Heron, 2007). In spite of these progressive moves outside the metropoles of human geographic knowledge production, it is probably fair to say that for many folks interested in issues cohering around ‘identity politics’, the name ‘radical geography’ became a somewhat problematic term. Many progressive yet non-Marxist geographers started to seek out a different terminology to refer to themselves and their work (some of these tensions played out regularly at annual meetings of the Socialist and Critical Geography specialty group of the American Association of Geographers in the late 1990s and early 2000s). Perhaps more importantly, at the same time, there were bigger problems with the institutional structures of national geographical societies in various places. These institutions were seen by many progressives as problematic because of their implicit support for the status quo in a deeply unequal and inequitable world. These problems came to a head in the UK, for example, when the Institute of British Geographers (IBG) was subsumed into the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) to become the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) (RGS-IBG). As it turned out, the RGS-IBG was sponsored by the multinational Royal Dutch Shell: Many geographers had concerns about the RGS-IBG being sponsored by multinational capital, with its attendant exploitation of workers (through the appropriation of the surplus value of labor); they were also concerned with issues of Indigenous peoples’ rights, environmental justice, and environmental racism, and they were concerned with the neocolonial relationship that the RGS-IBG was implicated in because of its acceptance of money from Shell. (Berg, 2010, n.p.)

Lawrence Berg

Indeed, Shell was implicated in the deaths of numerous Ogoni activists, members of Indigenous communities in the Niger Delta where Shell was extracting petroleum with a significant negative impact on the environment and local Indigenous inhabitants (Gilbert, 1999). After various failed attempts to convince the RGS-IBG to end its relationship with Shell, a group of British geographers began to explore the potential for creating an alternative organization of human geographers to represent the interests of left-progressive geographers. Eventually, this led to an online forum called the Critical Geography Forum, which in turn led to the inaugural International Conference of Critical Geographers (ICCG) in 1997 in Vancouver, Canada (Berg, 2010). There have now been seven more ICCG conferences (Daegu, Korea – 2000; Békéscsaba, Hungary – 2002; Mexico City, Mexico – 2005; Mumbai, India – 2007; Frankfurt, Germany – 2011; Ramallah, Palestine – 2015; and Athens, Greece, 2019). As I have argued elsewhere (Berg, 2010), critical geography is now hegemonic throughout much of the discipline. Though there will still be large numbers of human geographers around the globe who do not see themselves as critical geographers, much of the publishing space available to human geographers is dominated by work that is overtly ‘critical’. So what is critical geography now? To give some sense of the answer to this question, I quote from the description for ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, the history of which is intimately connected to events recounted above. For ACME, critical geography is: critical work about space and place in the social sciences – including anarchist, anti-racist, autonomist, decolonial, environmentalist, feminist, Marxist, non-representational, postcolonial, poststructuralist, queer, situationist, and socialist perspectives. Analyses that are critical are understood to be part of the praxis of social and political change aimed at challenging, dismantling, and transforming prevalent relations, systems, and structures of colonialism, exploitation, oppression, imperialism, national aggression, environmental destruction, and neoliberalism. (ACME, 2021; emphasis added)

Of course, whenever you create a list, there is always a danger of unwitting exclusions.

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With that in mind, one could easily add black geographies (see Bledsoe and Wright, 2019; McKittrick, 2006) and Indigenous geographies (Hunt, 2014) to the list above, as these are both important (and relatively new) additions to what one might think of as being part of critical geography. Perhaps more importantly, in looking to the future, the key question to be asked is: what is to be done when ‘critical’ becomes the hegemonic approach in geography – as presently is surely the case? It should be standard practice for anyone who claims to be critical to deeply question any hegemonic approach in the discipline, especially if it is one’s own approach. Clearly this is absolutely necessary when thinking critically about the relationship between the way folks think about the world as critical geographers and the way that they act in that world as scholars and people. Most academic geographers now work in deeply neoliberalized institutions, ones that want to produce academics as atomized human capitals in a deeply competitive workplace (Berg, Huijbens and Larsen, 2016). Academic geography also has a long history of white supremacy and anti-black racism (Peake and Kobayashi, 2002; Gilmore, 2002), patriarchy (Massey, 1991), heterosexism (Binnie, 1997), ableism (Chouinard and Grant, 1995) and colonialism (De Leeuw and Hunt, 2018; Holmes, Hunt and Piedalue, 2015). While critical geography involves attempts to contest the injustices that arise within neoliberal capitalist, white supremacist, colonial, ableist, hetero-patriarchy (adapted from hooks, 1989), a reinvigorated critical geography must come to grips with the way many critical geographers are privileged by the very processes they seek to contest. Moreover, a geography that calls itself critical needs to turn in on itself, and be critical of the longstanding and taken-for-granted practices of geographers that continue to marginalize folks in the discipline. These practices have become structural, and to be truly critical, critical geographers need to find structural and spatial responses. Perhaps a start to this search for a spatially aware response to marginalization was hinted at more than a decade ago by Nicholas Blomley (2008), who, when commenting on the importance of knowing the actual spaces where critical geographies are enacted, noted that significant numbers of critical geog-

raphers are a bit confused about this. He suggested that in spite of claims by critical geographers of the need for combining theory and practice (as praxis), ‘critical geography has largely been confined to traditional forms of scholarship and publication’ (p. 285). Blomley suggested that critical geographers confused the academy with the world they want to change, and in so doing they confuse their own subject position in the social relations of knowledge production. I argue that in many instances, this state of confusion still obtains in critical geography. This problematic understanding of the subject position for ‘the critical geographer’ to date can be explained, in part, because of the liberal and neoliberal systems of risk and reward in the academy that help to mould the work that critical geographers do. As Jessica Dempsey and Geraldine Pratt (2019, p. 274) argue: the current conjuncture in academia ‘takes place on the material terrain of “late liberalism”, which keeps relations of accumulation in place through the production and governance of difference and markets, across human and non-human forces of existence’. This puts great pressure on geographers to be ‘productive’, which in the neoliberal academy is understood as producing publications and obtaining funding (see Berg et al., 2016; Castree, 2006). Neoliberalization of universities and the transformation of academics into human capitals (Berg et al., 2016; Brown, 2015) via neoliberal logics and audit systems leads to many problems, not least of which is (re)producing a hegemonic single subject position for the practitioners of the discipline: white, male, cisgender, abled, hetero and middle class. The pressure to be ‘productive’ under such audit systems also leads to a tendency to produce theoretical work, often (though not always) at the expense of working in and with communities that are being theorized. This can lead to a number of key contradictions in critical geography and I outline four critical works by women of colour to suggest how these problems might work in critical geography. As Audrey Thompson (2003) theorizes, one key problem arises when white anti-racists appropriate the theoretical work of people of colour and Indigenous peoples to produce a wonderfully flexible positional superiority even as they work to contest (obvious) forms of racism. Robyn Wiegman (2002) analyses Lawrence Berg

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white, liberal disaffiliation to document the way that liberal white folk attempt to disaffiliate themselves from the more obvious forms of racism all the while continuing to benefit from the structural social relations of white supremacy. Sarita Srivastava (2005) studied white feminists and pro-feminists to document their over-investment in a politics of the ‘anti-racist Self’ (that fails to actually contest racism). Finally, Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack (1998) have theorized the subject positions in feminism that produce in white feminists a feeling of ‘innocence’ and a consequent failure to interrogate their complicity in other people’s lives, thereby allowing them to continue participating in the practices that oppress other men and women. The pressures of a neoliberalized academy cannot be avoided by critical geographers. This puts pressure on critical geography in myriad ways, with complex outcomes. Nevertheless, it is not beyond the realms of possibility to extend the works of the women of colour cited above to think about the ways that a neoliberalized critical geography and always already deeply liberal critical geographers can appropriate particular kinds of critical theory in order to disaffiliate from the social relations of marginalization that operate within the academy more generally and critical geography specifically. At the same time, such academic practices lead to almost no changes in dominant social relations either in the academy or beyond it. They are able to (and must) do so because a deeply neoliberalized academy operates through a variety of numerical metrics (citation counts, grant income, h-index, impact factors, i10-index, key performance indicators, publication counts, SciVal ranking, etc.) that measure almost nothing worth measuring. Academic critical geography becomes a sausage factory (Smith, 2000). This is not the future of critical geography that I want. Instead, I want a critical geography that is deeply connected to the communities it serves, that represents the people that live in our shared social worlds – rather than the geographies of a dominant minority. This is not a call for a simple identity politics of knowledge production, but it does open up opportunities for the socio-spatial production of new kinds of subject positions in critical geography. At the very least, it calls for deep connections to the places and objects that Lawrence Berg

critical geographers study. It is also a call for development of what Gayatri Spivak (1996) called ‘responsibility structures’ in the making of more responsible critical geographies (McClean, Berg and Roche, 1997). Lawrence Berg

References and selected further reading ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies. 2021. ‘About the journal: focus and scope’. Accessed 2 December 2021 at https://​www​.acme​-journal​.org/​index​.php/​acme/​ about. Berg, L.D. 1993. ‘Between modernism and postmodernism’. Progress in Human Geography, 17 (4), 490–507. Berg, L.D. 2010. ‘Critical human geography’. In B. Wharf (ed.), Encyclopedia of Geography [online]. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Accessed 23 October 2022 at https://​www​.academia​.edu/​ 2044691/​Critical​_Human​_Geography. Berg, L.D., Best, U., Gilmartin, M. and Larsen, H.G. (eds). 2022. Placing Critical Geographies: Historical Geographies of Critical Geography. London: Routledge. Berg, L.D., Huijbens, E.H. and Larsen, H.G. 2016. ‘Producing anxiety in the neoliberal university’. The Canadian Geographer, 60 (2), 168–80. Binnie, J. 1997. ‘Coming out of geography: towards a queer epistemology?’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 15 (2), 223–37. Bledsoe, A. and Wright, W.J. 2019. ‘The pluralities of black geographies’. Antipode, 51 (2), 419–37. Blomley, N. 2008. ‘The spaces of critical geography’. Progress in Human Geography, 32 (2), 285–93. Brown, W. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castree, N. 2006. ‘Research assessment and the production of geographical knowledge’. Progress in Human Geography 30 (6), 747–82. Chouinard, V. and Grant, A. 1995. ‘On being not even anywhere near “the project”: ways of putting ourselves in the picture’. Antipode, 27 (2), 137–66. De Leeuw, S. and Hunt, S. 2018. ‘Unsettling decolonizing geographies’. Geography Compass, 12 (7), Article e12376. Dempsey, J. and Pratt, G. 2019. ‘Wiggle room’. In Antipode Editorial Collective, T. Jazeel and A. Kent et al. (eds), Keywords in Radical

Critical geographies  83 Geography: Antipode at 50. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 274–9. Fellows, M.L. and Razack, S. 1998. ‘The race to innocence: confronting hierarchical relations among women’. The Journal of Gender, Race and Justice, 1, 335–53. Gibson-Graham, J.K. 1996. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Oxford: Blackwell. Gilbert, D. 1999. ‘Sponsorship, academic independence and critical engagement: a forum on Shell, the Ogoni dispute and the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)’. Philosophy & Geography, 2 (2), 219–28. Gilmore, R.W. 2002. ‘Fatal couplings of power and difference: notes on racism and geography’. The Professional Geographer, 54 (1), 15–24. Harvey, D. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Holmes, C., Hunt, S. and Piedalue, A. 2015. ‘Violence, colonialism and space: towards a decolonizing dialogue’. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14 (2), 539–70. hooks, b. 1989. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston, MA: South End Press. Hunt, S. 2014. ‘Ontologies of indigeneity: the politics of embodying a concept’. Cultural Geographies, 21 (1), 27–32. Larner, W. 1997. ‘The “New Zealand Experiment”: towards a post-structuralist political economy’. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Carleton University, Ottawa. Lees, L. 1994. ‘Rethinking gentrification: beyond the positions of economics or culture’. Progress in Human Geography, 18 (2), 137–50. Le Heron, R. 2007. ‘Globalisation, governance and post‐structural political economy: perspectives from Australasia’. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 48 (1), 26–40. Lehtinen, A. and K. Simonsen. 2022. ‘Moment of renewal: critical conversions of Nordic samhällsgeografi’. In L.D. Berg, U. Best, M. Gilmartin and H.G. Larsen (eds), Placing Critical Geographies: Historical Geographies

of Critical Geography. London: Routledge, pp. 223–45. Massey, D. 1991. ‘Flexible sexism’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 9 (1), 31–57. McClean, R., Berg, L.D. and Roche, M.M. 1997. ‘Responsible geographies: co-creating knowledge in Aotearoa’. New Zealand Geographer, 53 (2), 9–15. McKittrick, K. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Peake, L. and Kobayashi, A. 2002. ‘Policies and practices for an antiracist geography at the millennium’. The Professional Geographer, 54 (1), 50–61. Peet, R. 1969. ‘A new left geography’. Antipode, 1 (1), 3–5. Pile, S. and Rose, G. 1992. ‘All or nothing? Politics and critique in the modernism-postmodernism debate’. Environment & Planning D: Society and Space, 10, 123–36. Smith, N. 2000. ‘Afterword: who rules this sausage factory?’. Antipode, 32(3), 330–39. Spivak, G.C. 1996. ‘Subaltern talk’. In D. Landry and G. Maclean (eds), The Spivak Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 287–308. Srivastava, S. 2005. ‘“You’re calling me a racist?” The moral and emotional regulation of antiracism and feminism’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 31 (1), 29–62. Star, S.L. and Griesemer, J. 1989. ‘Institutional ecology, “translations” and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39’. Social Studies of Science, 19, 387–420. Thompson, A. 2003. ‘Tiffany, friend of people of color: white investments in antiracism’. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16 (1), 7–29. Wiegman, R. 2002. ‘Whiteness studies and the paradox of particularity’. In D.E. Pease and R. Wiegman (eds), The Futures of American Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 269–304.

Lawrence Berg

17. Cultural geographies

the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result’. At the core of this approach was a ‘superorganic’ concept of the cultural domain, in which culture was conceived as a static ‘whole’ that transcended nature as well as the actions of specific individuals, and which followed its own mysterious causal laws. However, by the 1980s, a new generation of geographers, inspired by the emergence of post-Marxist, feminist, post-modernist and post-structuralist theories across the social sciences and humanities, as well as increased social unrest in cities around the world, began to write a very different cultural geography. This ‘new cultural geography’ perceived culture not as a static thing or entity, but rather as a discursive and symbolic process bound up in the construction of political identities. Much of this work centred on understanding cultural representations (landscape art, novels, films, popular advertising) as all forms of ‘text’ that can be read for how they expressed and reproduced unequal power relations, especially along lines of class, gender and race. It was not long before this new style of cultural geography garnered its critics. Some geographers were anxious that cultural geography’s increasing emphasis on the symbolic meant a turning away from more directly political and material concerns (Jackson, 2000). Others, like Nigel Thrift (2008), were concerned by what they saw as a particular interpretation of post-structuralist ideas that emphasized discourse and representation over questions of experience, practice and embodiment. In the last two decades, we thus see the rise of non-representational theory as an influential approach in contemporary cultural geography, one that sought to understand the performative and affective force of representations to make and remake worlds (Simpson, 2020). The problem with linear and paradigmatic stories of progress like this is the false impression they give of cultural geography as a homogeneous intellectual terrain (i.e., everyone used to be ‘new cultural geographers’ and now everyone is ‘non-representational’). Cultural geography has never been defined by uniformity in its philosophical, methodological or political approach. In fact, cultural geography is arguably one of the most eclectic of geography’s subdisciplines, given its long-held ambition to bridge the approaches of the humanities, the

Traditionally, and in its broadest sense, ‘cultural’ refers to the values, beliefs and practices that comprise the ‘particular whole ways of life’ shared by social groups (Williams, 1961, p. 57). Since the discipline’s ‘cultural turn’ in the late 1980s, cultural themes and approaches have become foundational across human geography. An interest in culture and its geographies can thus be seen in a wide range of subdisciplinary areas – including economic, political, urban and social geography – reflecting an increased recognition of the centrality of culture both to the neoliberal capitalist economy as well as contemporary forms of political struggle. However, and unsurprisingly, it is in the subdiscipline of cultural geography that we witness some of the most vibrant debate around what defines the constitutive fabric of the cultural, especially in the last few decades (Anderson, 2020). The cultural has been variously theorized by cultural geographers as, for example, a discursive system of signifying codes and symbols; as a question of dominance or resistance in relation to forms of identity; as the materialities and meanings embedded in objects and artefacts; as a set of embodied practices and habits of ‘dwelling’ in place; as an affective encounter; and as a heterogeneous assemblage of human and non-human forces and agencies. This diverse list is obviously far from exhaustive and reflects the fact that the question of how to define the cultural remains a live and open one (Wylie, 2010). Accounts of the history of the subdiscipline of cultural geography often tend to follow a linear narrative of progress through a series of distinct ‘periods’ and ‘turns’, each seen to encompass a radically different sense and understanding of the cultural to its predecessor. Most trace the origins of the subdiscipline to the 1920s, and what would come to be known as the ‘Berkeley school’ of cultural geography led by the pioneering of the American geographer, Carl Sauer. Sauer and his colleagues would inspire nearly half a century of geographical scholarship on the ‘cultural landscape’, a concept Sauer devised to denote the morphological shaping of ‘natural landscapes’ by the activity of specific cultural groups. Sauer (1996, pp. 309–10) famously summarized his approach as follows: ‘Culture is the agent, 84

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social sciences, and the arts. This eclecticism is what attracts many students and new researchers to cultural geography, along with its reputation, forged especially in the last few decades, for cutting-edge conceptual thinking and methodological experimentalism. Indeed, cultural geography has often been the landing site for a whole range of innovative theories and methodologies from outside the discipline before they percolate to other areas of human geography (the concept of ‘affect’ being a notable recent example here – see below). Another problem with the epochal narrative is that it emphasizes change and novelty and elides much of what remains the same. The development of cultural geography, as John Wylie (2010, p. 215) notes, is thus better grasped in terms of an ‘evolution rather than a revolution’, where we see the endurance of certain themes alongside the emergence of an array of new concerns and concepts. In the remainder of this entry, I want to offer an account of five key problematics setting the agenda for cultural geographic debate today. Some of these address the exciting transformations taking place in relation to well-established concepts (e.g., nature, representation), while others speak to novel concepts and approaches (affect, post-humanism) or renewed engagement with themes traditionally believed to fall outside cultural geography’s remit (technology). The first theme is nature. In contemporary human geography there is increased awareness that the contemporary ecological crisis is also an ontological crisis, one that reveals the stark inadequacies of the dualistic frames that have long structured Western thought, most notably that which separates (human) culture from (non-human) nature. We famously witness this binary thinking in Sauer’s cultural geography, which perceives nature as a passive and inert medium awaiting the imprint of human activity. In the last two decades, cultural geographers have drawn on a range of philosophical approaches to dismantle the ontological ‘Iron Curtain’ established between nature and culture, and to incite new ways of thinking and ethically relating to the non-human world. We can point, for example, to work since the early 2000s developing ‘hybrid’ or ‘more-than-human’ geographies that decentre the agential monopoly of the subject in its material environments, and instead fore-

ground the co-constitutive entanglement of human and non-human ‘actors’ (Whatmore, 2002). More recently, cultural geographers have turned to various ‘new materialisms’ to produce innovative theorizations of the active role played by non-human and technological agencies in the ongoing production of the social. J.-D. Dewsbury (2015), for example, turns to philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s affirmative and materialist sense of habit as a key concept for our times in helping us overturn the moral-laden paradigm of the sovereign human subject. He notes how habit, rather than being an internal dynamic of mechanistic repetition, is instead a material force where the key term becomes the organic eccentricity of non-human nature pulsing in and around us. The implication is that habits are therefore never strictly ours but are instead the more distributed and emergent products of our incessant relations with the material spaces that occupy us. Dewsbury highlights how habit therefore also gives rise to a radically different apprehension of the concept of landscape in cultural geography: landscape, here, no longer as a passive backdrop to activity, but rather a performative agent in the ongoing constitution of the human, cueing experience and altering how we think and act in various ways. This smoothly segues into the second theme: affect. Affect first emerged in the early 2000s as a key concern of non-representational styles of cultural geography, which called for greater attention to the multitude of events, forces and relations that constitute life, yet which often fall below the threshold of conscious perception. Thrift’s (2008) early use of affect drew heavily on experimental neuroscience research into non-cognitive modes of thought and embodiment, with affect coming to describe the ‘roiling mass of nerve volleys [which] prepare the body for action in such a way that intentions or decisions are made before the conscious self is even aware of them’ (p. 7). There are several competing approaches to affect in the social science literature (see Thrift, 2008, pp. 192–6 for a summary). But the dominant approach within cultural geography has been the Deleuzeo–Spinozan understanding of affect as an intensive transformation in a body’s capacity to act and be acted upon generated by its relational encounters with other (human or non-human) bodies. One Andrew Lapworth

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of the distinct features of this approach is its tendency to distinguish ‘affect’ (understood as radically preindividual and transindividual intensities that exceed the individuated human subject) from ‘emotion’ (understood as the socio-linguistic qualification of these intensities according to significations and meanings that are already known). This distinction has been the source of considerable debate, with some critics arguing that the emphasis on affect produces a distanced cultural geography that is insensitive to the personal identities and intersubjective relations that ground everyday emotional landscapes. In response, Derek McCormack (2013) contends that theories of affect do not denigrate the importance of emotional geographies, but instead address different registers of thought and experience, foregrounding logics of individuation and becoming over identity and stasis. The promise of affect for contemporary geography, he argues, is how it expands the envelope of ethics and politics beyond the human-centred frames of emotion, enabling us to cultivate new sensibilities in our thinking to a diverse range of bodies and agencies that constitute our more-than-human environments. The third theme is technology. Traditionally, the attitude to technology in the humanities and social sciences has reflected the long-standing philosophical bias that distinguishes the ‘cultural’ as a ‘kingdom of ends’ (and thus a domain of sense, values and meaning) from the ‘technical’ as a mere ‘kingdom of means’ (one that is utilitarian, mechanistic, and ultimately dehumanizing). We encounter this understanding of technology as something problematic and suspicious in much post-war human geography, where it has usually been framed through either a Marxist lens of its role in the commodification of space and the alienation of the labouring body, or alternately through a humanistic-phenomenological perspective of the devitalization of embodied experience. Recently, however, cultural geographers have been at the forefront of a disciplinary reassessment of technology, theorizing its more evental capacities to transform our experience of space and time, rather than to merely reproduce the world as we already know it. James Ash (2015), for example, has drawn on the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler to develop a post-phenomenological account of the role that technologies play in shaping Andrew Lapworth

human consciousness and sense-making outside of the phenomenal realms of the subject. Here, a crucial concept his work introduces is that of the ‘interface’ that ‘cuts across theoretical distinctions between digital or analogue or body and screen to focus on encounters and relations between objects’ (Ash, 2015, p. 31). Through an engagement with practices of videogame design, Ash (2015) highlights how digital interfaces are complex sites of spatio-temporal emergence that, due to their ubiquity, are central to the shaping of perception today, and thus change ‘how we anticipate, recollect and prepare for events’ (p. 14) in the world. A fourth major theme is representation. There is something of a mistaken assumption that with the emergence of non-representational theories over the last two decades, cultural geography has largely moved away from a concern with images, words and other forms of representation. The problem, as many non-representational geographers have been at pains to emphasize, is not with representations per se, but rather with a ‘representationalism’ understood as a specific mode of thinking that sees representations as expressions of a pre-existing signifying system that mediates people’s access to the ‘real world’. If anything, non-representational theory has brought a new energy and intensity to engagement with representational practices, developing styles of thought that approach representations ‘not as a code to be broken or as an illusion to be dispelled, [but rather] as performative in themselves; as doings’ (Dewsbury et al., 2002, p. 438). Here, then, attention falls on the material conduct and composition of representations in terms of their affective capacities to transform ways of thinking and living. Here, I would point to my own recent work developing a non-representational geography of film (Lapworth, 2016, 2021). Eschewing representational approaches that narrowly define a cinematic politics in terms of the reification or subversion of already-existing identities, my work instead locates the transformative potential of cinema in terms of its immanent relation to the material event of thought. A key influence here is the innovative philosophy of cinema outlined by Deleuze, who believed that cinema was unsurpassed in its capacity to deliver direct affective shocks to the brain, which involve the disruption of pregiven channels and the tracing of uncharted lines

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of thought. Understood in these terms, the cinematic image thus introduces new virtualities and forces into thinking, ‘intervening in habitual circuits of sense-making in ways that experiments with other ways of seeing, feeling and acting’ (Lapworth, 2016, p. 14). Finally, methods. The last decade has witnessed an intensification of methodological experiment across the subdiscipline, as cultural geographers increasingly recognize that the task of grasping the non-human, affective and non-representational dimensions of cultural life sketched above demands a move beyond the standard suite of talk and text-based methods that have been the staple for some time. There are a few key innovations we can point to here. The first relates to ongoing attempts to extend cultural geography’s sensory palette beyond its traditional emphasis on the ‘visual’ domain. Recent years have therefore seen the development of range of multi-sensory methodologies of sound, touch, taste and smell that emphasize the material plenitude of the body’s sensory relations to the world (Dowling, Lloyd and Suchet-Pearson, 2018). Some of this work has focused on the development of new research techniques (such as video film production, sound recording, comic books and forms of creative writing) to supplement cultural geography’s methodological arsenal. Others, however, have explored the possibility of creatively repurposing ‘old’ methods, like interviews, for research into the multi-sensory and affective textures of everyday life (Bissell, 2015). Another key area of innovation relates to the growing interest in ‘creative’ and ‘arts-based’ methodologies, in which we see cultural geographers engaging collaboratively with artists and other practitioners to explore new pathways for the production and dissemination of cultural geographic knowledges. However, Nina Williams (2016) argues that it is important to remain wary of the more instrumental logics that sometimes guide such art–geography collaborations, which tends to foreground the finished products over the open-ended process of research creation. Arts-based methods and techniques, she argues, do much more than simply offer a new means of communicating research to publics. They also open up new possible ways of relating to research, enabling us to think about the more relational, intangible, and affective dimensions of our research

encounters that are typically glossed over by conventional methodologies. The above choice of themes is obviously far from exhaustive of the full theoretical and empirical diversity of contemporary cultural geography and is circumscribed by my own academic interests and background. Nonetheless, I think it demonstrates cultural geography as a rich and vibrant subdiscipline, one that has always drawn strength from the diversity of its approaches and especially its engagements with other allied disciplines. Such cross-disciplinary collaboration (especially with the creative arts and philosophy) looks set to further strengthen in the years to come, further expanding cultural geography’s methodological and conceptual repertoire. Looking to the future, we can also expect cultural geographers to continue the long history of reimagining the concept of ‘the cultural’ in ways better suited to address the most urgent challenges facing society, from the ethical implications of new technologies to the politics of contemporary ecological crises. We see glimpses of such creative reimagining in the work I have described above (Anderson, 2020). On the one hand, the engagement with non-representational theories has disrupted traditional conceptions of culture as a ‘signifying system’, focusing attention on the material and affective force of representations to transform worlds and subjects. And on the other, through engagements with new materialist and post-humanist concepts, we witness an ontological expansion of culture as a ‘way of life’ to include consideration of a variety of non-human, technological and inorganic forces and processes that are intimately bound up in the production of the everyday. Andrew Lapworth

References and selected further reading Anderson, B. (2020). Cultural geography III: the concept of ‘culture’. Progress in Human Geography, 44 (3), 608–17. Ash, J. (2015). The Interface Envelope: Gaming, Technology, Power. London: Bloomsbury. Bissell, D. (2015). How environments speak: everyday mobilities, impersonal speech and

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88  Concise encyclopedia of human geography the geographies of commentary. Social and Cultural Geography, 16 (2), 146–64. Dewsbury, J.-D. (2015). Non-representational landscapes and the performative affective forces of habit: from ‘live’ to ‘blank’. Cultural Geographies, 22 (1), 29–47. Dewsbury, J.-D., Harrison, P., Rose, M. and Wylie, J. (2002). Enacting geographies. Geoforum, 33, 437–40. Dowling, R., Lloyd, J. and Suchet-Pearson, S. (2018). Qualitative methods 3: experimenting, picturing, sensing. Progress in Human Geography, 42 (5), 779–88. Jackson, P. (2000). Rematerializing social and cultural geography. Social & Cultural Geography, 1 (1), 9–14. Lapworth, A. (2016). Cinema, thought, immanence: contemplating signs and empty spaces in the films of Ozu. Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 3 (1), 13–31. Lapworth, A. (2021). Responsibility before the world: cinema, perspectivism, and a nonhuman

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ethics of individuation. Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 15 (3), 386–410. McCormack, D. (2013). Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sauer, C.O. (1996). The morphology of landscape. In D.N. Livingstone and J. Agnew (eds), Human Geography: An Essential Anthology (pp. 296–315). London: Routledge. Simpson, P. (2020). Non-Representational Theory. London: Routledge. Thrift, N. (2008). Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge. Whatmore, S. (2002). Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces. London: SAGE. Williams, N. (2016). Creative processes: for interventions in art to intervallic experiments through Bergson. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 48 (8), 1549–64. Williams, R. (1961). The Long Revolution. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Wylie, J. (2010). Cultural geographies of the future, or looking rosy and feeling blue. Cultural Geographies, 17 (2), 211–17.

18. Development geographies

a separate paper he argues that development is an ‘empty signifier that can be filled with almost any content’ (Ziai, 2009, p. 198). It is this slipperiness and malleability that makes development hard to oppose, famously described as an ‘anti-politics machine’ by Ferguson (1994), as who can be against good change? However, critical researchers have shown that development is also associated with much less desirable processes, from widespread ecological degradation through to worsening inequality, exploitation, marginalization and dispossession. For some post-development and anti-development scholars calling for an end to or radical reworking of development, such impacts are not avoidable outcomes resulting from poor policy or practice but integral to development itself (see, for example, Escobar, 1995; Sachs, 1992). Irrespective of people’s critiques of development, the concept has captured popular and political imaginations and has become possibly the most important lens for understanding and engaging with the world. It is difficult to imagine a world without development. For geographers, the spatialization of the world into two or three categories based on their levels of development, through labels like North/South, minority/majority, developed/ developing/under-developed, First/Second/ Third World, high income/middle income/ low income, is deeply problematic for its reliance upon statistical averages that give the impression of uniformity by masking vast differences within and between countries. It makes little sense, for example, to classify a wealthy suburb in downtown Shanghai as somehow similar to a rural community living on an atoll in Kiribati. The traditional terminology of development is also inherently neocolonial, implicitly positioning developed countries as linear endpoints that other countries should strive to emulate. While the nomenclature of development has evolved to less paternalistic terms, spatial divisions remain, and development as a set of theories, policies and practices is almost always directed at those countries considered ‘less developed’ than others. This is not to suggest that terms like the Global South, which I will refer to in the discussion below, do not have some merit. As Miraftab and Kudva (2015, p. 4) have argued, the Global South need not refer to self-contained territories constructed in oppo-

Development is a complex and contested term that is used within geography to focus upon the processes through which societies change. While strongly linked with economic change, development also refers to social, cultural, political and environmental change. Rather than incorporating any change, however, such as that caused by war or famine, development is often generalized as ‘good change’ (Chambers, 1997), being positioned as desirable or aspirational, a goal or set of processes that societies should pursue. As such, development has a powerful normative appeal, referring to the pathways through which societies can improve. This makes it an extremely influential organizing concept uniting authorities from across the political spectrum in the pursuit of development. Cowen and Shenton (1996) usefully distinguish between two forms of development: immanent and intentional. Immanent development refers to generalized processes of structural change, through, for example, the expansion or deepening of capitalism. Immanent development emerges through the cumulative actions of governments, businesses and communities operating within economic and political systems. In contrast, intentional development refers to specific projects and activities implemented to reach particular ends, being strongly associated with foreign aid and the development industry. As Bebbington (2004, p. 730) has pointed out, intentional development often, but not always, seeks to address some of the inequalities that derive from immanent forms of development. However intentional development is also complicit in setting up processes and institutions that drive immanent and unequal forms of development. This broad definition of development has allowed it to become associated with a huge array of activities. Ziai (2013, p. 131), for example, lists ‘economic growth… unemployment, basic needs, redistribution, self-reliance, school education, life expectancy, gender equality, empowerment, democracy and human rights or simply freedom’ alongside diverse approaches such as ‘endogenous, participatory, alternative, sustainable, and human development’. In 89

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sition to the Global North, but instead signify the shared experience of a group of countries that emerged from colonialism to engage with a global development apparatus that has sought to influence national and subnational decision making. North/South and other categories can also be useful in highlighting just how unequal the world is, although using regional or national spatial containers can be even more illuminating. Unfortunately, a brief analysis by Rigg (2007) found that geographic knowledge about the Global South is also unequal, with just 12 per cent of articles in leading geography journals focused on the Global South, despite housing approximately 80 per cent of the world’s population. Nevertheless, geography has made substantial contributions to knowledge about development theory, governance and experiences by focusing upon uneven development, the spaces, networks, mobilities and imaginaries of development, and the relationship between development and place. Given the size of the field, I can only touch briefly on some of these contributions below.

Theorizing development Development as a concept and emerging body of theory is most often traced to the end of World War II when colonial empires were retreating and new multilateral development agencies were forming. Development became a near-universal goal for newly independent states and provided a framework for guiding international relations. Early development theory was heavily influenced by US geopolitical interests, particularly Rostow’s (1960) modernization theory as outlined in his book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Modernization theory promoted a linear pathway of development, with countries needing to progress through five stages of growth to reach a desired endpoint modelled on the US economy. There was little consideration of the legacies of colonialism, the particularities of different places, or ongoing exploitative trade relationships; instead, underdevelopment was constructed as an endogenous problem to be solved by industrializing cities and engaging in global capitalist economies from which development benefits would flow to other areas. Andrew McGregor

The simplicity and promise of modernization theory was attractive to newly independent states and informed international aid and trade strategies in the years that followed. However, its a-geographical approach, assuming a singular model could apply to all countries irrespective of the different societies, cultures, environments, resources and histories of those countries, blunted its effectiveness, and other more critical theories soon emerged. These include neo-Marxist approaches such as dependency theory, which argued that poorer countries were trapped in dependent and exploitative relations with more powerful countries that were stymying rather than enabling development (Frank, 1975), and world systems theory (Wallerstein, 1979) argued that the global economy required core, semi-periphery and periphery countries to operate, posing structural barriers for countries wishing to develop. Under these radical theories, global capitalist economies were contributing to the ‘development of underdevelopment’ (Frank, 1975), and newly independent states should protect their economies and minimize international trade to develop. Others advocated for less capitalocentric community-based development. Grassroots theories sought to pursue development ‘from below’ and generated a range of participatory strategies and tools oriented towards helping communities identify their own development priorities and pathways to achieve them (e.g., Chambers, 1997). Their very practical field-oriented focus made grassroots theories popular with development non-governmental organizations (NGOs), while also appealing to many geographers due to their sensitivity to place, diversity and inclusiveness. Geographers, for example, continue to play a leading role in action research involving community economies and assets-based community development projects (e.g., Gibson-Graham and Dombrovski, 2020). However, grassroots approaches have also been criticized for being too small in scale and for potentially placing additional burdens on already busy communities (Cooke and Kothari, 2001). Market-oriented development theories, most notably neoliberalism, have dominated development debates since the 1980s. Development institutions, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), promoted neoliberalism through structural

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adjustment programmes that promised financial aid to indebted countries that underwent structural reforms such as privatization, the abolishment of subsidies and tariffs, deregulation, and a reduction in government services and support. The goal was to allow the ‘invisible hand’ of the free market to distribute development benefits evenly throughout the world by minimizing market disruptions. The outcome, for poorer communities, of an all too visible hand has been severe, with prices often increasing at the same time as government support dropped off. While some wealthier populations have benefited from neoliberalism, inequality has jumped sharply in most countries undergoing neoliberal reforms, contributing to deepening poverty. Through their commitment to place-based analysis, geographers have played a key role in highlighting the devastating impacts neoliberalism has had for marginalized groups. There can be no doubt that markets and the private sector remain central to the current ‘era of neoliberalism’ (Hart, 2002); however, there is also widespread disaffection with this and other development theories since the Global Financial Crisis. And while it should be recognized that much has been achieved through the prism of development, with billions of people emerging from poverty, there is still much to be achieved for the billion still experiencing deep intergenerational poverty, the majority of whom are women. It has also become clear that not only is there no easy or clear pathway for development, but the high-consumption lifestyles traditionally positioned as endpoints for development are no longer universally desirable or even materially possible given their extreme resource intensity and impacts on ecological systems. Horner (2020, p. 427) has suggested that this is leading to a readjustment in development tropes, where the challenge to develop into a sustainable society means ‘we are all developing countries now’. Geography, which has a long-standing interest in human– environment relations, has much to offer in generating more inclusive and diverse theories aimed at living well in the Anthropocene.

Governing development Geographers have also contributed much to development governance and policy.

Focusing upon international financial institutions (e.g., Peet, 2007), aid agencies (e.g., Murray and Overton, 2016), the state (Silvey, 2010), NGOs (e.g., Bebbington, 2004), and the private sector (Scheyvens, Banks and Hughes, 2016), analysis has shown how policies form, how they are enacted, the flow of knowledge and resources along development networks, and their effectiveness and limitations across space and within communities. A number of researchers have adopted Foucauldian approaches that analyse development as a form of global governmentality, or ‘developmentality’, which steers populations towards particular ends (e.g., Li, 2007). Others have focused on the practices and cultures of development industries to understand how they operate (e.g., McKinnon, 2012) as well as gendered and racialized assumptions and blind spots (Radcliffe, 2006). Other work has concentrated upon the shifting goals of development policy. The Millennium Development Goals and subsequent Sustainable Development Goals have been the focus of sustained analysis (e.g., Liverman, 2018). Geographers have explored the strengths and weaknesses of such approaches at policy levels and through grounded case studies. Recent work has also traced the ascendency of South–South development relationships, fracturing the hegemony of Northern knowledge and resources in development processes (Mawdesley, 2015). Reflecting the growing global geopolitical importance of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and other countries, the rise of the South as a source of development flows poses a new and important area of research that may well derail the neocolonialism that continues to haunt North–South development flows.

Experiencing development Many of the insights gleaned by geographers derive from case study research focusing on experiences of change in particular locations. A commitment to fieldwork has enabled geographers to get below the surface of development theory and policy and focus in on the people, places and spaces being affected by development. While traditionally much of this research was conducted by Northern researchers travelling to case study areas in Andrew McGregor

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the Global South, the practice of fieldwork is changing in line with post-colonial critiques, and North–South research collaborations are becoming more common, bringing much more nuance and awareness of social difference and diversity. However, case study research is still predominantly limited to locations in the Global South. We have yet to see sustained case study analyses of the Global North from Southern perspectives. In rural spaces, geographers have focused upon globalization and agricultural development programmes as well as livelihood diversification or ‘de-agrarianization’ associated with the growth and increasing importance in off-farm livelihood opportunities (e.g., Rigg, 2007). Gender, class, caste, race, ability and other social categories have been an explicit focus of rural livelihood research, including rural mobility, where out-migration and remittance economies are changing rural communities and landscapes (e.g., McKay, 2005). Rural spaces have also been studied as sites of conflict, particularly in relation to land grabs as globalizing agricultural businesses draw on political connections to claim rural land for industrial agriculture, or as agricultural encroachment and intensification contribute to deforestation and ecological degradation, threatening the livelihoods of communities dependent on those ecological systems (e.g., Astuti, 2021). The growth in market-based mechanisms, such as ecosystem services and carbon offset schemes, to prevent ecological degradation in rural areas are another important and growing area of geographic research (e.g., McGregor et al., 2015). In urban spaces, development is slowly shifting away from the expectation that cities in the Global South should mimic cities in the Global North. Robinson (2013) has called for post-colonial urban studies focused on ‘ordinary cities’, as opposed to global cities, where most people live. This aligns with a growing appreciation for Southern urbanism, or more regionally defined types such as Asian or African urbanism, that recognizes diverse urban forms and challenges. Much attention has been devoted to processes of urbanization and the swelling sizes of many Southern cities and the challenges this poses for service provision, employment and governance. Researchers have focused on

Andrew McGregor

informal or slum settlements that now house over a billion people, as well as the informal economies that provide income for most of the urban population. The spaces of formal labour have also been sites of research, such as factories and export processing zones, as well as gendered flows of transnational labour, such as when women move abroad to secure employment as domestic workers and form transnational families (Yeoh, Huang and Lam, 2005).

Challenges After almost 80 years of development, it is clear that it has not delivered on its basic promises of liberating the world from poverty. Inequality is rife, hunger widespread, and an underclass lacks access to essential services and basic opportunities. At the same time, billions of people have emerged from poverty, health and education levels are much improved, and people from diverse demographic profiles live with more freedom and opportunities than ever existed in the past. Development has been a contributor to both of these trends, the deepening of, and emergence from, poverty. Development is change, both good and bad, but development is also changing. Countries from the Global South are becoming development donors and the assumed superiority of Northern forms of development are being questioned as the environmental and social costs of high-consumption lifestyles becomes more well known in the context of planetary change. The championing of neoliberalism is much more muted and uncertainty reigns in the absence of a coherent and convincing macro-development theory. Southern livelihoods, landscapes and urban forms are being reappraised for their strengths rather than only their weaknesses as diversity and inclusion are celebrated over homogenization. While there are calls for an end to development, it is likely to stay. The challenge for geographers is to push it further from its neocolonial heritage and towards fresh goals based on social justice, inclusivity, diversity, ecological sustainability and redistribution. Andrew McGregor

Development geographies  93

References and selected further reading Astuti, R. (2021). Governing the ungovernable: the politics of disciplining pulpwood and palm oil plantations in Indonesia’s tropical peatland. Geoforum, 125, 381–91. Bebbington, A. (2004). NGOs and uneven development: geographies of development intervention. Progress in Human Geography, 28 (6), 725–45. Chambers, R. (1997). Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. (2001). Participation: The New Tyranny? London: Zed Books. Cowen, M. and Shenton, W. (1996). Doctrines of Development. London: Routledge. Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ferguson, J. (1994). The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Frank, A. (1975). On Capitalist Underdevelopment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. and Dombrovski, K. (eds) (2020). The Handbook of Diverse Economies. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Hart, G. (2002). Geography and development: development/s beyond neoliberalism? Power, culture, political economy. Progress in Human Geography, 26 (6), 812–22. Horner, R. (2020). Towards a new paradigm of global development? Beyond the limits of international development. Progress in Human Geography, 44 (3), 415–36. Li, T.M. (2007). The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Liverman, D. (2018). Geographic perspectives on development goals: constructive engagements and critical perspectives on the MDGs and the SDGs. Dialogues in Human Geography, 8 (2), 168–85. Mawdesley, E. (2015). Development geography 1: cooperation, competition and convergence between ‘North’ and ‘South’. Progress in Human Geography, 41 (1), 108–17. McGregor, A., Challies, E. and Howson, P. et al. (2015). Beyond carbon, more than forest? REDD+ governmentality in Indonesia.

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 47 (1), 138–55. McKay, D. (2005). Reading remittance landscapes: female migration and agricultural transition in the Philippines. Geografisk Tidsskrift–Danish Journal of Geography, 105 (1), 89–99. McKinnon, K. (2012). Development Professionals in Northern Thailand: Hope, Politics, Practice. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Miraftab, F. and Kudva, N. (2015). Editors’ introduction to the volume. In F. Miraftab and N. Kudva (eds), Cities of the Global South Reader (pp. 2–6). London: Routledge. Murray, W. and Overton, J. (2016). Retroliberalism and the new aid regime of the 2010s. Progress in Development Studies, 16 (3), 244–60. Peet, R. (2007). Geography of Power: The Making of Global Economic Policy. London: Zed Books. Radcliffe, S. (2006). Development and geography: gendered subjects in development processes and interventions. Progress in Human Geography, 30 (4), 524–32. Rigg, J. (2007). An Everyday Geography of the Global South. London: Routledge. Robinson, J. (2013). Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. London: Routledge. Rostow, W. (1960). The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sachs, W. (ed.) (1992). The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books. Scheyvens, R., Banks, G. and Hughes, E. (2016). The private sector and the SDGs: the need to move beyond ‘business as usual’. Sustainable Development, 24 (6), 371–82. Silvey, R. (2010). Development geography: politics and ‘the state’ under crisis. Progress in Human Geography, 34 (6), 828–34. Wallerstein, I. (1979). The Capitalist World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yeoh, B., Huang, S. and Lam, T. (2005). Transnationalizing the ‘Asian’ family: imaginaries, intimacies and strategic intents. Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 5 (4), 307–15. Ziai, A. (2009). ‘Development’: projects, power, and a poststructural perspective. Alternatives: Global, Local Political, 34 (2), 183–201. Ziai, A. (2013). The discourse of ‘development’ and why the concept should be abandoned. Development in Practice, 23 (1), 123–36.

Andrew McGregor

19. Diaspora

example. Importantly, transnationalism also challenges the conception of attachment of a population to a single nation-state. Rather, it draws attention to the in-betweenness that many migrants experience that is constituted by hybrid understandings and identities that are mutually constituted by space and time, host country and homeland (Mavroudi, 2007). One example is the Eritrean diaspora’s use of the Internet and social media platforms after Eritrea’s independence in 1993 to produce and debate issues related to culture and identity and, in the process, invent new forms of community, public spheres, and belonging (Bernal, 2006). Diasporas’ relationships with home and homeland, territory and territoriality, the state and capitalism, governance and citizenship, difference and identity are common themes explored by geographers. This includes feminist perspectives on the concept of ‘home’; a focus on migration patterns, territoriality and the state; and the real and imagined identities produced through diasporic processes and spatial practices. Regardless, there has been a convergence between many of these areas given the increasing acknowledgment that the diaspora experience is historically, politically, and culturally situated (NiLaoire, 2003). One of the central aspects of diaspora is a culture of longing for homeland, while a more specific site is the actual home, dwelling, or geographical community (Blunt and Dowling, 2006). The connection between home and homeland also draws attention to the multi-scalar and fluid nature of a ‘homing’ tendency that represents the tensions between settling and dispersing (Brah, 1996). This includes both inclusions and exclusions for diasporas that have not entirely settled in one place as well as contested notions of belonging. For example, British Ugandan Asians have multiple attachments to and feelings towards several countries due to their forced migration from Uganda in 1972, which transformed their sense of home, homeland, and belonging to include Britain, India, and Uganda based on their familial and generational experiences (Herbert, 2012). Another aspect is the transnational entanglements of home, which examines the specifics of people’s relationships with kin and geographical communities in their countries of origin (Mohan, 2008). This includes the study of hometown associations, remittances, and the relationships that cause people to

Diaspora, a term that reaches as far back as the Greek Old Testament, has broadened in definition and is used both academically and colloquially. As a topic of growing interest among human geography scholars since the early 2000s, it has evolved from a descriptive category of a group of people who left their homeland for a myriad of political, economic, and social reasons, but maintain ties. It now includes theoretical and empirical analyses of social, economic, and political processes ranging from state–diaspora relations to changing definitions of citizenship. The term ‘diaspora’ comes from the Greek translation of the Bible meaning ‘to scatter about, disperse’, from dia- ‘about, across’, and speirein ‘to scatter’ (originally in Deuteronomy 28:25). Over time, it came to mean a group of people who were expelled or had migrated from their historic homeland to different parts of the world. Diasporas make contact with people in receiving lands for various purposes, but generally remain close together as communities of religion, culture, and/or welfare. Among the many descriptions, diasporas have been primarily represented as a mode of categorization and typology, as a set of conditions, and as a methodology (Table 19.1). Yet, diasporas have also been defined as a process and cultural construction (Gilroy, 1993; Hall, 1990). The relationship between sending and receiving geographies is a defining characteristic of diaspora, but so too is its association with transnationalism, which refers to migration back and forth across sovereign borders and attention to the temporal dimensions of mobility and movement. The transnational experiences of diaspora communities disrupt a binary conception of emigration, in which one breaks with the home country and arrives at the host country. The fact that migration focuses on groups is also indicative of the scale at which diasporic experiences are often studied by migration scholars and population geographers alike. This is not to say that individual experiences are irrelevant, but they are embedded within a larger group under the term diaspora. Transnational migration of individuals between Mexico and other countries, which is enabled by migration networks and organizations to facilitate the flow of financial remittances back to Mexico, is one 94

Diaspora  95 Table 19.1

Dimensions of diaspora

Characteristics of

Genealogies of

Conditions of

Types of Diaspora

Methodology

Core Elements of

Diaspora

Diaspora

Diaspora (Cohen,

(Vortovec, 1999)

of Community

Diaspora (Brubaker,

(Safran, 1991)

(Brah, 1996)

1997)

Formation

2005)

(Butler, 2001) Dispersal to two or

An ensemble

Dispersal and

Diaspora as social

After dispersal,

Dispersion in space

more locations

of investigative

scattering

form

a minimum of two

Homeland

Collective

technologies

Collective trauma

Diaspora as a type of destinations

mythology of

that historicize

Cultural flowering

consciousness

There must be some Boundary

homeland

trajectories of

A troubled

Diaspora as

relationship to an

Alienation from host different diasporas

relationship with the a mode of cultural production

maintenance

actual or imagined homeland

land

Analyses of diaspora majority

Idealization of

relationalities

A sense of

Self-awareness of

homeland

across fields of

community

group identity

Commitment to

social relations,

transcending

Existence over at

the maintenance

subjectivity, and

national frontiers

least two generations

and restoration of

identity

Promoting a return

homeland

orientation

movement

Identity tied to ongoing relationship to homeland

Source: Portions adapted from Kalra, Kaur and Hutnyk (2005).

leave their homeland, but maintain social, economic, political, and cultural ties. A material expression might include the use of remittances to purchase land in a hometown and develop a family dwelling that incorporates architectural elements of receiving regions or, alternatively, to fundraise to implement public works and social projects in rural villages. Because of a geographical existence away from home, coupled with an idealized longing for return, diasporas are also characterized as having an ‘imagined’ or ‘mythical’ home. A striking example is the case of three groups of Tibetans who arrived in the United States at the same time during the 1990s, but differed in their relationship to Tibet due to different moments in which they and their families left the country. This resulted in an imagined homeland that differed by group in which the political capital of Tibetans in exile, Dharamsala, India, and the seat of the Dalai Lama, supplanted Lhasa, the historical capital in Tibet (Yeh, 2007). Scholars have also drawn attention to imaginations of homeland with an emphasis on place to include urban, suburban, and regional scales of home (Ashutosh, 2020; Blunt and Bonnerjee, 2013; Ortega, 2018). Places provide a common sense of territorial identity for diaspora com-

munities despite these groups having roots elsewhere. Related, placemaking is integral to understanding populations who long, as a group, for a distant homeland, and project that longing onto geographies where diaspora groups live in host countries. One example is the casita, which reinvents a vernacular house type found in the Caribbean into a hybrid architectural and landscape space that serves the purposes of cultural survival and resiliency for Puerto Ricans living in the South Bronx of New York City (Aponte-Pares, 2000). In California, the clan structure of the Hmong people, a sub-ethnic group of the Miao people originating from China, has enabled place-to-place relations, which has further strengthened ties through a number of practices including the establishment of a network of farmers’ markets throughout the state. Additionally, an annual New Year’s celebration in the state’s capital attracts clans of Hmong from other states and all over the world (Rios and Watkins, 2015). In this last example, placemaking practices are facilitated by trans-local circuits of solidarity created for social, political, and economic purposes. Diasporas also have an innate tie to territory due to associations with national Michael Rios

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identity, including its construction and maintenance (Burrell, 2003). This territorial basis includes relationships between sending and receiving regions as well as processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization by diaspora communities. The political nature of territoriality, especially involving political borders, the state, institutions, and capitalism, is a particular topic of interest among geographers (Délano and Gamlen, 2014; Faist, 2008; Mitchell, 1997). These foci remind us that migration still occurs across sovereign boundaries, and that human flows are still, in great part, up to the discretion of nation-states and the political economic systems therein (Ragazzi, 2014). It is worth noting that between 1980 and 2014, close to 60 percent of all United Nations member states had a diaspora institution (Gamlen, Cumming and Vaaler, 2017). Development, knowledge networks, differential valuations of diaspora labor, repatriation and return migration, and the strategic involvement of non-state actors are factors that imbricate diasporas with nation-states and capitalism. For example, expatriates are often part of a diaspora strategy for countries, as was the case for New Zealand in the mid-2000s, which enrolled expatriate populations through business, scientific, and policy networks to serve national economic development interests (Larner, 2007). Also with regard to state–diaspora relations, a related set of issues focuses on citizenship and the electoral politics in both sending and receiving regions (Blunt, 2007). The diaspora experience complicates a definition of citizenship tied to a single country due to multi-layered processes of transnational migration and social movements that challenge government policies (Smith and Guarnizo, 1998; Sokefeld, 2006). For example, recruitment of diaspora groups for development purposes often privileges certain migrants over others. In the case of Malaysia, this excluded a segment of the Malaysian diaspora from full and equal citizenship as well as their eligibility and participation in the country’s talent return migration program, which instigated electoral reform and oversees voting rights challenges in the 2000s (Koh, 2015). In other conceptualizations of diaspora with regard to the nation-state, citizenship involves economic rights and mobility privileges, and locating the state on the bodies and assets Michael Rios

of its citizens outside of territorial boundaries. Dual citizenship legislation in India in 2003, in which a more flexible notion of citizenship, handed down in this case by the nation-state, has maintained rather than corroded migrants’ ties to homeland, is one illustration (Dickinson and Bailey, 2007). More open conceptions of citizenship also exist and are produced by diaspora groups that have multiple political allegiances. For the years following 9/11, Arab-American activists’ nuanced and shifting attachments to home were connected to broader forces operating at various scales affecting their political identities. In this example, a sense of belonging and commitments to ‘here’ and ‘there’ complicated the relationship between transnational citizenship and place-based activism where these Arab-Americans lived (Staeheli and Nagel, 2005). However, the ambivalent quality of political identity among many diaspora groups presents a challenge as relational forms of citizenship do not always translate into political mobilization and action. For the Palestinian diaspora in Athens, Greece, informal political engagement in the early 2000s through demonstrations that promoted Palestinian issues to wider audiences created feelings of empowerment. However, these individuals lacked political agency without any formal Palestinian rights (Mavroudi, 2008). Similarly, categories of ethnicity, religion, and gender can create subordinate positions. Assimilation and race, class formation, and other forms of inclusion and exclusion exist and represent differences both in relationship to diaspora and within diaspora (Forrest, Johnston and Poulsen, 2013; Harris, 2020; Woltman and Newbold, 2009). This is the case with Iraqi diaspora political mobilization in Britain and Sweden after the 2003 Iraq invasion (Kadhum, 2019). While the Iraqi diaspora were allowed to be openly involved in homeland politics, individual positionality with respect to class, race, gender, and other social categories determined one’s relative political efficacy. These social distinctions and related intersections also create differences within diasporic communities (Jazeel, 2006). This may be expressed as a struggle for ‘authenticity’, while factors such as race and class distinctions are imposed from the outside by the majority culture. This is also true for diaspora communities that return to their homeland. For example,

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many foreign-born communities of Japanese descent called Nikkei returned to the country after 1990, but did not live up to the standard of Japanese-ness that had been established in the homeland, leading to difficulties over reintegrating back into Japanese society (White, 2003). From the perspective of individual identities and everyday encounters, the cultural negotiations in which individuals perform different identities at home and abroad is illustrative of the desire to hold tightly to two contrasting, and sometimes conflicting, parts of identity (Ghosh and Wang, 2003). One example is the exploration of Irish identity as performed through music and dance by British-born second- and third-generation Irish people in the English cities of Coventry and Liverpool (Leonard, 2005). This performance is both a physical demonstration of Irish identity and a connection with an imagined homeland. This illustration points to the performativity of diasporic identities, especially when concerning issues of group acceptance, authenticity, and power. The experiences of diaspora communities are multiple, responding to a host of signifiers from ‘home’ and abroad when considering space and time in the production of identity. This example also highlights a larger theme that diasporic practices shift and change based on the various negotiations of social, cultural, and political boundaries. The ‘space-challenging’ nature of diaspora underscores how definitions of territory, place, and location continue to evolve, and the important contributions made by human geography. Michael Rios

References and selected further reading Aponte-Pares, L. (2000). Appropriating place in Puerto Rican barrios, preserving contemporary urban landscapes. In A.R. Alanen and R.Z. Melnick (eds), Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America (pp. 94–111). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ashutosh, I. (2020). The spaces of diaspora’s revitalization: transregions, infrastructure and urbanism. Progress in Human Geography, 44 (5), 898–918. Bernal, V. (2006). Diaspora, cyberspace and political imagination: the Eritrean diaspora. Global

Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 6 (2), 161–79. Blunt, A. (2007). Cultural geographies of migration: mobility, transnationality and diaspora. Progress in Human Geography, 31 (5), 684–94. Blunt, A. and Bonnerjee, J. (2013). Home, city and diaspora: Anglo-Indian and Chinese attachments to Calcutta. Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 13(2), 220–40. Blunt, A. and Dowling, R. (2006). Home. London: Routledge. Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Brubaker, R. (2005). The ‘diaspora’ diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28 (1), 1–19. Burrell, K. (2003). Small-scale transnationalism: homeland connections and the Polish ‘community’ in Leicester. International Journal of Population Geography, 9 (4), 323–35. Butler, K. (2001). Defining diaspora, refining a discourse. Diaspora, 10 (1), 189–220. Cohen, R. (1997). Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press. Délano, A. and Gamlen, A. (2014). Comparing and theorizing state–diaspora relations. Political Geography, 41, 43–53. Dickinson, J. and Bailey, A.J. (2007). (Re)membering diaspora: uneven geographies of Indian dual citizenship. Political Geography, 26 (7), 757–74. Faist, T. (2008). Migrants as transnational development agents: an inquiry into the newest round of the migration–development nexus. Population Space and Place, 14 (1), 21–42. Forrest, J., Johnston, R. and Poulsen, M. (2013). Middle-class diaspora: recent immigration to Australia from South Africa and Zimbabwe. South African Geographical Journal, 95 (1), 50–69. Gamlen, A., Cumming, M. and Vaaler, P. (2017). Explaining the rise of diaspora institutions. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45 (40), 492–516. Ghosh, S. and Wang, L. (2003). Transnationalism and identity: a tale of two faces and multiple lives. Canadian Geographer–Le Géographe canadien, 47 (3), 269–82. Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Hall, S. (1990). Cultural identity and diaspora. In J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (pp. 222–37). London: Lawrence & Wishart. Harris, J. (2020). Nativist-populism, the internet and the geopolitics of Indigenous diaspora. Political Geography, 78, 102–24. Herbert, J. (2012). The British Ugandan Asian diaspora: multiple and contested belongings.

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98  Concise encyclopedia of human geography Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 12 (3), 296–313. Jazeel, T. (2006). Postcolonial geographies of privilege: diaspora space, the politics of personhood and the ‘Sri Lankan Women’s Association in the UK’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31 (1), 19–33. Kadhum, O. (2019). Ethno-sectarianism in Iraq, diaspora positionality and political transnationalism. Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 19 (2), 158–78. Kalra, V., Kaur, R. and Hutnyk, J. (2005). Diaspora and Hybridity. London: SAGE. Koh, S.Y. (2015). State-led talent return migration programme and the doubly neglected Malaysian diaspora: whose diaspora, what citizenship, whose development? Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 36 (2), 183–200. Larner, W. (2007). Expatriate experts and globalizing governmentalities: the New Zealand diaspora strategy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32 (3), 331–45. Leonard, M. (2005). Performing identities: music and dance in the Irish communities of Coventry and Liverpool. Social & Cultural Geography, 6 (4), 515–29. Mavroudi, E. (2007). Diaspora as process: (de) constructing boundaries. Geography Compass, 1 (3), 467–79. Mavroudi, E. (2008). Palestinians in diaspora, empowerment and informal political space. Political Geography, 27 (1), 57–73. Mitchell, K. (1997). Different diasporas and the hype of hybridity. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 15 (5), 533–53. Mohan, G. (2008). Making neoliberal states of development: the Ghanaian diaspora and the politics of homeland. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26 (3), 464–79. NiLaoire, C. (2003). Editorial introduction: locating geographies of diasporas. International

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Journal of Population Geography, 9 (4), 275–80. Ortega, A.A.C. (2018). Transnational suburbia: spatialities of gated suburbs and Filipino diaspora in Manila’s periurban fringe. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108 (1), 106–24. Ragazzi, F. (2014). A comparative analysis of diaspora policies. Political Geography, 41, 74–89. Rios, M. and Watkins, J. (2015). Beyond ‘place’: translocal placemaking of the Hmong diaspora. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 35 (2), 209–19. Safran, W. (1991). Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return. Diaspora, 1 (1), 83–9. Smith, M.P. and Guarnizo, L. (eds) (1998). Transnationalism from Below. New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions. Sokefeld, M. (2006). Mobilizing in transnational space: a social movement approach to the formation of diaspora. Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 6 (3), 265–84. Staeheli, L.A. and Nagel, C. (2005). Topographies of home and citizenship: Arab-American activists in the United States. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 38 (1), 599–611. Vortovec, S. (1999). Three meanings of diaspora, exemplified by South Asian religions. Diaspora, 6 (3), 3–36. White, P. (2003). The Japanese in Latin America: on the uses of diaspora. International Journal of Population Geography, 9 (4), 309–22. Woltman, K. and Newbold, K.B. (2009). Of flights and flotillas: assimilation and race in the Cuban diaspora. Professional Geographer, 61 (1), 70–86. Yeh, E.T. (2007). Exile meets homeland: politics, performance, and authenticity in the Tibetan diaspora. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25 (4), 648–67.

20. Digital geographies

sought to understand how digital processes – as an abstraction and reconstitution of the world through binary operations – transform different spaces and places and how they are unevenly distributed, felt and practised (Cockayne and Richardson, 2017). This entry thus excavates what the digital may consist of, the disciplinary challenges of the digital on human geography, how this has emerged as a ‘digital turn’, as well as new ways of engaging and ‘doing’ geographical research.

Introduction The ‘digital’ has become a common and popular term, as much as it morphs and permeates contemporary life. As such, it encompasses an ever-growing field of computational technologies and their associated materials, such as digital media, mobile phones, software applications, corporate platforms, digital infrastructures such as ‘smart’ cities, as well as digital forms of labour. The digital then interconnects and is embedded across multiple processes of communication, the ‘critical’ infrastructures that supply electricity, water and telecommunications, to various interfaces, geolocation software, and securing computation through cyber security, often with certain ways of thinking that promote greater automation in the (contested) hope that the world can be made more ‘efficient’ or easily accessible. Such a widespread change to our lives – albeit unevenly distributed – means that it can be difficult to comprehend the multifaceted transformations it has wrought upon us. To disentangle our lives from the digital is increasingly problematic, however, as it is not only its visible instantiations but how it invokes an innumerable range of processes that are invisible to us. Yet, before we delve further into what the digital is, human geographers have been attentive to the ways that the digital not only concerns computational devices (Ash, Kitchin and Leszczynski, 2016). Rather, it is part of a broader socio-cultural phenomenon regarding the way in which societies organize, think and represent themselves. Such experiences are not universal, and geographers seek to perpetually ask, who is discussing the ‘digital’, for what purposes, how is this experienced differently by various communities and individuals, and how does this produce certain forms of power and relationships to be performed, enacted and embedded within and through computational devices and processes? The digital in its most elementary form could be simplified to a binary operation (the 0s and 1s of the ‘logic gates’ upon which computational devices work). However, this narrows the world to a universal and mathematical process. Geographers have instead

Defining ‘the digital’ Notwithstanding the massive changes around the digital, it has not led to a new disciplinary subfield with a dedicated set of literatures, journals and thinkers. Instead, geographers have pursued a more decentralized grouping around ‘digital geographies’. This aims to keep a broad perspective on how the digital – as a wide-ranging and deep transformation – impacts various sites and how it intersects with previous knowledge. Thus, digital geographies lack a ‘thingness’, in that they are plural, complex and inherently interdisciplinary in form. Yet, in being open, there are some sites where digital geographies have come to be more popularly discussed, predominantly in Anglo-centric and German scholarship (Leszczynski, 2021). These include the formation of dedicated research groups and some journals, such as Digital Geography and Society, emerging from discussions that criss-cross geographical interest. Yet, even in these more specialized arenas, the wide extent of the digital in geographical scholarship retains a persistent diversity that draws on geography’s already considerable insights into various (conventionally non-digital) spheres such as in urban, cultural and political geographies, as well as with previous engagements with geographic information systems (GIS) and quantitative approaches. Although it is possible to define the digital in its most abstract of forms – that of binary – it does rather little to help us understand how it becomes activated and comes to be worked with, talked about, and how computationally arranged environments transform the world. This is emphasized in a central paper on the study of the digital within geography – ‘Digital turn, digital geographies?’ 99

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by James Ash, Rob Kitchin and Agnieszka Leszczynski (2016). This advocates for a plural and interdisciplinary approach that draws on the various subdisciplines of geography. There is a subsequent emphasis on not reducing digital to a universal term, where they explain that geographers must avoid a generality of the digital and instead place it ‘in relation to specific objects, techniques, logics, processes, practices, and affects’ (Ash, Kitchin and Leszczynski, 2019, p. 3). Thus, when studying and thinking about the digital in human geography, we must engage with questions of spatiality, temporality and power among others, in order not to be drawn towards what may be understood as a technological short-sightedness that focuses on the new and emergent rather than the histories and lineages of the development of technologies and how they may be applied to the digital.

A digital turn To study and understand the digital then requires an equal attention to previous academic work amid an orientation to how the digital may be transforming and articulating new geographies. This has been understood as a broad ‘digital turn’ in geography and beyond. Such transformations of space and time have been studied well before the term ‘the digital’ became popular (Kinsley, 2014), using a variety of descriptors that have applied to the study of technology (digital and non-digital), including the ‘virtual’, ‘information and communications technologies (ICTs)’ and ‘cyberspace’, to name a few. This extends geography into a long history of digital technologies and ways of knowing beyond the past two or three decades (Zook et al., 2004). Yet, today, the digital has become more urgent to address as its application to, and imbrication with, many parts of our lives has exponentially grown. One of the most influential books written on the subject is Code/Space (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011). This argued that both code (the instructions that often collectively form software) and space are co-constituted and constantly becoming. This means that space and code are not just isolated or separate, but integral to each other’s construction. For example, in the airport check-in area, code is Andrew Dwyer

required to process passengers, their luggage and their tickets. If the software in the check-in area fails, then the space is transformed into a waiting area. Kitchin and Dodge are keen to suggest that code is not just about binary, but also how space becomes transformed, shifts and is relational. The digital is not something that exists ‘out there’ or is in a stable form, but continually (re)makes the world. There are many situations where code and space are interdependent, not least in how many of us socialize online and how this creates new senses of belonging to the device you may reading this on, which may change from one of work to play after reading this piece! In understanding how code and space are interrelated, we can apply this to the field of the digital. The digital cannot be understood geographically apart from its imbrication with other objects, things, processes and thinking. Code/Space offers important reading for how geographers may engage with the digital, including contextualizing ‘big data’ and ‘algorithms’ that may at first appear to be detached from discussions on the relations between space, place and time that geography is concerned with. By embracing this relationality and interconnection by geographers, this section delves into several cases to demonstrate how the digital has transformed various geographies as part of a broader ‘digital turn’. First, this explores big data and algorithms, cyber security, and platforms to demonstrate how new configurations of the digital apply to geography before turning to ‘smart’ cities, social media and algorithmic security and borders to demonstrate how these are connected to the concerns of urban, cultural and political geography in turn. Big data and algorithms Big data – very large volumes of data that could not be feasibly processed without digital technologies – has revolutionized what we produce about the world. Geographers have sought to understand who has access to such information, who has the power to derive value from data, and the new spaces of calculation and reasoning that emerge within algorithms (Amoore, 2020). Simply, such algorithms may be understood as a sequence of instructions. Some of these are known as ‘machine learning’, which introduces iterative and recursive processes that are some-

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times known as ‘artificial intelligence’. These have become central to the study of the digital within geography and beyond, as they often support much of the commercial and governmental application of digital technologies today. Through algorithmic sorting, categorization and calculation, they offer the promise of rational, efficient and a ‘true’ resolution to several problems – ranging from resource allocation and biometrics, to the provision of public services. However, geographers have been attentive to who has access to such information, their unequal application, and how they extenuate, and perpetuate, enduring forms of racism, colonialism, misogyny and other forms of prejudice as much as they transform the spaces of modelling and governance of contemporary life. Cyber security The rise of the digital has come with a range of different vulnerabilities within computational systems, and new arrangements, of how (in)security is performed. This has led to the ‘hacking’ of individuals, corporations and governments – often for profit and sometimes for espionage. For geographers, this can be linked to older geopolitical forms of technological development and processes of governance. However, it is also distinct in how new forms of harm and violence may emerge through the digital. ‘Ransomware’ attacks that ‘lock’ a system have been used to extort individual personal devices, hospital systems and other critical national infrastructures. Geographers have exposed how people relate to digital technology and their reliance on this for their personal and social lives. This has led to research on privacy and surveillance, such as on menstruation apps (Shipp and Blasco, 2020). Although there is frequent hype around the potential for ‘cyber war’, geographers have sought to attend to how objects and processes of security have become embedded and articulated through digital technologies, where there are complex environments and uneven impacts, particularly on women and those living in the Global South.

Platforms As in the ‘smart’ city below, there is an integration of digital technologies in urban spaces. This has been aided and perpetuated by the rise of various digital platforms that include common names, ranging from Alibaba, Google and Uber. All seek to integrate and make possible new relations and connections, principally between an individual and a service. Sustained by big data and algorithms, platforms have transformed how space and place are arranged. Such platforms collect, condense and render knowable different geographies to claim more ‘efficient’ the infrastructural maintenance of ‘smart cities’ as well as the often enforced ‘flexibility’ of digital work and labour. Geographers have questioned how this has sustained a transition to less secure employment (at least in the Global North), and how this is changing practices of work in the Global South (Wood et al., 2019). However, platforms have also enabled new mappings and visualizations to emerge of different spaces. For example, the world of Uber is about achieving omnipresence through modelling supply and demand of drivers in urban spaces, while for Google, it is about understanding the relations between searches, and selling these relations for profit from our search results. These platforms now exert much influence over our daily lives, telling us what is important, how we move, and often how we relate, albeit for capital accumulation and potentially, in the process, depriving certain communities – such as impoverished, black majority neighbourhoods – of such facilities as they are deemed unprofitable. ‘Smart’ cities There is an extensive and long-ranging inquiry into the study of urban spaces within geography. With the proliferation of the digital among such places, there has been a burgeoning study of how they are transforming how the urban is constituted, performed and materialized through ‘smart’ cities. These are often thought to integrate digital technologies to ‘improve’ the provision of services and make life more ‘efficient’, often with promises of a digitally slick future (Rose, 2017). Some may be integrated into the fabric of urban life – such as through digitally Andrew Dwyer

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connected devices as part of the ‘Internet of Things’ – or be distributed to cloud servers to be worked upon by algorithms. As much as ‘smart’ cities may not be considered all that intelligent, digitalization has enabled an abstracted view of the city to be created that can be replicated, as envisioned by many of the corporations who wish to operate smart cities. This privatization of public goods and spaces is not new, and the digital here all but extends existing trends. Social media Within cultural geographies there has been a growing emphasis on the role of social media, images, and how we collectively share, consume and relate to one another through various media. This has emerged alongside the growth of platforms such as Facebook, TikTok and WeChat. Geographers have sought to understand how images on social media may change how we consume different landscapes, to understand how people consume information, and how this may be linked to questions of disinformation and emerging forms of political communications, such as through ‘deep fakes’ (e.g.,videos that animate faces from photos). However, this has also provided opportunities for geographers to analyse and understand how we use and interact in ways that have not been possible before (e.g., Zhang et al., 2016). This may include assessing a plethora of geotagged images, to analysing the content of messages, through to assessing its meaning. Social media have opened up new worlds of engagement for geographers – as both spaces of research and spaces for engaging research participants. For online communities of users, social media have now become a place for conducting research and are sometimes the only place in which to do this. While conventional media have been studied for a long time for their meaning, social media have continued these research trends, but broadened and added to them. Security and borders In work throughout the 2000s, political geographers have developed a deep appreciation about how borders transform space and time. In Louise Amoore’s work on ‘biometric Andrew Dwyer

borders’ (2006), she detailed how the ‘war on terror’ emergent after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States transformed where borders were performed, and how they became situated within the body. Here, the desire by governments to collect ever-greater amounts of data became part of new ‘smart borders’. Although today it is almost impossible to imagine crossing international borders (beyond free movement zones such as the EU’s Schengen Zone) without extensive data collection, the digital has allowed for a reformulation of the border – and thus reconstituted who belongs in which spaces and embeds this according to bodily and contextual attributes. Contemporary arrangements are now permitted less through scrutiny of the body per se but through big data and algorithms that offer new forms of corporate and state power.

A digital future? The digital is likely to become more diffuse yet more imbricated in our lives. For human geographers, this means being attentive to how the digital is changing, and potentially creating new forms of space and place. This will transform how we research. This may mean becoming acquainted with a range of online tools, software and spaces. Key, however, is understanding how people and the digital come together in particular ways and how this draws on various interlinking historic genealogies. Although the digital may have revolutionized the world (in some ways), the core of geographical enquiry remains the same. What the future of the digital within human geography might be remains an open question, but it is likely to embrace further intersectional feminism and queer approaches (Elwood, 2021) as well as look to decolonize and develop perspectives that are not so dependent on Anglo-centrism (McLean, 2020). The wide-ranging depth of the digital within society means that its study geographically is required more than ever in terms of how it is unequally distributed, the power that is afforded by control of digital technologies and practices, and articulating why these are important for our collective futures. Andrew Dwyer

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References and selected further reading Amoore, L. (2006). Biometric borders: governing mobilities in the war on terror. Political Geography, 25 (3), 336–51. Amoore, L. (2020). Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ash, J., Kitchin, R. and Leszczynski, A. (2016). Digital turn, digital geographies? Progress in Human Geography, 42 (1), 25–43. Ash, J., Kitchin, R. and Leszczynski, A. (2019). Introducing digital geographies. In J. Ash, R. Kitchin and A. Leszczynski (eds), Digital Geographies (pp. 1–10). London: SAGE. Cockayne, D.G. and Richardson, L. (2017). Queering code/space: the co-production of socio-sexual codes and digital technologies. Gender, Place & Culture, 24 (11), 1642–58. Elwood, S. (2021). Digital geographies, feminist relationality, Black and queer code studies: thriving otherwise. Progress in Human Geography, 45 (2), 209–28. Kinsley, S. (2014). The matter of ‘virtual’ geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 38 (3), 364–84. Kitchin, R. and Dodge, M. (2011). Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Leszczynski, A. (2021). Being genealogical in digital geographies. The Canadian Geographer/ Le Géographe canadien, 65 (1), 110–15. McLean, J. (2020). Decolonising digital technologies? Digital geographies and Indigenous

peoples. In J. McLean (ed.), Changing Digital Geographies: Technologies, Environments and People (pp. 91–111). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer. Rose, G. (2017). Posthuman agency in the digitally mediated city: exteriorization, individuation, reinvention. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107 (4), 779–93. Shipp, L. and Blasco, J. (2020). How private is your period? A systematic analysis of menstrual app privacy policies. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2020 (4), 491–510. Wood, A.J., Graham, M., Lehdonvirta, V. and Hjorth, I. (2019). Good gig, bad gig: autonomy and algorithmic control in the global gig economy. Work, Employment and Society, 33 (1), 56–75. Zhang, W., Derudder, B. and Wang, J. et al. (2016). Using location-based social media to chart the patterns of people moving between cities: the case of Weibo-users in the Yangtze River Delta. Journal of Urban Technology, 23 (3), 91–111. Zook, M., Dodge, M., Aoyama, Y. and Townsend, A. (2004). New digital geographies: information, communication, and place. In S.D. Brunn, S.L. Cutter and J.W. Harrington Jr. (eds), Geography and Technology (pp. 155–76). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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21. Disability Geography is a significant problem and challenge for disabled people who experience space and place as a series of socio-psychological and physical impediments. From the historic incarceration of people deemed to have emotional disorders, to the design of buildings that are rarely attentive to the needs of vision-impaired people, places are marked out by a disabling culture that inhibits disabled people from living free and full lives. This disablist culture is characterized by what Garland-Thomson (2017) describes as imbibing a eugenics logic or a system of values that perpetrates the view that the world would be a better place without impairment, and, by implication, disabled people (also see Snyder and Mitchell, 2006; Wheeler, 2017). Here, an objective of many governments is the management and marginalization, even the elimination, of impaired bodies, or those traits in people considered to be less than human. This manifests as continuous, systemic discrimination against, and oppression of, disabled people that commonly includes the denial of their rights to make critical life choices, from sexual reproduction, where to live, and how to access and engage in the labour market. The evidence of disabling practices is overwhelming, ranging from the involuntary sterilization of disabled girls and women in many different countries (Elliott, 2017; Zampas and Lamačková, 2011), to discrimination in job hiring processes, which Bjørnshagen and Ugreninov (2021, p. 818) describe as perpetuating ‘disability-related inequality in employment outcomes’. For most disabled people, this means existing at the margins of the labour market, largely confined to unskilled, low-paid work and, more often than not, working in precarious jobs with little job security or status, or not working at all. As Scope (2020, n.p.) notes, ‘disabled people in the UK are almost twice as likely to be unemployed as non-disabled people’, a pattern repeated across the globe. Such disadvantages are compounded by other lifestyle and health inequalities, and disabled people are most at risk from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (Eskytė et al., 2020). They are much more likely than non-disabled people to die from the virus, with more than 60 per cent of deaths from COVID-19 in the UK occurring amongst

disabled people (Webster, 2020). Many of these deaths have been explained away, even justified, as happening to people with a ‘pre-existing’ physiological condition, or a medical disposition that lays them open to catching and dying from the disease. For Abrams and Abbott (2020, p. 168), the term ‘pre-existing’ represents disability as ‘non-life’, or a life less valued or valuable, compared with those categorized as ‘healthy’ or ‘normal’. Here, attitudes to COVID-19 have exposed the underlying eugenics logic of society, shaped by state-orchestrated narratives that blame medical deficiencies in individual bodies for the harm done to them. These narratives eschew overtures to the systemic, structural conditions that shape the lived experiences of disabled people, and instead seek to sort and filter people by norms of medically defined bodily fitness. Those who fail to ‘fit’, or do not accord with a rationality of normality, or bodies deemed to be productive, are denied rights to life, or to live in ways whereby they are able to flourish, irrespective of bodily performance. In the context of COVID-19, the lives of many disabled people have shrunk, whereby the absence of systemic support, including appropriate care facilities, has lessened their presence in public space, and made access to goods and services harder (Andrews et al., 2021; Eskytė et al., 2020). Here, the pandemic highlights the inadequacies of urban infrastructure to enable physical distancing and a presence in place, and, for many disabled people, the outcome is retreat into self-isolation, including the onset and intensification of loneliness (Imrie, 2018). The socio-spatial, and human, implications of COVID-19 on disabled people is one of many substantive fields of geographical inquiry, building on a substantial quantity of scholarship that, since the late twentieth century, has sought to describe, and critique, the disabling nature of society.1 The earliest geographical writings focused on the measurement and mapping of illness, disease and impairment, deploying biomedical models that propagated the understanding of disability as a medical condition, or a problem of, and for, the body. Park et al. (1998) outline this body of work comprising the mapping of ‘disability as disease’, including the description of regional variations in physiological disorders, such as spina bifida and multiple sclerosis (Lovett and Gattrell, 1988; Mayer,

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1981). A significant tranche of scholarship in this tradition was the study of sensory perception amongst vision-impaired people and people with learning difficulties, generating data to produce tactile maps and personal guidance systems (Golledge, 1991; Wiedel, 1966). Such research, while valuable, rarely commented on the social and cultural contexts shaping the lives of disabled people, nor did it engage with the politics of disablement, including the institutionalization and state management of those deemed to have unfit and impaired bodies. Rather, the approaches were technical and data driven, with a focus on pattern description and the use of empiricist methodologies, based on the understanding that ‘a person’s experiences and/ or observations comprise the person’s prima facie evidence’ (Bealer and Strawson, 1992, p. 99). A critical, interpretative geography was lacking, and by the mid-1990s, scholars, in seeking to redress this, were developing a range of methodological approaches that situated disability in the broadcloth of disabling socio-cultural and -political relations. No longer was a medical conception of disability acceptable. Instead, geographers began to explore the interdisciplinary and intersectional nature of disability and the production of disablement through the contours of systems of political power and oppression. The point was to focus less on impairment, as a medical condition, and more on the intersection of historical, political and cultural relations involved in the production of disabling environments. An illustration is Schweik’s (2011) study of municipal statutes in the USA prohibiting the occupation of public spaces by people who, in the words of Crowe and Drew (2021, p. 387), ‘did not conform to the idea of the ideal American citizen’. These statutes, the so-called ‘ugly laws’, were aimed at keeping the streets clear of the ‘unsightly’, or those deemed to be an affront to civilized society. One of the earliest ordinances, in Chicago (1881), was targeted at anyone ‘who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object or improper person’ (quoted in Schweik, 2011, p. 2). Such directives were indicative of the spatial erasure of many disabled people from public places, or the configuration

of space to render particular categories of people politically impotent and invisible. Here, spatial practice has, historically, conceived of the disabled body as abject and disordered, an object of the normalizing discourses of embodiment that do not have a place for ‘non-normate’ bodies. Hamraie (2020, p. 409) cites the recent example of the liveable city movement in the USA that she describes as promoting ideal city images shaped by ‘rationalist economic frameworks that calculate the value (and risks) of particular populations to urban economies’. This calculus is premised on propagating ‘active bodies’, by promoting infrastructures, such as walkable routeways and cycleways, that encourage the ‘abled, hyper fit body’ while excluding, potentially, ‘people who are racialized, poor, fat, unhoused, and disabled from representations of the good urban life’ (Hamraie, 2020, p. 411). For Hamraie (2017), there is urgent need to develop ‘critical access studies’ (CAS) to contest disabling representations of space as part of a process to produce real liveable places, or environments that respond to the manifold bodily needs of everyone. Such studies emphasize the importance of rejecting the dominant, econometric narrative – that is, the propagation of physical access as a prerequisite of productive citizenship, and, instead, highlighting the role of accessible spaces in addressing social injustices by liberating and enabling disabled people to choose how, where and when to access, and be part of, geographical environs. CAS also seeks to critique, and move beyond, the environmental construction of disability, or the rehabilitative ideology that notes that by removing physical barriers, disabilities are eliminated. Here, geographers highlight that access to, and emplacement, in space, requires more than reshaping the physicality of a place, but is predicated on transforming the socio-cultural relations of disablism that pervade attitudes and values towards disability and the body. This is illustrated by the precarious lives of many disabled people whose experiences of space are, as Edwards and Maxwell (2021) suggest, conditioned, in part, by fear and un/ safety. Their research documents the rising incidents of violence and hate crime against disabled people, and they describe how this shapes their ‘everyday encounters with Rob Imrie

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space’, particularly the circumscription of ‘their access to socio-spatial justice’ (Edwards and Maxwell, 2021, p. 17). Interviews I conducted with vision-impaired people in the 1990s bore witness to this, particularly for people who used canes as a means to detect and avoid physical obstructions (Imrie and Kumar, 1998). As respondents said, the cane was a signifier of their difference, and sometimes it drew unwarranted attention to them that often translated into name calling and worse. One person recalled that ‘when you go around town you often get your cane kicked out from under your hand and you lose grip… so why go out’ (quoted in Imrie and Kumar, 1998, p. 362). This testimony, among others, reveals the depth of disablist and xenophobic attitudes in society that, manifesting as hate crimes, are implicated in the production of distinctive, iniquitous geographies, characterized by where disabled people feel they can go to in comfort, in contrast to those places they avoid or seek to bypass or transform. For geographers, the study of what Hall and Bates (2019, p. 110) call ‘hatescapes’ is an emerging part of the geographies of disability that, in building upon CAS, seeks to understand disabled people’s emplacement in space as a complex assemblage of diverse bodies, emotions, memories, objects and environments. In the interactions between these elements, the making of places is part of a ‘dynamic unfolding’ in which disabled people’s access into and out of places, while shaped by prejudicial attitudes and pejorative, often hateful, actions, does not preclude

Source: Rob Imrie.

Figure 21.1

Rob Imrie

Graycliff

their agency. For CAS, this is suggestive of an active making of spaces, in which, as Hall and Bates (2019, p. 109) suggest, ‘disabled people, in their interactions and encounters, contribute to the ongoing making’ of the environment. Such making can be enhanced and made productive by spatial practitioners, including urban designers and architects, developing much more sensitivity to the senses and the neurodiverse body. Geographical scholarship has made inroads into the study of neurodiversity and the city, with attention to how space and place are ‘affective’ or intertwined with socio-psychological and emotional states. The body, as the means of being in the world, and making sense of it, pervades the work of different architectural practitioners, the ideas of which, in relation to mind, body and design, have rarely been discussed or recognized. There is a fruitful line of inquiry to be pursued by geographers here – that is, the excavation of past knowledges, often buried or partially hidden, that can provide insights, and practical steers, about the interrelationships between access, space, place, emotions, architecture and the body (see, for example, Imrie, 2018). An illustration is the architecture of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW) who, in his numerous writings, conceives of space as a sensuous experience, bound up with people’s emotional and mental well-being (also see Imrie, 2018). For FLW, bodily experience was the basis of all life, and the point and purpose of his architecture was liberating the human body, to facilitate

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its well-being by creating calm and repose, and proffering places to enhance people’s ease of living. The relationality between people and the non-human world were key to FLW’s understanding of how to create spaces of repose, by his rejection of the non-organic, the toxic, or the artifice, such as air-conditioning systems, that, in combination, denuded the body’s senses. For FLW, the key to liberating space, and places that enhanced the body, was an organic design, such as that seen at Graycliff (Figure 21.1), a dwelling he designed near Buffalo in 1924. Its interior is spacious, open, accessible, with floor to ceiling windows to enable light and air to circulate, including legible spaces that are easy to navigate and creating a cognitive consonance. While FLW’s architecture is suggestive of a potentially important direction for CAS – that is, to excavate and work with the ideas of past spatial practitioners – there is still much that is lacking in relation to broader political agendas for change, or ways to transform, and overturn, the systemic nature of disablism in society. How, then, might systemic disadvantage and inequality be redressed to enable social relations in and through space and place to be non-disabling, and supportive of a diversity of lifestyles and values irrespective of bodily comportment? A multiplicity of interdependent changes are required, including transforming the pedagogic nature of architectural training, shifting from abstract models of design and space, towards engaging with what Boys (2017, p. 171) calls ‘embodiment and situated actions’. This is to focus on how people’s spatial experiences are made through socio-material practices, of how bodies, objects and their interactions with (in) space, are dynamic in their production of ‘action or inaction, ability or disability’ (Galis, 2011, pp. 830–31). Much more, though, is required, including a biopolitics that confronts the many faces of disablism in society. For Jordan (2013, p. 12), there is need to deconstruct, and confront, the mainstream discourses of disability that emphasize essential bodily differences ‘by denaturalizing the logic of ability that informs modern processes of exclusion’. This needs to occur at all levels of society, from formative schooling through to a thorough-

going transformation of governance, to eradicate systemic and institutional disablism and create the basis for an inclusive future. Space, and the making of places, is core to this endeavour, and the ongoing responsibility of geographers is not only to document the spatial manifestations of disablism, but also to agitate for a better world in which there can be no place for the oppression of disabled people. Rob Imrie

Note 1.

There are a number of review papers about disability and geography, and readers are recommended to look at Hall and Wilton (2017); Imrie and Edwards (2007); and Park, Radford and Vickers (1998). Important contributions to the subdiscipline also include the excellent writings by Aimi Hamraie (2017, 2018).

References and selected further reading Abrams, T. and Abbott, D. (2020). Disability, deadly discourse, and collectivity amid coronavirus (COVID-19). Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 22 (1), 168–74. Andrews, E.E., Ayers, K.B. and Brown, K.S. et al. (2021). No body is expendable: medical rationing and disability justice during the COVID-19 pandemic. American Psychologist, 76 (3), 451–61. Bealer, G. and Strawson, P. (1992). The incoherence of empiricism. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 66, 99–143. Bjørnshagen, V. and Ugreninov, E. (2021). Disability disadvantage: experimental evidence of hiring discrimination against wheelchair users. European Sociological Review, 37 (5), 818–33. Boys, J. (2017). Architecture, place and the ‘care-full’ design of everyday life. In C. Bates, R. Imrie and K. Kullman (eds), Care and Design: Bodies, Buildings, Cities. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 155–77. Crowe, B. and Drew, C. (2021). Orange is the new asylum: incarceration of individuals with disabilities. Behaviour Analysis in Practice, 14, 387–95. Edwards, C. and Maxwell, N. (2021). Towards safe(r)space: disability and everyday spaces of

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108  Concise encyclopedia of human geography un/safety and hostility in Ireland. University College Cork, Ireland. Elliott, L. (2017). Victims of violence: the forced sterilisation of women and girls with disabilities in Australia. Laws, 6 (3), 1–19. Eskytė, I., Lawson, A., Orchard, M. and Andrews, E. (2020). Out on the streets – crisis, opportunity and disabled people in the era of Covid-19: reflections from the UK. Alter: European Journal of Disability Research, 14, 329–36. Galis, V. (2011). Enacting disability: how can science and technology studies inform disability studies? Disability and Society, 26, 825–38. Garland-Thomson, R. (2017). Eugenic world building and disability: the strange world of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Journal of Medical Humanities, 38, 133–45. Golledge, R. (1991). Tactual strip maps as navigational aids. Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, 85, 296–301. Hall, E. and Bates, E. (2019). Hatescape? A relational geography of disability hate crime, exclusion and belonging in the city. Geoforum, 101 (3), 100–110. Hall, E. and Wilton, R. (2017). Towards a relational geography of disability. Progress in Human Geography, 41 (6), 727–44. Hamraie, A. (2017). Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hamraie, A. (2018). Enlivened city: inclusive design, biopolitics, and the philosophy of liveability. Built Environments, 44 (1), 77–104. Hamraie, A. (2020). Alterlivability: speculative design fiction and the urban good life in Starhawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing and City of Refuge. Environmental Humanities, 12 (2), 407–30. Imrie, R. (2018). ‘The lonely city’: urban infrastructure and the problem of loneliness. In O. Sagan and E.D. Miller (eds), Narratives of Loneliness: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from the 21st Century. London: Routledge, pp. 140–52. Imrie, R. and Edwards, C. (2007). The geographies of disability: reflections on the develop-

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ment of a sub-discipline. Geography Compass, 1 (3), 623–40. Imrie, R. and Kumar, M. (1998). Focusing on disability and access in the built environment. Disability and Society, 13 (3), 357–74. Jordan, T. (2013). Disability, ablebodiedness, and the biopolitical imagination. Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal, 9 (1), 1–16. Lovett, A.A. and Gattrell, A.C. (1988). The geography of spina bifida in England and Wales. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 13, 288–302. Mayer, D. (1981). Geographical clues about multiple sclerosis. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 71, 28–39. Park, D., Radford, J. and Vickers, M. (1998). Disability studies in human geography. Progress in Human Geography, 22 (2), 208–33. Schweik, S. (2011). Kicked to the curb: ugly law then and now. Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review Amicus, 46, 1–16. Scope (2020). Disability facts and figures. Accessed 7 October 2022 at https://​www​.scope​ .org​.uk/​media/​disability​-facts​-figures/​. Snyder, S. and Mitchell, D. (2006). Eugenics and the racial genome: politics at the molecular level. Patterns of Prejudice, 40 (4–5), 399–412. Webster, L. (2020, 4 July). Coronavirus: why disabled people are calling for a COVID-19 inquiry. BBC News. Accessed 7 October 2022 at https://​ www​.bbc​.co​.uk/​news/​uk​-53221435. Wheeler, S. (2017). The construction of access: the eugenic precedent of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 31 (3), 377–87. Wiedel, J.W. (1966). Tactual maps for the visually handicapped. Professional Geographer, 18, 132–9. Zampas, C. and Lamačková, A. (2011). Forced and coerced sterilization of women in Europe. International Journal of Gynaecology and Obstetrics, 114 (2), 163–6.

22. Displacement Displacement within human geography is most commonly understood as the outcome or processes leading to the involuntary relocation of individuals, households and/ or socio-economic/-cultural groups from their place of residence. Displacement can be studied and conceptualized as (forced) (im)mobilities across and within national, regional, and local territories and borders, and be centered on internal and external refugees. But it can also be studied relationally, outside classical geopolitical logics, and centered on uprooting and the loss of home and community, for instance. The displacement literature is often concerned with the contexts of conflict and war, environmental risk, and climate refugees. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, 2021) estimates that these contexts have led to 82.4 million people, or more than 1 percent of the world population, being displaced in 2020, a doubling from 2010. Yet, human geography scholars have continually widened the set of contexts within which displacement should be understood. Environmental pressures and socio-cultural forces such as nationalism and various ethnic, religious, and gender tensions are known to produce displacements, and development-induced displacement (DID) and displacement from market forces in urban and rural settings are common, but varied, globally. Displacement is always complex and paradoxical. It involves, often simultaneously, mobility and confinement, continuity and rupture, estrangement and opportunity, capability, mobilization, and vulnerability. Human geographers today understand displacement as multi-layered, and as an interplay between different spatial, temporal, historical, political, cultural, and economic elements. In The Handbook of Displacement, displacement is conceived as ‘interlinked ideas, acts, experiences, and effects of enforced spatial, social, symbolic, and material disruption’ (Hammar, 2020, p. 67; original emphasis). Important to note here, is the sensitivity to space invoked in this conceptualization, which allows for displacement to encompass a wide set of place and space processes that go beyond relocation. Empirically, displacement is related to a wide set of processes, on different geo-

graphical scales. The driving actors range from international entities, nation-states, regional actors and municipalities to private companies and social groupings. Forced displacement from geopolitical conflict and war is a common form of displacement, to which the figures from the UNHCR attest. The literature on this form of displacement is extensive and focuses on, among other things, journeys and routes, internal and external border regimes, forms of territoriality, terrorism, and anti-terrorist measures. Mobility and immobility are central topics in this research, and migrant trajectories are understood as phases of movement and stasis, of waiting and of action. But it also relates to situations of displaceability and liminality in host countries and to asylum processes and integration, for instance. The literature also deals with artifacts of displacement and their geographies, such as refugee camps, detention centers, border crossings, structured and clandestine routes, and so forth. Human geographers have advanced our understanding of borders as porous, as borderlands, and borderscapes, and of bordering as a process where borders are continually being (re)made through socio-spatial processes involving everyday practices, political discourse and institutions, symbolic bordering, media discourse, and so on. Urban displacements, meanwhile, are studied both in relation to large-scale urban interventions and to more mundane everyday practices. Examples of displacement-inducing urban processes include slum clearance and demolition schemes, infrastructure projects such as highway construction, Olympic villages and arena constructions, and different types of gentrification and urban renewal schemes. Displacement is not inherently an urban phenomenon driven by (re)development, however. Rural displacement is common and discussed in connection with so-called DID associated with the construction of national parks, dams, mining operations, airports, and other infrastructure projects. Rural displacements have also been connected to the global market expansion of agri-business, increased touristification, and the global marginalization of rural economies that relocates people through contracting job markets. It is also a prominent theoretical and empirical category in discussions on settler colonialism, land occupation, land dispossession, and geo-piracy. The impacts

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of race, ethnicity, racialization, racism, and ‘Othering’ are prevalent topics in much of the displacement literature. In relation to forced migration, much of the literature focuses on the impacts of racial and ethnic discrimination in the treatment and integration in receiving countries in the Global North. Such literature addresses explicit discrimination in migration laws and policy, like quotas that limit entry to receiving countries, and the integration processes once entry has been made. Generally, even though explicit ethnic and racial restrictions are often delegitimized, research shows that, for instance, admission tests discriminate against certain, often poor and Muslim, groups, while ‘white’ asylum seekers are generally favored (FitzGerald et al., 2018). Recently, post-colonial researchers have warned against transposing theories regarding racial and ethnic discrimination in the Global North to empirical contexts in the Global South, where other logics operate. In Latin America, for instance, racial selectivity in migration processes is often based on criteria that can be traced to the nation’s colonial roots. Race and ethnicity in this context are more fluent and interlinked with class, gender, education, and colonial history, forming a complex and relational conception of race (Freier, Bird and Castillo Jara, 2020). Because displacement takes many forms, it is difficult to estimate the scale and range of the phenomenon (Baeten et al., 2020). In one of the earliest studies on housing displacement in the US, Grier and Grier (1980) estimated housing displacement to encompass a few hundred households per city and year, while LeGates and Hartman (1986) said that 2.5 million annually displaced households were a conservative estimate. These wildly different accounts of the scale and severity of the issue have persisted in the literature since. There are several reasons. Conceptually, there is no decided upon definition of displacement, and operationalizing the concept differently will yield different results (see Adey et al., 2020). Definitions of displacement have matured over time, but there are still disagreements between researchers on what kind of displacement really constitutes displacement or not, and how it should be defined. Besides this disagreement, many forms of displacement are hard to measure. Census data in many countries is often too coarse both geographically (with resolutions at city or district level rather Emil Pull

than at a neighborhood level, for instance) and temporally (with data constituting snapshots in time with decades between them, for instance) to capture the often-subtle displacement between and within neighborhoods over time. Other forms of displacement are by their nature impossible to measure since they are subjective and experiential, and defy quantification. Consequently, many forms of displacement are rarely measured in and by themselves but inferred from other parameters. Scholars have inferred displacement through neighborhood statistics on evictions, over-time changes to the social and economic composition of a neighborhood, changes in tenure forms, loss of affordable housing, in statistics on homelessness, and in changes on occupancy levels, and so on – each adding to the puzzle, but neither parameter in itself, or combined, fully accounting for the scale and quality of displacement. Historically, displacement can at the very least be traced back to medieval times, where poverty laws and ordinances restricted access to, and evicted poor populations, outcasts, and ‘Others’ from urban spaces (Coy, 2008). The conceptual genealogy of displacement in a European context can be traced back to Karl Marx’s ([1887] 2013) discussion on primitive accumulation. For Marx, primitive accumulation was a process whereby farmers were displaced from their land in pre-industrial Britain and subsequently forced into the surplus labor army as ready hands for the burgeoning factories. In this reading, displacement as a process heralded and made possible the advent of industrialization and the British turn from feudalism to capitalism. Friedrich Engels ([1872] 1970) later discussed displacement of the working-class population in British cities following urban renewal schemes modeled after Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s modernist interventions in Paris. Engels noted, like gentrification researchers a century later, how slum clearances and urban renewal projects displaced the working class from the inner city to the outskirts – and how the qualitative improvements of the city rarely resulted in qualitative improvements for those whose homes were demolished. Engels, like the early gentrification scholars of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, saw displacement as a re-formation of space along class lines. Indeed, displacement within human geography is closely entwined with, and often

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seen as the murky backside of, gentrification. Ruth Glass, who in the 1960s coined the term gentrification, asserted how the process not only changed the physical and social fabric of former working-class neighborhoods, but that the original inhabitants were in fact displaced (Glass, 1964). There is a long tradition within human geography centered on attachment to place and home, drawing on the insights of Heidegger (1971) and formative phenomenological human geographers like Tuan (1975) and Relph (1976). These place-centered bodies of thought have lent themselves to investigations of displacement outside the commonly used out-migration lexicon. While displacement is most commonly understood and investigated as relocation in abstract space, from point a to b, phenomenologically attuned researchers have instead focused on changes in relative, relational, and emotional space and geographies – that is, changes in place. This strand of research is often attributed to Marc Fried (1963) who pioneered through his investigations into slum clearings in Boston. He found that the emotional toll of displacement on dwellers was connected more to the destruction of the neighborhood and the social fabric within it, than to the relocation itself. Marcuse (1985) would later coin this displacement pressure and conclude that when the local environment undergoes radical shifts, when neighbors move and social networks are shattered, when old stores and services liquidate and change for a different clientele, displacement (through displacement pressure) is already a fact for many dwellers – even though they have yet to relocate (or not). This strand of research that attempts to reaffirm the importance of place over abstract space has received renewed attention (Davidson, 2009) and given rise to new conceptualizations of different forms of displacement like domicide (Porteous and Smith, 2001), expulsions (Sassen, 2014), banishment (Roy, 2017), and un-homing (Atkinson, 2015). In this view, displacement builds incrementally and is less a singular event than an ongoing state of being. This research also reasserts the traumatic and often violent experience of displacement through the primacy given to dweller narratives, and the in-depth engagement with displaced persons (see Fullilove, 2005; Pain, 2019). The refocus from out-migration to

dis-place-ment further incentivized a diversification of methodological approaches. If the nature and scale of displacement cannot be captured through a quantitative analysis based on out-migration data, new methods are needed. This has led to an increased proliferation of qualitative case studies and ethnographic investigations into displacement. Displacement theories based on place attachment are to some extent reactions and a critique against a contemporary hypermobility trend, a view on humans as innately mobile, and of migration and displacement as natural aspects of the human condition. Place-centered ontologies, however, have also been criticized. The fixture to place lends itself to notions such as a natural state, a homestead, or habitat to be uprooted from; an authentic location to be forced out of. This view carries with it some potentially problematic consequences. From this point of view, it is easy to give primacy to the population already in place, at the cost of those who never were, like youth, the homeless, and immigrants, for instance. It is also a view that has been accused of neglecting the relation between displacement and possession. Butler and Athena (2013) remind us that in order to be dispossessed, one must first possess. When defending the right to stay put and the freedom from displacement, one risks naturalizing existent property regimes that allow housing and home for some, but not for others. The critique of displacement risks becoming tied up in a defense of the very property regimes that underpin displacement logics in the first place. Yet, attachment to place and the violence of being uprooted has played a large part in the formation of resistance against displacement, and resistance has been crucial not only for dwellers, but also for the research field itself. Displacement research is, and has been from the outset, heavily influenced by grassroot movements and activist research. Contemporary housing movements like Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH), a Spanish anti-eviction movement, and the US-based Anti-Eviction Mapping Project are two examples of movements where community resistance, grassroot mobilization, and research have become entangled to produce high-quality research. This has led to a proliferation of unorthodox methodologies for researching, and resistEmil Pull

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ing, displacement such as counter-mapping, action research, narrative histories, and collective documentation (on the latter see www​ .estatewatch​.london). As the urban displacement literature has grown to become a central topic in human geography, it has also been criticized for being dominated by perspectives from the ‘Global Northwest’. Post- and decolonial, Indigenous and feminist researchers (e.g., Chatterjee, 2014) argue that this not only restricts the empirical field, but also that the various and differing causes of displacement become obscured and theorization incomplete when filtered through a prism of Northwestern capitalism, neoliberalism, financialization, and gentrification. Displacement studies in the Global Northwest are often associated with, and linked to, a wider critique of the neoliberal city. In this view, displacement is interpreted as the outcome of relentless capital investment, speculation, and urban (re)development through the global commodification and financialization of land and housing. There are, however, perhaps, logics other than the ball-and-chain operation of the neoliberal markets that can act as primary drivers of displacement. Many processes of displacement, like forces of national identity, religious and gender domination, separatist movements, environmental pressures, settler colonialism, and geo-piracy might be linked to markets and global capitalism, but according to Yiftachel (2020), they cannot be reduced to a subset thereof, and sometimes these processes even work against the interests of capital. This debate around ‘differentiated displacement’ (Doshi, 2015), and the infusion of perspectives from outside the Northwest, arguably represents one of the most fertile grounds for displacement research today. Emil Pull

References and selected further reading Adey, P., Bowstead, J.C. and Brickell, K. et al. (eds) (2020), The Handbook of Displacement, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer. Atkinson, R. (2015), ‘Losing one’s place: narratives of neighbourhood change, market injus-

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tice and symbolic displacement’, Housing, Theory and Society, 32, 1–16. Baeten, G., Listerborn, C., Persdotter, M. and Pull, E. (eds) (2020), Housing Displacement: Conceptual and Methodological Issues, London: Routledge. Butler, J. and Athena, A. (2013), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Cambridge: Polity. Chatterjee, I. (2014), Displacement, Revolution, and the New Urban Condition: Theories and Case Studies, London: SAGE. Coy, J.P. (2008), Strangers and Misfits: Banishment, Social Control, and Authority in Early Modern Germany, Leiden: Brill. Davidson, M. (2009), ‘Displacement, space and dwelling: placing the gentrification debate’, Ethics, Place and Environment, 12 (2), 219–34. Doshi, S. (2015), ‘Rethinking gentrification in India: displacement, dispossession and the spectre of development’, in L. Lees, H.B. Shin and E. López-Morales (eds), Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement, Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 101–19. Engels, F. ([1872] 1970), The Housing Question, Moscow: Progress Publishers. FitzGerald, D.S., Cook-Martín, D., García, A.S. and Arar, R. (2018), ‘Can you become one of us? A historical comparison of legal selection of “assimilable” immigrants in Europe and the Americas’, Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies, 44 (1), 27–47. Freier, L.F., Bird, M.D. and Castillo Jara, S. (2020), ‘“Race,” ethnicity, and forced displacement’, in P. Adey, J.C. Bowstead and K. Brickell et al. (eds), The Handbook of Displacement, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, pp. 143–56. Fried, M. (1963), ‘Grieving for a lost home’, in L.J. Duhl (ed.), The Urban Condition, New York: Basic Books, pp. 151–71. Fullilove, M.T. (2005), Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It, New York: Random House. Glass, R. (1964), Aspects of Change, London: MacGibbon & Kee. Grier, G. and Grier, E. (1980), ‘Urban displacement: a reconnaissance’, in S.B. Laska and D. Spain (eds), Back to the City: Issues in Neighborhood Renovation, Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp. 252–68. Hammar, A. (2020), ‘Displacement economies: a relational approach to displacement’, in P. Adey, J.C. Bowstead and K. Brickell et al. (eds), The Handbook of Displacement, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, pp. 67–78. Heidegger, M. (1971), ‘Building, dwelling, thinking’, in Poetry, Language and Thought (edited by A. Hofsdater), New York: Harper & Row, pp. 143–62. LeGates, R.T. and Hartman, C. (1986), ‘The anatomy of displacement in the United

Displacement  113 States’, in N. Smith and P. Williams (eds), Gentrification of the City, London: Unwin Hyman, pp. 178–200. Marcuse, P. (1985), ‘Gentrification, abandonment, and displacement: connections, causes, and policy responses in New York City’, Washington University Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law, 28 (195), 195–240. Marx, K. ([1887] 2013), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I, Book One: The Process of Capitalist Production, New York: Cosimo Classics. Pain, R. (2019), ‘Chronic urban trauma: the slow violence of housing dispossession’, Urban Studies, 56 (2), 385–400. Porteous, J.D. and Smith, S.E. (2001), Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home, Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Relph, E.C. (1976), Place and Placelessness, London: Pion. Roy, A. (2017), ‘Dis/possessive collectivism: property and personhood at city’s end’, Geoforum, 80, A1–A11.

Sassen, S. (2014), Expulsions – Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Tuan, Y.F. (1975), ‘An experiential perspective’, Geographical Review, 65 (2), 151–65. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (2021), Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2020, accessed 9 October 2022 at https://​www​.unhcr​.org/​60b638e37/​unhcr​ -global​-trends​-2020. Yiftachel, O. (2020), ‘From displacement to displaceability’, City, 24 (1–2), 151–65.

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23. Economic geographies The scope of ‘economic’ matters encompasses a broad array of issues and scales. Clark et al. (2018), in the New Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography, summarized the study of ‘economic’ matters in geography as asking ‘where’, ‘why’ and ‘so what’ questions of the spatiality of economic processes in different locations, places and territories, the diversity of economic lives they create, and the consequences of these organizations and processes on the economy, society and nature. Empirically, this entails the study of a broad range of activities including the production, consumption, distribution and exchange taking place at scales ranging from individual, household, small-to-medium size businesses and transnational corporations, to municipalities, nations and supranational blocs, taking place in both formal and alternative economic spaces. Given the breadth of the topic and the constant innovation and evolution of economic processes and relations, geographical inquiry into matters ‘economic’ has seen multiple ‘turns’ in theoretical underpinnings, methodological approaches and empirical foci, deeply influenced by contemporary developments (Barnes, 2000; Scott, 2000). This entry will follow the historic development of what ‘economic’ has meant for geographers. In doing so, it will summarize the multiple theoretical, methodological and empirical approaches and foci of the field, and showcase the relevance of economic geography research in answering contemporary matters of concern.

Colonial, imperialist roots While there is not a definitive institution or author that marked the emergence of the study of economic geography, the study of economic production and flow across space rose to prominence in the Anglo-American world between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when various modern academic disciplines began to be institutionalized (Barnes, 2000). Early economic geographical work bears uncomfortable links with colonialism and imperialism (ibid.). At the time, geog-

raphers were interested in the production and flow of commodities under the imperial system (ibid.). Geographical research was primarily concerned with the production of maps, figures and tables to record and visualize the intricacies of the imperial project, and these empirical pursuits were underpinned by the overarching conceptual belief of environmental determinism. Though the study of the ‘economic’ by geographers has since evolved, as the remainder of this entry will elaborate, economic geographers should be aware and critical of theoretical concepts and methodologies that are hangovers from its colonial, imperialistic roots, which necessarily omit and compromise the perspectives and interest of the Global South and Indigenous communities (Radcliffe, 2017).

The regionalist approach Borrowing Barnes’s conceptualization of the development of economic geography as an ‘invention’ of a field that is situated in, and influenced by, contemporary political and social contexts, the globalist, environmentally deterministic approach to economic geographical studies was replaced by a regionalist approach by the end of World War I. Instead of documenting the production and transportation of commodities in the imperialist system, the regionalist approach focused on localities – especially those close to the homes of researchers – that were bound together by both visible and invisible components of the economy, such as assets, economic activities, market and prices, as well as practices and knowledge. Moving away from analysing archival information, the regionalist approach deployed on-the-ground field research to uncover the unique complexity of regions. The approach was heavily focused on empirics. Rather than seeking to formulate universal geographical laws, the regionalist approach was interested in organizing observed data into typologies of photographs, maps, tabulations and lists. This development laid the foundations for field research in economic geography, as well as the use of typologies as an analytical method. This approach fell out of favour in the wake of the post-World War II Fordist boom, but interest revived in the 1970s and 1980s as Fordism declined and post-Fordist

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industries, characterized by spatial agglomeration and intra-regional business relations, rose. Empirically, this approach focused on regions with highly concentrated industries, such as the high-tech manufacturing districts in California and Britain, and international financial centres and neo-artisanal districts in Europe. The revival of the regionalist approach in this era sheds new light on how formal and informal relations, at both intraand inter-institutional scales, shape economic activities and processes by facilitating learning and constructing conventions (Bathelt and Glückler, 2003). This approach combined the conceptual and methodological tools from previous economic geographical queries in economic globalization and regional economics, and defended the relevance of geographical inquiry in a ‘hyper-connected’ era.

New economic geography Geographical studies of the ‘economic’ would inevitably involve dialogues with economists. The Fordist boom, the rise of modern consumer society and the Keynesian state in the 1950s gave rise to intellectual demands for explaining the unprecedented levels of growth, industrialization, urbanization and flow. A ‘quantitative revolution’ emerged in the Anglo-American academic world, fuelled by post-war optimism in the ability of science and technology to provide solutions and explanations for contemporary phenomena. This development envisioned economic geography as a universal law-finding subdiscipline underpinned by a positivist epistemology. In the place of a field-based, idiographic regional approach, geographers sought to construct models and deploy statistical methods that were subsequently tested against the real world. In parallel, economists and geographers who were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with neoclassical economists’ spatial insensitivity began to incorporate the spatial analytical approaches of geographical studies to challenge the prevalent neoclassical competitive equilibrium theory. Instead of taking a spatially agnostic approach, new economic geography (NEG) sought to overlap spatial analysis with economic equilibrium theory. That is, supplies and price variables expressed as an explicit function of loca-

tion. The combination of the quantitative revolution and incorporation of spatial and regional analysis into economic thinking gave rise to the NEG that prevailed in the 1960s. At the time, the deployment of mathematics and computer-generated results to devise practical solutions to problems around transportation or urban planning, or devising optimal solutions for the location of firms, shops and residents, also afforded economic geographers greater policy influence. While the popularity of spatial analysis and regional science has waned with the rise of critical political economy, as I will discuss below, Krugman’s core–periphery model introduced in the early 1990s put NEG back into prominence in both academia and in policy fields (Krugman, 1991). However, economic geographers proper have also pointed out the fundamental incompatibility between the ontology and epistemology of geographers and economists (Martin, 1999). The development of and debates around NEG thus showcases the mutual complementarity and tensions between the field of geography and adjacent fields in addressing research topics related to the ‘economic’.

Critical political economy As the quantitative approach to regional science and spatial analysis developed, a strong critical political-economic discourse emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s within the Anglo-American context with the rise of the civil rights movement, challenges to the Fordist manufacturing system, and the collapse of the Keynesian welfare state. These contemporary developments exposed the analytical inadequacy of methodological individualism underpinning NEG at the time, and it subsequently gave rise to a critical geographical enquiry of capitalist modes of production, spearheaded by David Harvey. This development brought in Marxian thinking of class struggle, labour theory of value and structural crisis within the capitalist economy and their spatial effect on understanding contemporary issues of poverty, unemployment, uneven development, job loss, poverty and regional decline. In addition to providing critical political-economic critique to the contemporary phenomenon of inequality, a critiFelicia Liu

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cal political economy approach challenged the underlying politics of conducting spatial analysis and regional science. By assuming neutrality of analysis and accepting existing technocratic and institutional structures at face value, these studies had failed to confront the structurally determined injustices of capitalist modes of production. To address this problem, scholars sought to uncover and critique how the forces of capital accumulation have created and recreated geographical realities. However, critics of this approach pointed to the key omissions of macro and micro social structures beyond production, labour and class relations in this approach, such as gender struggles, ecological problems and the variation of human intentionality and experience.

Feminist economic geography and alternative economies In response, feminist economic geographers adopted a post-structuralist lens with which to analyse the gendered, racialized and informal dimensions of economic production and relations (Massey, 1991). Notably, J. K. Gibson-Graham (the pen name shared by Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham) (1996) coined the concept of ‘diverse economies’ and challenged the Marxian assumption of capitalism as a hegemonic economic entity. Instead, they put forward a post-structural, feminist conceptualization of economies that exist in informal, marginalized and alternative spaces that are not visibly represented in the formal, capitalist, firm-based system. Feminist economic geography gave rise to a new lens of understanding scholarship as an ‘ontological performance’ of the world that we live in (Gibson-Graham, 2008). This scholarship has encouraged a post-structural approach to economic methodologies. They favoured data collection methods such as interviews as a means of excavating the ‘truth’ but rather interpreted as performed narratives, as well as the diversification of methodological approaches, incorporating sociological and anthropological methods such as ethnography (McDowell, 1992). Importantly, the feminist turn also gave rise to critical reflections on scholars’ positionality in research. This encouraged economic geographers to evaluate their internal biases, Felicia Liu

as well as the power dynamics and relations in the processes of collecting and analysing data, and in disseminating research (ibid.).

Evolutionary economic geography Another development that arose from critiques of the NEG is evolutionary economic geography (EEG). Departing from using models in identifying universal laws, EEG provided nuanced explanations of spatial differentiations of how economic activities take place and are organized. Instead of explaining spatial difference as regions – being at different stages of recovering, or pre-existing, or in new states of equilibrium – EEG attributes the similarities and differences in economic patterns as the creation and selective transmission of routines in space. Uniquely, EEG draws upon biological concepts such as variety, selection, life cycles and adaptation, and economic notions such as path-dependency, lock-in and proximity. EEG provides an institution-centric interpretation of the emergence and diminishing of economic activities and organization (Boschma and Frenken, 2006). The analytical focus of EEG lies in individual institutions and the contested impact of their contingencies path- and place-dependencies in determining the behaviour. In aggregate, these factors and the uneven relations between firms make up the composition of a market landscape. In particular, EEG has provided important empirical insights into the patterns through which spatial clusters emerge, evolve, endure or decline, the formation of uneven network relations and subsequent access to knowledge, as well as the processes of regional diversification (Boschma and Frenken, 2011). In sum, evolutionary approaches to economic geography have in common a focus on historical processes that explain the uneven development and transformation of the economic landscape.

Financial geographies Coinciding with the financial ‘Big Bang’ in the wake of the deregulation of the London Stock Exchange, in the 1980s economic geographers turned to the study of money and

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finance, and the relations between markets and the state. Distinct from the economic processes of production of goods and services that are grounded in the real economy, finance is characterized by abstracting and stretching the temporal and geographical scale of production to generate liquidity and managed risk. Early economic geographical work in finance drew conceptually and methodologically from regional and relational economic geography, focusing on the development of financial centres and the role of financial centres in organizing the flow of capital, as well as the relations between finance and local development. Subsequently, developments in research on money and finance have taken a cultural economy approach that has sought to unpick the geographically variegated processes of constructing calculative devices, technologies and relations that constitute the global financial system (Hall, 2011). Another avenue of research focused on the role of space and place in constituting financial subjectivities (Hall, 2012). Through these lenses, economic geographers have offered critical explanations of contemporary events and phenomena, such as the Global Financial Crisis, as well as the ‘financialization’ of public institutions, urban spaces and everyday lives (Fields, 2015; Lai, 2018). These contemporary issues drove the study of financial geography into prominence, but it is also important to heed Christophers’ (2015) warning of the careless deployment of the concept of ‘financialization’ that limits geographers’ ability to precisely describe, theorize and critique the domination and penetration of financial logics and relations into different realms of life, and its subsequent impacts on equality, democracy, and more recently, global climate and the environment.

Environmental economic geography As climate change, biodiversity loss and nature degradation entered into public concern in the late 1990s, environmental concerns that have long been side-lined in economic geography were finally incorporated into the field (Bridge, 2008). By directly confronting the encounter between the economic and envi-

ronmental realms, environmental economic geography shed new light on existing learnings in economic geography. Production, rather than being a process of value creation, was reconceptualized as a process of material transformation, putting environmental change and the organization of elements at the centre, rather than the margins, of economic activity. The contemporary ecological emergency unearthed the structural crisis in the neglect and marginalization of nature in the model of economic growth adopted since the Industrial Revolution, spread geographically as the result of imperialism, and scaled up exponentially since the end of World War II. Global trade, particularly the flow of commodity and capital between the developed ‘Global North’ and developing ‘Global South’, was reconceptualized as unequal ecological exchange. In addition to pushing for a reincorporation of nature into analyses of the economic realm, environmental economic geography has captured new empirical phenomena, as environmental concerns are receiving increasing attention in the economic realm. Focusing on emerging models of reorganizing economic activities to deliver positive environmental outcomes, such as carbon markets, sustainable finance and various environmentally oriented innovations, could bring new theoretical conceptualizations that could contribute to contemporary environmental and climate policy debates (Bailey and Caprotti, 2014).

Developments since the turn of the century The conceptual and empirical foci and subsequent methodological approaches of ‘economic’ geographical inquiry, have evolved, heavily influenced by shifts in contemporary economic contexts. This entry has attempted to provide a summary of how these developments have shaped the way geographers have approached economics, research questions, and what theoretical and methodological tools the field has at its disposal in addressing contemporary and future economic problems. Three key developments have emerged for the geographical study of things ‘economic’, Felicia Liu

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posing both opportunities and challenges for the field. At the turn of the century, the focus of economic geography shifted towards the rapid growth of Asian and other emerging markets, as well as the expansion of South–South investment and trade flows. This shift has not only been an empirical one, there has also been a growing call, especially from scholars from traditionally marginalized groups, to develop and adopt theories from the Global South (Murphy, 2008; Pollard et al., 2009). Relatedly, calls for ethical and inclusive scholarship in economic geography, especially concerning gender and post-colonial representation, have strengthened (Pollard et al., 2009). In the future, economic geographers should enhance their commitment to ‘respectful engagement’ with different theoretical, methodological and topical lines, in order to achieve a more inclusive, equitable terrain of knowledge production (Rosenman, Loomis and Kay, 2020). Second, the current fossil-dependent, gross domestic product (GDP) growth-driven economic status quo has driven the world into the crises of climate change and unprecedented biodiversity and nature loss, which will bring unprecedented levels of social inequality. Economic geographers, with their literacy in economic and financial language, spatial sensitivity and critical analytical tools of the economic system, are well situated to offer policy-relevant but critical research that contributes to resolving the environmental crisis. Third, the rise of financial technology (fintech) and other modes of digitalization of the economy broadly has brought about new dimensions to imagining economic processes and relations. Digitalization cuts across topics related to the ‘economic’ that have interested geographers, including urban development (Fields, 2022), financial and production networks (Lai and Samers, 2021), as well as equity and inclusion (ibid.). In sum, future geographical studies of matters ‘economic’ need to remain sensitive to contemporary economic developments and offer critical evaluation of such developments on global equity, democracy and environ-

Felicia Liu

mental justice. At the same time, economic geography as a field must be committed to a diversity of research topics, methods, theories, as well as representation of research practitioners. Felicia Liu

References and selected further reading Bailey, I. and Caprotti, F. (2014). The green economy: functional domains and theoretical directions of enquiry. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 46 (8), 1797–813. Barnes, T.J. (2000). Inventing Anglo-American economic geography, 1889–1960. In T.J. Barnes (ed.), A Companion to Economic Geography, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 11–26. Bathelt, H. and Glückler, J. (2003). Toward a relational economic geography. Journal of Economic Geography, 3 (2), 117–44. Boschma, R.A. and Frenken, K. (2006). Why is economic geography not an evolutionary science? Towards an evolutionary economic geography. Journal of Economic Geography, 6 (3), 273–302. Boschma, R. and Frenken, K. (2011). The emerging empirics of evolutionary economic geography.  Journal of Economic Geography,  11 (2), 295–307. Bridge, G. (2008). Environmental economic geography: a sympathetic critique. Geoforum, 39 (1), 76–81. Christophers, B. (2015). The limits to financialization. Dialogues in Human Geography, 5 (2), 183–200. Clark, G.L., Feldman, M.P., Gertler, M.S. and Wójcik, D. (2018). Introduction. In G.L. Clark, M.P. Feldman, M.S. Gertler and D. Wójcik (eds), The New Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–18. Fields, D. (2015). Contesting the financialization of urban space: community organizations and the struggle to preserve affordable rental housing in New York City. Journal of Urban Affairs, 37 (2), 144–65. Fields, D. (2022). Automated landlord: digital technologies and post-crisis financial accumu-

Economic geographies  119 lation. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 54 (1), 160–81. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996). The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Oxford: Blackwell. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2008). Diverse economies: performative practices for other worlds. Progress in Human Geography, 32 (5), 613–32. Hall, S. (2011). Geographies of money and finance I: cultural economy, politics and place. Progress in Human Geography, 35 (2), 234–45. Hall, S. (2012). Geographies of money and finance II: financialization and financial subjects. Progress in Human Geography, 36 (3), 403–11. Krugman, P.R. (1991). Geography and Trade. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lai, K. (2018). Financialization of everyday life. In G.L. Clark, M.P. Feldman, M.S. Gertler and D. Wójcik (eds), The New Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 611–28. Lai, K.P. and Samers, M. (2021). Towards an economic geography of FinTech. Progress in Human Geography, 45 (4), 720–39. Martin, R. (1999). The new ‘geographical turn’ in economics: some critical reflections. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 23 (1), 65–91. Massey, D. (1991). Flexible sexism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 9 (1), 31–57.

McDowell, L. (1992). Doing gender: feminism, feminists and research methods in human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 17 (4), 399–416. Murphy, J.T. (2008). Economic geographies of the Global South: missed opportunities and promising intersections with development studies. Geography Compass, 2 (3), 851–73. Pollard, J., McEwan, C., Laurie, N. and Stenning, A. (2009). Economic geography under postcolonial scrutiny. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34 (2), 137–42. Radcliffe, S.A. (2017). Decolonising geographical knowledges. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42 (3), 329–33. Rosenman, E., Loomis, J. and Kay, K. (2020). Diversity, representation, and the limits of engaged pluralism in (economic) geography. Progress in Human Geography, 44 (3), 510–33. Scott, A.J. (2000). Economic geography: the great half-century. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 24 (4), 483–504.

Felicia Liu

24. Education The work on geographies of education encompasses research on spaces of formal and informal learning and the experiences of actors within educational spaces. Research concerns early-years education, primary and secondary schools, further education, higher education (HE), adult education, alternative education, informal education and lifelong learning. Geographers are interested in education because it concerns how knowledge is produced and transmitted and the specific spatial and cultural variations surrounding this. Research on education takes place in other disciplines such as sociology, psychology, and the field of education itself; however, geographers offer a critical contribution to educational issues by examining their spatial aspects (Kučerová, 2020). Research within the geographies of education intersects with other subdisciplines of geography – for example, children’s geographies, emotional geographies, digital geographies, and research on geographical education. Research on the geographies of education differs from geographical education, which concerns the pedagogies of geography as a subject within schools and universities. However, they are united in the Royal Geographical Society’s GeogEd research group, which supports geographers in ‘pedagogic research and the scholarship of teaching and learning [of geography] across a variety of educational spaces’, as well as ‘geographical understanding of education, teaching and learning’ (GeogEd, 2022, n.p.). The GeogEd research group, formerly known as the Higher Education Research Group, launched in 2019 with an expanded scope to include researchers interested in the geographies of education and geographical education beyond HE whilst recognizing their overlapping interests (West et al., 2022). Geographies of education research utilizes a wide range of methodologies and research methods depending on topic and the age of participants. Geographers of education frequently utilize creative and participatory methodologies, incorporating young people as co-researchers (e.g., Cutter-Mackenzie and Rousell, 2019; Honkanen, Poikolainen and Karlsson, 2018) to reflect the value of their voices and further increase the benefits of involvement by encouraging young people

to learn about the research process. Research with children is increasingly taking on a participant child-centric approach (Stafford, 2017), recognizing that children are expert social agents. Nevertheless, many ethical approval boards mandate that research with children requires parental consent. However, immersive methodologies, such as institutional ethnography, may problematize this decree due to the large number of potential participants within an educational institution and relevance of fleeting encounters in ethnographic research in sensing the atmosphere of a space. The geographies of education are defined by the focus on the importance of spatialities in educational environments in shaping how education is constructed and experienced (Holloway and Jöns, 2012, p. 482). Formal education takes place in specific spaces/ institutions, such as schools, colleges and universities, each of which have their own geographies, spatialities and materialities. Research within the geographies of education ranges various scales, from the micro-spaces of classrooms, playgrounds and lecture halls, to local, national and international policies that determine who attends educational institutions and where. It is important to note that research on individual educational spaces ‘cannot be considered in isolation from other social processes operating at a variety of spatial scales’ (Cook and Hemming, 2011, p. 2). Schools and educational facilities are important sites of socialization where students learn not only academic knowledge and skills, but also social norms and values, preparation for adulthood, and how to live cohesively within society (Holt, 2007). Education is a formative time for young people and is one of the most influential elements of childhood and growing up, contributing to its significance as a geographical research area. Students not only experience socialization differently based on their identities, but also based on the demographics and socio-spatial context of their educational institution. Educational spaces, particularly classrooms in schools, are highly regulated and controlled by hierarchal adults, with carefully designed desk layouts and seating plans to encourage pupil productivity, minimize disruption and provide a vantage point for teachers to teach and survey the class (Collins and Coleman, 2008). Many scholars draw on Foucault (1980) to conceptualize

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how school experiences are dictated by adult power through surveillance, discipline and control. However, pupils seek to challenge these confines, disrupting the conceived socio-spatial order of learning spaces (Collins and Coleman, 2008). School hallways and playgrounds provide greater opportunities for autonomy and the contestation of adult control, although access to and use of these spaces are still governed by staff. Educational spaces are key sites of identity formation, shaped by their socio-spatial contexts, due to the bringing together of people from different backgrounds and identities, with the spatialities of social difference being a significant area of research within the geographies of education (Worth, 2013). Geographers of education have researched how the physical and social organization of educational spaces impact the experiences of pupils with various identity characteristics. For example, increased international migration has had a significant impact across the education sector, particularly in the Global North, reflected in increased geographical research on multiculturalism in education and the educational outcomes of students from ethnic minority backgrounds. Anglocentric geographical research into multiculturalism has generally focused on ethnicity in terms of diversity and tensions, with language and multilingualism being largely omitted despite forming a significant element of culture and being a focus of schools in terms of second language acquisition and statistics on EAL (English as an additional language). Concepts used elsewhere in human geography to analyse and understand multiculturalism, such as superdiversity, cohesion, everyday multiculture, and conviviality, are applied to educational settings to understand young people’s everyday experiences of education in diverse contexts (Bennett et al., 2017; Wilson, 2013). Furthermore, intersecting with research from the geographies of disability, geographical studies, predominantly from the UK, North America and Australia, have explored the educational experiences of disabled students at various educational stages. Such research initially focused on experiences of physically disabled students surrounding social exclusion and the physical design of educational spaces and has since diversified to cover a range of physical and cognitive disabilities, mental health experi-

ences, and socio-emotional needs. Previous research has explored how children with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) have been segregated from mainstream classes, either in special schools or segregated units/classrooms within mainstream schools (Holt, Lea and Bowlby, 2012), examining the complexities around creating a supportive learning environment and the resulting simultaneity of inclusion and exclusion. Geographical research has explored the experiences of SEND pupils depending on their other intersecting identity characteristics, such as class, wealth and capital (Holt, Bowlby and Lea, 2019) and race and ethnicity (Waitoller and Lubienski, 2019), which may influence the quality and types of educational spaces to which they are exposed. With increasing national and international education policies focusing on promoting equality, research into the experiences of pupils with different intersecting identity characteristics is likely to continue in different global contexts. However, there are particular absences in research on educational opportunities for young people living in various marginalized circumstances in both the Global South and North, particularly those facing poverty, environmental hazards and conflict zones (Kraftl et al., 2022). Whilst the need to work and lack of proximity to educational facilities are often assumed to be barriers to education amongst disadvantaged pupils in the Global South, scholars such as Baschieri and Falkingham (2009) (speaking in the context of Tajikistan) highlight the need to consider the multitude of factors affecting school attendance at an individual, household and community level. Geographers have turned their attention to the specific socio-spatial contexts of alternative education, which intentionally diverge from conventional educational experiences offered at mainstream schools in their use and arrangement of physical learning spaces, funding, curricula, and the skills and aims that they promote in their learners (Kraftl, 2014). Nevertheless, the positioning of alternative education is heterogeneous and continuously changing, interacting and dis/ connecting with the mainstream (Kraftl, 2013). Alternative education sites include forest schools, Steiner schools, Montessori schools, care farms and home-schooling, with growing numbers of pupils participating in Ellen Bishop

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alternative education (e.g., ~5 per cent in the UK, reflecting the legality of non-attendance at mainstream educational facilities in place of alternatives; ibid.). Geographical scholarship on alternative education has largely come from Europe and the US (although there are some studies in other locations such as China – see De Silva, Woods and Kong, 2020). Increasing research on alternative education has emerged alongside research on informal learning spaces, which promote ‘collaborative learning outside the traditional classroom setting, traversing the divide between education and play’ (Pimlott-Wilson and Coates, 2019, p. 270). Hence, informal education is also an inherently spatial and geographical issue through which young people’s interactions with other people and the spaces around them shape their experiences. Geographers, such as Gough et al. (2019) and Aufseeser (2014) who research informal education in a Ghanaian and Peruvian context, respectively, advocate for a wider understanding of informal education to consider learning through work as a form of education and livelihood. They have also called for greater research into informal education in the Global South, which may challenge the formal/informal education dichotomy based on education systems in the Global North. Gough et al. (2019) specifically highlight the need for increased global geographical inquiry into apprenticeships as learning on the job. Research on HE students may be termed ‘student geographies’ due to the distinct and significant effects they have on university towns/cities, student (im)mobilities, and the micro-geographies of university campuses and student accommodation. HE is shaped by migration, both internal and international. There are multiple factors affecting decisions on which university to attend, relating to the provision of HE institutions (including courses offered, admissions grades, university rankings and location) and relating to individual students (including habitus, capital and socio-economic and cultural characteristics). For example, Gamsu, Donnelly and Harris (2018, p. 1) argue that ‘students’ mobility decisions for university are influenced by the uneven geography of race in U.K. cities and universities’, with white students in the UK typically attending universities in more ethnically diverse areas than they are from (although this is likely due to universities Ellen Bishop

typically being located in large urban areas with more diverse populations) and students from ethnic minority backgrounds seeking university places at institutions where there will be other students from similar backgrounds. Research on the ethnic make-up of HE institutions across different geographical locations parallels widening participation initiatives currently taking place in UK universities, encouraging students from underrepresented backgrounds (such as ethnic minority, working class, and first-generation university attendees) to attend university and/ or take specific subjects. There is a history of research into international students in various countries, with recent debates covering the importance of social networks for international student mobilities (Beech, 2015), the precarity, temporality and sense of belonging of international students in light of changing migration policies (Chacko, 2021, writing in the context of Singapore), and processes of home-making amongst international students (see Prazeres, 2018, who considers Canadian exchange students studying/working in Global South countries). The datafication of education facilities through the local, national and international generation and collection of data for use in monitoring and evaluation in the form of rankings and league tables (Jarke and Breiter, 2019), predominantly in the Global North, contributes to the current competitive culture of education (Finn, 2016). Such measures may be used by students and parents to inform their choices over education providers, of which there are various geographies, as global university rankings have created ‘a new multi-scalar geography of institutional reputation’ (Collins and Park, 2016, p. 115). The internationalization, globalization, neoliberalism and commodification of education has had significant impacts on the education sector, particularly in HE, which is reflected in geographical scholarship. The role of education in young people’s lives is valued globally, and therefore researched globally. Education has gained further political attention in the Global North due to its role in contributing to a knowledge economy, and in the Global South through the promotion of universal education in the UN’s Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals (Kraftl et al., 2022). Hence, local, national and international education policy changes impact the geogra-

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phies and spatialities of education, provoking geographical research. Education has the ability to promote equality, yet often creates further inequalities. Geographers have examined how educational experiences and curricula can reproduce social inequalities across different spatial contexts, through inequitable access and quality of education for young people from disadvantaged socio-economic groups and deprived areas, for example. This challenges the view of policymakers who see education as a means for children to escape disadvantage through education and resulting improved job prospects. Despite burgeoning research on education in the Global South, voices from the Global North, and particularly anglophone voices, still dominate geographies of education research (ibid.). Hence, alongside other geographical subdisciplines, there are calls to decolonize geographical knowledge on education, as well as challenge racism in the structures of education and curricula. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is drawing the attention of education researchers as they seek to examine the effects of home/virtual learning resulting from closures of in-person educational facilities on students across various age groups globally. Reports show that school-aged children received varied quality and quantity of virtual learning during COVID-19 lockdowns, thus widening existing socio-economic inequalities facing children (Andrew et al., 2020). Likewise, remote learning for university students is said to have led to social isolation and widening inequalities (e.g., around digital access), although the benefits of flexibility and independence have also been recognized. Geographers are turning their attention to such issues, specifically drawing attention to the geographies and spatialities of learning at a distance and the resulting effects on students from different backgrounds. Such research also intersects with existing research on the experiences of international students, students from working-class backgrounds, SEND pupils, and black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) students, to name a few, with exploration of the effects on specific students. Increasing research on the long-term effects of the disruption to education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to emerge. Ellen Bishop

References Andrew, A., Cattan, S. and Costa Dias, M. et al. (2020). Family time use and home learning during the COVID-19 lockdown. Institute for Fiscal Studies. Accessed 8 October 2022 at https://​ifs​.org​.uk/​publications/​15038. Aufseeser, D. (2014). Limiting spaces of informal learning among street children in Peru. In S. Mills and P. Kraftl (eds), Informal Education, Childhood and Youth: Geographies, Histories, Practices. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 112–23. Baschieri, A. and Falkingham, J. (2009). Staying in school: assessing the role of access, availability, and economic opportunities – the case of Tajikistan. Population, Space and Place, 15 (6), 205–24. Beech, S. (2015). International student mobility: the role of social networks. Social & Cultural Geography, 16 (3), 332–50. Bennett, K., Cochrane, A., Mohan, G. and Neal, S. (2017). Negotiating the educational spaces of urban multiculture: skills, competencies and college life. Urban Studies, 54 (10), 2305–21. Chacko, E. (2021). Emerging precarity among international students in Singapore: experiences, understandings and responses. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 47 (20), 4741–57. Collins, D. and Coleman, T. (2008). Social geographies of education: looking within, and beyond, school boundaries. Geography Compass, 2 (1), 281–99. Collins, F. and Park, G. (2016). Ranking and the multiplication of reputation: reflections from the frontier of globalizing higher education. Higher Education, 72 (1), 115–29. Cook, V. and Hemming, P. (2011). Education spaces: embodied dimensions and dynamics. Social & Cultural Geography, 12 (1), 1–8. Cutter-Mackenzie, A. and Rousell, D. (2019). Education for what? Shaping the field of climate change education with children and young people as co-researchers. Children’s Geographies, 17 (1), 90–104. De Silva, M., Woods, O. and Kong, L. (2020). Alternative education spaces and pathways: insights from an international Christian school in China. Area, 52 (4), 750–57. Finn, M. (2016). Atmospheres of progress in a data-based school. Cultural Geographies, 23 (1), 29–49. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books. Gamsu, S., Donnelly, M. and Harris, R. (2018). The spatial dynamics of race in the transition to university: diverse cities and white campuses in

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124  Concise encyclopedia of human geography U.K. higher education. Population, Space and Place, 25 (5), 1–15. GeogEd (2022). About GeogEd. Accessed 8 October 2022 at https://​geogedrg​.org/​about/​. Gough, K., Langevang, T., Yankson, P. and Owusu, G. (2019). Shaping geographies of informal education: a Global South perspective. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109 (6), 1885–902. Holloway, S. and Jöns, H. (2012). Geographies of education and learning. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37 (4), 482–8. Holt, L. (2007). Children’s sociospatial (re)production of disability within primary school playgrounds. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25 (5), 783–802. Holt, L., Bowlby, S. and Lea, J. (2019). Disability, special educational needs, class, capitals, and segregation in schools: a population geography perspective. Population, Space and Place, 25 (4), 1–11. Holt, L., Lea, J. and Bowlby, S. (2012). Special units for young people on the autistic spectrum in mainstream schools: sites of normalisation, abnormalisation, inclusion, and exclusion. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 44 (9), 2191–206. Honkanen, K., Poikolainen, J. and Karlsson, L. (2018). Children and young people as co-researchers – researching subjective well-being in residential area with visual and verbal methods. Children’s Geographies, 16 (2), 184–95. Jarke, J. and Breiter, A. (2019). Editorial: the datafication of education. Learning, Media and Technology, 44 (1), 1–6. Kraftl, P. (2013). Geographies of Alternative Education: Diverse Learning Spaces for

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Children and Young People. Bristol: Policy Press. Kraftl, P. (2014). What are alternative education spaces – and why do they matter? Geography, 99 (3), 128–39. Kraftl, P., Andrews, W. and Beech, S. et al. (2022). Geographies of education: a journey. Area, 54 (1), 15–23. Kučerová, S. (2020). Special issue: geography of education. Journal of Pedagogy, 11 (1), 5–9. Pimlott-Wilson, H. and Coates, J. (2019). Rethinking learning? Challenging and accommodating neoliberal educational agenda in the integration of Forest School into mainstream educational settings. The Geographical Journal, 185 (3), 268–78. Prazeres, L. (2018). At home in the city: everyday practices and distinction in international student mobility. Social & Cultural Geography, 19 (7), 914–34. Stafford, L. (2017). ‘What about my voice’: emancipating the voices of children with disabilities through participant-centred methods. Children’s Geographies, 15 (5), 600–13. Waitoller, F. and Lubienski, C. (2019). Disability, race, and the geography of school choice: toward an intersectional analytical framework. AERA Open, 5 (1), 1–12. West, H., Hill, J. and Finn, M. et al. (2022). GeogEd: a new research group founded on the reciprocal relationship between geography education and the geographies of education. Area, 54, 24–52. Wilson, F. (2013). Collective life: parents, playground encounters and the multicultural city. Social & Cultural Geography, 14 (6), 625–48. Worth, N. (2013). Making friends and fitting in: a social-relational understanding of disability at school. Social & Cultural Geography, 14 (1), 103–23.

25. Emotional Noun: with the: ‘That which is emotional; emotions collectively’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2021); e.g., ‘Incorporating the emotional in/ through embodied ways of knowing’ (Askins and Swanson, 2019, p. 4)

Since the turn of the century, geographers have been at the forefront of a project to advance understandings of the complex, political, ambiguous and inherently geographical dynamics of the emotional. At its inception, ‘emotional geographies’ was associated with, and sometimes framed in opposition to, non-representational and affect theories, and there were generative discussions on both the critical role of emotion in personal and social life and how to conceptualize emotion(ality). Early flirtation with a ‘basic emotions theory’, which categorizes universal emotional experience and expression around ‘core’ emotions, was quickly abandoned in favour of more relational and processual approaches. How to dissect, order and catalogue the multifaceted and valenced emotional experience, spatialities and temporalities of, for example, grief, seemed to delimit geographical work on the emotional. We are always already emotional, in that diverse emotional registers are evoked through/in us with variable levels of intensity and valence, shaping our engagements with the world. Emotional processes are often difficult to recognize and read, and almost all experiences elicit ‘mixed emotions’, never exclusively or unproblematically joy, sorrow and so on. German language is better than English at capturing the complexity of emotional ‘states’ or feelings. Gemütlichkeit, for example, refers to an intangible feeling of comfort, cosiness and belonging; however, it is more inarticulable than that simple description. A key principle with emotional geographies, which has thankfully been sustained, is not to restrict or overly conceptualize the emotional and shut off possibilities for where the field could go, something we emphasize and explore in later discussions (Anderson, 2017; Bondi, 2005a). The significance of such emotional dimensions of lived experience proved more contentious, though, with early proponents challenging assumptions that the emotional was confined to the personal and individual and had a more subsidiary role to more impor-

tant, broader and more collective ‘affects’. The focus on affect was identified as a political move whereby embodied, ‘humanity of emotional experience’ (Thien, 2005, p. 452) was side-lined (yet again) to make room for growing focus on the transhuman, inhuman, impulses and capacities of affect (Boler and Davis, 2018). Pile (2010) sketched out some of the common ground shared by writing on affect and emotion, as well as where they diverge and potential for further conceptualization. That emotional experiences are deeply personal is, of course, true, and emotions are indeed ‘vital (living) aspects of who we are and of our situational engagement within the world; they compose, decompose, and recompose the geographies of our lives’ (Smith et al., 2009, p. 10). It is also perhaps the case that the individual feeling body is the principal ‘site’ of emotion (Lobo, 2014). However, emotionality is also a social, shared and collective phenomenon. Emotional experience may encapsulate isolation, loneliness, and emotionally intense episodes of trauma or loss can isolate us, instilling feelings that no one understands, that we are alone in the world. Yet, emotions also connect us, both in interpersonal experiences but also with those we have never met. We have collective emotional experiences in space, articulated in work on affective atmospheres and collective moods (Anderson, 2017). In many respects, debates over the importance of emotion and the centrality of emotional dynamics to collective life reflected common valuations of what it means to be emotional. Historically rooted in discussions of rationalism, empiricism and reason, the emotional is often seen to be the antonymic enemy of rationality and clear or ordered thought. Valorizations of rationality and empiricism suggest that the emotional distorts an authentic reading of the world, that emotions are to be suppressed and that decision making is to be emotionlessness. We should supposedly not act on emotion. The stubborn lingering influence of false and impossible distinctions – between rationality and irrationality/emotional, between head and heart – underpins the politics of the emotional and emotional politics.

Adjective: ‘Having the capacity for or displaying emotion; easily affected by emotion’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2021); e.g., ‘the non-rational, or irrational, is often associated with emotional life, with the feminine and with the body’ (Bondi,

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The synonymic alignment of ‘emotional’ with ‘irrational’ and ‘illogical’ underpins a deep-seated gendering of emotionality that crosses cultural contexts, albeit with important distinctions and nuances. Often, it is ‘the emotional woman’ that is deemed to be out of control and in need of containment. Such ‘passions’ – emotional excess – have been used to restrict women access to certain spheres of public and political life. These were/are also used to justify gendered divisions of labour, with women supposedly more suited to ‘caring’ roles. The gendering of emotional expression – implicit in the Oxford English Dictionary reference to being ‘easily affected by emotion’ – relates to what cultures and societies promote as ‘legitimate’ gender identification and performance, and who is permitted to be emotional and in what ways. For us, the supposed absence of emotion – of being totally emotionless – is a delusion. Emotionlessness should in fact be seen as a process of emotional regulation and management related to the suppression of emotional expression. Who has not tried to hide or conceal their emotional experience through regulation of emotional expression? In many cultures, to be ‘stoic’ – originating in the third-century Greek philosophy of stoicism – is valorized, particularly as an aspect of masculinity, demonstrating resiliency and command over emotion. Ironically, the suppression of emotional expression necessitates much emotion work/labour, which, in turn, can lead to more emotionally challenging conditions. Conversely, some emotional expressions – of anger, for instance – are also masculinized and permitted to certain genders, classes, races and sexualities in certain contexts. Moreover, such regulation and policing of emotional expressions are intersected by race, class and other subjectivities. In sum, different groups of people in different situations are more allowed or accepted than others to be emotional and to display or express those emotions (Ahmed, 2004). In this sense, we may conceive – as others have done – emotion/ emotional cultures that emerge historically to have their own ‘feeling rules’ to be adhered to, transgressed and regulated. Indeed, ‘affective lives and how we experience the world Katy Bennett and Jay Emery

through our emotions, bodies and senses is largely owing to the imprinting of histories lived by those who predate us’ (Emery, 2019, p. 6; Walkerdine, 2015). The regulation and management of collective emotion and cultures of emotion can also be operationalized in political and seemingly democratic ways. The politics of emotion (or emotional politics) has been critical in recent years, though emotions always deeply underpin political action and cause. Emotional registers infuse political bases of belonging, nationalism, democracy or alienation, propelling groups into political action and movements for change. It is argued that we are currently living through an age of ‘anger’, ‘discontent’ and ‘disillusionment’, undergirded by emotional processes of nostalgia (Anderson et al., 2020; Mishra, 2017; Walkerdine, 2020). Far from mere personal feelings of alienation or discontent, shared emotions converge into political agendas and shift the geopolitical axis on national and global levels (Pain, 2009). Often, shared emotional attachments coalesce around nebulously defined concepts of (inter)nationalism, senses of justice and rights, which manifest and realize geographically in bordering and notions of inclusion/exclusion and belonging (Khosravi, 2010). Adjective: ‘Of or relating to the emotions; based on or appealing to the emotions’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2021); e.g., ‘emotional geographies are inherently woven through all human experiences and interactions, with other people, places and things’ (Askins and Swanson, 2019, pp. 3–4)

Geographies evoke, are embedded and shape, the emotional in all its varied social and political dynamics. The emotional relations of/with space at the level of everyday life is regularly dependent on the experiences and encounters we have in them or the feelings we take into them. In this sense, the emotional underpins our ordering of space, and our reordering of space, and much work has focused on the specification of emotional experiences in designated spaces, particularly mourning, grief and remembrance (Maddrell, 2013, 2016). For instance, ‘museums and heritage sites are places where people go to feel, and indeed they are arenas where people go to “manage” their emotions’ (Smith and Campbell, 2015, p. 446). Nevertheless, the geographical interrelations of memory and the emotional extend beyond ‘authorized’

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memory landscapes or sites (Jones and Garde-Hansen, 2012). Our personal affective memories are embedded in spaces, materialities and sensory experiences that, in turn, evoke emotional registers in their revisitations, whether physical, embodied or cognitive. Sometimes, affective memories are invoked by direct placed experiences – of a holiday, a former home(land), a school. Others are indirect or intergenerational, and these traumas or nostalgias transferred to us in stories by relatives, diasporic cultures, or other modes of representation can be hard to apprehend or articulate. Take, for instance, the ‘ten-minute area’ in Anna Burns’s (2018) Milkman, named because of the duration it takes to cross it. The ten-minute area is ‘a place attempting perhaps to transcend some dark, evil happening without managing to transcend it and instead succumbing to it’ (ibid., p. 84). Much emergent geographical and urban studies work concerns the relations between space, memory and trauma that examines the ambiguous emotional registers imbued in and by spaces of disaster, war or ruination (de Leeuw, 2016; Gordillo, 2014; Pain, 2019, 2021). This work attempts to give voice and representation to complex and fraught emotional experiences that can transform and conflict over time. It is the spatialization of emotionally traumatic events and experiences that leads to individuals, groups, institutions and governments to ‘re-emotionalize’ spaces of trauma, seeking to reconfigure the emotionalities of space into more therapeutic landscapes of care. The emotionalities of space, then, are not fixed in time or space. Instead, they are disparate, in flux and changeable, with emotional meanings open to adaptation, transformation and emplacement. Adjective: ‘Characterized by strong emotion; arising from or arousing intense feeling’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2021); e.g., ‘emotional dimensions of research’ (Askins and Swanson, 2019, p. 4)

There are a multitude of ways to read, understand and interpret emotional lives, and geographers have approached the emotional dimensions of research in a range of ways, which can sometimes feel overwhelming in their discussion and debate. So we finish this contribution with you – yes you – in mind, especially if you are new to all of this

and struggling with the ‘emotional’ in your research, looking for a way in: You’re already in! Motivations and doing ‘more-than-research’ We think that emotion already always shapes our research focus and field sites (Meloni, 2020). Emotion is what moves us to do research in the first place and we are emotionally invested in our subjects (Askins, 2009; Askins and Swanson, 2019). Sometimes, we can articulate our passion for our subjects and topics, sometimes not, with drives and intensities shaping our research in ways we might never fully comprehend. Our actions in fieldwork are, in part, emotional reactions, connecting with broader structures of power and histories of contact (Laliberté and Schurr, 2016). Emotional labour Building on our above point, consider the emotional labour and emotion management that research of all kinds involves, such as putting research participants at ease, fitting into a setting, masking your nerves, observing ‘feeling rules’ of institutions and the ‘pinch between “what I do feel” and “what I should feel”’ (Hochschild, 2012, p. 57). Researchers sometimes keep research diaries in which they record not only findings and observations, but also reflect on their feelings and experiences. How might your emotional labour and experiences shape your findings? And how might your experiences connect with what others, especially your research participants, are feeling? Listening better and developing skills around empathy are starting points for working with feelings and experiences (Bondi, 2003). Bringing non-representational and representational approaches into conversation with one another in their practice approach to affect, Wetherell, McConville and McCreanor (2020, p. 18) argue that ‘distinguishing affect from human meaning making is unsustainable’ because ‘both are woven together in the hit of affect’. How feelings are articulated, how they are made meaningful, is crucial to what is felt and ‘how social forces assemble, register and have effects’. Katy Bennett and Jay Emery

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Creative and critical What makes research on emotional life both daunting and exciting, though, is the sheer variety of creative approaches and practices of researchers as they dance, walk, listen, write (and so on) their way into feelings, creating considerable debate, critique and discussion along the way (Crang, 2003). In geography at least, concern with emotion and affect is a relatively young, bubbling stream of work, carving its way through new terrain, sometimes overflowing into other areas of geography not usually considered emotional. This means that there are opportunities to explore and innovate approaches and practices, channelling these more widely into geography, connecting with other disciplines, such as psychotherapy and psychoanalysis (Bondi, 2005a; Gammerl, Hutta and Scheer, 2017). Making these kinds of connections does not mean that you should be psychoanalysing participants (although rare, geographers with significant training have done so), but sharpening up social science practices and reflecting on experiences in ways that might be meaningful for your research. Emotional geographies still has so much further to go in terms of approaches and practices. For example, have you looked at your phone at any point whilst reading this? Sent or read a message? Checked into a social media platform of some kind? Whilst reading this contribution, you might also have been involved in generating ‘big’, social media data – encompassing digital devices, such as smart phones, and social media platforms – responding to comments or liking posts, with your (emotional) reading of this entry saturated by affective connections with people and places elsewhere. Qualitative approaches so far largely underpin emotional geographies, but what about quantitative approaches and (for example, algorithmic sentiment) analysis of social media data to explore the affective intensities and atmospheres it might generate (Anderson and Ash, 2015; Bennett, Gardner and De Sabbata, 2022)? You could argue that our use of digital devices and social media platforms is generating an emerging, evolving, contemporary structure of feeling described by Williams (1977, p. 131) as ‘a particular quality of social experience

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and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or a period’. Perhaps through your use of quantitative and/or mixed methods you might be able to quantify what we have so far struggled to qualify. Writing Our starting point is that our texts are already emotional in that feelings that develop through our research affect what we write (Bennett, 2009). Scrap that, slide back, go further and consider excessive affect rolling through bodies, across generations (Emery, 2020), via intergenerational transmission – sometimes traumatic (Walkerdine, 2010) – sometimes much less so – and how it might weave through writing. To open up to excessive affect, make time to write, let words flow, see what takes shape and imagine that no one else will ever read you. Daydreaming We started with one kind of scholarly sin – dictionary definitions. We finish with another – in school at least – daydreaming. Everything we have suggested so far in relation to emotional geographies demands a productive use of time involving doing, writing and labour. But what about time and space to switch off from this activity (and smart phones and ‘the promise of intensity’), to escape from what might feel chaotic and unfathomable, for reverie with emotional (heart) aches, to be a little bit bored and unfocused (Anderson, 2021; Philo, 2003). Daydreaming in a seminar, down a supermarket aisle or on the bus, allowing experiences and imagination to move through one another, stretching out beyond ourselves, decentring, sliding into the general milieu. Occasionally stuff emerges in these moments or later, a shift of some kind. Or maybe not, or at least, not obviously. Emotional is not just about sparks and bright spots, but routines that shape the everyday and meaning making that does not feel all that meaningful at all, in sludgy time and corners of life. Embrace the sludge, as well as the sparks, and see where it takes you. Katy Bennett and Jay Emery

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References and selected further reading Ahmed, S. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Anderson, B. (2017). Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions. London: Routledge. Anderson, B. (2021). Affect and critique: a politics of boredom. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39 (2), 197–217. Anderson, B. and Ash, J. (2015). Atmospheric methods. In P. Vannini (ed.), Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research (pp. 34–51). London: Routledge. Anderson, B., Wilson, H.F. and Forman, P.J. et al. (2020). Brexit: modes of uncertainty and futures in an impasse. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45 (2), 256–69. Askins, K. (2009). ‘That’s just what I do’: placing emotion in academic activism. Emotion, Space and Society, 2 (1), 4–13. Askins, K. and Swanson, K. (2019). Holding onto emotions: a call to action in academia. Emotion, Space and Society, 33, Article 100617. Bennett, K. (2009). Challenging emotions. Area, 41 (3), 244–51. Bennett, K., Gardner, Z. and De Sabbata, S. (2022). Digital geographies of everyday multiculturalism: ‘Let’s go Nandos!’ Social & Cultural Geography, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 14649365​.2022​.2065699. Boler, M. and Davis, E. (2018). The affective politics of the ‘post-truth’ era: feeling rules and networked subjects. Emotion, Space and Society, 27, 75–85. Bondi, L. (2003). Empathy and identification: conceptual resources for feminist fieldwork. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2 (1), 64–76. Bondi, L. (2005a). Making connections and thinking through emotions: between geography and psychotherapy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30 (4), 433–48. Bondi, L. (2005b). The place of emotions in research: from partitioning emotion and reason to the emotional dynamics of research relationships. In J. Davidson, L. Bondi and M. Smith (eds), Emotional Geographies (pp. 231–46). Farnham: Ashgate. Bondi, L., Davidson, J. and Smith, M. (2005). Introduction: geography’s emotional turn. In

L. Bondi, J. Davidson and M. Smith (eds), Emotional Geographies (pp. 1–18). Farnham: Ashgate. Burns, A. (2018). Milkman. London: Faber & Faber. Crang, M. (2003). Qualitative methods: touchy, feely, look-see? Progress in Human Geography, 27 (4), 494–504. de Leeuw, S. (2016). Tender grounds: intimate visceral violence and British Columbia’s colonial geographies. Political Geography, 52, 14–23. Emery, J. (2019). Geographies of deindustrialization and the working‐class: industrial ruination, legacies, and affect. Geography Compass, 13 (2), Article e12417. Emery, J. (2020). After coal: affective-temporal processes of belonging and alienation in the deindustrializing Nottinghamshire coalfield, UK. Frontiers in Sociology, 5 (38), https://​doi​ .org/​10​.3389​%2Ffsoc​.2020​.00038. Gammerl, B., Hutta, J.S. and Scheer, M. (2017). Feeling differently: approaches and their politics. Emotion, Space and Society, 25, 87–94. Gordillo, G.R. (2014). Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hochschild, A.R. (2012). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Jones, O. and Garde-Hansen, J. (eds) (2012). Geography and Memory: Explorations in Identity, Place and Becoming. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Khosravi, S. (2010). ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Laliberté, N. and Schurr, C. (2016). Introduction. Gender, Place & Culture, 23 (1), 72–8. Lobo, M. (2014). Affective energies: sensory bodies on the beach in Darwin, Australia. Emotion, Space and Society, 12, 101–9. Maddrell, A. (2013). Living with the deceased: absence, presence and absence-presence. Cultural Geographies, 20 (4), 501–22. Maddrell, A. (2016). Mapping grief: a conceptual framework for understanding the spatial dimensions of bereavement, mourning and remembrance. Social & Cultural Geography, 17 (2), 166–88. Meloni, F. (2020). A boat taking on water: rethinking emotions and the politics of knowledge in ethnographic research with ‘hard-to-reach’ and

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130  Concise encyclopedia of human geography marginalised populations. Emotion, Space and Society, 36, Article 100708. Mishra, P. (2017). Age of Anger: A History of the Present. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Pain, R. (2009). Globalized fear? Towards an emotional geopolitics. Progress in Human Geography, 33 (4), 466–86. Pain, R. (2019). Chronic urban trauma: the slow violence of housing dispossession. Urban Studies, 56 (2), 385–400. Pain, R. (2021). Geotrauma: violence, place and repossession. Progress in Human Geography, 45 (5), 972–89. Philo, C. (2003). ‘To go back up the side hill’: memories, imaginations and reveries of childhood. Children’s Geographies, 1 (1), 7–23. Pile, S. (2010). Emotions and affect in recent human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35 (1), 5–20. Smith, L. and Campbell, G. (2015). The elephant in the room: heritage, affect and emotion. In W. Logan, H. Nic Craith and U. Kockel (eds), A Companion to Heritage Studies (pp. 443–61). Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Smith, M., Davidson, J., Cameron, L. and Bondi, L. (2009). Geography and emotion – emerging

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constellations. In M. Smith, J. Davidson, L. Cameron and L. Bondi (eds), Emotion, Place and Culture (pp. 1–20). Farnham: Ashgate. Thien, D. (2005). After or beyond feeling? A consideration of affect and emotion in geography. Area, 37 (4), 450–54. Walkerdine, V. (2010). Communal beingness and affect: an exploration of trauma in an ex-industrial community. Body & Society, 16 (1), 91–116. Walkerdine, V. (2015). Transmitting class across generations. Theory & Psychology, 25 (2), 167–83. Walkerdine, V. (2020). ‘No-one listens to us’: post-truth, affect and Brexit. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 17 (1), 143–58. Wetherell, M., McConville, A. and McCreanor, T. (2020). Defrosting the freezer and other acts of quiet resistance: affective practice theory, everyday activism and affective dilemmas. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 17 (1), 13–35. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

26. Energy Energy is increasingly a core concern for human geographers. From studies of emerging low-carbon energy transitions through to nascent debates around thermodynamics, energy issues are currently animating some of the timeliest and most stimulating research within the discipline. Yet the question of what the concept of ‘energy’ refers to has no straightforward answer. How we define and understand energy matters, both for the subdiscipline of energy geography and for human geography more broadly. One common starting point has been to treat energy as a resource, with some of the most influential encounters with energy from within human geography focusing upon issues surrounding the ownership, extraction, transportation and usage of energy resources (Bridge, 2010a). Studies of oil have been particularly prominent, with human geographers offering a range of interventions pertaining to conflicts over access to and control over oil (Watts, 2004); the subterranean geographies of oil extraction (Bridge, 2013); the concept of ‘peak oil’ (Bridge, 2010b); the social construction of oil prices and markets (Zalik, 2010); activism within and against the oil industry (Valdivia, 2008); and the role of oil within the changing political economy of global capitalism (Huber, 2013; Labban, 2008). Alongside oil, the contested geographies of coal (Brown and Spiegel, 2017; Kumar, 2021; Rohse, Day and Llewellyn, 2020) and gas (Bridge and Bradshaw, 2017; Kaup, 2008) have also been explored, as have a range of non-fossil energy resources including nuclear (Kaur, 2021; Kimura, 2015); solar (Luke and Heynen, 2020; Rignall, 2015; Sareen, 2020); wind (Avila-Calero, 2017; Siamanta, 2019); and bioenergy (Palmer, 2021). Energy resources constitute one component of broader energy systems, which also require various infrastructures to facilitate the flow of energy across space. As such, human geographers have also interrogated the role of gas and electricity grids (Luque-Ayala and Silver, 2016); oil and gas pipelines (Barry, 2013; Bouzarovski, Bradshaw and Wochnik, 2015; Mitchell, 2011); and gas and electricity meters (Baptista, 2015, 2016) in the unfolding of social life. Rather than treating energy resources and infrastructures as assets or things, energy

geographers have come to approach these as social or socio-ecological relations (Calvert, 2016). To explain this, first with regard to energy resources, these are conceptualized as socio-ecological phenomena produced through political, economic and cultural processes (Bridge, 2010a). Oil, for example, has no pre-given social usage without the input of human labour; oil becomes a resource through an array of contested processes such as dispossession, enclosure and commodification (Huber, 2011). The point is not that energy resources like oil are social constructions, devoid of material reality. Indeed, influenced by new materialist theory, human geographers have come to acknowledge that the socio-ecological production of energy resources is shaped by the specific materialities at play (Barry, 2013; Bennett, 2010; Mitchell, 2011). In the words of Huber (2013, p. 4), conceptualizing energy resources as social relations implies just that their ‘biophysical capacities only come to be mobilized in specific historical circumstances and through particular social relations’. Geographical studies of energy infrastructures tend to share this approach. Luque-Ayala and Silver (2016), for example, argue that contemporary urban politics is being shaped by contestation around urban electricity grids as converging challenges of energy poverty and climate change underpin demands for the ‘rewiring’ of the city. Indeed, the emergence of struggles around the ownership and governance of urban electricity grids has attracted the attention of a number of human geographers, who understand these struggles as articulating new claims towards the right to the city and the urban commons (Angel, 2017; Becker, Angel and Naumann, 2019; Becker, Beveridge and Naumann, 2015). These struggles often seek to challenge the uneven geographies of energy infrastructure, which render access to energy as contingent upon racialized, gendered and classed power relations (Angel, 2019; Harrison, 2016; Silver, 2016). For urban political ecologists, energy infrastructure networks themselves are both the cause and effect of dynamic and contested socio-ecological processes stretching far beyond the urban environment, from global environmental change to the circulation of capital (Heynen, Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2006; Loftus, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2004). Geographers have theorized energy not only as a social relation, but also as a spatial

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one (Calvert, 2016; Solomon and Calvert, 2017). Energy flows across and between scales, territories and landscapes, producing space in the process. The forms of global transportation, trade, migration and urbanization that have come to characterize contemporary spatial relations have been enabled by intensive energy consumption. Indeed, Malm (2016) has positioned fossil energy as integral to capitalism’s spatial economy, arguing that capitalists’ capacity to move production to areas where labour and nature can be most easily disciplined was first enabled by the materialities of coal, a solid and static fuel that can be transported across space with relative ease (in contrast to the liquid flow of water). The importance of a spatial approach to energy has been highlighted within geographical debates around energy transition. Nascent shifts from fossil to renewable energy are inescapably geographical processes implicated in the reconfiguration of dominant spatial relations. Geographers have done important work to challenge the assumption that renewable energies are necessarily bound up with a more spatially distributed energy system, while simultaneously exploring the transformations in landscape, land usage, policy scale and decision-making power that are currently co-evolving alongside energy system change (Bridge, 2018; Bridge et al., 2013; Huber and McCarthy, 2017). The very category of ‘renewable’ energy has also been called into question, exposed as a highly politicized and malleable concept (Behrsin, 2019), with the same also true of the notion of ‘transition’ itself (Bailey and Wilson, 2009). Attempts to theorize energy systems and energy transitions spatially must attend to the space of the home as a key site of energy consumption (Shove and Walker, 2007). Accordingly, the social practices of domestic energy demand have become an important focus of human geographical investigation (Walker and Shove, 2014). Huber (2013) links supply and demand – and in doing so connects the home to other scales such as the urban and the national (see also Cederlöf, 2020) – excavating the role of oil in facilitating the atomized energy-intensive consumption habits of post-Fordist capitalism in the US. Here, the role of everyday energy consumption practices – from driving to washing – are positioned as central to the hegemony of capitalist notions of the good life. Hegemony, James Angel

though, is always fragile and open to contestation. Multiple contributions have shown how the absence of household energy access via exclusion from energy infrastructure networks can often result in the formation of subjectivities, knowledges and practices that stand in antagonism to dominant power relations (Angel, 2019; Baptista, 2016). A recent articulation of this kind of counter-hegemonic energy politics to be analysed by geographers comes through the social movement imaginary of ‘energy democracy’ (Angel, 2017; Burke and Stephens, 2017, 2018). Energy democracy has become a contested term, with multiple varying definitions reflecting different political perspectives and various forms of democratic control imagined, ranging from small-scale energy cooperatives through to the remunicipalization of energy networks and the nationalization of energy systems (Becker and Naumann, 2017). A related but distinct concept is ‘energy justice’. The geographical literature on energy justice analyses and sets out to challenge the ways in which energy systems lead to unjust outcomes, reflecting and deepening social, spatial and socio-economic inequalities (Sovacool and Dworkin, 2015). As well as attending to uneven distributional outcomes, failures of recognition and procedural injustices within energy systems have also been highlighted, given the marginalization and exclusion of some social groups from energy decision making (Jenkins et al., 2016). An important critique of the energy justice literature comes from Cederlöf (2021), who argues that human geographers have for the most part neglected energy’s thermodynamic properties. The discipline of thermodynamics was first posited by nineteenth-century physicists attempting to understand the steam engine developed during the Industrial Revolution. It has now become a dominant approach to conceptualizing energy across the natural sciences. The laws of thermodynamics make two claims. The first law establishes the conservation of energy: energy is never destroyed, but rather is transformed from one form to another. The second law establishes the phenomenon of entropy: when energy changes form, its quality or orderliness decreases. As such, to maintain energy in its orderly form, an energy system requires a constant supply of low-entropy energy. Cederlöf argues that the implica-

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tions of a thermodynamic approach to energy are far-reaching for political ecology, which typically analyses the co-evolution of ecological processes and political struggle. Political ecology, on this view, should itself be redefined as ‘a field that studies how political, economic, and social relations shape and are shaped by energy systems, which co-constitute the ecological conditions of human life’ (Cederlöf, 2021, p. 71). The point here is that rather than studying energy systems as an object of enquiry with unjust distributional consequences as per the energy justice literature, a thermodynamic lens shows that intrinsic to the organization of human life is ‘ecologically unequal exchange’, whereby low-entropy energy is transferred from one place to another (from periphery to core in the terms of world systems theory), enabled by violence and dispossession. A counterpoint to Cederlöf’s argument can be found in Daggett’s (2019) genealogy of ‘energy’, which shows that the modern concept of energy is a relatively recent invention. Prior to the emergence of thermodynamics in the 1840s, the term ‘energy’ was deployed more poetically than scientifically, used as a metaphor to describe the dynamism of life. Daggett’s argument is that while the emergence of thermodynamics lends a veneer of scientific objectivity to the modern concept of energy, in fact the thermodynamic approach to energy has always been a political project bound up with the imperatives of industrial capitalism and British imperialism. The Scottish scientists who coined the laws of thermodynamics, Daggett argues, began to understand the workings of the steam engine in ways that implicitly reflected their own ideological commitment to a Protestant work ethic. Thus emerged the dominant thermodynamic conceptualization of energy as the ability to do work, positioning energy as a unit of equivalence through which diverse ‘work’ activities, including the motion of pistons, the generation of heat and the endeavours of the human body, could be made commensurate. The result was a powerful new governmental logic used to monitor, quantify and discipline labour as well as to legitimize the racial hierarchies of empire, juxtaposing claims of an admirable white European work ethic with the waste and idleness of racialized colonial subjects.

In contrast to Cederlöf’s attempt to centre thermodynamic conceptualizations of energy within political ecology, Daggett’s view is that environmental scholars and activists would do better to do away with thermodynamics and adopt alternative energy epistemologies, for the thermodynamic conceptualization of energy, Daggett argues, keeps environmentalism tied to an adulation of work, when an emancipatory energy politics would do better to align itself with a post-work agenda premised upon measures such as a universal basic income and shorter working week. Thus, while human geographers have been important advocates of transitions to lower-carbon energy systems, the questions and debates raised within energy geography go far beyond the issue of how one form of fuel might be replaced by another. Rather, energy geography shows that the ways in which energy is known, conceptualized and contested has important implications for broader processes of socio-ecological change and the political struggles that define this. James Angel

References and selected further reading Angel, J. (2017). ‘Towards an energy politics in-against-and-beyond the state: Berlin’s struggle for energy democracy’. Antipode, 49 (3), 557–76. Angel, J. (2019). ‘Irregular connections: everyday energy politics in Catalonia’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43 (2), 337–53. Avila-Calero, S. (2017). ‘Contesting energy transitions: wind power and conflicts in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec’. Journal of Political Ecology, 24 (1), 992–1012. Bailey, I. and G. Wilson (2009). ‘Theorising transitional pathways in response to climate change: technocentrism, ecocentrism, and the carbon economy’. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 41, 2324–41. Baptista, I. (2015). ‘“We live on estimates”: everyday practices of prepaid electricity and the urban condition in Maputo, Mozambique’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (5), 1004–19. Baptista, I. (2016). ‘Maputo: fluid flows of power and electricity – prepayment as mediator of state–society relationships’. In A. Luque-Ayala and J. Silver (eds), Energy Power and Protest on the Urban Grid: Geographies of the Electric

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134  Concise encyclopedia of human geography City (pp. 112–32). London and New York: Routledge. Barry, A. (2013). Material Politics: Disputes Along the Pipeline. Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Becker, S., J. Angel and M. Naumann (2019). ‘Energy democracy as the right to the city: urban energy struggles in Berlin and London’. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 52 (6), 1093–111. Becker, S., R. Beveridge and M. Naumann (2015). ‘Remunicipalization in German cities: contesting neo-liberalism and reimagining urban governance?’ Space and Polity, 19 (1), 76–90. Becker, S. and M. Naumann (2017). ‘Energy democracy: mapping the debate on energy alternatives’. Geography Compass, 11 (8), Article e123321. Behrsin, I. (2019). ‘Rendering renewable: technoscience and the political economy of waste-to-energy regulation in the European Union’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 109 (5), 1362–78. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bouzarovski, S., M. Bradshaw and A. Wochnik (2015). ‘Making territory through infrastructure: the governance of natural gas transit in Europe’. Geoforum, 64, 217–28. Bridge, G. (2010a). ‘Resource geographies 1: making carbon economies, old and new’. Progress in Human Geography, 35 (6), 820–34. Bridge, G. (2010b). ‘Geographies of peak oil: the other carbon problem’. Geoforum, 41 (4), 523–30. Bridge, G. (2013). ‘The hole world: scales and spaces of extraction’. In R. Ghosn (ed.), New Geographies, 02: Landscapes of Energy (pp. 43-50). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Bridge, G. (2018). ‘The map is not the territory: a sympathetic critique of energy research’s spatial turn’. Energy Research & Social Science, 36, 11–20. Bridge, G., S. Bouzarovski, M. Bradshaw and N. Eyre (2013). ‘Geographies of energy transition: space, place and the low-carbon economy’. Energy Policy, 53, 331–40. Bridge, G. and M. Bradshaw (2017). ‘Making a global gas market: territoriality and production networks in liquefied natural gas’. Economic Geography, 93 (3), 215–40. Brown, B. and S.J. Spiegel (2017). ‘Resisting coal: hydrocarbon politics and assemblages of protest in the UK and Indonesia’. Geoforum, 85, 101–11. Burke, M.J. and J.C. Stephens (2017). ‘Energy democracy: goals and policy instruments for

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sociotechnical transitions’. Energy Research & Social Science, 33, 35–48. Burke, M.J. and J.C. Stephens (2018). ‘Political power and renewable energy futures: a critical review’. Energy Research & Social Science, 35, 78–93. Calvert, K. (2016). ‘From “energy geography” to “energy geographies”: perspectives on a fertile academic borderland’. Progress in Human Geography, 40 (1), 105–25. Cederlöf, G. (2020). ‘Maintaining power: decarbonisation and recentralisation in Cuba’s energy revolution’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45, 81–94. Cederlöf, G. (2021). ‘Out of steam: energy, materiality, and political ecology’. Progress in Human Geography, 45 (1), 70–87. Daggett, C.N. (2019). The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harrison, C. (2016). ‘The American South: electricity and race in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, 1900–1935’. In A. Luque-Ayala and J. Silver (eds), Energy Power and Protest on the Urban Grid: Geographies of the Electric City (pp. 21–44). London and New York: Routledge. Heynen, N., M. Kaika and E. Swyngedouw (eds) (2006). In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. London and New York: Routledge. Huber, M. (2011). ‘Oil, life, and the fetishism of geopolitics’. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 22 (3), 32–48. Huber, M. (2013). Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Huber, M. and J. McCarthy (2017). ‘Beyond the subterranean energy regime? Fuel, land use and the production of space’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42 (4), 655–68. Jenkins, K., D. McCauley and R. Heffron et al. (2016). ‘Energy justice: a conceptual review’. Energy Research & Social Science, 11, 174–82. Kaup, B.Z. (2008). ‘Negotiating through nature: the resistant materiality and materiality of resistance in Bolivia’s natural gas sector’. Geoforum, 39 (5), 1734–42. Kaur, R. (2021). ‘Nuclear necropower: the engineering of death conditions around a nuclear power plant in South India’. Political Geography, 85, Article 102315. Kimura, A.H. (2015). ‘Understanding Fukushima: nuclear impacts, risk perceptions and organic farming in a feminist political ecology perspective’. In R. Bryant (ed.), The International Handbook of Political Ecology (pp. 260–73). Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Kumar, M. (2021). ‘Disassembling coal: finance capital, environmental law, and the right to

Energy  135 information in South India’. Antipode, 53 (4), 1124–42. Labban, M. (2008). Space, Oil and Capital. London and New York: Routledge. Loftus, A. (2012). Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Luke, N. and N. Heynen (2020). ‘Community solar as energy reparations: abolishing petro-racial capitalism in New Orleans’. American Quarterly, 72 (3), 603–25. Luque-Ayala, A. and J. Silver (eds) (2016). Energy Power and Protest on the Urban Grid: Geographies of the Electric City. London and New York: Routledge. Malm, A. (2016). Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso. Mitchell, T. (2011). Carbon Democracy: Political Power in an Age of Oil. London: Verso. Palmer, J. (2021). ‘Putting forests to work? Enrolling vegetal labor in the socioecological fix of bioenergy resource making’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 111 (1), 141–56. Rignall, K.E. (2015). ‘Solar power, state power, and the politics of energy transition in pre-Saharan Morocco’. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 48 (3), 540–57. Rohse, M., R. Day and D. Llewellyn (2020). ‘Towards an emotional energy geography: attending to emotions and affects in a former coal mining community in South Wales, UK’. Geoforum, 110, 136–46. Sareen, S. (2020). ‘Metrics for an accountable energy transition? Legitimating the governance of solar uptake’. Geoforum, 114, 30–39. Shove, E. and G. Walker (2007). ‘CAUTION! Transitions ahead: politics, practice, and sus-

tainable transition management’. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 39, 763–70. Siamanta, Z.C. (2019). ‘Wind parks in post-crisis Greece: neoliberalisation vis-à-vis green grabbing’. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2 (2), 274–303. Silver, J. (2016). ‘Disrupted infrastructures: an urban political ecology of interrupted electricity in Accra’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (5), 984–1003. Solomon, B.D. and K.E. Calvert (2017). Handbook on the Geographies of Energy. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Sovacool, B. and M. Dworkin (2015). ‘Energy justice: conceptual insights and practical applications’. Applied Energy, 142, 435–44. Swyngedouw, E. (2004). Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Valdivia, G. (2008). ‘Governing relations between people and things: citizenship, territory, and the political economy of petroleum in Ecuador’. Political Geography, 27 (4), 456–77. Walker, G. and E. Shove (2014). ‘What is energy for? Social practice and energy demand’. Theory, Culture & Society, 31 (5), 41–58. Watts, M. (2004). ‘Resource curse? Governmentality, oil and power in the Niger Delta, Nigeria’. Geopolitics, 9 (1), 50–80. Zalik, A. (2010). ‘Oil “futures”: Shell’s scenarios and the social constitution of the global oil market’. Geoforum, 41 (4), 553–64.

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27. Environmental geographies Environmental is a capacious and loaded adjective that is increasingly attached to a series of fields, issues, and processes to, in the most general sense, designate a relationship to the natural world. Historically, environmental geography has simplified complex relations between people and their environments through determinism, whereby culture is directly determined by the environment. But when contemporary geographers use the word environmental, we are describing a complex set of physical, chemical, biotic, and cultural relations that span from the microbial to the atmospheric that interact to produce a given space. Today’s environmental geographies house a world of difference. Every part of this broad definition and its assumptions are debated and contested. The struggle to define these terms is far from an academic abstraction – how each part of this definition is understood has political stakes in a world where climate change is intensifying and reconfiguring the environmental injustices of colonialism, capitalism, and racism. I am writing this entry from the unceded territories of the Musqueam people in British Columbia, where the stakes of defining the environmental are undoubtedly clear. In the summer of 2021, the Western North America heatwave swept the region and was responsible for the death of 595 people in British Columbia, which made it the deadliest weather event in Canadian history. Almost all these deaths occurred at home or in a hotel and disproportionately impacted the province’s already marginalized elderly, disabled, and poor communities. The most intimate environment, one’s shelter, became a site of mass death. Outside the province’s urban areas, entire communities were destroyed. The town of Lytton recorded Canada’s hottest temperature on record at 49.6°C on 29 June 2021. The next day, wildfires destroyed most of the town. Beyond the human toll of the disaster, it is estimated that the extreme heat killed more than 1 billion marine animals along Canada’s Pacific coast and an additional 651 000 farm animals. Months later, the fundamentally transformed landscape was rendered more vulnerable to unprecedented flooding. A series of atmospheric

river weather systems flooded entire regions of British Columbia’s lower mainland, submerging vast agricultural lands and destroying highways, which interrupted vital supply chains. Although support was in desperate demand throughout the province, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) dedicated its capacities to raiding the Unitst’ot’en Healing Centre – a site where Wet’suwet’en Indigenous land defenders are fighting the infrastructure in their territories that would enable further fossil fuel extraction. From 2019 to 2021, the RCMP has spent $20 million protecting the interests of private extractive industries on Wet’suwet’en land. All these relations, from atmospheric rivers and unbearably hot homes, to the loss of marine life and the violence of settler colonial police are within the seemingly innocent adjective ‘environmental’. In this entry, I show that how this term is defined either opens or limits political action in a world rife with injustice. To do so, I provide a survey of how different approaches to the environmental in geography define relations, complexity, and space.

Relations If the environment can be understood as a complex set of relations, who and what is included? Geographers have traditionally defined environmental relations narrowly to mean those between people and nature. Seemingly capacious, both people and nature in this understanding were understood as distinct, static, apolitical, and often excluded marginalized people. Carolyn Finney (2014) demonstrates in her book, Black Faces, White Spaces, how black people are structurally excluded and written out of the memory of American environmentalism. William Cronon (1995) destabilizes the very idea of a pristine nature that exists separately from people by historically tracing how the construction of wilderness only served those perhaps most alienated from it, the urban upper classes. In recent years, the who and what of environmental relations has been opened up to appreciate the complexity of the world. Indigenous scholarship has challenged the hegemony of dominant environmental knowledge. In this vein, Zoe Todd (2017)

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argues that the beings rendered into fossil fuels in Alberta through extraction should be understood not as resources, but as kin. She writes: ‘the bones of dinosaurs and the traces of flora and fauna from millions of years ago which surface in rocks and loamy earth in Alberta act as teachers for us, reminding us of the life that once teemed here when the place that we know as Alberta was home to myriad species who made life, made worlds’ (p. 104). Elizabeth Povenelli (2016) argues that the ability to delineate what counts as life and non-life is a hallmark of how contemporary environmental and state power operates. In Pollution is Colonialism, Max Liboiron (2021) demonstrates how settler colonial states justify pollution by denigrating land as an inert resource. Liboiron writes that anticolonial environmental relations must take seriously not only the relations between people and nature, but also focus on land that they define as ‘the unique entity that is the combined living spirit of plants, animals, air, water, humans, histories, and events’ (p. 7). Far from a resource, a backdrop, or inert matter to be acted upon or mobilized by people, the environmental exceeds, these scholars argue, the separation and categorization of relations as physical, chemical, biotic, or cultural. These seemingly objective descriptors inherited from dominant environmental knowledge systems are laden with an assumption of agency and value and can justify extractive, exclusionary, and violent relations. Environmental historians, urban geographers, and political ecologists have also worked to challenge what relations are understood as environmental. Scholars who study urban environments suggest that cities and the process of urbanization are fundamental environmental relations. David Harvey (1996), for example, has famously argued that there is nothing unnatural about New York City. Cities are where the majority of the world’s population live; so, if cities remain outside of what is commonly understood as environmental, then people are once again cast out of the environment. From the large-scale processes of urbanization to the microscopic, Jamie Lorimer (2020) encourages geographers to take the microbial world seriously. In Probiotic Planet, he analyzes an emergent relation between people, animals, and microbes that he characterizes as a probiotic

way of being and governing. For Lorimer, probiotic environmental relations are those in which life is being used to manage life. The who and what of relations in the environmental is rapidly expanding, but the question remains, how do geographers conceive of the interactions and links between diverse webs of relations?

Complexity Environmental geography has evolved from simplified and deterministic models of nature and culture to complex and overdetermined approaches (Castree et al., 2009). Political ecology was, in part, borne out of this struggle to define the complex interactions between people and their environments within larger political economic structures. Cultural ecology, political ecology’s predecessor, sought to ethnographically study specific local relations and intersections between people and their environments in place. In this view, cultures and their surrounding environments constituted a unified whole, whereby feedback loops maintained a certain balance or equilibrium. While cultural ecology presented a complex model of environmental relations, its insistence on understanding people as distinct from their environments and its reliance on ideas of balance limited its explanatory and political power. Critiques of how cultural ecologists understood complexity catalyzed the formation of political ecology. For political ecologists, environmental relations are mediated through political economic relations like labor. Neil Smith (1984, 1996) theorizes this approach as the production of nature, whereby nature is not distinct from people, but a product of societal labor. This product is itself a potential relation that exists within nature. In this conceptualization, people and their environments are the product of complex historical forces and relations of production. For example, a team of political ecologists studying large-scale agriculture in India argue that coffee plantations are not incommensurate with conservation and biodiversity goals. Examining the biodiversity of amphibians and birds in coffee plantations, researchers found that biodiversity can thrive in landscapes altered by human agriculture. Mohammed Rafi Arefin

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What determines whether such activities will support diverse ecologies is not only ecological factors, but also the complex interaction of the landscape with agricultural labor markets (Robbins et al., 2020). Biodiversity in this view is not opposed to human activity, and people’s actions are not outside nature – they work to produce one another for certain ends. This historically informed and relational view helps define the interaction between diverse actors, but how do geographers name and account for the ‘where’ of these complex relations?

Space From dense rainforests to Arctic regions, the word environmental is often associated with spaces imagined as without people. But there are many challenges to this romantic and apolitical view of environmental spaces. Environmental justice movements around the world have fought to redefine the where of environmental relations by focusing on place-based struggles to dismantle racist and classist structures that disproportionately pollute the immediate environments of the most marginalized. For grassroots environmental justice organizations such as WE ACT in New York City, the environment should be understood broadly as the spaces where communities live, work, play, and pray. With climate change’s global impact permeating relations at all scales, scholars have also sought to name a planetary spatial and temporal aggregate of environmental struggles and relations. In the early 2000s, atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen popularized the ‘Anthropocene’ as a supplemental geological marker to the Holocene. The descriptor was powerful as far as it positioned humans as geologic and ecological actors on a planetary scale, but marked the beginning of an ongoing debate about how to connect environmental relations across space and time. For many human geographers, this term did not appreciate a key spatial fact – that because of capitalist uneven development, people across the globe are not equally responsible for humanity’s destructive environmental relations. Jason Moore (2017) instead suggested the alternate descriptor, the ‘Capitalocene’. For Moore, the Capitalocene Mohammed Rafi Arefin

directly names the global system of power, profit, and production that is responsible for global environmental relations like those propelling climate change. Geographer Laura Pulido (2018) argues that the Anthropocene and its alternatives may point to economic inequalities, but neglect the racial aspects of uneven development. The Plantationocene, then, was forwarded as another alternate spatio-temporal marker to bring into view ‘the ongoing socioecological consequences of plantation agriculture and the permutations and persistence of the plantation across time and space’ (Davis et al., 2019, p. 3). Critical geographers are refining this concept to ensure it remains attuned to the racist and racialized spatial politics of plantations and their planetary importance. Others have argued that all these descriptors focus too heavily on undifferentiated spaces of the human or spaces of production and consumption. Marco Armiero (2021) suggests turning attention to global spaces of disposal to recognize the uneven planetary relations with waste and toxicity – he terms this planetary space–time the ‘Wasteocene’. If the environmental refers to complex relations in a given space, the struggle over defining that given space is urgent for both analysis and action. What is the spatiality of planetary environmental relations? Is it to be found in an undifferentiated anthropos of the Anthropocene? A critique of capital in the Capitalocene? An undoing of racist histories and presents of the Plantationocene? Or a focus on the detritus of all of these systems, the Wasteocene? Each descriptor highlights a certain spatial environmental relation and inevitably hides others. Which is to say, each term prefigures political action.

Conclusion In this short entry, I have reviewed only a small part of the world of difference housed in contemporary geographical approaches to the environmental. Far from inconsequential, these myriad differences have immense impacts. In the case of British Columbia, after months of climate and environmental emergency, the discourse is slowly turning not only to immediate concerns, but also to future recovery. Who and what relations will be valued? Will the intimate environ-

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ments of disabled and elderly tenants in rental apartments be treated with the same care as the coastline? How will recovery approach the complexity of interacting relations? Will funds pour into techno-scientific environmental fixes, instead of directly into the hands of those displaced? Whose spaces will be valued? Will the focus be on an undifferentiated settler colonial subject, rather than respecting the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples defending their lands from further violence and extraction? We are in a moment of proliferating visions for an environmentally just transition to avoid the intensification and repetition of climate and environmental injustice. Proposals span from the Green New Deal in the US, to the Red New Deal of Indigenous peoples, to calls for a global People’s New Deal (Ajl, 2021). Each proposal conceptualizes the environmental differently and therefore prefigures environmental politics in radically diverging ways. How we understand and act on this definition will, in part, set us on course for a future of green apartheid or a future of just and liberatory environmental relations. Mohammed Rafi Arefin

References and selected further reading Ajl, M. 2021. A People’s Green New Deal. London: Pluto Press. Armiero, M. 2021. Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Castree, N., Demeritt, D., Liverman, D. and Rhoads, B. (eds) 2009. A Companion to Environmental Geography. Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Cronon, W. 1995. ‘The trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature’. In W.

Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, pp. 6–90. Davis, J., Moulton, A.A., Van Sant, L. and Williams, B. 2019. ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene? A manifesto for ecological justice in an age of global crises’. Geography Compass, 13 (5), Article e12438. Finney, C. 2014. Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Harvey, D. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Liboiron, M. 2021. Pollution is Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lorimer, J. 2020. Probiotic Planet. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Moore, J.W. 2017. ‘The Capitalocene, part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis’. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44 (3), 594–630. Povinelli, E.A. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pulido, L. (2018). Racism and the Anthropocene. In G. Mitman, M. Armiero and R. Emmett (eds), Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 116–28. Robbins, P., Tripuraneni, V., Karanth, K.K. and Chhatre, A. 2020. ‘Coffee, trees, and labor: political economy of biodiversity in commodity agroforests’. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111 (4), 1046–61. Smith, N. 1984. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, N. 1996. ‘The production of nature’. In G. Robertson, M. Mash and L. Tickner et al. (eds), Future Natural: Nature, Science, Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 35–54. Todd, Z. 2017. ‘Fish, kin and hope: tending to water violations in amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory’. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, 43, 102–7.

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28. Ethics Ethics is the branch of philosophy that concerns the systems of beliefs that govern human conduct. It pertains to questions of responsibilities, duties and obligations, and to the effects of actions or inaction on human and non-human beings. It encompasses relations that are proximate as well as distant, at the multi-scalar intersections of individual people’s actions and wider social, economic and political dynamics. Ethics involves moral judgements based on the probable effects of an action (the theory of ethics known as consequentialism) and those based on the evaluation of actions on their own merit, independent of consequences (known as deontological theories of ethics). The values that govern such evaluations undergird questions of practice in their purpose and aim, and in their relational dimension. In the realm of social science and humanities scholarship, ethics permeates all aspects of knowledge production and dissemination: at the point of selection of the object of inquiry, of the methodological approach, of the procedural dimension of the research encounter, and in terms of the performative afterlives of research through writing, presentations and visualization. Ethics also informs content and formats of teaching and learning in educational settings, an area that is often overlooked by scholarly debates. This brief entry will explore how these dimensions have been discussed and challenged within the discipline of human geography, drawing out contemporary debates and how they build on longer critical and radical trajectories. Human geographers often undertake research on, about or in situations that demand careful ethical attention. The topics of study contained by the boundaries of the discipline are multiple and wide-ranging, encompassing economic, social, cultural, environmental and political phenomena in their contemporary and historical socio-spatial articulations. The methodological approaches and techniques that characterize the discipline are equally diverse. They combine a wide variety of data, materials and techniques, from statistical analysis and cartography, qualitative interviews and ethnography to artistic and multi-sensory methods. Concrete ethical issues concerning cultural sensitivity, consent, anonymity, but also emotions, expectations, power and posi-

tionality, all emerge alongside considerations about wider dilemmas – for example, on potential unintended consequences of generating knowledge about specific socio-spatial phenomena. It has also been noted that research in human geography is often conducted with the explicit or implicit aim and hope of bringing about social, political or environmental change. Inevitably, debates about ethics become profoundly political, as ‘the ethics of research and the ethics of the research topic are not easily disentangled’ (Wilson and Darling, 2020, p. 2). Concerning both the ethics of research and the ethics of the research topic, human geography scholarship offers an important set of critical contributions to understanding the ethical entanglements present in knowledge and research – as well as its teaching and learning – across trans-local social, economic, cultural and political geographies. A fundamental concept that cuts across ethical considerations – both consequentialist and deontological – is that of positionality. The concept builds on feminist geographic approaches that demand researchers to acknowledge that all knowledge is situated (Rose, 1997); since then, the notion has been taken up by the discipline more broadly to address how a researcher’s identifiers such as race, nationality, age, gender, sexuality, and social and economic status can influence all stages of the research process, from the choice of topic to what we understand as legitimate knowledge. Positionality is much more than a perfunctory acknowledgement of how researchers are ‘positioned’ within social, cultural and economic dynamics; it requires a nuanced engagement with and accounting of how such positioning affects the ways in which we approach, interpret and generate knowledge about the world. Positionality thus embodies an epistemological concern that requires critical and reflexive scrutiny of how research processes and knowledges are inevitably positioned within hierarchies of power and identity. Moreover, these positionings are not to be understood as fixed once and for all, but rather need to be understood as relational and shifting in response to research encounters, changing contexts and interpretative frameworks (Sanyal, 2020). Reflexivity and positionality have taken centre stage in debates on the ethics of the research encounter. One of the frontiers of

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this debate is outlined through the expansion of theorization on collaborative and participatory approaches to research. These often explicitly build upon traditions of social movements, critical race and feminist theories, and diverse forms of advocacy for social justice. Within this framework, the aim of participatory ethics is to explicitly address ‘unequal relations of power, open up new spaces for decolonized knowledge production, and challenge the dominant hegemonic paradigm’ (Cahill, Sultana and Pain, 2007, p. 307). Such an approach encompasses a critical look at the politics of participation, its practical implementation as well as the institutional frameworks and codes that may support or hinder the pursuit of ethical research. Resistance to oppressive and marginalizing structures and discourses, within and beyond institutions, is at the core of this ethical reformulation. In practice, this leads to a privileging of subaltern knowledges and to enabling research subjects to shape research questions, the interpretations that frame research as well as the meaningful actions that may be designed as a consequence of the study, towards greater social and environmental justice (Pain, 2004). Building on the above, participatory ethics in geography is usually understood through the lens of feminist approaches that privilege an ethics of interpersonal care, which often follows a deontological ethics that revindicates a processual openness in frameworks and approaches as necessary to counter power relations and redistribute power (Askins, 2018). A clear example of this is the question of anonymity of research participants, a key tenet of orthodox institutional code of ethics in social science research. In participatory ethics, particularly in research geared towards social justice objectives, the anonymity principle comes into tension with the hope of providing platforms to marginalized and invisibilized personal and collective experiences. While ethics in non-participatory research is always coached in the language of ‘protecting’ vulnerable subjects, this protection can be the object of careful negotiations, and the taken-for-granted value of anonymity is here reconsidered and challenged. Arguments have been made in favour of naming participants and communities involved, to assert their ‘moral right to be recognized as sources of information’ (Cahill

et al., 2007, p. 310), to value their participation in data interpretation and representation, and to participate in any of the benefits that emerge from the research. Similarly, scholar-activist approaches within the discipline have pushed for greater recognition of the politics and ethics of situated knowledge production through solidarity and collaboration (Derickson and Routledge, 2015). In recent years, advancements in knowledge exchange and knowledge sharing, and the possibility of co-production with research participants, have been incorporated into human geographical scholarship not strictly considered participatory or collaborative. Along with the ethos of recognizing and challenging dominant hegemonic paradigms and power dynamics, recent calls have been made to situate and decolonize the discipline of human geography as a whole. In the late twentieth century, the critical turn in the discipline has brought an examination of the power dynamics underpinning geographical knowledge production, and its roots in colonial and imperialist logics (Driver, 2000). From engagement with post-colonial theories, calls to acknowledge such roots and decolonize the discipline have been made more recently to fundamentally transform human geography through greater openness to difference (Radcliffe, 2017). The ethical implications are profound and wide-ranging, given that not only have geographers researched the spatial dimensions of hegemonic processes, but they ‘have also been historically implicated in the production of the hegemonic worlding work of the discipline’ (McFarlane, 2021, p. 3), with ongoing consequences both within English-speaking academia and beyond. In contrast, shifts are emerging across the praxis of the discipline – for example, through reflections on the ethics and practices of publishing – in an effort to expand and value scholarship from across the globe (Tolia-Kelly et al., 2020). Rethinking the institutions, formats and approaches of scholarship under such push, calls have focused on finding ways to address the politics of representation and visibility (Müller, 2021; Noxolo, 2009). A high-profile recent example of this shift is represented by the theme of the 2017 Royal Geographic Society with the Institute of British Geographers annual conference, titled ‘Decolonising geoMara Ferreri

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graphical knowledge: opening geography out to the world’ (see Noxolo, 2017). Within ethical discussions of (de)colonial disciplinary futures, another significant contribution on ethics concerns histories and practices of representing geographical knowledge. Given the breadth of the subject, it is helpful to focus on the specific case of cartography, a key element in the analytical and data visualization toolbox of the discipline. The use of cartography within the projects of imperialism and colonialism, within and beyond academia, has been the subject of scholarship and debates. The extractivist nature of mapping as method, as well as of the ethical consequences of producing geospatial visualizations, have long been shown to contribute to neocolonial approaches to territories (Driver, 2000; Gregory, 2004). A critical rethinking of the ethics of cartographic practice and representation has thus led to critiques of representation in post-colonial and decolonial veins, bringing into the discipline greater understanding and recognition of Indigenous mapping culture and methodologies (Louis and Grossman, 2020). In recent years, cartography has also been examined in its performative dimensions, in a critical shift from representational to processual understandings of mapping. Maps have been reconceptualized as a processual, dynamic unfolding, through and in response to negotiated practices of interpretation and knowledge, which are themselves embedded within contextual webs of relations (Kitchin, Gleeson and Dodge, 2013). Besides opening up the possibility for more nuanced and situated understandings of the role and agency of maps as objects, such insights have become helpful for challenging dominant ways of knowing and representing knowledge in practice (Counter-Cartographies Collective, Dalton and Mason-Deese, 2012). These advancements in theory and practice are central in the design and implementation of new mixed-methods cartographic and archival projects moved by a social justice ethos, such as the well-known Anti-Eviction Mapping Project which responded to the 2008 mortgage repossession and housing dispossession crisis in many US cities (Maharawal and McElroy, 2018). Discussions of the powers and ethics of data mapping are becoming increasingly pressing in an emerging area of ethical debates about the impacts of pervasive computing Mara Ferreri

and digital mediation on social and spatial processes. Concerns about the powers and ethics of accessing and making visible geographical knowledge thus proceed alongside the need to engage with the challenges and possibilities offered by the capillary real-time data generated through digital engagement and capture. The distinction between analogic, or conventional, and ‘digital’ research methods and topics – represented by the binaries virtual/real and online/offline – is becoming increasingly untenable, as consistently argued by geographical scholarship (Duggan, 2017). In this line, the ethics of the ‘digital’ in human geography expand beyond questions of access and treatment of digital data; it requires, at the very least, a critical and detailed engagement with the definition of its objects of inquiry and of appropriate theoretical and methodological frameworks. Contemporary debates have drawn attention to the opaque, powerful and complex architectures of corporate and state bureaucracies that enable the collection and governance of digital data. Furthermore, real-time deep machine learning through assemblages of models and decision making captured by the term ‘algorithm’ has been argued to be world-making (Amoore and Raley, 2017), transforming the very processes they are capturing and analysing. The ethics of producing critical knowledge about such algorithmic assemblages has significant implications for human geography that have yet to be fully grasped and that are likely to shape the future of the discipline, above and beyond debates on ‘big data’ (Amoore, 2020). All the considerations raised above are profoundly shaping not only ethics in scholarship but also, importantly, how ethics is understood and taught in human geography education. Teaching and learning are key sites of the worlding discussed earlier; in higher education in particular it is an important locus for reimagining and advancing the future of ethics within the discipline. Attempts at promoting decolonial approaches in teaching and learning, for example, have in recent years generated significant debates about the de facto reproduction of ‘white geographies’ within Western universities (Domosh, 2015), particularly within the US (Pulido, 2002) and the UK (Esson, 2020), and their transnational spheres of influence. The entanglement between the ethics of research and the ethics of the research topic is here

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made more complex by the histories of educational institutions and their contemporary role as hegemonic nodes within global geographies of knowledge production and formal education. Another ethical frontier within the discipline is here marked by a current ethos of challenging and expanding not solely the content, references and modes of geographical knowledge but also the languages, imaginaries and viewpoints from and through which social and spatial processes are taught and learnt. Alongside debates on the human geography curriculum, there is also a question of pedagogical formats. As a versatile discipline engaging with real-world problems past and present, human geography is often taught through field visits and fieldwork, which are fundamental components of the curriculum, both as guided sessions and as individual student projects. From a procedural viewpoint, in educational institutions, various ethical codes and processes are in place before staff and students can reach ‘out’ to the field. This, it has been noted, has generated a certain weariness concerning ethics as mere form filling, at best, or as an obtrusive institutional impediment to the actual encounter with the world, at worst (Philo and Laurier, 2020, p. 34). In terms of challenging traditional understandings of fieldwork and field trips, the very definition of an outside ‘field’ has also been the subject of scrutiny and debates, rooted in a critique of distance and towards a more hopeful proposition of a politics of engagement beyond compartmentalized social actors (Katz, 1994). More recently, the critique of the very idea of ‘fieldwork’ in all its dimensions has been argued to be a qualifier of radical geographical scholarship and practice (Asher, 2019). Finally, innovations in learning and teaching have expanded debates on the ethics of the human geography field trip as an important pedagogical moment, pivoted on the potential for facilitated individual and collective encounters that follow an ethos of engaging with difference through a repositioning of the centrality of emotions. On this point, facilitating learning alongside emotional and sensory engagements has been a component of rethinking field trips as ‘critical feel-trips’

(Golubchikov, 2015), which aim to encourage critical reflection and self-reflection in higher education students, as well as greater awareness of positionality and ethical issues in all geographical understanding. Mara Ferreri

References and selected further reading Amoore, L. (2020). Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Amoore, L. and Raley, R. (2017). Securing with algorithms: knowledge, decision, sovereignty. Security Dialogue, 48 (1), 3–10. Asher, K. (2019). Fieldwork. In Antipode Editorial Collective (ed.), Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50 (pp. 123–7). Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Askins, K. (2018). Feminist geographies and participatory action research: co-producing narratives with people and place. Gender, Place & Culture, 25 (9), 1277–94. Cahill, C., Sultana, F. and Pain, R. (2007). Participatory ethics: politics, practices, institutions. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 6 (3), 304–18. Counter-Cartographies Collective, Dalton, C. and Mason-Deese, L. (2012). Counter (mapping) actions: mapping as militant research. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 11 (3), 439–66. Derickson, K.D. and Routledge, P. (2015). Resourcing scholar-activism: collaboration, transformation, and the production of knowledge. The Professional Geographer, 67 (1), 1–7. Domosh, M. (2015, 1 June). President’s column: why is our geography curriculum so white? AAG.org. Accessed 11 October 2022 at https://​ www​.aag​.org/​author/​mona​-domosh/​. Driver, F. (2000). Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell. Duggan, M. (2017). Questioning ‘digital ethnography’ in an era of ubiquitous computing. Geography Compass, 11 (5), Article e12313. Esson, J. (2020). ‘The why and the white’: racism and curriculum reform in British geography. Area, 52 (4), 708–15. Golubchikov, O. (2015). Negotiating critical geographies through a ‘feel-trip’: experiential, affective and critical learning in engaged fieldwork.

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144  Concise encyclopedia of human geography Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 39 (1), 143–57. Gregory, D. (2004). The Colonial Present. Oxford: Blackwell. Katz, C. (1994). Playing the field: questions of fieldwork in geography. The Professional Geographer, 46 (1), 67–72. Kitchin, R., Gleeson, J. and Dodge, M. (2013). Unfolding mapping practices: a new epistemology for cartography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38 (3), 480–96. Louis, R.P. and Grossman, Z. (2020). Indigenous methods and research with Indigenous communities. In H.F. Wilson and J. Darling (eds), Research Ethics for Human Geography: A Handbook for Students (pp. 143–55). London: SAGE. Maharawal, M.M. and McElroy, E. (2018). The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project: counter mapping and oral history toward Bay Area housing justice. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108 (2), 380–89. McFarlane, C. (2021). Editorial: geography in the world. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 46 (1), 2–8. Müller, M. (2021). Worlding geography: from linguistic privilege to decolonial anywheres. Progress in Human Geography, 45 (6), 1440–66. Noxolo, P. (2009). ‘My paper, my paper’: reflections on the embodied production of postcolonial geographical responsibility in academic writing. Geoforum, 40 (1), 55–65. Noxolo, P. (2017). Introduction: decolonising geographical knowledge in a colonised and

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re-colonising postcolonial world. Area, 49 (3), 317–19. Pain, R. (2004). Social geography: participatory research. Progress in Human Geography, 28 (5), 652–63. Philo, C. and Laurier, E. (2020). Consent. In H.F. Wilson and J. Darling (eds), Research Ethics for Human Geography: A Handbook for Students (pp. 33–42). London: SAGE. Pulido, L. (2002). Reflections on a white discipline. The Professional Geographer, 54 (1), 42–9. Radcliffe, S.A. (2017). Decolonising geographical knowledges. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42 (3), 329–33. Rose, G. (1997). Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics. Progress in Human Geography, 21 (3), 305–20. Sanyal, R. (2020). Positionality. In H.F. Wilson and J. Darling (eds), Research Ethics for Human Geography: A Handbook for Students (pp. 25–32). London: SAGE. Tolia-Kelly, D., de Carvalho Cabral, D. and Legg, S. et al. (2020). Historical geographies of the 21st century: challenging our praxis. Journal of Historical Geography, 69, 1–4. Wilson, H.F. and Darling, J. (2020). Introducing ethics’. In H.F. Wilson and J. Darling (eds), Research Ethics for Human Geography: A Handbook for Students (pp. 1–5). London: SAGE.

29. Ethnography Ethnography: from the Greek ‘ethnos’ meaning people, and ‘grapho’ to write.

Ethnography originated within anthropology to describe the practice of observing, interacting and living within a specific group of people, often from a non-Western society, over an extended period (Davies, 2008, p. 5; Hoggart, Lees and Davies, 2014, p. 505). Sometimes described as ‘going native’, the ethnographer fully immerses themselves in the society they are studying (for historical ethnographies see Malinowski, 1922 and Mead, 1928). Although an anthropological method, human geographers have long been interested in these practices. Indeed, ethnography emerged as an increasingly popular method during the ‘cultural turn’ in human geography towards post-structural theories, including feminism and post-colonialism (see Geertz, 1973 and Clifford and Marcus, 1986, who were the main influences of the ‘cultural turn’). Human geographers were interested in the thick description of human action (Geertz, 1973) and the post-modern turn towards reflective practices (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). They were motivated to use bottom-up approaches to understand and familiarize themselves with the everyday life experiences of their research participants, including those who are most marginalized. Rather than working from a hypothesis, the ethnographer’s research starts with the experiences of their participants, and knowledge is collected in the field (Cook and Crang, 1995, p. 15). Observations are either documented in note format or audio-recorded. By immersing themselves in the world of their participants, the ethnographer attempts to understand their culture, practices and language. They observe what people do in comparison to what they say (Herbert, 2000, p. 552). Participant observation as ethnographic practice became a key feature of the Chicago school of sociology and humanist geography (Hoggart et al., 2014, p. 507). In the earlier, traditional ethnographic approach, the ethnographer attempted to expose what really is the lifeworld of their participants (for realist ethnography, see Gobo, 2008). British social anthropologists favoured an emotionally detached approach to participant observation, taking scientific notes to

produce objective reports on the reality of their participants’ lived experiences, and often failing to recognize their own bias or the impact of their positionality (Hoggart et al., 2014, p. 508). In response to the earlier positivist methods, the Chicago school and humanist geography adopted a far more interactionist approach, recognizing that knowledge is a social construction and that while ethnographers can interpret their recordings, these may be fallible. They argued that the purpose of ethnography is to find and explain the symbolic social and cultural meanings of their participants’ lifeworld, not to try to simply reflect reality. This type of ethnography should avoid overall theories on social and cultural processes (Herbert, 2000, p. 552). From this arose critical ethnography (see Porter, 2002), which acknowledges that once reality is constructed it exists independently and cannot be replicated to other social contexts. Ethnographers cannot record complete truths but instead they create ‘textual constructions of reality’ (Atkinson, 1990). In many ways, they become storytellers (Revill and Seymour, 2000). Clifford (1986) went as far as to say that ethnographers invent cultures, rather than represent them (Hoggart et al., 2014, p. 523). Critical ethnography is arguably unscientific, too reliant on interpretation, unable to be generalized and specific to only one social context (Herbert, 2000, p. 557). Yet all methods rely on interpretation. Data is never naive or unproblematic and there are always questions of relevance, reliability and measurability (ibid., p. 559). By familiarizing themselves with their participants’ lifeworld, the ethnographer may be able to develop generalizations about human nature: ‘all humans are ethnographers whenever they enter a new social scene, one moves from outsider to insider as one comprehends the world from the insiders’ point of view’ (ibid., p. 556). Critical ethnographers aim to be self-conscious and reflective when writing up and interpreting their observations. This type of critical ethnography has since become a key methodological component in human geography. Herbert (2000) argued for the use of ethnography in human geography because it uncovers the meaningful and everyday processes, structures and actions that make up our participants’ socio-spatial life (Geertz, 1973). Ethnographers not only write about

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human relationships, but also how people interact with animals (Lorimer, Hodgetts and Barua, 2019), materials and forces. Ethnography enables us to explore how the built environment is understood and embodied by the social practices performed in them (see Lees’ 2001 ethnography on a public library in Vancouver). Back in 2000, Herbert argued that ethnography in human geography, however, was limited. Since then, the vast amount of fieldwork training on ethnography available at higher education level reveals the popularity of this method within the social sciences. However, scholars have not yet theorized what makes geographical ethnography arguably distinctive. Many of my examples below include ethnographies from geographers and sociologists highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of both ethnography and scholarship that encompasses human geography. There are many branches of ethnography employed by human geographers, including visual ethnography (Oldrup and Carstensen, 2012), ethnographic walking (McLean et al., 2018) and digital ethnographies (Koch and Miles, 2021). Even more recent evolutions involve gay suburban ethnographies (Bain and Podmore, 2021) and decolonized ethnographies (see Bauder’s 2020 work on refugees’ politics of place). In response to concerns about whether an ethnography can really provide a grounded approach that represents the voice of the marginalized (Lees, 2003, p. 110), geographers and other social scientists have used ethnographic biographies to look at residents’ experiences of eviction and displacement (Lees and Robinson, 2021; Wilde, 2022). In ethnographic biographies, the participant becomes a collaborator in the ethnographic research. While they cannot be generalized to represent whole communities, ethnographic biographies provide a rich and detailed description of the individual experience. Early ethnographers were criticized for ‘othering’ and advocating the ‘cultural context of white supremacy’ (Hoggart et al., 2014, p. 519) as it was usually a white male researcher observing a non-white community. One method of addressing this is to study our own socio-culture rather than others (Bourdieu, 1990), a form of autoethnography, a ‘self-narrative’ (Reed-Danahay, 1997, p. 9), as the researcher analyses and interprets meaning in their own lifeworld. Sharda Rozena

Autoethnography comes with its own set of problems, including the legitimacy of storytelling in academia (Wall, 2008), the overly descriptive nature of self-reflective writing (Ellis, 2004), and the highly emotional aspects of reflecting on your own experience. Nonetheless, autoethnography has emerged as a valuable method in geographical scholarship (see Rozena and Lees, 2021). Ethnographies have historically lacked attention to gender as an analytical category and political issue (see Stacey, 1988). In response, however, there has been a burgeoning scholarship on feminist ethnography in human geography (McDowell, 1992; and England, 1994). Arguably we need to go further towards institutional ethnography (Billo and Mountz, 2016, p. 200), a geographical exploration of processes of subordination. This is an embodied feminist and Marxist approach that considers the effect of institutions on socio-spatial relations and everyday life (ibid.). This method is still under-used and would fill a gap in existing empirical research in human geography. Ethnography comprises other qualitative approaches, including semi-structured and unstructured interviews, focus groups, walking biographies, oral histories, photography, surveys, discourse analysis and archival research. Human geographers often use multiple methods because they are required in the interpretation of meaning and actions. Participant observation over a long period of time is the principal element of an ethnography (Atkinson, 2015, p. 12), and this can take place in a variety of different settings, including online (for cyberethnography, see Garrett, 2010). Geographers continue to spend a longitudinal period in far-away destinations (Cook, 2018); however, there are plenty of ethnographies that occur closer to home. For example, in Minca and Roelofsen’s (2021) digital ethnography of Airbnb, they engaged as both participants (users) and observers. Okely (2012, p. 77) maintains that ‘observation involves more than co-residence, verbal interaction and observation; it also involves knowledge through the body, through all the senses’. Indeed, the phenomenological tradition is crucial in ethnographic practice. Herbert (2000, p. 553) emphasized how attachment to place is felt (though our eyes, ears, sense of touch etc.) and therefore geographers must take note of the senses to better understand how people embody place.

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Covert research is rare in ethnography, although sometimes telling participants too much about the research may influence the way they behave (Hoggart et al., 2014, p. 539). However, most ethnographies use overt methods in line with ethical guidance. Indeed, Atkinson (2015, p. 172) argues that ‘ethnography is among the most ethical forms of research’ because it involves a personal and emotional commitment to the lives of participants and a methodological commitment, through reflective practice, to address the unequal and hierarchical power relations in the field. Being reflective about your presumptions, prejudices and your insider/outsider position helps mitigate the risk of creating a colonizing image as the all-knowing researcher. To maintain critical ethnographic practice in the discipline, geographers should write about their reflexivity in their research. Atkinson (2015, p. 277) defined ‘reflective practice’ as being ‘conscious, self-aware of what we are doing…acknowledge, as far as we can the essential character of social research…interpret, make sense of, the social events and actions we witness and participate in’. The ethnographer must engage with their own positionality in the research process and consider how their gender, class, ethnicity, age, academic privilege and so on impacts the research process, and the way that participants may respond to them (Hoggart et al., 2014, p. 527). Clifford and Marcus’s (1986) book Writing Culture highlighted the post-modern turn towards reflexivity within ethnography. Clifford and Marcus (1986, p. 9) argued that the popular image of the ethnographer had shifted from the sympathetic yet authoritarian observer to an unflattering caricature of the cruel and assertive researcher imposing themselves on another civilization. They highlighted the power inequalities between the researcher and their observants. In the 1960s, the ‘conventions cracked’ (ibid.) as the ethnographer began to write about their experiences, and the way this impacted upon or disrupted the power relations and the subjective/objective balance. Self-reflexivity led to wider discussions on the ethnographic experience, the problems of participant observation and the renegotiating of power relations in the field (ibid., p. 14). Indeed, these discussions attracted human geogra-

phers to ethnographical practice during the ‘cultural turn’. Reflexivity can be difficult. Ethnographers may have to interact with people and communities they find hard to tolerate. Fieldwork can be difficult to comprehend and be emotionally or politically challenging. Since we all have personal agendas and opinions, we hold ‘pre-assumptions, make pre-judgements and harbour prejudices: they are inescapable’ (Gobo, 2008, p. 76). Being reflexive and conducting ethical practice may include nurturing mutual relationships or remaining in flexible dialogue with participants, but there are concerns about whether the researcher should maintain long-term relationships with the people they are studying after the research has finished, or indeed if they are even able to. Ethnographic practice can be dangerous or may carry potential risks to the researcher’s safety and privacy (Bott, 2010). Nonetheless, by being self-reflexive about these concerns and addressing the unequal power relations in the research, the ethnography is inevitably richer and more honest. Reflective practice involves being able to understand the complex, contradictory nature of human behaviour, even when studying those we deem as ‘unlovable’ (ibid.). This type of reflexivity requires negotiating with our emotional selves and considering how best to represent our participants (ibid.). By writing about how the data is accessed and how positionality influences knowledge collection, geographers can also avoid appropriating the image of ethnography as a colonizing discipline that advocates writing about ‘the other’ (England, 1994; Herbert, 2000, p. 562). Lees (2003, p. 108) called for a more reflective ethnography specifically in ‘new urban geography’. Geographers need to be explicit about how they have conducted ethnography and ensure they record their reflexivity in their writing (Hitchings and Latham, 2020, p. 973). There are ongoing issues with geographers doing ethnography without explaining how (see Hitchings and Latham, 2020 for examples). Ethnography may bring us closer to the people we are studying, but the researcher only ever has partial insight into their participants’ world (Lees, 2003, p. 110) and therefore they could deliberately manipulate voices to support their arguments (Dear and Flusty, 1999, p. 413). As such, the ethnographer must provide a reflective Sharda Rozena

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discussion of their methods, how they carried them out, and the impact or influence their presence has on the people they are studying (Lees, 2003, p. 111). Since Lees’ call for more reflexivity, many geographers have achieved this through activist ethnography (e.g., Casas-Cortés, Osterweil and Powell, 2008; Graeber, 2009; Wilde, 2019). This is doing ethnography as a critical insider, an anarchist of a social activist movement or mass direct action (Graeber, 2009, p. 12). Using the idea of ‘knowledge practices’ (Casas-Cortés et al., 2008), human geographer Matt Wilde (2019) provides a grounded analysis of a renter activism group in London and the everyday struggles experienced in the pursuit of housing justice. Knowledge practice means the ‘experiences, stories, ideologies, and claims to various forms of expertise that define how social actors come to know and inhabit the world’ (Casas-Cortés et al., 2008, p. 27). These practices often take place in ‘militant ethnography’ (Juris, 2008, p. 64) where the ethnographer adopts a politically engaged form of knowledge production. Critical ethnography has emerged as a valuable and popular method within human geography. It enables us to understand and interpret the complexities of social and cultural life in the everyday spatial contexts of our participants (Herbert, 2000, p. 564). There are many ways of doing ethnography (including feminist, Marxist and post-modern approaches) that aim to create a more grounded analysis of research subjects, particularly those whose voices are seldom heard. Human geographers, however, need to continue writing about their critical ethnographic practice and reflexivity in their research to ensure honest constructions of

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meaning. By doing this, ethnography can continue to be a valuable way of representing the complexities of language, culture and society within the geospatial landscape. Sharda Rozena

References and selected further reading Atkinson, P. (1990). The Ethnographic Imagination. London: Routledge. Atkinson, P. (2015). For Ethnography. London: SAGE. Bain, A. and Podmore, J. (2021). ‘Relocating queer: comparing suburban LGBTQ2S activisms on Vancouver’s periphery’. Urban Studies, 58 (7), 1500–519. Bauder, H. (2020). ‘Migrant solidarities and the politics of place’. Progress in Human Geography, 44 (6), 1066–80. Billo, E. and Mountz, A. (2016). ‘For institutional ethnography: geographical approaches to institutions and the everyday’. Progress in Human Geography, 40 (2), 199–220. Bott, E. (2010). ‘Favourites and others: reflexivity and the shaping of subjectivities and data in qualitative research’. Qualitative Research, 10 (2), 159–73. Bourdieu, P. (1990). In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity. Casas-Cortés, M.I., Osterweil, M., & Powell, D.E. (2008). ‘Blurring Boundaries: Recognizing Knowledge-Practices in the Study of Social Movements’. Anthropological Quarterly, 81 (1), 17-58. Clifford, J. (1986). ‘Introduction’. In J. Clifford and G. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 1–26. Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.E. (eds) (1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of

Ethnography  149 Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cook, B. (2018). ‘The aesthetic politics of taste: producing extra virgin olive oil in Jordan’. Geoforum, 92, 36–44. Cook, I. and Crang, M. (1995). Doing Ethnographies. Norwich: Geobooks. Davies, C.A. (2008). Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others. London: Routledge. Dear, M. and Flusty, S. (1999). ‘Engaging postmodern urbanism’. Urban Geography, 89, 412-16. Ellis, C. (2004). The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Oxford: Altamira Press. England, K. (1994). ‘Getting personal: reflexivity, positionality, and feminist research’. Professional Geographer, 46 (1), 80–89. Garrett, B. (2010). ‘Videographic geographies: using digital video for geographic research’. Progress in Human Geography, 35 (4), 521–41. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gobo, G. (2008). Doing Ethnography. London: SAGE. Graeber, D. (2009). Direct Action: An Ethnography. London: AK Press. Herbert, S. (2000). ‘For ethnography’. Progress in Human Geography, 24 (4), 550–68. Hitching, R. and Latham, A. (2020). ‘Qualitative methods II: on the presentation of “geographical ethnography”’. Progress in Human Geography, 44 (5), 972–90. Hoggart, K., Lees, L. and Davies, A. (2014). Researching Human Geography. London: Routledge. Juris, J.S. (2008). ‘Performing politics: image, embodiment, and affective solidarity during anticorporate globalization protests’. Ethnography, 9 (1), 61–97. Koch, R. and Miles, S. (2021). ‘Inviting the stranger in: intimacy, digital technology and new geographies of encounter’. Progress in Human Geography, 45 (6), 1379–401. Lees, L. (2001). ‘Towards a critical geography of architecture: the case of an ersatz colosseum’. Ecumene: A Journal of Cultural Geographies, 8, 51–86. Lees, L. (2003). ‘Urban geography: “new” urban geography and the ethnographic void’. Progress in Human Geography, 27 (1), 107–13. Lees, L. and Robinson, B. (2021). ‘Beverley’s story: survivability on one of London’s

newest gentrification frontiers’. City, 25 (5–6), 590–613. Lorimer, J., Hodgetts, T. and Barua, M. (2019). ‘Animals’ atmospheres’. Progress of Human Geography, 43 (1), 26–45. Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Project Gutenberg. McDowell, L. (1992). ‘Doing gender: feminism, feminists and research methods in human geography’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 17 (4), 399–416. McLean, J., Lonsdale, A. and Hammersley, L. et al. (2018). ‘Shadow waters: making Australian water cultures visible’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 43 (4), 615–29. Mead, M. (1928). Coming of Age in Samoa. New York: William Morrow & Company. Minca, C. and Roelofsen, M. (2021). ‘Becoming Airbnbeings: on datafication and the quantified Self in tourism’. Tourism Geographies, 23 (4), 743–64. Okely, J. (2012). Anthropological Practice: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Method. London: Berg. Oldrup, H. and Carstensen, T. (2012). ‘Producing geographical knowledge through visual methods’. Human Geography, 94, 223–37. Porter, S. (2002). ‘Critical realist ethnography’. In T. May (ed.), Qualitative Research in Action. London: SAGE, pp. 53–72. Reed-Danahay, D. (1997). Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. London: Bloomsbury. Revill, G. and Seymour, S. (2000). ‘Telling stories: story telling as a textual strategy’. In A. Hughes, C. Morris and S. Seymour (eds), Ethnography and Rural Research. Cheltenham: Countryside and Community Unit, pp. 136–57. Rozena, S. and Lees, L. (2021). ‘The everyday experiences of Airbnbification in London’. Social and Cultural Geography Journal, https://​ doi​.org/​10​.1080/​14649365​.2021​.1939124. Stacey, J. (1988). ‘Can there be a feminist ethnography?’. Women’s Studies International Forum, 11 (1), 21–7. Wall, S. (2008). ‘Easier said than done: writing an autoethnography’. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 7 (1), 38–53. Wilde, M. (2019). ‘Resisting the rentier city: grassroots housing activism and renter subjectivity in post-crisis London’. Radical Housing Journal, 1 (2), 63–80. Wilde, M. (2022). ‘Eviction, gatekeeping and militant care: moral economies of housing in austerity London’. Ethnos, 87 (1), 22–41.

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30. Feminist geographies Introduction Feminists are increasingly ever more publicly present, staking a claim stridently when necessary, as movements with hashtags from #PinjraTod (‘Break the Cage’, origin India) to #BLM and #MeToo (origin USA) testify. The need to be continuously noisy and keep the feminist struggle going, however, underlines that feminist aspirations as laid out by early feminist movements and waves are a continuous process, with new turns and emphasis. These shifts, turns and evolutions are also captured by feminist scholarship and interventions, both within human geography and the social sciences more broadly. In this entry, we will outline current themes and concerns that shape feminism at this juncture, with the aim of highlighting the work of black feminist geographers and feminists of colour. Mona Domosh in her reflections on the 25th anniversary of Gender, Place and Culture, the first journal specifically for feminist geography debates, remarked: ‘It is fantastic. But that’s beyond the success of us or the journal, it’s just the success of feminist geography, right? It’s just so much more expansive and vital and interesting, and the thing that we were fearful of, which is that the journal would ghettoise the discipline, that hasn’t happened at all… Now the journal reflects the vitality of geography, but I mean feminist geographies, and what they have become’ (Domosh and Ruwanpura, 2018, pp. 4–5). Her enthusiasm for the broadening of feminist geographies is at one level a testimony to its current vitality and yet it is also a reflection of the social challenges that remain. While she was underlining the achievements of a (white) feminist geography to better understand the ways in which gender and space are theorized in daily and political life (England and Lawson, 2005; Massey, 1994; McDowell, 1999; Rose, 1997), she was also calling for a recognition and celebration of contributions by black feminists and feminists of colour ­– in our estimation still too often on the margins (see also Staeheli and Nagar, 2002). In a call to not simply look at past human geographies but to ‘look forward’ within this Encyclopedia, we want to broaden out fem-

inist geographies and showcase scholarship written in different languages, in different contexts for different audiences. For instance, many recent works claiming the decolonial title borrow from Anibal Quijano and other Andean intellectuals. Similarly, those claiming post-colonial labels borrow from Samir Amin for Middle East/North Africa (MENA) regions, and Guha and Chatterjee for South Asia. These non-Western scholars were writing about modernity and world capitalism from the 1960s, highlighting how the unequal distribution of power was only possible via the social classification of the world’s population based upon the social construction of race consolidated during colonialism, which Fanon wrote about early on and which exists to this day (Quijano, 2000). Thus our aim is to widen the bounds of Western academic feminism and feminist geography in particular and acknowledge that politics around class, caste and sexuality, to name a few other social vectors, stubbornly persists and needs recurrent examination.

South Asian feminisms Feminist geographers of colour identify themselves within two dominant abbreviations: in the UK as Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) and in North America as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour); elsewhere in the global academic landscape as minorities or feminists of colour. The majority of feminists and women academics of colour often identify as working class. From the vast array of contributions to geography by feminists of colour, we focus on the contributions made by South Asian, Latin American and Chicana feminists, partly reflecting on our own expertise. Drawing on these contributions, we want to underline that knowledge production evolves and that there are multiple strands within feminism and feminist geography that cannot be captured in a short entry. We simply highlight a few key threads. For feminism more generally and South Asian feminism in particular, early contributions by feminists – such as Kumari Jayawardena, Ritu Menon, Urvashi Butalia, (the late) Kamla Bhasin, Hameeda Hossain, Kursheed Erfan Ahmed and Khushi Kabir – have been pivotal in how debates have

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evolved. Their spirited contributions spanned from giving voice to how the feminist imperative was homegrown and accentuated connections to the violence of bordering and boundary-marking in South Asia and its colonial antecedents. The value of these contributions is reflected in the works of contemporary South Asian feminist geographers. Anindita Dutta, Shilpa Phadke, Aparajita De and Saraswati Raju, for instance, continue to underline the structural facets that shape and bear upon women’s struggles and feminist scholarship itself. Drawing on intersectional feminist analysis via Kimberley Crenshaw, black feminist and Latin American feminist geographers are increasingly raising ideas around sexuality, decoloniality and casteism. The decolonizing imperative is important in underlying, enduring colonial/neocolonial structural facets. This more recent emphasis also draws on and reworks concepts already highlighted by subaltern and post-colonial scholars, including feminists, such as Gayathri Spivak, Nivedita Menon and (the late) Malathi de Alwis. The current generation of Indian feminists and feminist geographers, for instance, demonstrate a growing impatience with previous generations of feminist scholars and accuse them of casteism (svarna), class privilege and misogyny towards transgender people. The animated debates make it seem like there is much diversity within feminists/feminism, yet a young activist in the Twitter community (@Dipti24753969) remarks ‘South Asian feminism is not as diverse as it has always seemed from the outside. One just has to look at the caste/ class composition of this block’. Her astute remark is a reminder that structures of class and caste stubbornly persist and our identities also intersect with these structural facets, as Kimberley Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality stressed. Dismantling these structures through redistributive politics, however, requires us to work across difference and acknowledge how current intellectual views stand on the shoulders of those that came before us.

Latin American and Chicana feminisms Latin American intellectuals and geographers take inspiration from ‘subaltern studies’1 but are informed very much by their Latin American location. Much of this work is just beginning to be translated and introduced into the English-speaking canon. While some scholars are interested in making distinctions between post-colonial and decolonial feminisms, we believe it more productive to talk about their intersections (see also Asher, 2013). Latin American and Chicana feminisms share similarities but also are distinctively unique. The major difference is that Chicana feminists have written mostly in English, although through a hybrid language inflected with Spanish and Indigenous terms, while Latin American feminists write in Spanish, or in Indigenous languages. The lack of translation of these into English might have given the impression to some that Latin American feminisms are lacking in theoretical impetus. Yet, what must be discussed is the primacy of the English language and academic journals with paywalls2 as the home of feminist geographical epistemology, which hides other, different venues for feminist theorizing (see Sengupta, 2021). In English-speaking contexts, we learn about Latin American feminisms from those who are ‘border crossers’ or ‘world travellers’ (see Lugones (1987), ‘Playfulness, “world”‐travelling, and loving perception’). World travellers must work to be identifiable in many distinct locations, as they must constantly negotiate, navigating distinct socially imposed colonial identities centring around race, gender, sexuality and location, highlighting the problematic of fixed and static social identifiers. Other Latin American feminisms occur independently from the Western gaze, but they are now receiving increased attention in human geography. They highlight the distinct gendered and racialized systems brought upon Latin America, first by colonization and then capitalism. Rita Segato writes about the disposability of certain bodies (brown, poor, women) resulting from capitalist and neoliberal extractive policies condoned by elite interests. There is a total disregard for women’s lives in these contexts as we learn about the devastating effects of violence

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from maquilas, mining and oil industries, and the violence of neoliberal policies, even those seeking to advance ‘women’s rights’, especially on poor, racialized women. Ulloa (2016) and recently Gay-Antaki and De Luca (2022) call for a Latin American feminist political ecology (LAFPE), as a necessary lens through which to understand how patriarchy and colonialism, as intersecting systems of domination, encompass oppressive and exploitative relationships that affect women, nature and feminized bodies, resulting in distinct gendered and racialized systems that determine access and control over resources. A recent publication edited by De Luca, Fosado Centeno and Velázquez Gutiérrez (2020) has condensed and compiled analytical positions, as well as concepts inherent to gender studies and feminist theory to present new methodological and epistemological approaches from Latin America, while highlighting and acknowledging the feminist classics. The publication highlights Latin American challenges for women, minorities and the environment, and shows how injustices unfold at different sites, the centrality of power relations between the Global North and the Global South. It also highlights relations between the centre and the peripheries, between the elites and marginalized populations, as well as recognizing the effects of the neoliberal capitalist system in environmental deterioration and in the generation of poverty and inequality. While the publication underscores the socio-environmental challenges of colonization and domination of political and economic elites, it offers alternative understandings of nature, allowing one to imagine other possible worlds, both in ecological and social terms (De Luca et al., 2020). Similar work can be found across Latin America – for instance, in the Latin American Group of Feminist Studies, Formation and Action (GLEFAS in Spanish) headed by Ochy Curiel Pichardo and Yuderkys Espinosa. Although we have attempted to provide a summary of recent work in separate categories, by no means does this work lack intersectional understanding of the simultaneous oppressions that are faced by women across the globe. For instance, geographers Sharlene Mollett and Caroline Faria (2018) have conducted important work highlighting the centrality of race within feminist political ecology (FPE) when conducting work in Latin America, a place where much scholar-

ship focuses on development, negating issues of race. They underscore that development is very much a racializing force. The lack of academic feminist decolonial literature in English-speaking contexts is reflective of a feminism more interested in activism rather than in reflecting on academic feminism, as Zaragocin (2020) explains in the case of Ecuador. Nevertheless, contributions from Latin American feminist activists do infiltrate academic circles, as we learn from the work of Aymara intellectual Rivera Cusicanqui who has long been connecting critical feminisms and subaltern studies with her Aymara heritage to critique the ongoing colonial condition of most of Latin America. Rivera Cusicanqui’s (2012) interventions have been crucial in underscoring that work coming from Latin America does not automatically make it revolutionary or decolonial, but rather she has found her work to be co-opted and depoliticized by those claiming decolonial practice. Feminist geographers, such as Astrid Ulloa, Diana Ojeda, Kiran Asher, Caroline Faria, Sharlene Mollett, and more recent work from Sofia Zaragocin, Margaret Marietta Ramírez, Miriam Gay-Antaki and Laura Pulido, are increasingly bringing the above insights into their own work.

Black and indigenous feminisms Feminist and critical race scholars who identify themselves as black geographers draw largely on the works of Kimberley Crenshaw and Stuart Hall – pre-eminent black thinkers of their generation – although the roots of these scholarly debates span to the early twentieth century. If for Hall, black connoted a political category in Britain that encompassed Afro-Caribbean, South Asian and African people, more recent articulations by black geographers locate that identity to be a place firmly in Afro-Caribbean, Afro-American and Afro-British communities. Decentring the hegemonic priorities of Eurocentrism is coupled with highlighting anti-blackness in black geographies; the purpose is to create and acknowledge the power of black spaces within the discipline. Similar impetus also comes from Indigenous scholarship, including North Americans that seek to reclaim Indigenous spaces of knowledge creation and stake a claim within domi-

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nant strands in the discipline. We take each in turn here in the following. Black feminisms, like other feminist thought, have undergone temporal shifts of emphasis, with even the same moment accentuating spaces of blackness in different concepts. The intimate relationship between spaces inhabited and the struggles enacted by black women has been the focus for human geographer Katherine McKittrick (2002), for instance. She argues that women’s liberation depends upon the imaginative ways in which obstacles that emanate from existing social structures are negotiated, with a reiteration of how oppression faced by black women is also linked to white women. Her crucial input is to give voice to the ways in which black women’s spatial struggles have been foundational, and not marginal, for significant historical modes of enslavement, colonization, classism, racism and sexism. For instance, recent work by feminist geographer Howard (2019) highlights the problematic erasure of blackness in US spaces that highlights other ethnic identities, despite policies permeated with anti-blackness sentiments, stressing the presence and erasure of African-descended people in US landscapes. Feminist geographers Howard, McKittrick and Mollett who work on race always also understand and work at the intersections of class, gender and sexuality. The space-making practices of black subjects and communities is underlined by Eaves (2017), who argues that black subjects and communities ought not to be slotted into fixed, hierarchical categories but rather be viewed as a modality of geographic knowledge formation. The forced dispersion of African people from one continent to another also has geographical roots and routes, which Eaves emphasizes needs more than a nod in pursuing research on black spaces and subjects. Meanings of blackness are hence suffused by the corporeal, aesthetic, creative, spiritual and elemental – and subsequently how oppression is viewed and the futures imagined are also part of black geographical knowledge. Indigenous thinkers too have influenced feminist and black radical thought, as well as emerged as a powerful feminist force in their own right. In more recent times, the work of Tuck and Young (2012) has been particularly influential in reorienting academic

attention towards the decolonization project by re-emphasizing how calls for decolonization ought to specifically pivot towards the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. They are at pains to emphasize that decolonization should not be considered a metaphor to improve curriculums, buildings, societies and schools, for instance, as it risks making the concept a metaphor rather than a medium for political change. The easy adoption of decolonization as a metaphor has, however, gathered pace all over academia. The most egregious evidence of its metaphorical purchase is when decolonization projects are spearheaded by white men and white colleagues to ensure palatability by the more conservative forces within academia. Feminist geographers and feminist geographers of colour fight against this epistemological violence to elucidate the radical potential of truly intersectional thinking within academia and beyond that can dismantle power structures that continue to oppress and silence women, and especially women of colour (Molana, 2021; Mollett and Faria, 2013, 2018; Ranjibar, 2017). However, Indigenous scholars themselves have pushed the boundaries of academic disciplines and methods partly as a nod towards decoloniality and partly because excavating Indigenous knowledge systems leads to the broadening of the discipline and its methods, signalling the need to extend the curriculum. For instance, Iralu (2021) in her work on locating Indigenous spatial justice, has drawn on the cultural practices of the Zuni people that remix colonial mapping tropes together with artistic endeavours based on their cultural knowledge. Alternative methods of reading space, place and race arise that ‘contests dominant ideas of nation and territory while centring Zuni notions of reading gender on the landscape’ (Iralu, 2021, p. 1499). Such a project disrupts colonial relations entrenched in mapping practices that enforce dispossession. This rupture facilitates decolonization and underscores the necessity of incorporating Indigenous knowledge systems where Indigenous peoples represent themselves. Elspeth Iralu, as well as other Indigenous scholars, such as Kim Tallbear, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Mishuana Goeman, Margaret Wickens Pearce, Renee Pualani Louis, Michelle Daigle and others, disrupt Western epistemological frameworks,

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making space for alternative ways of being and knowing this world. The need to give expression to embodied experiences and material conditions is also the bedrock of queer and transgender geographies, which come from both black and Indigenous scholars (Eaves, 2017; Goeman, 2013). Eaves, for instance, argues that in contrast to the singular nodes of analysis common in queer studies, transgender black geographic perspectives require being attentive to connections between public spaces or the structuration of home life. Such an analytical gaze needs to be recognized in terms of ‘overlapping dialectics that link institutions, power and knowledge’, which facilitates grasping the socio-spatial interactions of these communities (Eaves, 2017, p. 87). These interventions and interruptions within feminist geography specifically, and human geography more broadly, are a reminder of the racism and genocide that human geography as a discipline has discounted.

Concluding words The work of the feminist geographers discussed above investigates a diversity of issues from across the globe. As they challenge the foundations of Western thought, they call into question development, class-inflected colonial and scientific practices, central to gendering and racializing processes that perpetuate multiple inequities and differentiation. Needless to say, the intellectual differences and struggles that occur within feminisms and feminist geographies reflect their health, and signals the need to respect difference and diversity, moving away from homogenizing second-wave, middle-class, white Western feminisms. The feminisms here highlight the centrality of geography, race, class, ethnicity and sexuality, if we are to better comprehend the different gendered struggles across the globe. Intolerance and an inability to accept different views, public lynching, and naming and shaming colleagues ought to be avoided, as should a willingness to continuously engage

in academic dialogue and conversation – recognizing that knowledge production is a continuously evolving process, reflecting temporal shifts in our inhabited geographies. Kanchana N. Ruwanpura and Miriam Gay-Antaki

Notes 1.

Subaltern studies looks at how common people are political actors in the making of history rather than limit themselves to re-explore the political roles of social and economic elites. Subaltern scholars had the strongest presence in India, but they also extend to South Asia. 2. A method of restricting access to content with a purchase of paid subscription.

References and selected further reading Asher, Kiran (2013), ‘Latin American decolonial thought, or making the subaltern speak’, Geography Compass, 7 (12), 832–42. De Luca Zuria, Ana, Ericka Fosado Centeno and Margarita Velázquez Gutiérrez, (2020), Feminismo socioambiental: revitalizando el debate desde América Latina, Mexico City: Centro Regional de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias. Domosh, Mona and Kanchana N. Ruwanpura (2018), ‘A conversation between Mona Domosh and Kanchana N. Ruwanpura: reflections on the past, present and future of GPC’, Gender, Place & Culture, 25 (1), 4–12. Eaves, LaToya (2017), ‘Black geographic possibilities: on a Queer Black South’, Southeastern Geographer, 57 (1), 80–95. England, Kim and Victoria Lawson (2005), ‘Feminist analyses of work: rethinking the boundaries, gendering, and spatiality of work’, in Lise Nelson and Joni Seager (eds), A Companion to Feminist Geography, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 77–92. Gay-Antaki, Miriam and Ana De Luca (2022), ‘Feminist political ecology’, in F. Nunan, C. Barnes and S. Krishnamurthy (eds), Routledge Handbook on Livelihoods in the Global South. London: Routledge, pp. 170–80. Goeman, Mishuana (2013), Mark my Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations,

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Feminist geographies  155 Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Howard, Natasha (2019), ‘Spatializing blackness in New Mexico’, Journal of Pan African Studies, 12, 33–41. Iralu, Elspeth (2021), ‘Putting Indian country on the map: Indigenous practices of spatial justice’, Antipode, 53 (5), 1485–502. Lugones, Maria (1987), ‘Playfulness, “world”‐ travelling, and loving perception’, Hypatia, 2, 3–19. Massey, Doreen (1994), Space, Place and Gender, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. McDowell, Linda (1999), Gender, Identity, and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. McKittrick, Katherine (2002), ‘“Their blood is there, and they can’t throw it out”: honoring black Canadian geographies’, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 7, 27–37. Molana, Hanieh (2021), ‘Decolonizing geography of the Middle East: utilizing feminist pedagogical strategies to reconstruct the classroom’, Gender, Place & Culture, https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1080/​0966369X​.2021​.2016653. Mollett, Sharlene and Caroline Faria (2013), ‘Messing with gender in feminist political ecology’, Geoforum, 45, 116–25. Mollett, Sharlene and Caroline Faria (2018), ‘The spatialities of intersectional thinking: fashion-

ing feminist geographic futures’, Gender, Place & Culture, 25, 565–77. Quijano, Annibal (2000), ‘Coloniality of power and Eurocentrism in Latin America’, International Sociology, 15, 215–32. Ranjibar, Azita Marie (2017), ‘Silence, silencing and (in)visibility: the geopolitics of Tehran’s project’, Hypatia, 32 (3), 609–26. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia (2012), ‘Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: a reflection on the practices and discourses of decolonization’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 111 (1), 96–109. Rose, Gillian (1997), ‘Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics’, Progress in Human Geography, 21 (3), 305–20. Sengupta, Papia (2021). ‘Open access publication: academic colonialism or knowledge philanthropy?’, Geoforum, 118, 203–6. Staeheli, Lynn and Richa Nagar (2002), ‘Feminists talking across worlds’, Gender, Place & Culture, 9, 167–72. Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang (2012), ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, 1 (1), 1–40. Ulloa, Astrid (2016), ‘Feminismos territoriales en América Latina: defensas de la vida frente a los extractivismos’, Nómadas, 45, 123–39. Zaragocin, Sofia (2020), ‘Geografía feminista descolonial’, Geopauta, 4, 18–30.

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31. Food geographies Food, along with shelter, water and air, is an essential, universal need – vital for (human) life as well as (human) social reproduction. This binds food, along with these other essential resources, to political economy, making it an object from which political and economic institutions stem (Scott, 2017) and a tool through which political and economic institutions control or otherwise subjugate populations (Nally, 2011). Food is also transgressive and trans-scalar. It enters the body, and as it crosses the boundaries between self and other, it brings with it meanings and other materialities embedded into its very matter. Food also comes laden with meanings. It is a boundary object whose individual meanings are socially and culturally contingent, as well an object that crosses social and cultural as well as spatio-temporal divides. Rich with situated and contextual meaning(s), however, food also always provides a material connection to the physical world, establishing, and at the same time materializing, a metabolic relationship between its consumers and the (N) natures from which it is produced. Resulting from these universalizing, as well as socially and culturally specific semiotic tendencies, food and its production is implicated in multiple global and indeed planetary processes and systems that are enacted at a range of scales – from the political-economic, social-cultural and bio-climactic, and from the microbiological and biochemical to the planet. These multiple facets, and no doubt others too numerous to mention, led anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and innumerable other commentators from multiple other perspectives and disciplines, to suggest that food is good to eat, but also good to think with. As well as an object of study in its own right, for geography food acts as an objective corollary through which other socio-spatial practices are read, engaged with, or otherwise analysed. In so doing, it crosses between the ostensibly human and physical realms, and opens up discussion about the more-than-human. Food thus makes space, (re)produces as well as jumps scales, and therefore provides an entry point into a range of disciplinary and subdisciplinary inquiry and debate. Within human geography in particular, the study of food (and food production) has run the gamut of human

geographical inquiry. These include the topographic surveys associated with European and imperial and colonial projects in which the productive potential of empire was measured; the nineteenth-century German urban economic studies of Johann von Thünen; the cultural landscape studies of Carl Sauer; and other early formative modes and traditions of human geographical research, such as the environmental determinism of Ellen Semple or Ellsworth Huntington. More recent analyses of food tend to be divided between the political economies and political ecologies associated with its production, which lead to food and food production’s embeddedness in globalized systems of provision, and, since the ‘cultural turn’ in economic geography, looking at its cultures of consumption (Jackson, 2010). This leads some commentators to query both the geographies of ‘in between’, and the spaces, places and practices where such production and consumption occurs (Coles, 2021). Occupying an increasingly visible position within the discipline, ‘critical food studies’ (Goodman, 2016) has emerged within geography to challenge disciplinary understandings of food’s role in shaping contemporary social, cultural, economic lives, to blur the lines between the supposed ‘human’ and ‘natural’ worlds, and to shape geographical debate about its nature and constitution on a planet subject to asymmetric threats and crises associated with climate change. Yet, however rich an intellectual opportunity the turn to critical food studies affords, and despite the variety of insights and analyses it engenders, the geographical investigation of food remains more or less delineated along the lines of production, consumption and their associated geographies. The rest of this entry will focus on these geographies, with some brief conclusions about possible future directions regarding research. Geography’s focus on food production is broadly concerned with its political economies and political ecologies. Taking a Marxist position, this branch of research focuses on the global shifts within agriculture over the last 100 years or so (Goodman and Watts, 1997). Over this period, farming and food provision’s position as a means of social reproduction has eroded into forms of agri-capitalist extractivism in which foodstuffs are primarily viewed as commodities and become another means for capital

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circulation and accumulation. A modernist state spatial logic that rationalizes farming on a ‘huge’ scale by privileging monoculture cropping systems (as opposed to polyculture) facilitates large-scale territorial transformation to spaces of extraction, and develops technologies that override the specific logics of place to that of productivism that underpins this shift (Scott, 1998). Mid-twentieth-century Cold War geopolitics and expansionist neoliberal US foreign policies embedded within international ‘development’ and United Nations food security mandates extended this logic around the world. The ‘long’ Green Revolution that emerged was founded on investments in agricultural technologies – namely, pesticides and herbicides, modified seeds, ‘scientific’ cropping techniques and other innovations. Ostensibly to secure food and alleviate hunger, this shift in agriculture was and remains intertwined with structural adjustments that blur the lines between public good, state– corporate function and the international concentration and accumulation of capital (Patel, 2013). Examples of what amounts to a neoliberal revolution in food provision that privileges the deterritorialization of capital and concentrates power into relatively few transnational agribusiness firms are visible across South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and South and North America (Busch, 2011). A state of endemic environmental crises underlies and at the same time drives this spatial logic. For example, ‘New Deal’ economic policies, specifically the Agricultural Adjustment Act enacted in the United States in the 1930s, were attempts to stabilize volatile agricultural commodities through subsidies, whilst at the same time addressing the over-production that resulted in both agricultural-economic and ecological crisis associated with the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression (Winders, 2009; Worster, 2004). In the period prior, however, the Homestead Acts of the middle–late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries actively encouraged settlement and land ‘improvement’ under a doctrine of manifest destiny. The subsequent occupation and colonization of North America led directly to the large-scale conversion of native ecosystems – primarily the tall and short prairie grasslands of the Great Plains – into mechanized monoculture cropping systems, and set the stage for ecosystem

collapse and resulting crises a few decades later. The development of soya, and large-scale agribusiness in South America particularly, which resulted in the near-wholesale conversion of primary landcover in the Amazon through mechanized monoculture, is likewise the result of state-sponsored, expansionist land policies designed to assert the state’s territorial claims by populating and eventually cultivating its frontiers. Across Brazil, policies adopted (and enforced) by the military government (1964–89), such as Constitutional Amendment No. 18 (1965), encouraged settler-colonialism in the Brazilian Amazonian interior by offering a range of fiscal incentives to – in the words of General Golbery do Couto de Silva – ‘inundate the Amazon forest with civilization’ (Hecht and Cockburn, 2011; Schmink and Wood, 1992, p. 59). Large-scale infrastructure became the means to secure the state, and the means to realize the economic potential embedded in its natural ‘capital’. Soon afterwards, the Amazon underwent a rapid period of colonization, first by cattle ranchers and small-scale farmers, who were then displaced by large-scale mechanized agriculture and agribusiness. Such ontological occupation (Escobar, 2020), which gives extractivist capitalism license to operate, results in the further deterritorialization of capital into the spaces of stateless multinational agribusiness firms and the ecological sacrifice of land and landscape to capital accumulation through industrial agriculture (Oliveira and Hecht, 2016). Repeated throughout the world, state policies that privilege the alienation and dispossession of (N)nature enable such occupation. The manipulation and rationalization of the natural landscape results in a landscape of production in which resources can be efficiently managed (Scott, 1998). The social and ecological crises that emerge from food provision under agri-capitalism have led scholars to position the nexus of agriculture and capitalism as part of a metabolic rift. The energy (in the form of calories) associated with food production is displaced from the sites of production, transported to distant sites of consumption and ultimately lost as waste, rather than cycled back through the ecosystem; this rift implicates food production – as organized under contemporary Benjamin Coles

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capitalism – as a key driver of planetary crises (Foster, 1999). And, it leads to lively debate and discussion over the gap that seemingly divides food production and consumption and how this might be lessened. The metabolic implications of the social and economic geographies implicit in food production within capitalism have therefore led scholars and activists to call for ‘agrarian citizenship’ (Schneider and McMichael, 2010, p. 476), in which food is rescaled and (natural) capital reterritorialized for the benefit of local populations and to redress agri-capitalism’s social and ecological depredations. A range of ‘alternative’ food networks, initiatives and systems worldwide have emerged as a result. These variously seek to localize, reclaim, or otherwise ‘re-place’ food provision from ‘placeless foodscapes’ ‘pulverized’ by agri-capitalism (Ilbery and Kneafsey, 2000). Their underlying rationale is that if agri-capitalism is characterized by the dispossession of people and ecosystems, the deterritorialization of power and capital, and increasing distances between spaces of production and places of consumption, then alternative food initiatives seek to reduce these metaphorical and physical distances through social, material and semiotic practices that ‘reconnect’ consumers with producers. Thus, much of the research associated with food production highlights the complex relations and spaces constituted by food’s production, and the relations through which spaces of production and consumption are articulated. An undercurrent of this work, whether stated or not, tends to focus on unveiling the commodity fetishism that obscures social relations associated with the production of things, and replaces them with relations between commodities. This in turn leads to a multitude of accounts that attempt to de-fetishize commodities by detailing where food comes from, how it is made, and how it gets from production and producers to consumption and consumers (see Cook, 2004 for one such example). Drawing on concerns over geography’s role in constituted ethics and morality, the logic behind such calls to de-fetishize food (and commodities) is that if only consumers were aware of the implications of their consumption on places of consumption, they would seek out better, more ethical and morally just modes of food consumption. These modes, it is argued, would replace Benjamin Coles

the ‘thing-logic’ (Taussig, 1980) whereby people, animals and ecosystems are alienated by agri-capitalism with ‘relations of regard’, which promote an ethic of ‘good’ – for example, good food, animals, landscapes, people and so on (Sage, 2003). As a result, the spaces and practices associated with alternative food networks and initiatives, including farmers markets, ‘organic’, ‘fair’, ‘local’ food and so on, have emerged as the subject of geographical inquiry. Critics, however, have noted that such ‘ethical’ consumption, and the spaces in which it is practised, fails to address the complex practicalities of generating and maintaining a so-called ethical food system, to define ethics and ethical food production more generally, or to interrogate more fundamental structural inequalities associated with food provision in the first place (Slocum and Saldanha, 2016). These include de facto imbalances of power such as that between producers and consumers; a more systemic failure to address the structural inequalities inherent to capitalism whilst simultaneously essentializing its control over economic reproduction; the reproduction of unhelpful dualities when it comes to defining and differentiating ethical foods from their presumably unethical others; and the neglect of the multitude reasons, rationales and emotions that drive consumption and consumer culture beyond what might otherwise be construed as ‘rational’ or ‘ethical’ economic thinking. In turn, concerns over matters of culture have led to proposals by some to shift the analytical lens of food geographies away from the materialities of production, and instead focus on consumption. It is important to note, however, that this turn to consumption is less a move to redress the imbalances of capitalism through the interrogation of particular sets of practices, than advocates embedded within the ethical turn might suggest. Instead, it is a move to understand the practices by which consumers engage with and practise consumption, and otherwise fashion spaces and places of consumption in their own right. This genre of geographical research draws heavily from the traditions of cultural and economic anthropology, which treats the often-normalized elements of political economy, such as commodities, markets and capitalism, as culturally contingent and subject to continuous negotiation. When imported into food geographies, this leads

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to questions over where, when and how, and in what contexts, foodstuffs and other commodities come into being (Castree, 2004); the ways in which commodity fetishism is fashioned, including the ways in which ostensibly ethical consumption comprises a ‘double’ commodity fetish in its own right (Barnett et al., 2010; Cook and Crang, 1996); the sites, spaces and places that enable and are enabled by food (Coles, 2021); and on the practices whereby consumers understand and negotiate meanings associated with consumption and food, as well as the consumption of food (Jackson, 2013). The recognition that food and its consumption results from a range of culturally and geographically contingent practices that supersede as well as constitute food’s political economy, ultimately lies at the heart of such cultural approaches to food. Focusing on consumption in turn leads scholars to (re)consider the cultural circuits whereby knowledges are transmitted from spaces of consumption to those of production (Jackson, Ward and Russell, 2009). Moreover, it enables consideration of the geographical displacements made by food (as well as other commodities) as food knits between and shuttles across multiple sites and spaces between those of production and consumption. Finally, focusing on cultures of consumption to better understand how meanings about food and its consumption are constituted opens the door whereby new modes of production and consumption, as well as of food itself, may take place. The final part of this entry sketches out some future directions in which geographical research into food, as well as food itself, might take. It begins by drawing attention back to the crisis moment in which political and cultural economies of food found itself. This crisis stemmed/stems from planetary crises brought on by capitalism in which current systems of food production are implicated, and from consumer culture’s inability to redress it. A wicked problem lies at the core of this crisis. Exponential human population growth (as well as resource use) over the last century or so is in part the result of the increased availability and quality of protein – namely, that of animals (Bennett et al., 2018). At

the same time, animal production for food is responsible not only for trophic energy losses that might contribute to the metabolic rift, but also for significant greenhouse gases at all stages of production, transport and consumption, as well as massive biodiversity loss and ecosystem devastation. Additionally, questions have emerged pertaining to the moral grounds on which non-human animals are consumed as food, and on which large swathes of arable lands are dedicated to the production of feed crops. Agri-capitalism and the aforementioned Green Revolution technologies are certainly complicit in these widespread impacts on the biosphere and their underlying ethics, but, needless to say, human populations remain locked into the production and consumption of meat. In geography, such questions have led to some calling for the ‘de-animalization’ of the food system (Morris et al., 2021), more in-depth analyses into the potential for non-animal alternatives to protein, and the possibilities for bioengineering novel forms of protein (Sumberg and Thompson, 2012). Such questioning posits food geographies at the forefront of debate associated with planetary crisis and climate change. Likewise, it leads to questions over the role and position of human social reproduction in relation to wider ecosystems. For these reasons, food is at the centre of debate pertaining to the relationships between human and non-human populations; the roles humans play in maintaining the biosphere; and the responsibilities humans have in ensuring a just and equitable future for all populations. Future directions of food geographies are therefore positioned to make significant contributions to how all populations can live sustainably together. Benjamin Coles

References and selected further reading Barnett, C., Cloke, P., Clarke, N. and Malpass, A. 2010. Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption. Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Bennett, C.E., Thomas, R. and Williams, M. et al. 2018. The broiler chicken as a signal of

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160  Concise encyclopedia of human geography a human reconfigured biosphere. Royal Society Open Science, 5 (12), Article 180325. Busch, L. 2011. Standards: Recipes for Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castree, N. 2004. The geographical lives of commodities: problems of analysis and critique. Social & Cultural Geography, 5 (1), 21–35. Coles, B. 2021. Making Markets Making Place: Geography, Topo/graphy and the Reproduction of an Urban Marketplace. Cham: Springer. Cook, I. 2004. Follow the thing: Papaya. Antipode, 36 (4), 642–64. Cook, I. and Crang, P. 1996. The world on a plate: culinary culture, displacement and geographical knowledges. Journal of Material Culture, 1 (2), 131–53. Escobar, A. 2020. Sentipensar with the Earth: territorial struggles and the ontological dimension of the Epistemologies of the South. In A. Escobar (ed.), Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (pp. 67–83). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foster, J.B. 1999. Marx’s theory of metabolic rift: classical foundations for environmental sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 105 (2), 366–405. Goodman, D. and Watts, M. (eds) 1997. Globalising Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring. London: Routledge. Goodman, M.K. 2016. Food geographies I: relational foodscapes and the busy-ness of being more-than-food. Progress in Human Geography, 40 (2), 257–66. Hecht, S.B. and Cockburn, A. 2011. The Fate of the Forest. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ilbery, B. and Kneafsey, M. 2000. Registering regional speciality food and drink products in the United Kingdom: the case of PDOs and PGls. Area, 32 (3), 317–25. Jackson, P. 2010. Food stories: consumption in an age of anxiety. Cultural Geographies, 17 (2), 147–65. Jackson, P. 2013. Food Words: Essays in Culinary Culture. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Jackson, P., Ward, N. and Russell, P. 2009. Moral economies of food and geographies of respon-

Benjamin Coles

sibility. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34 (1), 12–24. Morris, C., Kaljonen, M. and Aavik, K. et al. 2021. Priorities for social science and humanities research on the challenges of moving beyond animal-based food systems. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8 (1), 1–12. Nally, D. 2011. The biopolitics of food provisioning. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36 (1), 37–53. Oliveira, G. and Hecht, S. 2016. Sacred groves, sacrifice zones and soy production: globalization, intensification and neo-nature in South America. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 43 (2), 251–85. Patel, R. 2013. The long green revolution. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 40 (1), 1–63. Sage, C. 2003. Social embeddedness and relations of regard: alternative ‘good food’ networks in south-west Ireland. Journal of Rural Studies, 19 (1), 47–60. Schmink, M. and Wood, C.H. 1992. Contested Frontiers in Amazonia. New York: Columbia University Press. Schneider, M. and McMichael, P. 2010. Deepening, and repairing, the metabolic rift. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 37 (3), 461–84. Scott, J.C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, J.C. 2017. Against the Grain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Slocum, R. and Saldanha, A. (eds) 2016. Geographies of Race and Food: Fields, Bodies, Markets. London: Routledge. Sumberg, J. and Thompson, J. (eds) 2012. Contested Agronomy: Agricultural Research in a Changing World. London: Routledge. Taussig, M. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Winders, B. 2009. The Politics of Food Supply. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Worster, D. 2004. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

32. Gender

Gender/sex dualism

The history of gender within geography demonstrates a shift from essentialist assumptions about relatively static gender identities and roles, toward a fuller exploration of how diverse gender identities and relations are constructed in all spheres of life. Gender has been understood in a variety of ways, as categorical (binary), relational, or intersectional. Geographers increasingly accept that there are diverse ways of living gender, varieties of femininities and masculinities, and these vary depending on context (place and time) and intersections with race, class, religion, nationality, sexuality, and other social and geographical axes of differences (Valentine, 2007). Gender and other social relations appear in nearly all aspects of the discipline of geography. However, the understanding of the terms gender and sex and the relation between the two differs among geographers. Sketching out the history of these terms within broader feminist geographies provides a helpful starting point. Gender and sex are slippery and contested/complex concepts, and classifications and categorizations of these terms within and outside the discipline of geography can be problematic. For the purpose of this chapter, we demonstrate the conceptual shifts that have happened in the way feminist geographers understand gender and sex, and the relation between the two. Examining the history of feminist geography reveals how our understanding of gender and sex has evolved over time from essentialism (biological determinism as the foundation for male/female distinction); to social constructionism (societal construction of gender differences); to post-structuralism (gender/sex as the result of certain practices and performance); and toward queer geographies that further challenge the geographer’s reliance on normative gender binaries and demand we ‘position sexuality within multifaceted constellations of power’ (Oswin, 2008, p. 100). We trace some key examples of work relevant to this evolution in Table 32.1.

Inspired by the women’s movements of the 1960s, attention to gender as a category of analysis within geography started during the late 1970s. Ever since, feminist geographers have called for the inclusion of women as both producers and subjects within mainstream (or malestream) geographic research (Browne, 2006; Monk and Hanson, 1982). As a result, the significance of gendered analysis of geographical phenomena has become widely accepted. Recognizing the absence of women’s lived experiences, studies influenced by liberal feminism and welfare geography sought to add women to geographic investigations as a discrete group with distinct geographies. By focusing on the differences between men and women as explained by gendered roles and relations, these studies examined how gendered spaces affect women’s labour market participation, employment opportunity (Hanson and Pratt, 1995), commuting patterns, and access to public transit and other services (McLafferty and Preston, 1991). The geography of women approach, however, was found to be problematic as gender inequality was typically explained in terms of the concept of gender roles (derived from biological differences, e.g., women’s roles as caregivers, homemakers, and mothers). This approach tended to reflect static social theory that narrows the focus onto women’s roles, presenting them as passive recipients of gender roles within unexplored wider matrixes of power. The early work of liberal feminism considered the biological body as a starting point for analyses, which limited a more comprehensive institutional analysis of gender inequalities. Other feminist geographers were reluctant to consider gender as a product of biological differences, since such essentialist gender perspectives naturalized social differences (such as who is responsible for caring for children). By moving away from essentialist perspectives, researchers theorized gender as a socially constructed characteristic. Early efforts to address the absence of gender-based research were rooted in economic and urban geography. Socialist feminist geographers sought to explain the links between patriarchal relations and structures of advanced industrial societies. By raising issues such as the exploitation of women’s

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The evolution of gender in geographical research

Approaches to Gender in

Understanding of Gender and Sex

Select Examples

Biological determinism/essentialist

Constraints of distance and spatial separation between work

(Feminist) Geography Geography of women

perspective retained in much analysis and home (Hanson and Pratt, 1995) of gender and sex

Promotion of the study of women outside the household

Gender roles rooted in biological

(Monk and Hanson, 1982; Tivers, 1978)

difference Feminist socialist geography Gender is a social construct

Gender and urbanization; processes of production (paid work) versus reproduction (unpaid work); urban restructuring (Massey, 1994; McDowell, 2011) Urban planning, design and architecture, housing (homelessness and gentrification) (Bondi, 1991; Curran, 2017)

Feminist geographies of

Gender as a social construct, the

Social construction of gendered identities (Silvey, 2007;

differences

importance of gendered difference,

Wright, 1997)

and the intersection with structures

Corporeal geographies of the body (Rose, 1995)

of power

Imaginative geographies; colonialisms and post-colonialisms (Blunt and Rose, 1994). Social constructions of difference, and the diversity of women’s experiences (McKittrick and Peake, 2005) Intersectionality (Valentine, 2007)

Post-structuralist feminists

Gender and sex are both socially

Sexuality and space/geographies of sexuality (Bell and

constructed

Valentine, 2003; Binnie and Valentine, 1999; Johnston and Longhurst, 2010) Queer urban spaces (Nash and Bain, 2007; Oswin, 2008; Wright, 2010) Embodied urban geographies (Bell and Binnie, 2004)

unpaid domestic work and job segregation within capitalist societies, feminist socialist geographers expanded the scope of gender perspectives in the discipline. Reflecting increasing awareness of the issues at the intersection of gender with race, class, nationality, ethnicity, and other axes of difference, early feminist scholarship was critiqued for its exclusion of non-Western perspectives and the dominance of white, Western, and middle-class experiences (Mohanty, 2003). Beginning in the late 1980s, non-Western and Third World feminists urged for a broader theorization of difference that not only includes the influence of gender and class, but also the complex intersection of multiple social categories such as ethnicity, race, nationality, age, and sexuality that contribute to discrimination and inequality, or ‘intersectional’ analyses (Crenshaw, 1989). Hence, feminist geographers began to consider the differences in the construction of gender relations across multiple social categories/axes of social power and the ways

gender classification shapes the material realities of both men and women.

Beyond the sex/gender dualism Geographers have drawn heavily on a broader range of social and cultural theory, including psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, and post-structuralism, to develop a more comprehensive understanding of gender, and how prevailing systems of power shape gender relations. In the 1990s, a fundamental shift happened in the theorization of gender. Feminist philosopher and post-structural theorist Judith Butler challenged the essentialist dualism of sex (as biological) and gender (as socially constructed). Questioning the boundaries of, and distinctions between, men and women, Butler argued that considering women or men as discrete, ahistorical groups bolsters the gender binary view and enacts violence

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toward those who deviate from normative sexual categories in terms of dress, speech, gait, and presence. Butler argued that it is through repetitive socialization processes that these characteristics are assigned to gender categories. Hence, instead of defining women or men, Butler argued that the focus should be on how societal power relations form our understanding of gendered identities. Butler destabilizes the link between gender and sex by arguing that gender is not an essential quality that follows biological sex; gender and sex are categories we repeatedly perform rather than something we are. Hence, gender is a performance not an essence. Further shifts in how we reflect on gender have emerged with the increasing attention devoted to sexualities and queer geography. Fostering non-essentialist and post-structuralist perspectives, queer geographers have engaged with the conceptualization of queer urban spaces through the relational lenses of sexuality, space, and place. Queer geographers focus on ‘understanding the always multiply fluid, ambiguous and contingent sexualized spatialities that are constant in human experience’ (Knopp, 2007, p. 22). This work highlights the diversity of trans, intersex, drag, cross-dressing, and other gender and sexual subjectivities, and challenges the active production of space as heterosexualized, thereby criticizing the normalization of heterosexual relations in geographic knowledge (Oswin, 2008).

How is geography gendered Gender roles and gender relations vary across place, space, and time. Feminist geographers have demonstrated a sustained interest in how gendered relations unfold in specific places and in turn shape those places, creating gendered spaces that reflect power relations among people. Geographic studies that examine the link between gendered social processes and space, place, and scale are diverse and explore a broad range of topics, scales, and spaces. We briefly explore two examples below as a sample of the range of geographical scholarship that attends to gender issues.

Gender and the city Geographers’ interest in the topic of gender and the city was, on the one hand, the result of the influence of the feminist movement on geography and, on the other, the increasing emphasis by critical geographers on a political economy approach to explain the inequalities in cities in advanced industrialized societies under capitalism. Since the late 1970s, a diverse body of research in urban geography from a feminist perspective has examined the gendered qualities of urban life and the ways the experience of inequality and injustice related to gender and sexuality is formed by/in the urban context (Bondi and Rose, 2003). Historically, feminist research about gender and the city focused on women. This is now starting to change given the inroads that are being made by queer geographies, LGBTQ+ and masculinity studies, which consider the diversity of gender identifications and disidentifications, such as living between genders as transgendered. Despite the efforts of feminist scholars, gendered perspectives remain a neglected aspect of theory and practice in shaping cities. Feminist urban geographers have criticized urban planning for overlooking gender differences in the urban experiences of everyday lives, and creating gendered spaces that are predominantly suited to the needs of men and the heteronormative family (Kern, 2020). Research about gender and the city has a broad focus, but the main concern for feminist urban geographers remains the structure of power and material discourses that reproduce inequalities in cities. Emphasizing the importance of everyday lived spaces as political sites, scholars encourage recognition of the processes of negotiation, challenge, or appropriation within these gendered spaces that mediate everyday spatial practices and where gender relations are discursively created. The structures of gender, race, and class play into determining whose bodies belong where, and how different social groups subjectively experience various environments. This includes who feels safe in different ‘public’ places – who feels powerful in alleyways, or at home in red-light districts, afraid in the suburbs, or ‘in place’ in the central city – and what sorts of exclusionary and

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disciplinary techniques are applied to specific bodies in the urban context (e.g., regulations against ‘loitering’ that label homeless people’s bodies ‘out of place’). Gender and migration Geographical analysis of international migration has been subject to critique for working from a political economy approach that has explained the mobilization of labour from a masculinist perspective. Geographers have since developed an important body of work that focuses on the neglect of women’s migration experiences and patterns of migration (Silvey, 2004). Such interventions have drawn attention to the impacts of migration on men and women within the household, arguing that migration analysis considered the household a unified unit and scale of decision making (Willis and Yeoh, 2000). Feminist geographers have emphasized the gender-specific material consequences of particular constructions of scales, including within the household. Examining the hierarchies and power relations within the household has been at the core of feminist contributions to migration studies (Lawson, 1998). Geographers have studied the construction of the household as a scale that pivots between patriarchal structures and the agency of gendered subjects (Marston and Smith, 2001; Mattingly, 2001). The emphasis on gender forces questions the ways migration patterns are shaped by intersectional hierarchies within the household. Migration geographers focused on gender have also addressed other social differences in unequal geographies of mobility, displacement, belonging, and exclusion, including how this interacts with the state (Silvey, 2007). Geographic analyses of migration examine gender differences in relation to specific spatialities of power and contribute to shifting the conception of migration from a predominately economic process of labour mobility to a socio-cultural review of how power, identity, and mobility interact under conditions of globalization. This includes careful gendered consideration of narratives of identity, embodiment, and connectivity across trans-

national migration spaces (Walton-Roberts, 2004). These narratives reveal the interconnectedness between globalization processes at the macro level and the lived gendered experiences of individual migrants at the micro level. Gender operates simultaneously at multiple spatial scales ranging from the body to the national and global scale (Silvey, 2004).

Gender in/and the discipline of geography While this entry has highlighted advances in the integration of gender into geographical research, the interrogation of the discipline as highly masculinized in terms of gender and minority group bias is clear (Rose, 1993). Increased representation of women in academic and publishing positions in the field of geography is evident, but barriers to their career progression and recognition remain. There is a disproportionate overrepresentation of women at adjunct and assistant professorship levels, and the situation is even worse for women (or men) of colour, Indigenous scholars, in other national contexts outside the anglophone world (Schurr, Müller and Imhof, 2020). Cerney et al. (2021) describe a series of surveys and interviews that identify gender bias within geography and recommend the development of diverse networking and mentoring support for women and minority groups in order to support their inclusion and retention. Reflecting the #MeToo zeitgeist, geographers have argued that power relations within the discipline reflect toxic masculinity. Mansfield et al. (2019) discuss the reality of male harassers and abusers within the discipline, arguing that a structural transformation must occur in terms of how a scholar’s work is assessed and rewarded when evidence of abusive, exploitative, and toxic behaviour emerges. Addressing the masculinist bias in geography has also been addressed in terms of more conscious attention to citational practices (Mott and Cockayne, 2017). Despite the evolution and increased attention gender receives within geographical scholarship, it is clear we must continue to make space for

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the bodies and perspectives excluded from geographic scholarship. Anahid Shirkhodaee and Margaret Walton-Roberts

References and selected further reading Bell, D. and Binnie, J. (2004). Authenticating queer space: citizenship, urbanism and governance. Urban Studies, 41 (9), 1807–20. Bell, D. and Valentine, G. (2003). Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexuality. London: Routledge. Binnie, J. and Valentine, G. (1999). Geographies of sexuality – a review of progress. Progress in Human Geography, 23 (2), 175–87. Blunt, A. and Rose, G. (eds) (1994). Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New York: Guilford Press. Bondi, L. (1991). Gender divisions and gentrification: a critique. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 16 (2), 190–198. Bondi, L. and Rose, D. (2003). Constructing gender, constructing the urban: a review of Anglo-American feminist urban geography. Gender, Place & Culture, 10 (3), 229–45. Browne, K. (2006). Gender and geography. In B. Warf (ed.), Encyclopedia of Human Geography (pp. 176–8). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Cerney, D.L., Whitesides, C.J. and Allen, M.J. et al. (2021). A disciplinary perspective: applied geography and gender concerns. Papers in Applied Geography, 7 (2), 199–216. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989 (1), Article 8. Curran, W. (2017). Gender and Gentrification. London: Routledge. Hanson, S. and Pratt, G. (1995). Gender, Work and Space. London: Routledge. Johnston, L. and Longhurst, R. (2010). Space, Place, and Sex: Geographies of Sexualities. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kern, L. (2020). Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made world. London: Verso. Knopp, L. (2007). From lesbian and gay to queer geographies: pasts, prospects and possibilities. In J. Lim and K. Browne (eds), Geographies

of Sexualities: Theory, Practices and Politics (pp. 21–8). London: Routledge. Lawson, V.A. (1998). Hierarchical households and gendered migration in Latin America: feminist extensions to migration research. Progress in Human Geography, 22 (1), 39–53. Mansfield, B., Lave, R. and McSweeney, K. et al. (2019). It’s time to recognize how men’s careers benefit from sexually harassing women in academia. Human Geography, 12 (1), 82–7. Marston, S.A. and Smith, N. (2001). States, scales and households: limits to scale thinking? A response to Brenner. Progress in Human Geography, 25 (4), 615–19. Massey, D. (1994). Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mattingly, D.J. (2001). The home and the world: domestic service and international networks of caring labor. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91 (2), 370–86. McDowell, L. (2011). Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City. Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. McKittrick, K. and Peake, L. (2005). What difference does difference make to geography. In N. Castree, A. Rogers and D. Sherman (eds), Questioning Geography (pp.  39–54). Oxford: Blackwell. McLafferty, S. and Preston, V. (1991). Gender, race, and commuting among service sector workers. The Professional Geographer, 43 (1), 1–15. Mohanty, C.T. (2003). Feminism Without Borders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Monk, J. and Hanson, S. (1982). On not excluding half of the human in human geography. The Professional Geographer, 34 (1), 11–23. Mott, C. and Cockayne, D. (2017). Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement’. Gender, Place & Culture, 24 (7), 954–73. Nash, C.J. and Bain, A. (2007). ‘Reclaiming raunch’? Spatializing queer identities at Toronto women’s bathhouse events. Social & Cultural Geography, 8 (1), 47–62. Oswin, N. (2008). Critical geographies and the uses of sexuality: deconstructing queer space. Progress in Human Geography, 32 (1), 89–103. Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rose, G. (1995). Geography and gender, cartographies and corporealities. Progress in Human Geography, 19 (4), 544–48. Schurr, C., Müller, M. and Imhof, N. (2020). Who makes geographical knowledge? The gender

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166  Concise encyclopedia of human geography of geography’s gatekeepers. The Professional Geographer, 72 (3), 317–31. Silvey, R. (2004). Power, difference and mobility: feminist advances in migration studies. Progress in Human Geography, 28 (4), 490–506. Silvey, R. (2007). Mobilizing piety: gendered morality and Indonesian–Saudi transnational migration. Mobilities, 2 (2), 219–29. Tivers, J. (1978). How the other half lives: the geographical study of women. Area, 10 (4), 302–6. Valentine, G. (2007). Theorizing and researching intersectionality: a challenge for feminist

geography. The Professional Geographer, 59 (1), 10–21. Walton-Roberts, M. (2004). Rescaling citizenship: gendering Canadian immigration policy. Political Geography, 23 (3), 265–81. Willis, K. and Yeoh, B. (2000). Gender and Migration. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Wright, M.W. (1997). Crossing the factory frontier: gender, place and power in the Mexican maquiladora. Antipode, 29 (3), 278–302. Wright, M.W. (2010). Gender and geography II: bridging the gap – feminist, queer, and the geographical imaginary. Progress in Human Geography, 34 (1), 56–66.

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33. Geographic information systems (GIS) Mapping is one of the fundamental elements of geography, with geographic information systems (GIS) providing a key system for creating, connecting, analysing and presenting this map data. But what exactly does this mean in practice?

Defining GIS An increasingly complex and interdisciplinary concept, GIS definitions vary across the literature, although authors tend to agree on some core components. Where the term is defined, authors focus on the utility of spatial data, alternatively synonymized with ‘geospatial’, ‘geographical’, ‘location’, ‘earth’, ‘cartographic’ and ‘map’ data. In essence, all definitions tend to agree that space is what makes GIS unique (Lloyd, 2010). Maguire (1991) argues that the complexities of globally defining GIS stem from the widely differing ways of characterizing both objects and subjects, proposing that GIS is inherently interdisciplinary, arising from the intersection of remote sensing, cartography, database management and computer-aided design (CAD) disciplines. In this sense, it combines maps with databases and spatial analysis (ibid.). Rapid development of the field and a diverse pool of users may have contributed to both broad application and understanding of what a GIS is, and how it is used (ibid.). Dickinson and Calkins (1988) proposed that the term can be used to refer to both a discipline and a technology. Some GIS agencies themselves, such as Esri, provide a more holistic definition, covering the creation, management, analysis and mapping of diverse data types (Esri, 2021). This perspective is documented throughout the evolution of the field, as technological advancement has made GIS more accessible to diverse practitioners, with software such as Microsoft Excel and SPSS now capable of basic mapping and analysis, while popular programming languages such as R and Python have designated packages developed for optimal GIS

use across a range of subdomains. In addition, specific GIS software, which provides user interface interaction with mapping and spatial analysis, is now increasingly common, including both open-source (such as QGIS or GeoDa) and licensed products (such as Esri’s ArcGIS). In fact, some argue that any digital platform that utilizes location information can be considered a GIS (Maguire, 1991). Some authors and practitioners focus specifically on the visualization utility of GIS. The mapping advice service, Mango, describes GIS as a system that ‘allows you to visualize your data as a map’ (Mango, 2021, n.p.), a stance also supported by National Geographic, which focuses on GIS for ‘capturing, storing, checking, and displaying data related to positions on Earth’s surface’ (National Geographic, 2021, n.p.). This perhaps highlights the different perspectives of those focused on GIS for mapping, rather than those motivated by data integration and analytics. From this more computational perspective, others highlight technological and analytical attributes. Authors such as Mark (2003) and Reddy (2018) offer introductory texts to GIS that focus on methods and technology for unravelling geographical processes, and the capture and analysis of these processes. This focus, argues Maliene, et al. (2011), has stemmed naturally from the technological expansion on cartography, leading to the ubiquity of GIS applications, and the integration of technology and societal problem-solving. As such, future developments are likely to evolve with technology and domain-specific knowledge, combining artificial intelligence (AI) with GIS. AI is advancing rapidly, improving methodological efficiency, the breadth of data to be utilized, and the questions that can be asked (Zhao et al., 2020). However, it is this expert knowledge that allows GIS to be really powerful in terms of impact, by harnessing the computational power of geospatial analytics to gain insight and perspective from specific fields, share information and tackle complex, global, societal challenges (Esri, 2021). Most succinctly, then, what sets GIS apart from other approaches is the fundamental combination of two elements of the data, which together present a detailed yet simplified version of reality. The first is a location-based element, specifying where

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the object is geographically in space. This provides a reference for the more descriptive (statistical or non-locational) element, which resembles what we might think of more conventionally as an attribute table or spreadsheet. Therefore, a GIS can perform many of the same analyses as aspatial methods, but with the additional insight provided by where objects are in space, where they are located relative to one another, and how different variables are related (Esri, 2021; Maguire, 1991). Some also argue that GIS treats this geographic element as more important than the attribute, or non-spatial, element, which differentiates it from other information systems (Maguire, 1991). The acronym GIS is also, though less commonly, used to refer to geographic information science as a discipline. To reduce confusion, the latter is sometimes presented as GISc or GIScience. As a research field, GISc aims to investigate and understand geographical processes, with applications spanning geography, cartography, computer science and the social sciences (Mark, 2003). It therefore has core interests spanning spatial analysis, visualization and uncertainty (Goodchild, 2010), with an academic push towards advancing GISc in the 1990s being underpinned by the juncture of humans, computers and society (Goodchild et al., 1999). Therefore, GIS can be seen as a key tool for application within the field of GISc, among many others (Goodchild, 2010; Mark, 2003).

Spatial or geographical? While the terms ‘spatial’ and ‘geographical’ are commonly used interchangeably, they are in fact subtly different, though overlapping, concepts – the major difference being one of scale. While ‘spatial’ may refer to any locational information, the scale ranges widely, from nano-scale chemical or engineering processes to global remote sensing applications. In this sense, ‘geographical’ data can be seen as a subset of ‘spatial’, relating specifically to location relative to the surface of the earth, at ‘real life scales and in real world space’ (Maguire, 1991, p. 12). The portmanteau, ‘geospatial’, on the other hand, sits at the intersection of geography

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and mapping, as an adjective describing data, software or analytics. Geospatial data hence describes spatial information at a geographical (real-world) scale (Stock and Guesgen, 2016), and may be synonymous with ‘geographic data’. Therefore, geospatial data is that which is used within a GIS, comprising those attributes and locational components that are utilized for geospatial analysis.

A growing field A quick search for the term ‘GIS’ on the academic literature database Scopus returns nearly 200 000 document results (as of November 2021), displaying rapid growth of the topic since the 1970s, continuing to peak year on year. There were 12 484 documents published in 2020. The subject areas of these documents are diverse and wide-ranging, from ones we might expect, such as environmental science and earth and planetary science, to those perhaps less obviously connected with geographical methods, such as medicine, mathematics and biochemistry. The breakdown of these search results by publication field is shown in Figure 33.1. The evolution of GIS, then, seems to follow the technological advancement of the same period, whereby relative increases in availability of both computing hardware and software have made GIS data and applications accessible to a range of disciplinary and professional fields (Maliene et al., 2011). Alongside this sits the growing interest in open-source data, which has brought a range of geographical and population data to wider audiences (Stock and Guesgen, 2016). Much of this data is released by government bodies, as well as business stakeholders, and researchers themselves, in the interests of collaboration and public good (Bakillah and Liang, 2016). Government data, in particular, often comprises census, statistical, land use, and topographical data, which they may see as offering potential social, economic and environmental opportunities and insights (ibid.). Therefore, it can be argued that the spatial component of this data is central in identifying differences between people, places and policies.

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Figure 33.1

GIS publications by subject area, 1960s–present

How does GIS work? As described, a GIS combines two elements of a dataset: the attributes themselves and the spatial locations. However, there are two very different ways in which this spatial component can be presented: in raster or vector format. The old adage, ‘raster is faster, but vector is corrector’ is, admittedly, a great over-simplification, but the essential sentiment is correct, and is a good place to start (Esri, 2021). In essence, rasters form a grid over space, with each square assigned to an attribute, while, for vectors, the individual features are drawn as points or shapes, which are assigned to attributes. In this way, rasters can be quicker to load and analyse, but vector data is capable of presenting a more detailed description of shape and location, particularly for more complex configurations (Lloyd, 2010). As shown in Figure 33.2, vectors and rasters can be used to present the same data, but the results can look quite different

depending on the level of detail. We can also transform our data between vector and raster, according to the source and purpose of our analysis, although this usually results in some data loss. Let’s start with rasters. By dividing an area with a grid (also sometimes called a matrix), we can ensure there is complete data coverage, with every cell (also sometimes called a pixel) assigned to describe the value of one feature. The ID of each cell will also be present in the attribute table, allowing us to colour code according to features or values. One way this works particularly well is in describing continuous variables, such as land elevation or flood risk. This is because we could pick one colour to shade according to the strength of the variable at a certain location; for example, darker colours might indicate greater risk of flooding, as shown in Figure 33.3. Such graduated colour schemes can also be intuitive to interpret. Common sources of raster data are aerial imagery and LiDAR data, which provide gridded overviews of the earth’s surface. Victoria Houlden

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Figure 33.2

An example of raster (left) and vector (right) presentations of the same data

Figure 33.3

A raster map of flood risk

We can also make our rasters more, or less, detailed by increasing, or decreasing, the number of cells in our map. Having more cells gives us greater control over local details, as there is more space for variables to differ. However, the trade-off is with the size of the file, as a larger number of cells will be more intensive to store, load and analyse. Victoria Houlden

Vectors, on the other hand, allow us to draw individual features, using points, lines and polygons, which together provide discrete coverage over our map area, depicting where these features do, or do not, occur. Just as with rasters, each feature has an ID, which corresponds to a row in our attribute table, which may contain just one or several differ-

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ent descriptors in columns. This data, which looks very similar to that of any non-spatial data, can include information of almost any type, including numbers, text-strings, dates and categories, to name a few. In general, it is better for zooming in than raster data, though more computationally intensive to work with. As our spatial element is linked directly to a full attribute table, we can use this information to highlight different variables on our map. For example, if we had a column named ‘building type’, we might have values such as, ‘house, shop, school, factory’ and so on, and we can code our map using a different colour, shade or symbol to represent each different value of a variable; in this case, this is our type of building. Let us take a look at how these various features can be represented (Figure 33.4): ● Points. Point data is used to represent features that have one specific location, which can be represented by one set of (x, y) coordinates. A z (elevation) value is also sometimes used, where we are interested in representing the height of a point relative to the earth’s surface, as well as its position on a flat map. Examples of point data might be the location of a tree, an address, or the site of a crime. We can use different symbols or sizes to highlight different types of features (for example, type of crime, or tree species) or make our symbols bigger or smaller to signify the size of the tree or the number of crimes. ● Lines. Lines are great for depicting features that follow a trajectory, such as roads or rivers. The GIS is told how to plot these through the spatial element, which consists of a series of points that must be joined up in order to create the

Figure 33.4

line for each feature. To represent different types or attributes of each line, we can modify the thickness, colour, or use dashes. ● Polygons. Similarly to lines, polygons are plotted in the GIS through a series of points, but with the final point joining back up to the first to create a closed shape, which can be coloured, shaded or otherwise labelled to represent different values of the individual attribute. Examples of data suitable for plotting as a polygon would be anything that has a shape – for example, the outline of a park, a campus, or a lake. Whether we represent a certain feature as a point, line or polygon may also depend on the level of detail and scale of our map. For example, if we were focusing on just one city, we might draw a polygon round the city boundary, but if we were looking at a map of a whole country, we might represent the different cities as points. Similarly, if we are looking at a large-scale map, we might include rivers as lines, but if we are focusing in more closely to centre on river modelling, we might use polygons to look at the specific shapes and dimensions. Within the GIS, geospatial data is presented in layers, with each individual layer containing information pertaining to one type of feature, which may be rasters, points, lines or polygons. While only one type can be present in each layer, most GIS tasks require multiple datasets, of a range of types, which can be joined, aggregated and augmented, to maximize the analytical and informational output of the task. In this way, more complex arrangements of the data are obtainable when each layer is added to the GIS and presented

Examples of point (left), line (middle) and polygon (right) vector data

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Figure 33.5

Layers of point, line and polygon data represented on a single map

cartographically, allowing the spatial patterning of different features to be visually inspected (Figure 33.5).

GIS for real-world analysis Once we have compiled our geospatial data into the GIS, there is an increasingly broad number of possibilities for how we visualize, combine and analyse it. Although the options are almost endless, a snapshot of some of the most common approaches are described: ● Geoprocessing. One of the most common starting points is geoprocessing, which, in essence, is the way we combine and aggregate different parts of our data, to generate insight, meaning, or prepare for spatial analysis. For example, we may clip one feature, so its boundary matches that of another, such as clipping addresses to within the boundary of a city, if that is the area of interest. We may overlay Victoria Houlden

layers to identify which features of one layer fall within that of another, such as counting the number of crimes that have occurred within a certain area. We could also create buffers around features, which allow us to calculate zones of influence or access – for example, seeing how many shops are within 1km of a house. ● Spotting patterns. Statistical and visual inspection can be used to identify and interpret spatial patterning within the data. Examples of this might be locating particular features, or comparing which areas have voted for a certain political party. We can also quantify patterns statistically with methods like hotspot analysis, which is used to measure spatial clustering in the data, and highlight which areas are more similar, or different, than we might expect by chance, with measurements like the number of traffic accidents. ● Spatial analysis. Building on these patterns more statistically, we can use spatial analysis to characterize relation-

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ships between different factors. In this way, spatial analysis usually starts off very similar to any non-spatial analysis, before we take account of the locational element, and allow the model to capture or investigate spatial variation. We can then interpret the results, acknowledging that space itself may be an important parameter, which either explains some of the spatial variation, or reveals different relationships in different areas. ● Trends. We can examine how certain variables vary across space, or even time, using trend analysis. This allows us to draw out patterns and changes in either one specific parameter, or the relationships between multiple parameters, by characterizing the spatial or temporal trajectory. This can provide insight into current or past events and inform predictions for the future. ● Predictions. Potentially, building upon spatial or trend analysis, we can predict the likelihood of certain events. We might, for example, calculate the risks of a future occurrence, predict when and where future events are likely to happen, or model the likely spread of, for example, a virus, over space and time. On the flip side, we can examine our spatial patterns to predict the optimal location for, say, a new supermarket, or the most suitable population for a social intervention. ● Networks. Finally, we can conduct network analysis, which generally implements a line layer to compute distances, routes or access between certain features, and/or the connections between them. For example, this could be used for characterizing how people move around a space along roads to calculate the amount of greenspace available within a certain distance of residents, model ambient populations or pedestrian routing.

The future of GIS in human geography While GIS is becoming ubiquitous across diverse research fields, its integration within human geography allows us to examine and understand complex relationships between people and places in increasing depth. As

such, we are seeing a growing number of specialist UK research groups working at the intersection of GIS and human geography, including The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (University College London), the Centre for Spatial Analysis and Policy (University of Leeds) and the Geographic Data Science Lab (University of Liverpool), to name but a few. As described, advancements in AI and open-source data are both likely to continue driving forwards the utility and accessibility of GIS and its application to emerging global challenges. For example, the expansion of GIS accessibility facilitated a surge of web applications and dashboards designed specifically to monitor the spread of COVID-19. It is therefore likely that this trend towards data sharing, in the interests of government communication and public health, is only going to continue expanding. As well as data sharing, the free distribution of repositories and code, through platforms such as GitHub, facilitate easier reproduction between researchers. This also opens up machine learning approaches, which are increasingly used to maximize information gain from GIS analyses, to practitioners from various disciplines who may not previously have engaged with such tools. This will not only expand the application of advancing methods to a wider spectrum of researchers and topics, but also enables collaboration on tackling some of the biggest societal problems.

GIS and society As this entry has hopefully shown, GIS is a powerful tool for capturing, modelling and understanding people and places. By combining spatial and attribute elements, it allows us to represent a simplified version of reality, to analyse spaces and processes with unprecedented detail and context. As a swiftly evolving field, GIS is being applied to a broad spectrum of real-world topics, from population and land use data to political agendas and distributing aid. The continued integration of GIS with emergent technologies implies that this field has even more exciting development ahead. As it continues to expand in both functionality and applicaVictoria Houlden

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tion, the real strength of a GIS is in helping us understand the world around us. Victoria Houlden

References and selected further reading Bakillah, M. and S. Liang (2016). ‘Open geospatial data, software and standards’. Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards, 1 (1), http://​doi​.org/​10​.1186/​s40965​-016​-0004​-1. Dickinson, H.J. and H.W. Calkins (1988). ‘The economic evaluation of implementing a GIS’. International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, 2 (4), 307–27. Esri (2021). ‘What is GIS?’. Accessed 18 November 2021 at https://​www​.esri​.com/​en​-us/​ what​-is​-gis/​overview. Goodchild, M. (2010). ‘Twenty years of progress: GIScience in 2010’. Journal of Spatial Information Science, 1 (1), 3–20. Goodchild, M.F., M.J. Egenhofer and K.K. Kemp et al. (1999). ‘Introduction to the Varenius project’. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 13 (8), 731–45. Lloyd, C. (2010). Spatial Data Analysis: An Introduction for GIS Users. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maguire, D.J. (1991). ‘An overview and definition of GIS’. In D.J. Maguire, M.F. Goodchild and D.W. Rhind (eds), Geographical Information Systems: Principles and Applications. Hoboken,

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NJ and Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 9–20. Maliene, V., V. Grigonis, V. Palevičius and S. Griffiths (2011). ‘Geographic information system: old principles with new capabilities’. Urban Design International, 16 (1), 1–6. Mango (2021). ‘What is GIS?’. MangoMap.com. Accessed 20 June 2022 at https://​mangomap​ .com/​what​-is​-gis. Mark, D.M. (2003). ‘Geographic information science: defining the field’. In M. Duckham, M.F. Goodchild and M. Worboys (eds), Foundations of Geographic Information Science. London and New York: Taylor & Francis, pp. 1–17. National Geographic (2021). ‘GIS (Geographic Information System)’. Accessed 17 June 2022 at https://​www​.nationalgeographic​.org/​ encyclopedia/​geographic​-information​-system​ -gis/​. Reddy, G.P.O. (2018). ‘Geographic information system: principles and applications’. In G.P.O. Reddy and S.K. Singh (eds), Geospatial Technologies in Land Resources Mapping, Monitoring and Management. Cham: Springer, pp. 45–62. Stock, K. and H. Guesgen (2016). ‘Geospatial reasoning with open data’. In R. Layton and P.A. Watters (eds), Automating Open Source Intelligence. Waltham, MA: Syngress/Elsevier, pp. 171–204. Zhao, B., S. Zhang, C. Xu and X. Liu (2020). ‘Spoofing in geography: can we trust artificial intelligence to manage geospatial data?’. In X. Ye and H. Lin (eds), Spatial Synthesis: Computational Social Science and Humanities. Cham: Springer, pp. 325–38.

34. Geopolitics Geopolitics is a specific way of understanding the relationship between geography and politics. In that sense, it can be understood as a subset of the field of political geography. While the field of political geography has tended to focus on political relations within the borders of a nation-state, geopolitics has traditionally been concerned with how geography affects the political relations between nation-states, their territories and borders. Increasingly, geopolitics scholars have been forced to confront that states are not the only geopolitical actors in the world (taking account of the geopolitical actions of social movements, and transnational businesses etc.), and that geopolitical conflicts and decision making occur at many more spatial scales than the (inter)national. Historically, geopolitics has been associated with diplomatic and military strategy. This has often focused geopolitical agency – the capacity to act geopolitically – on specific types of people, deployed in particular places. Over the last 25 years, critical geopolitics scholars have questioned who is left out of this approach and explored how other people also have capacity to shape geopolitical relations. This work has expanded the range of sites, events and practices that are understood to be ‘geopolitical’. While geopolitics scholars have increasingly paid attention to how the world’s geography is imagined to be divided into competing geopolitical entities, a more conventional approach to the relationship between physical and population geographies, and the tactical (dis)advantages this confers on military and economic logistics, persists amongst those geopolitical analysts most directly involved in advising governments and their military (Cohen, 2015). To understand different approaches to geopolitics, it is important to historicize them, both in terms of the political context in which they were written, and the dominant intellectual debates at the time. But it is also important to ask, ‘Who benefited from this analysis?’. Until the last 30 years, most geopolitical theorizing directly served the (imagined) interests of the nation in which the researcher was located. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, this often meant analysing the relationship between geography and interna-

tional politics in ways that aided European (and US) colonial expansion and imperialism. This accounts for some of the significant national differences in the development of geopolitical ideas. In the late nineteenth century, many geographers were attempting to understand the relationship between the state and its geography. For example, the German political geographer, Friedrich Ratzel, applied Darwin’s theories of evolution to the state and developed his ‘organic theory of the state’, arguing that each state occupied an ecological niche needed to support itself. He believed that a healthy state needed Lebensraum (living space) to support its needs and should expand to achieve this at the expense of other states, if needed. Ratzel’s contemporaries in Britain and the USA took a different approach to geopolitics, seeking patterns in history between climates, landscapes and political successes to inform foreign policy strategies. Geographers like Mahan and Mackinder were concerned with how the emergence of new transport and communications technologies might upset the strategic advantages of their own states. This group of geopolitical thinkers believed that the key to success in militarized international relations was to work with geography, rather than against it. Mackinder, for example, believed that naval power would be the key to Britain’s international interests, especially if it could be used to block (European) land powers from threatening Britain’s territorial integrity. This work was broadly ‘realist’ in approach and often proceeded from the pretence that it was possible to know and describe the world ‘as it is’. It was fuelled by the pretence that geopolitical theorists could offer an ‘objective’ understanding of international relations that could ‘see everything’ (Dittmer and Sharp, 2014, p. 2). This body of geopolitical thinking is commonly known as ‘classical geopolitics’. Although the concept of ‘geopolitics’ lost popularity after World War II, as a result of its association with the Geopolitik pursued by the Nazi Party in Germany, this mode of analysing geography and international relations persisted throughout the Cold War and into the present day (Cohen, 2015). Where classical geopolitics saw geography as the ‘reality’ that needed to be analysed to explain ‘how the world is’, the new critical geopolitics (which emerged in the early

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1990s) examined the central role of language in shaping ‘why we think the world is the way it is’. The critical geopolitics approach understood geopolitics as a discourse that made sense of the world and opened it up to foreign policy interventions. It examined how our understandings of the world are produced through the repetition of representations that people (with different degrees of power and authority) communicate with each other, producing forms of geographical and geopolitical knowledge about the world, which come to be seen as ‘common sense’ through their repetition. In this context, the term ‘critical’ when applied to geopolitics does not imply criticism or critique, so much as a refusal to take these commonplace expressions of geographical knowledge for granted. It questions the political implications of different representations of world politics, asking how it enables particular foreign policy strategies and who benefits from these. Initially, critical geopolitics researchers applied this new framework to thinking critically about the history of classical geopolitical thought. However, they soon began to apply the same approach to analysing contemporary geopolitics. In this sense, the origins of critical geopolitics lie both within the intellectual debates instantiated by the ‘cultural turn’ in geography, and in relation to the challenges posed by trying to understand the new forms of geopolitics occurring at the end of the Cold War. In this period, Gearóid Ó Tuathail (1996) and others (Ó Tuathail and Dalby, 1998) proposed that it was useful to separate out three different strands of geopolitical discourse: formal, practical and popular. Formal geopolitics is the way in which geopolitical ideas and discourse are generated and circulated by academics and researchers working for official think tanks and other para-academic organizations. Geopolitical ideas generated in this arena are always developed in dialogue with geopolitical discourses produced in other contexts. Most of the thinkers discussed above all work in the production of formal geopolitical discourse. Practical geopolitics refers to the production and circulation of geopolitical discourse by politicians, military strategists and others whose work originates from the perspective of the state. There is often a direct dialogue between some people working in the field of formal geopolitics and those engaged in Gavin Brown

practical geopolitics – for example, when academics seek to generate research impact by influencing governmental policy. While formal geopolitical discourse often circulates in the form of academic publications, practical geopolitical discourse is more likely to be relayed through politicians’ speeches or policy briefings produced by civil servants or analysts employed by the military and security services. The ‘practical’ of practical geopolitics refers to those aspects of geopolitical discourse that are focused on applying geopolitical knowledge and doing something in the world. This is a useful reminder that, when we talk about ‘geopolitical discourse’ we are not just referring to speeches and texts, but also a far wider range of practices that produce and circulate ways of understanding and acting on geopolitical issues in the world. This could include the deployment of United Nations peacekeeping missions, the hosting of diplomatic summits, or the procurement of new surveillance technologies in response to a perceived security threat. These are not simply military, diplomatic or bureaucratic procedures; they contribute to the production of new knowledge about the world and help make the relationship between geography and politics coherent in some way. Popular geopolitics refers to the ways in which geopolitical discourses circulate through the media and popular culture. The most obvious example here might be how news media provide people with information about geopolitical events. This is the way most people find out about geopolitics. However, popular geopolitics is about more than journalistic reportage; it also refers to the ways in which cultural products of all kinds shape our understandings of the geography of world politics through films, novels, music, computer games, comic books or stand-up comedy and so on. People are not just passive consumers of popular geopolitical discourse; they make active choices about how to engage with it, how they incorporate it into their existing beliefs and understandings about the world, and how they in turn relay information they have received to others (Dittmer, 2010). Taken together, the interactions of formal, practical and popular geopolitics shape our ‘geopolitical imaginations’, the ways in which we understand the world to be, who are ‘our’ allies and who or what poses a threat to ‘our’ interests (the ‘our’ here might be an identification with the interests

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of the nation-state in which we live, but could just as easily be defined by a host of other ways of identifying ‘them and us’ – by class interests, religion, sexuality and gender etc.). From the early 2000s, feminist scholars increasingly intervened in geopolitical debates (Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Hyndman, 2001). Their feminist critiques were levelled as much at the early expressions of ‘critical geopolitics’ (which they built upon) as more traditional geopolitical approaches. They noted that geopolitics was imbued with masculinist approaches, particularly given how few women held positions of power in practical geopolitical roles and how formal geopolitical work in academia, including the earliest expressions of critical geopolitical thinking, were dominated by men. Feminist geopolitics scholars not only critiqued the marginalization of women from these debates but also highlighted how a masculinist gaze skewed scholars’ understandings of what counted as political action, where it took place, and who had agency to act politically in the world. Scholars such as Dowler and Sharp (2001) argued that, if geopolitical research continued to focus on state-centric political debates in the public realm, it would continue to overlook the ways in which other aspects of everyday life were entangled with geopolitics; and would continue to disregard women’s interests in geopolitical debates. The following extracts from Sara Koopman’s (2011, pp. 275–7) paper about the building of ‘alternative securities’ in post-conflict Colombia gives a concise sense of how this feminist critique developed over time: At first, critical geopolitics was too often not ‘peopled’, other than by Big Men… Anti-geopolitics looks at the people on the map that are pushing back, that are trying to move themselves, not be moved from above… I do not simply want to resist being moved by those playing the Great Game, I want to play a different game!… Feminist geopolitics is not just about critiquing hegemony, but also about pointing to, and I would argue also creating, alternatives. (Original emphasis)

Here we get a sense of the twin approaches of feminist geopolitics. This body of work refuses to always start from the actions of elite geopolitical actors engaged in acts of practical geopolitics, but starts, instead, from the everyday, embodied experiences of those

people (not just women) whose lives are shaped and disrupted by those policies. In her recent study of love and marriage in the disputed territory of India’s Jammu and Kashmir state, Smith (2020) demonstrates how intimacy is bound up with geopolitical tensions in a region where marriage across religious or ethnic boundaries is perceived as a threat to territorial integrity and security. Feminist scholars have often attempted to amplify the voices of those challenging mainstream geopolitical imaginations, to better address the needs of women, children, and all those whose voices that are never heard in dominant framings of world politics. There are synergies here with Routledge’s (1998) attention to ‘anti-geopolitics’. Just as early critical geopolitics scholarship frequently overlooked the experiences of women and children, it also tended to retain a focus on geopolitical discourses developed in Europe and the United States, as if they were the only significant geopolitical actors in the world. Although there has been a host of studies analysing the impact of US and European geopolitics in the Global South, until recently there has been relatively little work that has taken seriously geopolitical theories developed in and from the South. Building on her earlier feminist interventions, as well as the work of the international relations scholar Mohammed Ayoob (2002), Sharp (2011) developed the concept of ‘subaltern geopolitics’ as a means of taking seriously geopolitical analysis and policies developed by globally marginalized voices. Her initial analysis of subaltern geopolitics focused on understanding how the Tanzanian state positioned itself in relation to the ‘war on terror’. Later work (Sharp, 2013) stayed with Tanzania to analyse the Pan-Africanist politics developed by the country’s first post-colonial government led by Julius Nyerere in the 1960s. This work is a powerful reminder that in a period that is often framed, globally, in relation to bipolar Cold War geopolitics, politicians and grassroots social movements across Africa were articulating a Pan-African geopolitical vision for the continent’s self-reliance. If the critical geopolitics of the 1990s and early 2000s focused on the role of discourse in creating geopolitical knowledge and imaginations, increasingly geopolitical scholars have challenged the reduction of geopolitics Gavin Brown

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to the textual and have once again begun to think deeply about the materiality of the more-than-human world in doing geopolitics. The origins of this line of thinking lie with how feminist geopolitical scholarship opened up space for considering how geopolitical events and relations produce and respond to emotional and affective experiences (Pain, 2009). However, a concern for how more-than-human objects and things affect geopolitical practices has been extended by a sustained engagement with concepts and ontological approaches from actor network theory, assemblage thinking and (feminist) new materialism (Dittmer, 2017; Müller, 2012). Dittmer’s (2017) book Diplomatic Material has been particularly influential in rethinking how objects and the practices associated with them reshape geopolitical relationships, often in ways that cannot fully be known and predicted beforehand. He argues that geopolitical analysis has traditionally taken for granted that geopolitics occurs through the interactions of pre-existing geopolitical subjects (such as nation-states, diplomatic corps, or armies). In contrast, he argues that the ‘international community’ is ‘the constant becoming-together of specific media, objects, and bodies/practices from which individual political subjectivities, states, and broader geopolitical communities (like “the West” or “Europe”) emerge simultaneously’ (Dittmer, 2017, p. 3). Dittmer (2017) explores a variety of empirical case studies to support and enrich this analysis. For example, he considers how the accumulated weight of papers containing reports from Britain’s rapidly expanding diplomatic corps in the mid-nineteenth century necessitated the design of a new Foreign Office building to accommodate this growing archive and the circulation of papers between different departments. This, in turn, reconfigured how British civil servants and diplomats conducted their work, both in Whitehall and in diplomatic missions around the world. He argues that the diplomatic archive became more than a bureaucratic record of diplomatic practices, it became a material force that actively shaped the capacity of British diplomats to act in the world.

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These recent theorizations of how objects and things influence geopolitical events have contributed to a renewed interest in how the materiality of the ‘landscape’, environment and climate act geopolitically (that seeks to avoid the crude and problematic environmental determinism of the past). This new line of geopolitical enquiry is not purely inspired by current theoretical trends, but also responds to the geopolitical challenges of climate change and resource security in the Anthropocene (Dalby, 2020). This work has led geographers to enrich their understandings of ‘territory’ as a fundamental geographical concept in geopolitical analysis. Developments in drone warfare, the rapid erection of new border walls and fences (often accompanied by subsurface movement sensors), and the increasing search for critical mineral deposits beneath the seabed or the polar ice sheets, have all contributed to geographers thinking about territory as being a volume that extends above and below the surface of the landscape in three dimensions (Elden, 2013). Furthermore, as climate change poses new geopolitical challenges related to the melting of polar ice caps and glaciers, with concomitant geopolitical threats posed by the increasing risk of sea-level changes and access to freshwater, geopolitical scholars have increasingly begun to consider the political regulation of territories other than solid land (Peters, Steinberg and Stratford, 2018). The study of geopolitics will continue to develop in response to future geopolitical events (some of which can be anticipated; Dodds, 2021), as well as broader theoretical debates in geography and related disciplines. To adequately understand and interpret these conflicts, academics will need to take seriously geopolitical knowledge produced outside the anglophone North. Gavin Brown

References and selected further readings Ayoob, M. (2002). Inequality and theorizing in international relations: the case for subaltern

Geopolitics  179 realism. International Studies Review, 4 (3), 27–48. Cohen, S.B. (2015). Geopolitics: The Geography of International Relations (3rd edition). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Dalby, S. (2020). Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability. Ottawa, ON: University of Ottawa Press. Dittmer, J. (2010). Popular Culture, Geopolitics and Identity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Dittmer, J. (2017). Diplomatic Material: Affect, Assemblage, and Foreign Policy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dittmer, J. and Sharp, J. (eds) (2014). Geopolitics: An Introductory Reader. London: Routledge. Dodds, K. (2021). Border Wars: The Conflicts That Will Define Our Future. London: Ebury Press. Dowler, L. and Sharp, J. (2001). A feminist geopolitics? Space and Polity, 5 (3), 165–76. Elden, S. (2013). Secure the volume: vertical geopolitics and the depth of power. Political Geography, 34, 35–51. Hyndman, J. (2001). Towards a feminist geopolitics. The Canadian Geographer, 45 (2), 210–22. Koopman, S. (2011). Alter-geopolitics: other securities are happening. Geoforum, 42 (3), 274–84.

Müller, M. (2012). Opening the black box of the organization: socio-material practices of geopolitical ordering. Political Geography, 31 (6), 379–88. Ó Tuathail, G. (1996). Critical Geopolitics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ó Tuathail, G. and Dalby, S. (eds) (1998). Rethinking Geopolitics. London: Routledge. Pain, R. (2009). Globalized fear? Towards an emotional geopolitics. Progress in Human Geography, 33 (4), 466–86. Peters, K., Steinberg, P. and Stratford, E. (eds) (2018). Territory Beyond Terra. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Routledge, P. (1998). Anti-geopolitics: introduction. In G. Ó Tuathail, S. Dalby and P. Routledge (eds), The Geopolitics Reader (pp. 233–49). London: Routledge. Sharp, J. (2011). A subaltern critical geopolitics of the ‘war on terror’: postcolonial security in Tanzania. Geoforum, 42, 297–305. Sharp, J. (2013). Geopolitics at the margins? Reconsidering genealogies of critical geopolitics. Political Geography, 37, 20–29. Smith, S. (2020). Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory and the Future of India’s Northern Threshold. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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35. Health geographies The study of the relationship between health and place has a long history that has developed and evolved through time. In the early days of the discipline, medical geography was dominated by medical topography. Historic accounts refer to the work of John Snow and maps of the cholera epidemic and earlier scholarship such as Finke’s world map of disease in 1792. Such maps were central to the cartographic and positivist dominance in the foundation of the discipline. Connections were made between parasitic infection, climate and soil (May, 1950), with work such as Melinda Meade’s triangle of disease ecology critical in the advancement of the subdiscipline (Meade, 1977). The positivist approach to disease and disease mapping grew, but criticism of the emphasis placed on a biomedical model of health began to emerge. Critics focussed on the reductionist approach, arguing that disease and illness cannot be explained by measurable deviations from the ‘norm’. Instead, health geographers such as Kearns (1993) and Mayer and Meade (1994) argued that such an approach ignores the complexity of determinants, calling on geographers to apply ideas from other areas with an explicit recognition of the social and economic power that shapes health, disease risk and transmission. Such calls for medical geography to move beyond disease risk and more positivist approaches saw the emergence of ‘new geographies of health’, representing a shift that mirrored the ‘cultural turn’ in human geography. Health geography emerged as a revived subdiscipline that embraced questions beyond a biomedical focus. In a move away from a dominant positivist approach, health geographers began to pay attention to places as social and cultural phenomena, thus shaping a new subdiscipline that embraced theoretical and methodological diversity. Health geography did not necessarily ‘drop’ studies that focussed on disease pathology, rather the discipline made space for opposing views, for nuanced argument, and for a renegotiation of what place means in the study of health and well-being. Whilst the subdiscipline had been accused of being atheoretical, with place seen as a ‘container’ (Jones and Moon, 1993), the emergence of health geography saw research in the

area become more theoretically informed, with work leaning on concepts related to humanism, feminism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, and others. Place was now conceptualized as playing an active role within broader socio-ecological models of health, now viewed as relational, multi-scalar and heterogeneous (Cummins et al., 2007). Central to this development of health geography were arguments of social justice. The ‘social model of health’ largely adopted within health geography supported scholars to explore the social, cultural, economic and political determinants of health through a spatial lens. Themes of social and spatial polarization and resulting health inequalities are now key areas of enquiry. The 25-year gap in life expectancy between residents in suburbs of New Orleans (Bambra, 2016) or the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on racial and ethnic minorities (Harris, 2020) highlight the work of health geographers in exploring questions of moral and ethical importance. Central to our interpretation of these inequalities are the social determinants of health, essentially the social, economic and political conditions under which we live. Many health geographers have adopted a political economy approach, looking beyond the local influence of context and/or composition towards the unequal distribution of power, income, goods and services and the influence of national, international and global political and economic factors. Today, themes related to both the biomedical and social models of health continue to thrive in health geography, with burgeoning scholarship in the geographies of disease and illness as well as social well-being and health inequalities. In the following sections, I will explore examples of research in health geography related to three key areas – public health, mental health and well-being, and healthcare – before moving on to consideration of the interface between health geography and policy, and finally a view to the future of the subdiscipline.

Public health: communicable and non-communicable diseases The distribution of communicable and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are central to health geography. The COVID-19

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pandemic reminded the world that communicable disease remains a major risk to health, well-being and development. Health geographers continue to contribute such research through a disease ecology approach, but also exploring the social, economic and political drivers of infectious disease and our response to it. COVID-19 raised a plethora of geographical issues related to health and well-being. This included mobility, a restructuring of the economy, loss of income and stability, home-based learning, mental well-being, healthcare waiting lists, and the entrenchment of inequalities both social and spatial, reflecting unequal global responses to both the virus and vaccine. In recent years, whilst public health has turned its attention towards the dominance of NCDs, a return to a reductionist approach has also been evident. Individual lifestyle, notably health-related behaviours, has been the focus of government-led interventions to reduce NCDs and has dominated much research. In response to this, health geographers have led research exploring the ‘upstream’ drivers of these behaviours and the need for a multifaceted approach that addresses the structural explanations related to power, income inequalities and risk environments (Shortt et al., 2018). Health geographers have turned their attention to the role of place in health behaviours, notably the consumption of alcohol, tobacco and energy-dense food alongside work on physical activity and walkability – that is, access to amenities on foot. Research has recognized the complexity of health behaviours using quantitative approaches to explain differential pathways to smoking (Davies, Moon and Lewis, 2020) and more qualitative methods to explore experiential, social and cultural perspectives of both consumption and recovery (Wilton and DeVerteuil, 2006). Others have considered NCDs as global health challenges, paying attention to vested interests in public health and the role of the private sector in public policy formation (Herrick, 2016).

Mental health, wellness and therapeutic landscapes Philo and Wolch (2001) describe three waves in mental health geography. These waves

reflect the broader changes in medical/health geography, with a move from spatial data and positivist approaches through to more qualitative methods and an understanding of ‘place-specific happenings’ that include an exploration of micro-scale individual experiences and broader macro-scale processes. More recently, cultural and humanistic approaches in geography have been borrowed to explore how place can evoke a range of emotions and responses that can shape health experiences. The concept of therapeutic landscapes has received much attention over recent years, exploring how healing can occur in place and be facilitated by aspects of place (Gesler, 1992). Health geographers concerned with people’s experiences and feelings have explored the intimate and emotional connections between place and healing, focussing on aspects related to natural environments, particularly green (Mitchell et al., 2009) and blue spaces (White et al., 2016), built spaces including healthcare settings (Kearns and Barnett, 2000), and places of pilgrimage (Foley, 2013). The therapeutic landscapes literature has grown over the years to include more quotidian spaces such as the gym (Coen, Davidson and Rosenberg, 2020) and soundscapes of the more-than-human environment (Bates et al., 2020). In more recent years, this universal healing notion of therapeutic landscapes has been contested. Critical health geographers employing a relational view of place recognize that individuals are embedded in multiple health-promoting or health-damaging places at any one time, with risk environments and therapeutic environments ‘two sides of the same coin’ (Duff, 2009, p. 203). Critical health geography attends to this notion of relational outcomes, situating these spatio-temporal experiences within the complexities of individual responses.

Healthcare Early research in the geography of healthcare focussed on the distributive aspects of care and explored the location of doctors, clinics and hospitals in space and the population’s accessibility to such services (Joseph and Phillips, 1984). Andrews and Evans (2008) argued that such work, whilst important, reflects Niamh Shortt

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an only partial engagement with healthcare. They called for ‘geographies in healthcare work’ that considers places of care as social and cultural phenomena. Research related to healthcare has since moved to embrace this widening focus, exploring multidimensional measures of accessibility that consider cost (in monetary and temporal terms) and experience of use (Hanlon, 2009). This research also recognizes the spatial diffusion of healthcare, away from traditional centres of primary and tertiary care to community-based settings, the voluntary sector, private care settings for the elderly, and care within families and the home. Reflecting the political economy approach utilized in other areas of health geography, those engaged with healthcare research have also explored the neoliberalization of policies and provision of healthcare services (Gesler and Kearns, 2005) and the reframing of healthcare as a commodity to be consumed in a market-based economy (Curtis and Taket, 1996). Research in healthcare geographies has also embraced the relational turn in human geography, more widely recognizing a relational sense of space and focussing on the consumption of care in place, and the emotions and ethics of care. Of particular focus has been the ways in which care is embodied, including the receiving of care (Wiles, 2011), the transformation of the landscape of care, emergent forms of care (Power and Hall, 2018), and ‘caringscapes’ (Bowlby and McKie, 2019). In this vein, research has also explored healthcare policy (Macpherson et al., 2021), the emotional aspects of caring (Conradson, 2003), the flow of transnational healthcare workers (Connell and Walton-Roberts, 2016), and medical tourism (Crooks et al., 2011).

A policy focus The rise of public health and a more social model affords space for a new understanding of ‘intervention’ that recognizes the broader complexities in which individual health and well-being are embedded. Coupled with this development was the call for a policy turn in human geography. Whilst such a call was not uncontroversial, or widely accepted, health geography evolved to contribute to the policy landscape. Niamh Shortt

Parr (2004, p. 248) has argued that unhelpful dichotomies that place differential value on research that is constructed as ‘objective, truthful and hard’ and that which is devalued as ‘subjective, untruthful and soft’ may in fact mean that health geography has little traction outside academia. In part, such a dichotomy has evolved from a medical approach and the traditional ‘hierarchies of evidence’. Such hierarchies can work to exclude and may create ‘evidence bias’ that can result in interventions that are more focussed towards the medical and individual, rather than the social and population (Ogilvie et al., 2005). Reflecting this, health geographers have also argued for a reformulation of how any policy influence is measured. Rather than seeing the research-to-policy journey as a linear track, there have been calls to embrace a more enlightened model that pays attention to connections, conversations and impressions, thus giving greater recognition to the process of policy influence and valuing a triangulation of evidence (Shortt et al., 2016). Hester Parr’s work on missing people and her success with policy impact exemplifies the opportunities available to health geographers in the policy landscape (Parr and Fyfe, 2013).

Future concerns Looking ahead, it is clear that research interests in health geography will evolve and continue to address the most pressing global challenges of our time. In the immediate future, research in this area may move to consider three areas of importance: climate change, recovery from COVID-19, and intersectional inequalities. Curtis and Oven (2012) highlight the links between health geography and climate change and argue for a research agenda informed by theoretical frameworks drawing on both structuralist and post-structuralist approaches. Such a call reflects the need for an integrated approach to addressing complex global challenges. The authors call for a wide agenda exploring the many facets of climate change. This includes emerging climate-related inequalities; the significance of affect and emotion; the psychological health effects of the impacts of climate change, extreme weather events and impacts on health service provision; the links between climate change

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and communicable and non-communicable disease; and climate change as a contributory factor in mass migration. COVID-19 clearly dominated the research landscape of 2020 and 2021 and may do so for some time to come. Research within health geography is no exception, but as we begin to emerge from the pandemic, health geographers can also contribute towards a new, shared future. Research in health geography can explore the political, economic and social implications of COVID-19, or a future pandemic, in the short, medium and long term as well as the emerging challenges in inequitable vaccine geographies, healthcare management, social vulnerability to pandemics, and migration related to long-term border closures. Finally, health geographers have explored many aspects of inequality and have applied various theoretical approaches in doing so. The link between environment and health is clear, as are the social, political and economic processes that drive these associations. Less clear, however, are the ways in which individuals are experiencing their environments in multiple different ways. COVID-19 laid bare the inequalities that exist – we were faced with racial and social inequities in rates of infection, mortality and vaccination. The material and social conditions in which people find themselves is a key factor in the social patterning of health outcomes. The inequalities in health outcomes mirror the inequalities that marginalized sectors of society face on a daily basis. Health geographers have the tools to explore the different environmental experiences by taking an intersectional approach to inequalities focussing on the intersecting systems of oppression and privilege. Niamh Shortt

References and selected further reading Andrews, G.J. and Evans, J. 2008. Understanding the reproduction of health care: towards geographies in health care work. Progress in Human Geography, 32, 759–80. Bambra, C. 2016. Health Divides: Where You Live Can Kill You. Bristol: Policy Press. Bates, V., Hickman, C. and Manchester, H. et al. 2020. Beyond landscape’s visible realm:

recorded sound, nature, and wellbeing. Health and Place, 61, Article 102271. Bowlby, S. and McKie, L. 2019. Care and caring: an ecological framework. Area, 51, 532–9. Coen, S.E., Davidson, J. and Rosenberg, M.W. 2020. Towards a critical geography of physical activity: emotions and the gendered boundary-making of an everyday exercise environment. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45, 313–30. Connell, J. and Walton-Roberts, M. 2016. What about the workers? The missing geographies of health care. Progress in Human Geography, 40, 158–76. Conradson, D. 2003. Geographies of care: spaces, practices, experiences. Social & Cultural Geography, 4, 451–4. Crooks, V.A., Turner, L. and Snyder, J. et al. 2011. Promoting medical tourism to India: messages, images, and the marketing of international patient travel. Social Science & Medicine, 72, 726–32. Cummins, S., Curtis, S., Diez-Roux, A.V. and Macintyre, S. 2007. Understanding and representing ‘place’ in health research: a relational approach. Social Science & Medicine, 65, 1825–38. Curtis, S.E. and Oven, K.J. 2012. Geographies of health and climate change. Progress in Human Geography, 36, 654–66. Curtis, S. and Taket, A. 1996. Health and Societies: Changing Perspectives. London: Edward Arnold. Davies, M., Moon, G. and Lewis, N.M. 2020. Trends in smoking prevalence over time and space: a comparison between sexual minority and heterosexual populations. Health and Place, 65, Article 102421. Duff, C. 2009. The drifting city: the role of affect and repair in the development of ‘enabling environments’. International Journal of Drug Policy, 20, 202–8. Foley, R. 2013. Small health pilgrimages: place and practice at the holy well. Culture and Religion, 14, 44–62. Gesler, W.M. 1992. Therapeutic landscapes: medical issues in light of the new cultural geography. Social Science & Medicine, 34, 735–46. Gesler, W.M. and Kearns, R.A. 2005. Culture/ Place/Health. London: Routledge. Hanlon, N. 2009. Access and utilization reconsidered: towards a broader understanding of the spatial ordering of primary health care. In G.J. Andrews and V.A. Crooks (eds), Primary Health Care: People Practice, Place. London: Routledge, pp. 43–56. Harris, R. 2020. Exploring the neighbourhood-level correlates of Covid-19 deaths in London using

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184  Concise encyclopedia of human geography a difference across spatial boundaries method. Health and Place, 66, Article 102446. Herrick, C. 2016. The post-2015 landscape: vested interests, corporate social responsibility and public health advocacy. Sociology of Health & Illness, 38, 1026–42. Jones, K. and Moon, G. 1993. Medical geography: taking space seriously. Progress in Human Geography, 17, 515–24. Joseph, A.E. and Phillips, D.R. 1984. Accessibility and Utilization: Geographical Perspectives on Health Care Delivery. London: Paul Chapman Publishing. Kearns, R.A. 1993. Place and health: towards a reformed medical geography. The Professional Geographer, 45, 139–47. Kearns, R.A. and Barnett, J.R. 2000. ‘Happy meals’ in the Starship Enterprise: interpreting a moral geography of health care consumption. Health and Place, 6, 81–93. Macpherson, H., Hall, E., Power, A. and Kaley, A. 2021. Debilitating landscapes of care and support: envisaging alternative futures. Social & Cultural Geography, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 14649365​.2021​.1922736. May, J. 1950. Medical geography: its methods and objectives. Geographical Review, 40, 9–41. Mayer, J.D. and Meade, M.S. 1994. A reformed medical geography reconsidered. The Professional Geographer, 46, 103–6. Meade, M.S. 1977. Medical geography as human ecology: the dimension of population movement. Geographical Review, 67, 379–93. Mitchell, R., Gibbs, J. and Tunstall, H. et al. 2009. Factors which nurture geographical resilience in Britain: a mixed methods study. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 63, 18–23. Ogilvie, D., Egan, M., Hamilton, V. and Petticrew, M. 2005. Systematic reviews of health effects

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of social interventions: 2. Best available evidence: how low should you go? Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 59, 886–92. Parr, H. 2004. Medical geography: critical medical and health geography? Progress in Human Geography, 28, 246–57. Parr, H. and Fyfe, N. 2013. Missing geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 37, 615–38. Philo, C. and Wolch, J. 2001. The ‘three waves’ of research in mental health geography: a review and critical commentary. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences, 10, 230–44. Power, A. and Hall, E. 2018. Placing care in times of austerity. Social & Cultural Geography, 19, 303–13. Shortt, N.K., Pearce, J., Mitchell, R. and Smith, K. 2016. Taking health geography out of the academy: measuring academic impact. Social Science and Medicine, 168, 265–72. Shortt, N.K., Rind, E. and Pearce, J. et al. 2018. Alcohol risk environments, vulnerability, and social inequalities in alcohol consumption. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108, 1210–27. White, M., Pahl, S. and Wheeler, B. et al. 2016. The ‘blue gym’: what can blue space do for you and what can you do for blue space? Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, 96, 5–12. Wiles, J. 2011. Reflections on being a recipient of care: vexing the concept of vulnerability. Social & Cultural Geography, 12, 573–88. Wilton, R. and DeVerteuil, G. 2006. Spaces of sobriety/sites of power: examining social model alcohol recovery programs as therapeutic landscapes. Social Science & Medicine, 63, 649–61.

36. Historical geographies Historical work and thinking in human geography are most commonly undertaken and practised in the subdiscipline of historical geography. This work is generally concerned both with the geographies of the past, and the influence of the past in shaping the geographies of the present and future (Heffernan, 2009). The intellectual pursuits of historical geographers can productively be considered on two levels. First, historical scholars examine past places and peoples through a geographer’s lens by asking geographical questions of historical events and/or materials. And second, historical geographers look at how historical events, institutions and infrastructures impact and influence the present and future. As such, this subdisciplinary field has a focus on generating new knowledge about the geographies of past environments, peoples and places, while still engaging in the here and now, through consideration of how history and meaning are made and embedded in the present and future (Domosh, 2021). The development of historical work in the discipline of geography itself has long and numerous histories that illustrate that in different spaces and at different times, historical geography’s presumed meanings and practices varied significantly (see, for more detail, Mayhew, 2021). There have been many changes in both style and substance of historical geography. For example, in the Anglo-American tradition of the early nineteenth century, physical geography and the environment shaped the foundations of historical-geographical work with a focus on regional case studies, particularly those of the ancient world. Geographical thinking was a tool used for explaining historical change in the French Annales school, which covered regional geographies and histories with a distinct sociological approach (but is generally situated as geohistory rather than historical geography). Early German historical geography was focused on the evolution of settlements and the urban–rural divide. From the 1970s onwards, anglophone historical geography started to engage with wider conceptual frameworks such as Marxism and structuralism, with prominent geographers

such as David Harvey using their historical and geographical work to cross over into human geography more widely. Now and from the 1980s, however, the hybrid term ‘cultural-historical geography’ reflects the increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse scholarship undertaken in geography. Whilst the debates and examples of the myriad changes and differing traditions of historical geography are too extensive to detail here, a unifying factor is the situating of localized pasts in broader and comparative contexts (Morrisey et al., 2014). The questions and concerns of these scholars – in researching and writing in historical context – both reverberate across the discipline and inform it. The fields of history, human geography and historical geography have always been closely related. Indeed, the possibility of the separation of historical thinking and analysis with the discipline of geography more generally has been questioned by historical geographer Felix Driver, who considered an integrated approach an essential part of doing human geography (Driver, 1988). More recently, the importance of historical thinking in the discipline has been affirmed by a forum of North American scholars. With the backdrop of some of the more pressing concerns of the twenty-first century – from the climate emergency to the legacies of colonialism – they note that as ‘geography is always a product of history’ good critical geographers often illustrate the way the past shapes the present. Going further, they suggest that this historic analysis permits and inspires ‘direct engagement with problems in the present, and which intend to do something about them’ (Van Sant et al., 2020, p. 169). Although there has been no singular methodological or philosophical approach in historical geography since the 1970s – which Van Sant and others suggest requires renewed conversation on these different approaches – this does mean that historical work in the discipline engages with a broad range of concerns. Both thematically and methodologically, historical geography can be described as eclectic. The breadth of historical work in geography can be illustrated through a brief survey of recent papers in the Journal of Historical Geography (2021, vols. 70, 71, 72, 74), which features papers on communication in the Gordon Riots in London of 1780 (Awcock, 2021); smellscapes and colonial

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knowledges in New Zealand (Parsons and Fisher, 2021); geographical print culture in German-speaking territories (Fischer and Withers, 2021); black and brown bodies in nineteenth-century Australia in digital archives (Bressey, 2021); and the geographies of Holocaust rescue in Budapest (Cole and Giordano, 2021). Such scope allows the field to engage with most other subjects in human geography, which over the years has resulted in a wide variety of geographical and historical enquiry. Nevertheless, several key themes have emerged: the study of landscape and the environment; knowledge and the circulation of ideas; and peoples and spaces in historical contexts, often concentrating on power, networks and property ownership. The study of landscape has a long history in geography, dating back to nineteenthand early twentieth-century area studies of regional landscapes. More modern scholarship on landscape focuses on the cultural significance of landscapes, asking questions about memory, identity and representations of landscapes past and present (Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988). This work engages with heritage and cultural representation of rural as well as urban landscapes through maps, paintings or written literatures. In doing so, this work critically examines how the past is used in the present, and which groups are represented by this heritage. With a focus on questions of belonging and the relationship between land use, living and ownership, historical geographers examine how power and history are recorded in the material and representational landscape. Related but different are historical geographies of the environment. Often engaging with the field of environmental history, examinations of society–nature relationships by historical geographers bring a sensitivity to place and the application of social science theory and methods to the subject. This work has increasingly been framed by the concept of the Anthropocene, and concerns humanity’s multiple impacts on the natural world. Scholarship has examined how climate change influenced and restricted the choices that individuals and societies made in the past, but also examines the cultural spaces and representations of past people’s relationship towards environments – their own and those they encountered – as well as the history of societal concern with changCarry van Lieshout and Benjamin Newman

ing climates (see, for example, Mahony and Randalls, 2020). A second prominent theme in the subdiscipline’s scholarship is the historical geographies of knowledge and science. This work is interested in how knowledge was produced in specific places, how it travelled through particular networks, and how it was communicated to different audiences. Scholarship in this theme critically examines by whom, in what form, and to what ends scientific – and often geographical – knowledge was gathered and distributed. Space and the mobility of ideas through knowledge networks, as well as how new knowledge was received by different audiences, play important roles in these narratives. Much of this scholarship is focused on the written word, reflecting the subdiscipline’s reliance on written or published sources in archives and libraries. The essays in Charles Withers and Miles Ogborn’s Geographies of the Book (2010), for instance, examine the importance of place in the making of books as well as the reception of printed culture. However, there are some important exceptions – for example, Diarmid Finnegan (2017) has illustrated the possibility of exploring the nineteenth-century lectures of Michael Faraday and Thomas Henry Huxley, to make claims about the dissemination of scientific knowledge and its relationship with speech. Other work has focused on magazines (e.g., Bressey, 2013 on the role of the radical magazine Anti-Caste in Victorian criticisms on empire); travel writing (e.g., Saldanha, 2011 on the multiple knowledges and voices embedded in early-modern travel writing); or botanical collections (e.g., Johnson, 2017, on the intersection of gender and the environment in colonial science); as well as geographies of the circulation of technical and engineering knowledge and the technologies involved in the construction of this knowledge. Historical geography also has close links with historical cartography. As both visual representations of the communication of knowledge as well as instruments of state and civic power, maps have played an important role in the reimagination of local and national identities, the forging of empires, and the appropriation of natural resources. Finally, several strands of historical-geographical research can be grouped under the theme people and space. Scholarship in these areas deals with wider

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social historical concepts and questions, such as the impacts of capitalism, urbanization and colonization. As such, this work is often closely related to wider geographical scholarship on these themes, and encompasses work on power and resistance, mobilities and flows, as well as the study of governmentalities and the creation of territories and population through measurement and counting. Reflecting wider trends in geography, historical geographers have focused on the spatial regulation and social order of urban populations, and how city spaces were gendered, racialized and classed (see, e.g., Legg, 2014). In recent years, there has been increasing engagement with colonial and post-colonial studies, with a particular emphasis on mobilities and flows (Lester, 2015). Across these thematics, historical geographers operate on multiple scales, both in terms of time – theoretically encompassing all of history, but in practice mostly focused on the most recent past – as well as space, with scholarship ranging across the national and global to more local geographies. It is a vibrant and varied collection of work that collectively opens up new understandings of pasts, presents and futures, and in doing so interests and engages scholars both within the (sub)discipline and beyond. In terms of methodology, the field is no less diverse. Unlike other human geographers, historical geographers cannot rely on contemporary tools such as questionnaires, interviews or ethnographic surveys. The dead, after all, do not answer questions (Baker, 1997). Historical-geographical research often consists of piecing together fragments, and as such tends to rely on what can be identified rather than a predetermined method. This demands the need for careful methodological considerations by historically inclined geographers, presenting both challenges and opportunities. For instance, historical geographers are often required to think laterally to find sources, to engage deeply with the biases and the gaps inherent in their materials, and to triangulate their claims through the piecing together of different types of evidence. In other words, doing historical geography often means using mixed methods and becoming proficient across various methodologies. Historical geographers make heavy use of the same sources historians do – namely, written documents and other print culture

from the past, which are often found in various forms of archive. In particular, the growing digitalization of archival holdings present – admittedly not without issue – new and varied modes of historical research with such sources. Digital methods’ recent advances and application in the humanities, as well as qualitative methods, have seen increased use in historical geography. For example, the large-scale digitalization of sources such as those found in the TEMPEST database – which records extreme weather events in the past – presents historical geographers with an opportunity for both quantitative and qualitative examination of the way people experienced and recorded weather events (Veale et al., 2017). Working with big data – often in the shape of historical-geographical information systems (HGIS) – is more common in historical geography than history as well. HGIS use maps to visualize the past, both reaching new audiences as well as allowing scholars to spatialize their findings and reach new conclusions. Historical geographies are often complemented by other sources too. Physical fieldwork such as reading the landscape, examining physical changes in infrastructures, or attending museums are not uncommon, and ethnographic methods such as oral histories can be integrated to allow examination of both the past and present. More importantly, historical geographers approach historical data as a process. Relying on preserved written sources has meant that historical geographers have long been interested in the gendered, racialized and classed biases inherent in the creation of archives, as well as the conscious decisions around what to keep, preserve and present in the case of public museums/exhibitions. As such, archives themselves have become the subject of study, not as the preserved storage spaces of history but as active constituents in the process and politics of the making of historical and geographical knowledge. Similarly, historical maps are used as source material while at the same time subject to critical examination. Map production, circulation and representation have long sustained scholarly attention from historical geographers, who focus on the representational and non-representational practices that produced (often colonial) territories, as well as shaped political power, resulting in visual cultures of ownership and exploration. Carry van Lieshout and Benjamin Newman

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The constraints of recording more fleeting experiences of the everyday in the past, such as sounds or smells, have pushed historical geographers to seek more creative engagements with material located in archives, and further decentre the subdiscipline’s reliance on the textual and visual. Elin Jones’s (2020) recent work on soundscapes in the eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Royal Navy considers the materiality of the vessels and the hierarchical zoning of its areas as spaces through which voices and other sounds could be hidden or amplified. Radio and its role in propaganda, war and diplomacy, as well as that in shaping national or youth identities, has been studied as well (Della Dora, 2021). There are exciting opportunities for historical work to continue to develop its methodological approaches – particularly in the context of politically informed work responding to present-day crises – by looking at interventions from scholars in allied disciplines. Work such as that by Ann Stoler (2010) or Saidiya Hartman (2008), for example, illustrate the utility of investigating archives for their unwritten or unknowable qualities with a specific focus on race and colonial rule. Such approaches present the opportunity for historical geographers to engage and respond to questions of colonial legacies that were not recorded by those in power. Historical work and approaches offer important insights into the geographies of the past and their relations and legacies with the present, as well as contributing to the discipline of geography more generally. Yet there remains more work to be done. The subdiscipline is heavily rooted in Anglo-American scholarship. While there have been some positive developments in the context of historical geography’s internationalization – for instance, at the International Conference of Historical Geographers – there remains much work to be done to ensure that the contributions of historical work from international geographers are both recognized and engaged with. Similarly, despite recent engagement with race and post-/decolonizing subject matters, the subdiscipline as a whole is still overwhelmingly white and Anglo-American. As Federico Ferretti (2022) has noted in the context of the history and philosophy of geography, the increasing amount of critical historical work from non-anglophone scholars is doing much to productively diversify Carry van Lieshout and Benjamin Newman

histories of geography and bring them to the attention of other historical geographers. Beyond the diversification of historical geography’s participants, the subdiscipline can be criticized for a bias towards the geographies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is owing, in part, to reliance on existing archival documents. A further consequence of relying on archives that are often geographically bounded, such as local or national archives, is that the resulting scholarship is often reflective of these constraints. Recent work has started a push not only to engage with different archives, but as Jake Hodder, Michael Heffernan and Stephen Legg (2021) have demonstrated, also to bring international archives into dialogue with one another to present new perspectives on, in their case, internationalism. In doing so, they argue that geographical readings across a series of archive holdings are central to richer understandings of what, where and to whom internationalization mattered. Their work is an important exemplar of the opportunity, and indeed, the need for historical geographers to consider whose voices are heard and seen to matter. To continue working with the notion of hidden histories then, seems critical to politically informed historical geography that takes seriously those that have been deliberately, obscured forgotten or rewritten. As such, historical work in the discipline of geography – with all its diversity and eclecticism – must continue to consider, contextualize and challenge dominant, Eurocentric and colonial narratives of various pasts. In doing so, historical geography is positioned to ensure that histories of violence and injustice are not relegated to the past but critically interrogated for their future-making capacity. Carry van Lieshout and Benjamin Newman

References and selected further reading Awcock, H. (2021). ‘Handbills, rumours and blue cockades: communications during the 1780 Gordon Riots’. Journal of Historical Geography, 74, 1–9. Baker, A. (1997). ‘“The dead don’t answer questionnaires”: researching and writing historical

Historical geographies  189 geography’. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 21 (2), 231–43. Bressey, C. (2013). Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste. London: Bloomsbury. Bressey, C. (2021). ‘Surfacing black and brown bodies in the digital archive: domestic workers in the late nineteenth-century Australia’. Journal of Historical Geography, 70, 1–11. Cole, T. and Giordano, A. (2021). ‘Geographies of Holocaust rescue spatial patterns and social geographies of Jewish rescue in Budapest, 1944’. Journal of Historical Geography, 71, 63–72. Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S. (eds) (1988). The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Della Dora, V. (2021). ‘Listening to the archive: historical geographies of sound’. Geography Compass, 15 (11), Article e12599. Domosh, M. (2021). ‘Introduction to Part IX’. In M. Domosh, M. Heffernan and C.W.J. Withers (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography, Volume 2. London: SAGE, pp. 939–42. Driver, F. (1988). ‘The historicity of human geography’. Progress in Human Geography, 12 (4), 497–506. Ferretti, F. (2022). ‘History and philosophy of geography III: global histories of geography, statues that must fall and a radical and multilingual turn’. Progress in Human Geography, 46 (2), 716–25. Finnegan, D.A. (2017). ‘Finding a scientific voice: performing science, space and speech in the nineteenth century’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42 (2), 192–205. Fischer, L. and Withers, C.W.J. (2021). ‘Geographical print culture in the German-speaking territories, c.1690–c.1815’. Journal of Historical Geography, 72, 1–12. Hartman, S. (2008). ‘Venus in two acts’. Small Axe, 26 (12), 1–14. Heffernan, M. (2009). ‘Historical geography’. In D. Gregory, R. Johnston and G. Pratt et al. (eds), The Dictionary of Human Geography (5th edition). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 332–5. Hodder, J., Heffernan, M. and Legg, S. (2021). ‘The archival geographies of twentieth-century internationalism: nation, empire and race’. Journal of Historical Geography, 71, 1–11. Johnson, N. (2017). ‘On the colonial frontier: gender, exploration and plant-hunting on

Mount Victoria in early 20th-century Burma’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42, 417–31. Jones, E. (2020). ‘Space, sound and sedition on the Royal Naval ship, 1756–1815’. Journal of Historical Geography, 70, 65–73. Legg, S. (2014). Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lester, A. (2015), ‘Commentary: new directions for historical geographies of colonialism’. New Zealand Geographer, 71, 120–23. Mahony, M. and Randalls, S. (eds) (2020). Weather, Climate and the Geographical Imagination. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Mayhew, R. (2021). ‘Pre-histories’. In M. Domosh, M. Heffernan and C.W.J. Withers (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography (vol. 1). London: SAGE, pp. 5–24. Morrissey, J., Nally, D., Strohmayer, U. and Whelan, Y. (2014). Key Concepts in Historical Geography. London: SAGE. Parsons, M. and Fisher, K. (2021). ‘Historical smellscapes in Aotearoa New Zealand: intersections between colonial knowledges’. Journal of Historical Geography, 74, 28–43. Saldanha, A. (2011). ‘The itineraries of geography: Jan Huyghen van Linschoten’s Itinerario and Dutch expeditions to the Indian Ocean, 1594–1602’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101 (1), 149–77. Stoler, A.L. (2010). Along the Archival Grain, Epistematic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Van Sant, L., Hennessey, E. and Domosh, M. et al. (2020). ‘Historical geographies of, and for, the present’. Progress in Human Geography, 44 (1), 168–88. Veale, L., Endfield, G. and Davies, S. et al. (2017). ‘Dealing with the deluge of historical weather data: the example of the TEMPEST database’. Geo: Geography and the Environment, 4 (2), Article e00039. Withers, C.W.J., Domosh, M. and Heffernan, M. (2021). ‘Introduction’. In C.W.J. Withers, M. Domosh and M. Heffernan, M. (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Historical Geography (vol. 1). London: SAGE, pp. xxvii–l. Withers, C.W.J. and Ogborn, M. (2010). Geographies of the Book. London: Routledge.

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37. Humanistic geographies Humble beginnings and struggles Struggling to be taken seriously as a subdiscipline since its beginning, humanistic geography centers on resultant actions of people, and more precisely the individual, and ways in which the human species understands its surroundings via processes of creation – how people view themselves within their surroundings (Buttimer, 1979; Tuan, 1976). Though undoubtedly a geographic pursuit, this focus was first formally described by the founder of humanistic geography, Yi-Fu Tuan (1976), who set the stage for future studies that centered specifically on the human experience. Almost immediately following Tuan’s seminal article, scholars began exploring different techniques for utilizing and engaging with the concept throughout the discipline of geography (Entrikin, 1976; various essays in Ley 1981; Ley and Samuels, 1978; Relph, 1976), with some proponents going so far as to suggest that humanistic geography should become a mainstream focus within the broader discipline (Daniels, 1985). From its outset, humanistic geography was criticized as having a weak methodology – even by some human geographers (cf., Ley and Samuels, 1978). Several proponents for humanistic geography, however, defended the concept, such as Smith’s (1984) early attempts to lessen the subfield’s alleged limitations. A few years prior, Pocock (1981) compiled specific essays, centered on landscape painting and literature specifically, to demonstrate the numerous (and perhaps unconventional at the time) ways humanistic geography’s approach could aid in better understanding people’s role with/in the landscape. A couple of decades later, Adams, Hoelscher and Till’s Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies (2001) featured a series of essays that integrated concepts based on a more humanist approach into the larger humanistic geography framework. Although the volume was dedicated to Tuan, the editors noted that most of the contributing authors did not classify themselves as particularly ‘humanistic’, a trend that continues to this day.

Still, humanistic geography had come forth in a seemingly direct challenge to the positivistic views brought on by geography’s so-called ‘quantitative revolution’ that grew out of the mid-century critique of geography’s propensity to focus mainly on qualitative interpretations of phenomena. Contrary to models at the time that seemed to treat society (and more specifically, people) as being confined by their place in space, humanistic geography touted the importance of incorporating the individual (and people more generally) into research frameworks as active participants who create, define, and alter place and space. While closely aligned to the French school of human geography and the Chicago school’s sociological approach based on neo-Kantianism and pragmatism, humanistic geography as practiced during its early years was perhaps more reminiscent of the phenomenological school of thought, which Entrikin (1976) reminded us came from older, radical-at-the-time philosophers such as Hegel and Kant (among others). Even so, the phenomenology-based idea of humanistic geography as a critique was helpful to geographers during its formative years because it allowed for assessing subjectivity in both the research being undertaken and the individual conducting said research. During its nascence, humanistic geography utilized methods from the social sciences and humanities almost exclusively, though traditional fieldwork was still retained and noted as being particularly important, much as it has been throughout geography’s lifetime. The difference was that now, when geography was essentially focused on quantitative approaches, utilizing humanistic geography’s tenets grounded in sociology, phenomenology, and the humanities, researchers were equipped with a slew of important tools allowing them to better assess their studies, as well as the oft-perceived physical–human geography divide. Although expanded upon greatly with modern undertones of performativity, gender studies, feminist geography, and lived experiences, this mindset continued to influence scholars seeking better understanding of the individual’s role in discovering their place in space. For example, Buttimer (1993) incorporated worldwide illustrations that explored human–environment connections through the eyes of people’s belief systems (e.g., their religion and myths) and science (e.g.,

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their views of natural processes), building on earlier work by Buttimer and Seamon (1980) which focused on the ‘being-in-the-world’ notion based on subjectivity of human experience and phenomenology. Tied to this is the concept of embodiment, where researchers such as Nast and Pile (1998), Harrison (2000), Thrift (2000, 2003), and Bruun and Langlais (2003) describe the importance of ‘body’ in terms of human connection to place (i.e., human–environment interaction). These ideas coincide with Tuan’s (1977) early humanistic work that notes the importance place holds for us as individuals learning about our surroundings, as well as his later work (Tuan, 2001), where he argues for the importance of a ‘wakeful life’ (p. 42) centered on what we do as individuals, noting that ‘humanists emphasize experience, scientists emphasize experimentation’ (p. 43).

Humanistic geography in the social sciences and humanities Humanistic geography was greatly influenced by two main, broad fields: the social sciences and humanities. The former’s impact stemmed from phenomenology, mostly based on Relph’s (1976) important Place and Placelessness, the phenomenology– social geography connection that Ley (1978) outlined, and ethnography as illustrated by Christensen (1982). Relph (1976) suggested that people become disconnected from their own place due to technological advances and conveniences, pointing out how, rather than being ‘placeless’ in the modern, built environment, authenticity can result when we (individuals or people at large) obtain a sense of place. Similarly, Ley, in both his chapter (1978) and throughout the edited volume (Ley and Samuels, 1978), pushed the phenomenological connections further by tying the concept to social actions, values, and perceptions, noting that while objectivity remains important, so is subjectivity and the acknowledgment of it. Extending the phenomenological argument a few years later, Relph (1981) noted that, while it retains multiple meanings, humanism remains a key interpretive tool for the built landscape. Around the same time, Christensen (1982) put forth the notion that, although phenomenology (usually) rejects

positivism, it should not exclude empiricism, as the two are somewhat dialectical. These authors’ ideas, as well as Tuan’s (1976) and Entrikin’s (1976) earlier works, were furthered in Smith’s (1984) article that lessened the blow to humanistic geography’s perceived weaknesses (and its methodology specifically) by focusing on how four main components in human geography can be addressed by humanistic geography: action– experience relationships, ethics, the agency vs structure debate, and the linkages between intellect and the world. In terms of the humanities’ influence on humanistic geography, the focus remains specifically on people. Entwined in the mix are how people utilize different approaches when viewing the same landscapes (cf., Meinig, 1979a, 1979b), how humans perceive place and space (Buttimer, 1979; cf., Harris, 1978), and (the potential for) geography being just as much art as science (cf., Meinig, 1983). In fact, a few years later, Daniels (1985) vehemently argued for integrating humanistic geography across the broader discipline of geography. Still, of these seminal works, perhaps Meinig’s (1979b) book represents one of the most important foundations for early humanistic geography. In the book, humanistic proponents such as Marwyn Samuels, Peirce Lewis, J.B. Jackson, David Lowenthal, and Yi-Fu Tuan highlighted their views and discussed ideas that, in many ways, served as foundations for future humanistic geography scholars, even if up-and-coming scholars shun the humanistic moniker.

Influence of humanistic geography on the ‘cultural turn’ Coming out of the quantitative revolution and bolstered by humanistic engagement, scholars began to seriously critique the discipline of geography – albeit with a focus more on the human/cultural side of geography than the physical. While staunch humanistic geographers were (re)assessing their endeavors, reconsidering and revising prior presumptions, components of humanistic geography were still incorporated into the ‘new’ cultural geography, even when scholars turned to Marxism, post-structuralism, and/or other post-modern paradigms. Casey D. Allen

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Though some assimilation of humanistic paradigms into mainstream geography continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, geography’s so-called ‘cultural turn’ attempted to move beyond traditional humanistic geography by pushing forwards ideas such as those outlined by Duncan and Ley (1982) – which viewed humanism as fiction, since not all human endeavors could be included in any single study – or Cosgrove (1989) who explored humanism’s genesis, tying it to the white, male-dominated hierarchy (that still often persists even to this day) created by (and/or being a product of) important events throughout history. These important critiques were further explained and examined in compendiums such as that edited by Barnes and Duncan (1992), where various authors discussed how items such as maps, text, and even paintings engage with the landscape, noting that exceptionally strong works can transcend socio-demographic statuses. Following not dissimilar lines of inquiry, volumes edited by Duncan and Ley (1993) and Pile and Thrift (1995) were also influential in steering humanistic geography through geography’s cultural turn, though the former suggested that meaning is created through different re-presentation modes (i.e., ‘cultural constructions’) in works of text, and the latter framed new paths for cultural geography (which included humanism components). Taking the ‘new’ geography one step further, Rose (1993), Massey (1994), and Monk (1994) each sought to liberate the discipline of geography from its historically (white) male-dominated roots. Of the three, Rose is the only one who, utilizing female experiences in space and place, directly examined how gender bias in geography might (should?) be addressed, noting that the triumvirate of power–subjectivity–knowledge remains vital in navigating and accepting gender bias. Massey further informed humanistic geography’s key constituent – the individual – by suggesting that examining places where varied experiences occur in space remains the key to increasing understanding across genders, while Monk (1994) attempted to understand the role feminist geography plays across space to enhance recognition of cross-cultural experiences. Intricately tied to these themes, performativity – in essence, any executed action – also finds its roots in humanistic geography, and grew out of geography’s ‘cultural turn’. While Casey D. Allen

a two-part special issue of Environment and Planning D reviewed performativity up to the year 2000 (Rose and Thrift, 2000; Rose et al., 2000), earlier works such as Butler (1993) and Nast and Pile (1998) sought to integrate forms of movement and action with place meaning and creation (i.e., sense of place), even if such spaces are social constructs. In a later article, Thrift (2003) addressed issues of criticism that came out of early performativity studies (and even gender studies prior to that, perhaps) and also outlined potential future trajectories for the inclusion of performativity in the broader geography framework, and the individual’s role in understanding their place.

Sense of place’s role in humanistic geography Though it also includes people in general, humanistic geography remains centered on the individual. At this core, how we feel about a location – our ‘sense of place’ – is essential to developing an understanding of our environment, both how we perceive it and how we function with/in it. Assessing sense of place remains a complex and interdisciplinary endeavor, often overlapping with the geography subfields of environmental perception and behavioral geography as well as the broader disciplines of anthropology, psychology, and sociology, as well as history, ethnography, and landscape studies, among others. Even so, the focus on sense of place retains vital importance in humanistic geography, whether it is noted as a ‘humanistic’ endeavor in the varying disciplines or not. Perhaps the most formative – and certainly earliest formal works in this arena – is Tuan’s (1974) Topophilia which, although written before his humanistic geography treatise (Tuan, 1976), contains strong undertones of the individual’s importance in terms of coming to grasp with an understanding of our place in the world. Indeed, concepts outlined in this book, perhaps more so than any other, retain a strong influence on both humanistic geography and sense of place. Tuan’s other defining sense of place work, Language and the Making of Place (Tuan, 1991), argued that language rests at the heart of how we create our own sense of place. Building on these ideas (whether they were aware of

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it or not), other scholars began examining the concept. For example, Jackson’s (1994) collection of essays tied the individual to the landscape through culture, as did Feld and Basso’s (1996) edited volume, which, although it took a more anthropological/ethnographical approach, remains clearly rooted in humanistic geography principles. Taking a more philosophical turn, Malpas (1999) mined the works of poets and philosophers to explore how the individual remains tied to place by thought and identity which they gain through experience – key tenets also alluded to in Tuan’s early humanistic geography endeavors, and concepts that Casey (1993, 1997) also explored.

Future directions Although practiced formally less often since the beginning of the twenty-first century, today’s humanistic geography – even if it is not necessarily labeled as such – still often includes a blend of Vidal de la Blanche’s French school, Park’s neo-Kantianism from the Chicago school, performativity and feminist geography (cf., Butler, 1993; Gregson and Rose, 2000; Harrison, 2000; Monk, 1994; Nast and Pile, 1998; Thrift, 2003), space (Harvey, 1993; Massey, 2005; cf., Massey, 1999), and Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1976) foundational individualistic, traditional, and more classical approach. Regardless of approach, however, the crux of humanistic geography has always been, and still remains, the individual’s search for meaning and understanding (place) in their world (space) – although people generally speaking are often lumped into the mix as well, often owing to their emplacement with/in the broader landscape (Allen and Lukinbeal, 2011; Seamon, 2013, 2018; Seamon and Larsen, 2016). Instead of focusing purely on the human geography realm (cf., Sapkota, 2017) or physical geography realm (Lave et al., 2014) irrespective of the intention or perceived need, the future of humanistic geography lies at the nexus where disciplinary boundaries are shattered so the individual can make sense of their place in space. Casey D. Allen

References and selected further reading Adams, P.C., Hoelscher, S.D. and Till, K.E. (eds) 2001. Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Allen, C.D. and Lukinbeal, C. 2011. Practicing physical geography: an actor-network view of physical geography exemplified by the rock art stability index. Progress in Physical Geography, 35 (2), 227–48. Barnes, T.J. and Duncan, J.S. (eds) 1992. Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. London and New York: Routledge. Bruun, H. and Langlais, R. 2003. On the embodied nature of action. Acta Sociologica, 46 (1), 31–49. Butler, J. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London and New York: Routledge. Buttimer, A. 1979. Reason, rationality, and human creativity. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 61 (1), 43–9. Buttimer, A. 1993. Geography and the Human Spirit. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Buttimer, A. and Seamon, D. (eds) 1980. The Human Experience of Space and Place. London: Croom Helm. Casey, E.S. 1993. Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-world. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Casey, E.S. 1997. Smooth spaces and rough-edged places: the hidden history of place. The Review of Metaphysics, 51 (2), 267–96. Christensen, K. 1982. Geography as a human science: a philosophic critique of the positivist– humanist split. In P. Gould and G. Olsson (eds), A Search for Common Ground (pp. 37–57). London: Pion. Cosgrove, D. 1989. Historical considerations on humanism, historical materialism and geography. In A. Kobayashi and S. Mackenzie (eds), Remaking Human Geography (pp. 189–205). London: Unwin Hyman. Daniels, S. 1985. Arguments for a humanistic geography. In R.J. Johnston (ed.), The Future of Geography (pp. 143–58). London: Methuen. Duncan, J. and Ley, D. 1982. Structural Marxism and human geography: a critical assess-

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194  Concise encyclopedia of human geography ment. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 72 (1), 30–59. Duncan, J.S. and Ley, D. (eds) 1993. Place/ Culture/Representation. London and New York: Routledge. Entrikin, J.N. 1976. Contemporary humanism in geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 66 (4), 615–32. Feld, S. and Basso, K.H. (eds) 1996. Senses of Place. Sante Fe, NM: School of American Research. Gregson, N. and Rose, G. 2000. Taking Butler elsewhere: performativities, spatialities and subjectivities. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18 (4), 433–52. Harris, C. 1978. The historical mind and the practice of geography. In D. Ley and M.S. Samuels (eds), Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems (pp. 123–37). London: Croom Helm. Harrison, P. 2000. Making sense: embodiment and the sensibilities of the everyday. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18 (4), 497–517. Harvey, D. 1993. From space to place and back again: reflections on the condition of post-modernity. In J. Bird, B. Curtis and T. Putnam et al. (eds), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change (pp. 3–29). London and New York: Routledge. Jackson, J.B. 1994. A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lave, R., Wilson, M.W. and Barron, E.S. et al. 2014. Intervention: critical physical geography. The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien, 58 (1), 1–10. Ley, D. 1978. Social geography and social action. In D. Ley and M.S. Samuels (eds), Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems (pp. 41–57). London: Croom Helm. Ley, D. 1981. Cultural/humanistic geography. Progress in Human Geography, 5 (2), 249–57. Ley, D. and Samuels, M.S. (eds) 1978. Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems. London: Croom Helm. Malpas, J. 1999. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Massey, D. 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Massey, D. 1999. Space–time, ‘science’ and the relationship between physical geography and

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human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24, 261–76. Massey, D. 2005. For Space. London: SAGE. Meinig, D. 1979a. The beholding eye. In D. Meinig (ed.), Interpreting Ordinary Landscapes: Geographic Essays (pp. 33–48). New York: Oxford University Press. Meinig, D. (ed.) 1979b. Interpreting Ordinary Landscapes: Geographic Essays. New York: Oxford University Press. Meinig, D. 1983. Geography as an art. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 8 (3), 314–28. Monk, J. 1994. Place matters: comparative international perspectives on feminist geography. The Professional Geographer, 46 (3), 277–88. Nast, H.J. and Pile, S. (eds) 1998. Places Through the Body. London and New York: Routledge. Pile, S. and Thrift, N. (eds) 1995. Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation. Hove: Psychology Press. Pocock, D.C. (ed.). 1981. Humanistic Geography and Literature: Essays on the Experience of Place. London: Croom Helm. Relph, E. 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion. Relph, E. 1981. Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography. London: Croom Helm. Rose, G. 1993. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity. Rose, G. and Thrift, N. 2000. Theme issue: Spaces of performance, part 1. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18 (4), 411–535. Rose, G., N. Thrift and Hinchliffe, S. et al. 2000. Theme issue: Spaces of performance, part 2. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18 (5), 575–651. Sapkota, K. 2017. Humanistic geography: how it blends with human geography through methodology. Geographical Journal of Nepal, 10, 121–40. Seamon, D. 2013. Lived bodies, place, and phenomenology: implications for human rights and environmental justice. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 4 (2), 143–66. Seamon, D. 2018. Life Takes Place: Phenomenology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making. London and New York: Routledge. Seamon, D. and Larsen, T. 2016. Humanistic geography. In D. Richardson, N. Castree and M.F. Goodchild et al. (eds), International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology (pp. 1–12).

Humanistic geographies  195 Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Smith, S.J. 1984. Practicing humanistic geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 74 (3), 353–74. Thrift, N. 2000. Performing cultures in the new economy. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90 (4), 674–92. Thrift, N. 2003. Performance and… Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 35 (11), 2019–24. Tuan, Y.-F. 1974. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Tuan, Y.-F. 1976. Humanistic geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 66 (2), 266–76. Tuan, Y.-F. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Tuan, Y.-F. 1991. Language and the making of place: a narrative‐descriptive approach. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81 (4), 684–96. Tuan, Y.-F. 2001. Life as a field trip. Geographical Review, 91 (1/2), 41–5.

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38. Identity Overview Identity operates as a broad social, cultural, and political concept that defines who we are and who we are not. Identities are individual, collective, hybrid, situational, intersectional, and change over time. In everyday contexts, people’s identities often depend on moment, situation, background, and history, among others. Identity can be influenced by specific histories, power relations, political contexts, and interpersonal relationships. In academic literature more broadly, identity has roots in literature on post-colonialism, intersectionality, race/ethnicity, representation/media, non-representational theory, geography, and beyond. For instance, DuBois (1903) with the theory of double consciousness, Crenshaw’s (1989) theorization of intersectionality, Bhabha (1994) with cultural hybridity, and Stuart Hall’s (1996) work on identity and diaspora, among others, provide foundational scholarship that has outlined contemporary identity theory. In human geography, identity has been addressed in a variety of ways. In particular, geographers are interested in how spatial phenomena impact identity and how identity is asserted through spatial means.

Place-based/placemaking Placemaking produces collective, spatial identities. Place and placemaking are constructed through the ‘selective bundling of human and non-human actants’ (Allen, Lawhon and Pierce, 2019, p. 1009) motivated by values and visions of groups competing politically, socially, and culturally (within uneven power relationships) to implement their vision of place (Martin, 2003; Massey, 2005; Pierce, Martin and Murphy, 2011). Places, then, are designs, discourses, and projects that enact a particular group’s vision of a neighborhood, city, nation-state, or even world. In the placemaking act, these projects also produce collective political, social, and cultural identities through the placemaking process. Decisions about whose values and visions are centered and whose are marginalized, excluded, and/or erased help forge collective identities.

Placemaking, then, is just as much about creating collective identities around shared spatial values and visions as it is about creating particular spatial forms. Many scholars have shown, for example, how race and place are co-constituted, and that racialization coexists with spatialization (Finney, 2006; Lipsitz, 2007; Neely and Samura, 2011; Shabazz, 2015; Sundstrom, 2003). As Sundstrom (2003, p. 83) states, when we produce space (or place) ‘we cannot help but to inscribe and produce categories and identities associated with our spatial divisions’. Sundstrom (2003) uses the term ‘ghetto’ to explain how places are used to ‘other’ communities by labeling their spaces with negative terms. He also argues, however, that these same terms can be reappropriated by racially marginalized communities to facilitate ‘appreciation and investment in their communities’ (p. 86). Hankins, Cochran and Derickson (2012) demonstrate how whiteness is reinforced socially as well as spatially by showing how discourses of ‘danger’ were used by white residents to push for a redevelopment of Buckhead, Atlanta to reify ‘Buckhead as a space of whiteness’ and erase its growing identity as a ‘black scene’ (p. 380). Identities, then, are products of our spatial engagement with the world. As we create place, we define our own communities and position other communities as not ours – from simple claims like what is a ‘real American’ (in which one can define not only the values of America the ‘place’ but also Americans the ‘people’) to more complex engagements like forging community action groups to address issues in communities, place and identity are co-constituted.

Intersectionality Intersectionality is a central theory for feminist scholars of identity and politics as well a foundation of feminist and black geographies. From the Combahee River Collective’s (1977) statement, a key piece for black feminism and identity politics, to Crenshaw’s (1989) theorization of the intersectionality of US black women’s oppression within white supremacy and patriarchy, intersectionality has become a key theory for understanding identity and how it mediates our relations

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in/with society. Intersectionality originally referred to how race, gender, and class identities intersect to create a unique form of marginalization for black women within the US legal system. Since, scholars have extended intersectionality to discuss how our identities are a multiplicity of intersecting identities situated within uneven power relations that frame specific marginalization and oppressions. Patricia Hill Collins (1990), for example, has used the term ‘matrix of domination’ to describe how interlocking systems of oppression work in the multiple oppressions experienced through intersectional identity marginalization. Since then, scholars have expanded this theory, originally used to describe black women’s oppression, to show how intersecting marginalized identities related to race, gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, ability, and sexuality are mutually constituted rather than exclusive categories (Collins, 2015; Nash, 2008). Human geographers, particularly feminist and anti-racist geographers, have taken up intersectionality to expose how identities are not just constituted through interlocking social conditions but also through interlocking spatial relationships. Valentine (2007) argues for understanding intersectionality and geography through lived realities, calling for more empirical work in feminist geographies to take up intersectionality. Similar to how intersectionality has been used to intervene in and/or bypass the race/gender/class debate of structural primacy, Valentine (2007) documents scholars studying intersecting identities and how their work critiques class-based arguments that ignore identity politics and universalize oppression within working-class politics. This scholarship shows that intersectionality has much to offer geography and geography has much to offer intersectionality. The intersections of race and gender, Eaves and Al-Hindi (2020) argue, are different in different places and the responses and consequences of COVID-19 expose that reality. Similarly, Hopkins (2019) argues that geographers not only have a need to use intersectionality to ensure the discipline does not continue to reproduce a white, colonialist, masculinist discipline but also that geographers have a lot to add to understandings of intersectionality with respect to scale, place, and spatial relations of belonging.

Post-colonial lenses and hybridity Identity in post-colonial literatures has been addressed through concepts like hybridity (Bhabha, 1994). Initially, hybridity was rooted in colonialism, stemming from colonial imaginings of hierarchical, racialized purity and discrete racial categories (Bhabha, 1994; Kraidy, 2005; Mahtani, 2005). Colonial propaganda often ‘othered’ non-Europeans, presenting them as ‘backward’ or fetishizing them to justify colonization and exploitation of land, people, and resources (Fanon, 1963; Loomba, 1998; Said, 1978; Yusoff, 2019). Colonial powers established and reinforced binaries between colonized and colonizer (Fanon, 1963). Even though whiteness was never ‘pure’, it was perpetuated as such to establish and maintain power, control, and perpetuate nationalism (Gilroy, 1993). Colonial discourse often represented identities as pure because anything ‘in-between’ threatened colonial power (Bhabha, 1994). In post-colonial literature, hybridity evolved to challenge binary identity/race structures leftover from colonialism and ‘challenged the separateness of them’ (Chacko and Menon, 2013). As many scholars argue, ideas of ‘racial’ and ‘cultural’ ‘purity’ persist in societal and popular representation as well as academia (Fanon, 1963; Kraidy, 2005; Mahtani, 2005). Hybridity, while resulting from colonial imaginings of racialized purity, conceptually and in practice, demonstrates that binaries of race and identity are imagined as most people experience their daily lives in-between spaces (Bhabha, 1994; Kraidy, 2005). Scholars have also demonstrated how colonial binaries persist in settler colonial states like the US and are used as tools to define ‘civility and savagery’, leading to instances of ‘othering’ and/or systematic discrimination (Harris, 2004; Mikdashi, 2013; Seth, 2010). Hybridity has been criticized for leaving out nuances of scalar identities (Bhabha, 2015; Hameiri and Jones, 2017). Post-colonial scholarship blurs lines and boundaries, but recognizes that each post-colonial experience is unique (Scanlon and Kumar, 2019). In other words, scale is important to understanding hybrid identities. People rely on scalar identities to challenge national, homogenized identities, complicating simple nationalistic rhetoric (Johnson and Coleman, 2012; Nicley, Christabel Devadoss and Doug Allen

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2009). Additionally, scalar identity can resist homogeneous or exclusionary identities (i.e., national identity). Scale is necessary to challenge ahistorical, acontextual applications of hybridity that ignore scalar nuance in global frameworks (Bhabha, 2015).

Representation and in the media Identity and representation have been examined in popular culture through visual or film media. Yet, media representation, especially in the West, has been critiqued for lack of diversity and equitable perspectives (Dave, 2013; Davis, 2019; Finney, 2014; Parameswaran, 2002). Popular American media outlets are still largely represented by white men (WMC, 2019). Additionally, much popular discourse has promoted US ‘white savior’ tropes and designated and homogenized ‘Third World’ others, especially women (Bandyopadhyay, 2019; Malkowski and Russworm, 2017; Mohanty, 1984). Popular discourse surrounding ‘American’ identity has historically resulted in loss of nuance. Histories of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) missing in US history books, new state laws against prohibiting teaching critical race theory at the state level, national lore that emphasizes ‘manifest destiny’, national monuments (like Devil’s Tower or Mount Rushmore), media representations, national politics, and even in everyday interactions like family gatherings through fetishizing Thanksgiving myths, are several examples of how representation impacts identity. Furthermore, conversations regarding national identity do not often address how colonial and Orientalist representations of people and places have shaped today’s representation of identities and cultures.

Sound and identity Geographers have examined sound’s relationship to identity, particularly with respect to representation, race, and resistance, among others (Devadoss, 2017, 2020; Haldrup, Koefoed and Simonsen, 2006; Jazeel, 2005; Kanngieser, 2012; Kapchan, 2016; Revill, 2016; Shabazz, 2021). Language and accent Christabel Devadoss and Doug Allen

are significant to understanding identity in terms of broader political implications and people’s experiences in everyday life (Anzaldúa, 1987; Kanngieser, 2012). Language, in human geography, has been used to study how identities are reinforced, asserted, or cultivated (Jones and Merriman, 2009; Paasi, 2003). Geographers have looked at how discrimination manifests in people’s daily lives through language and accent (Haldrup et al., 2006). These scholars are concerned with how language, accent, or even music challenge hegemonic structures (Jones and Merriman, 2009; Shabazz, 2021). Intentional use of language can counter-narrate dominant discourses through use of specific words and even through oral storytelling (Jones and Merriman, 2009; Lucchesi, 2018; Ramaswamy, 1998). Music is also significant to understanding identity in broader representations as well as people’s daily lives (Revill, 2016; Smith, 2000). Music can challenge hierarchical structures of power and privilege, ‘disrupt[ing] ideas of purity and origins’, particularly those related to identity (Sharma, 2006, p. 318; see also Jazeel, 2005; Saldanha, 2005). Sharma (2006, p. 324) shows how Bhangra (a fusion of Western and Punjabi folk music) is a product of ‘lived diasporic identity’ that challenges racist society and culture in Britain, which often homogenizes nuanced identities. Music ‘defies national boundaries and cultural authenticities’ while challenging Eurocentric ideas of race, place, and identity (ibid., p. 325). Recognizing sound’s role in identity can not only highlight the impacts of subtle othering and microaggressions, it can also draw attention to how people use these identities to dismantle hegemonic structures.

Implications The topic of identity is rich and robust. This entry covers a few examples in human geography, but there are several other important readings beyond geography in feminist studies, queer theory, post-colonial theory, transnationalism, theories of caste and race, black geographies, Latinx geographies, among others. Theories of identity are important to understanding socio-spatial relations. Identities and geographies are co-constituted

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through a myriad of modalities, and this branch of scholarly inquiry remains a vibrant, rich source of scholarly activity. Christabel Devadoss and Doug Allen

tion. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2 (1), 89–109. Devadoss, C. (2017). Sound and identity explored through the Indian Tamil diaspora and Tamil Nadu. Journal of Cultural Geography, 34 (1), 70–92. Devadoss, C. (2020). Sounding ‘brown’: everyday aural discrimination and othering. Political References and selected further Geography, 79, Article 102151. reading DuBois, W.E.B. (1903). The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago, IL: A.C. McClurg & Co. Allen, D., Lawhon, M. and Pierce, J. (2019). Eaves, L. and Al-Hindi, K.F. (2020). Intersectional geographies and COVID-19. Dialogues in Placing race: on the resonance of place Human Geography, 10 (2), 132–6. with black geographies. Progress in Human Fanon, F. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth Geography, 43 (6), 1001–19. (translated and edited by C. Farrington). New Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: York: Grove Press. The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Finney, C. (2006). Black Faces, White Spaces: Lute Books. Reimagining the Relationship of African Bandyopadhyay, R. (2019). Volunteer tourism Americans to the Great Outdoors. Chapel Hill, and ‘The White Man’s Burden’: globalization NC: University of North Carolina Press. of suffering, white savior complex, religion and modernity. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 27 Finney, C. (2014). Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African (3), 327–43. Americans to the Great Outdoors. Chapel Hill, Bhabha, H.K. (1994). The Location of Culture. NC: University of North Carolina Press. London: Routledge. Bhabha, H.K. (2015). Foreword. In P. Werbner Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: and T. Modood (eds), Debating Cultural Harvard University Press. Hybridity: Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism (pp. ix–xiv). London: Haldrup, M., Koefoed, L. and Simonsen, K. (2006). Practical orientalism – bodies, everyday life Zed Books. and the construction of otherness. Geografiska Chacko, E. and Menon, R. (2013). Longings and Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 88 (2), belongings: Indian American youth identity, 173–84. folk dance competitions, and the construction of ‘tradition’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (1), Hall, S. (1996). Ethnicity: identity and difference. In G. Eley and R.G. Suny (eds), Becoming 97–116. National: A Reader (pp. 339–49). Oxford: Collins, P.H. (1990). Black Feminist Thought: Oxford University Press. Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Hameiri, S. and Jones, L. (2017). Beyond hybridEmpowerment. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman. ity to the politics of scale: international interCollins, P.H. (2015). Intersectionality’s definivention and ‘local’ politics. Development and tional dilemmas. Annual Review of Sociology, Change, 48 (1), 54–77. 41, 1–20. Combahee River Collective (1977). The Combahee Hankins, K.B., Cochran, R. and Derickson, K.D. (2012). Making space, making race: reconstitutRiver Collective Statement. Accessed 13 americanstudies​ ing white privilege in Buckhead, Atlanta. Social October 2022 at https://​ & Cultural Geography, 13 (4), 379–97. .yale​.edu/​sites/​default/​files/​files/​Keyword​ Harris, C. (2004). How did colonialism dispossess? %20Coalition​_Readings​.pdf. Comments from an edge of empire. Annals of Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the interthe Association of American Geographers, 94 section of race and sex: a black feminist critique (1), 165–82. of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Hopkins, P. (2019). Social geography I: intersectionality. Progress in Human Geography, 43 Legal Forum, 1989 (1), Article 8, 139–67. (5), 937–47. Dave, S.S. (2013). Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television Jazeel, T. (2005). The world is sound? Geography, musicology and British-Asian soundscapes. and Film. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Area, 37 (3), 233–41. Press. Davis, J. (2019). Black faces, black spaces: Johnson, C. and Coleman, A. (2012). The internal other: exploring the dialectical relationship rethinking African American underrepresentabetween regional exclusion and the construction tion in wildland spaces and outdoor recrea-

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200  Concise encyclopedia of human geography of national identity. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102 (4), 863–80. Jones, R. and Merriman, P. (2009). Hot, banal and everyday nationalism: bilingual road signs in Wales. Political Geography, 28 (3), 164–73. Kanngieser, A. (2012). A sonic geography of voice: towards an affective politics. Progress in Human Geography, 36 (3), 336–53. Kapchan, D. (2016). Slow activism: listening to the pain and praise of others. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 48 (1), 115–19. Kraidy, M. (2005). Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Lipsitz, G. (2007). The racialization of space and the spatialization of race. Landscape Journal, 26 (1), 71–7. Loomba, A. (1998). Colonialism/Postcolonialism (2nd edition). London: Routledge. Lucchesi, A.H. (2018). ‘Indians don’t make maps’: Indigenous cartographic traditions and innovations. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 42 (3), 11–26. Mahtani, M. (2005). Mixed metaphors: positioning ‘mixed race’ identity. In J.-A. Lee and J. Lutz (eds), Situating ‘Race’ and Racisms in Space, Time, and Theory (pp. 77–93). Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Malkowski, J. and Russworm, T.M. (2017). Identity, representation, and video game studies beyond the politics of the image. In J. Malkowski and T.M. Russworm (eds), Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games (pp. 1–19). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Martin, D. (2003). ‘Place-framing’ as place-making: constituting a neighborhood for organizing and activism. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93 (3), 730–50. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: SAGE. Mikdashi, M. (2013). What is settler colonialism? American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 2, 23–34. Mohanty, C.T. (1984). Under Western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Boundary 2, 12 (3)/13 (1), 333–58. Nash, J.C. (2008). Re-thinking intersectionality. Feminist Review, 89, 1–15. Neely, B. and Samura, M. (2011). Social geographies of race: connecting race and space. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34 (11), 1933–52. Nicley, E.P. (2009). Placing blame or blaming place? Embodiment, place and materiality in critical geopolitic. Political Geography, 28 (1), 19–22. Paasi, A. (2003). Region and place: regional identity in question. Progress in Human Geography, 27 (4), 475–85. Parameswaran, R. (2002). Local culture in global media: excavating colonial and mate-

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rial discourses in National Geographic. Communication Theory, 12 (3), 287–315. Pierce, J., Martin, D.G. and Murphy, J.T. (2011). Relational place-making: the networked politics of place. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36 (1), 54–70. Ramaswamy, S. (1998). Body language: the somatics of nationalism in Tamil India. Gender & History, 10 (1), 78–109. Revill, G. (2016). How is space made in sound? Spatial mediation, critical phenomenology and the political agency of sound. Progress in Human Geography, 40 (2), 1–17. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books/Random House. Saldanha, A. (2005). Trance and visibility at dawn: racial dynamics in Goa’s rave scene. Social & Cultural Geography, 6 (5), 707–21. Scanlon, L.A. and Kumar, S.M. (2019). Ireland and Irishness: the contextuality of postcolonial identity. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109 (1), 202–22. Seth, V. (2010). Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shabazz, R. (2015). Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press Shabazz, R. (2021). ‘We gon be alright’: containment, creativity, and the birth of hip-hop. Cultural Geographies, 28 (3), https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1177/​14744740211003653. Sharma, S. (2006). Asian sounds. In N. Ali, V.S. Kalra and S. Sayyid (eds), A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain (pp. 317–26). London: Hurst & Company. Smith, S. (2000). Performing the (sound) world. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18 (5), 615–37. Sundstrom, R.R. (2003). Race and place: social space in the production of human kinds. Philosophy & Geography, 6 (1), 83–95. Valentine, G. (2007). Theorizing and researching intersectionality: a challenge for feminist geography. Professional Geographer, 59 (1), 10–21. Women’s Media Center (WMC) (2019, 21 February). The Status of Women in U.S. Media 2019. Accessed 13 October 2022 at https://​ womensmediacenter​.com/​assets/​site/​from​-bsd/​ WMCStatus​ofWomeninU​SMedia2019​.pdf. Yusoff, K. (2019). A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

39. Indigenous geographies

words and concepts like Indigenousness, Indigeneity, and Indigenize.

Introduction

Indigenous identities and the roles of geography

Across human geography and beyond, “Indigenous” is a complex, contested, and highly mutable concept. As a diverse group of anti-colonial social justice-oriented authors who identify as (among other things) a young Métis woman, a black Nigerian physician, a white settler, a mother, a member of the Dakelh First Nation, a Filipina woman, and queer geographer, who all currently live in so-called Canada, we unpack and consider “Indigenous” from a variety of vantage points and through a series of theoretical frames that inform the ways “Indigenous” circulates amongst geographers and is taken up across geography. Our considerations are specific and contained: we are not considering Indigenous as physical geographers do – as, for instance, a modifier of plants or soils. Our exploration of Indigenous is informed by an anti-colonial orientation to geography, by which we mean that theoretically and in our daily practices, we work to unsettle states of coloniality, which we take as tightly yoked to social and cultural injustices that include extractive capitalism, sexism, ableism, heteropatriarchy, violence, and classism (to name a few). We also take as a starting point that geography has always been, and continues to be, a white settler colonial discipline, or as others (especially Indigenous geographers) have argued, geography continues to pathologize Indigenous peoples and places; sideline or suppress Indigenous peoples and worldviews; lack in Indigenous representation; and refuse to consider Indigenous peoples’ and places’ own terms as opposed to reference to mostly white non-Indigenous ways of knowing and colonial or non-Indigenous referents. Our focus rests on geographies located within modern states of coloniality (mostly Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and the USA, with some references to Central and South America and countries that now encompass the territories of circumpolar Indigenous peoples, including Russia, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden). We also consider Indigenous in tandem with

Indigenous identities are multiple. Indigeneity is impacted by and changing through kinship, migration, displacement, colonization, and inter-ethnic relationships. There is no singular ‘Indigenous identity’. Indeed, defining Indigenous identities and Indigeneity is deeply contentious and (often) political. Indigeneity is collective in nature, demonstrating kinship and cultural ties, resting on a sense (and recognition of) community belonging. Indigeneity is also complicated through state attempts to define who can or cannot claim Indigeneity. Indigenous identities are typically self-determined and based upon cultural, kinship, and land claims to a specific place and people. Legislation in different countries, however, has a limited definition of Indigenous identity. For example, in modern states of coloniality, First Nations (status and non-status, as defined by the state), Métis, and Inuit, are all Indigenous identities within Canada; Māori are rooted in Aotearoa/New Zealand; with First Nations, or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia; and the Native American and Alaska Native peoples in the United States of America. Circumpolar Indigenous peoples, such as the Sámi, are connected to lands in places now known as Russia, Norway, and Sweden. In Bolivia alone, the Constitution recognizes the languages of 36 distinct Indigenous Nations. Each of these Indigenous identities are unto themselves nested within diverse languages, cultures, beliefs, laws, spiritualities, and practices. Legislative definition of Indigenous peoples is often not based on self-determination, and fails to recognize the influence of colonialism, migration, and urbanization on Indigenous peoples. Coloniality has attempted to limit the scope of who Indigenous peoples are, including distinct rights that various Indigenous peoples have to their lands. Although a pan-Indigenous identity does not exist, the United Nations defines Indigenous peoples through specific commonalities: “inheritors and practitioners of unique cultures and ways of relating to people

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and the environment. They [Indigenous peoples] have retained social, cultural, economic and political characteristics that are distinct from those of the dominant societies in which they live” (United Nations, n.d.). As a discipline, geography has often disregarded Indigenous self-determination. Indeed, geography has long been colonial, facilitating the dispossession of Indigenous lands. Mapping technologies delineated Indigenous territories and forcefully transferred land to colonial powers. Efforts to reclaim these lands require geographic mapping of Indigenous peoples’ culture, language, and traditional practices to their lands. Scholars have criticized state requirements for Indigenous peoples to ‘prove’ their claims to land, particularly when Indigeneity is tied to identification with traditional practices. Many Indigenous peoples live outside traditional territories and should not be limited to homelands constructed outside Indigenous legal orders that legitimately refuse colonial law. Colonialism attempts to detach Indigenous peoples from cultural practices, rendering problematic recognition of Indigenous identities based solely on cultural ties to land, and offering a narrow understanding of Indigeneity. Indigenous geographers such as Renee Pualani Louis, Jay T. Johnson and colleagues (2012) propose counter- and Indigenous mapping as an emerging practice and useful tool to retell Indigenous stories and reclaim Indigenous lands. Indigenous mapping practices often document Indigenous place names, ritual and sacred sites, histories, and land management techniques on maps, thus telling a richer story about geographic areas while also contributing to land reclamation efforts and to cultural and language revitalization. Geography as a discipline buttresses coloniality in other ways: data collection and interpretation often rely on geographic information science (GIScience) software and interpretation of data by expert, non-Indigenous peoples. Demystifying and decolonizing the use of GIScience technology requires geographers to understand their positionality and the ontology of GIScience and map-making itself. Indeed, Reid and Seiber (2021) argue for Indigenous ontologies in GIScience. With recent GIScience technology relying on crowd-sourced and social media data, data collection might instead be done through immersive engageChristine Añonuevo et al.

ment within Indigenous communities and by partnering with Indigenous peoples to verify and ensure a self-determined approach to data acquisition and application. Such actions would ensure that mapping practices respect and recognize expert Indigenous knowledges. Toponomy, or the study of place naming, is another geographic tool that has supported and detrimentally affected Indigenous self-determination. Indigenous place naming tells rich stories of ancestral origins and interactions of Indigenous peoples with the land. However, Mt. McKinley in Alaska, the highest peak in North America, was named after a former United States President. Settler naming obscured the Athabaskan Native American worldview reflected in the original name of the mountain, Denali, which means “the tall one” or “mountain-big”. Indigenous peoples’ place naming reflects relationships with place and, as such, naming places for people is not customary. It took a century to reclaim and rename Mt. Denali. Denali gives a richer and fuller perspective of the history of the mountain and its relationships. Geography is positioned to uphold, or risk undermining, Indigenous knowledge systems when studying toponomy.

Indigenous geographers in geography Human geographers tell complex stories of relationships formed at the intersection of humans, place, and space. These complex stories are best told by Indigenous peoples who have access to ancestral knowledge systems, names, connections, and spirituality. Such knowledges, when appropriate to share with a wider audience, can illuminate understanding of historical and ongoing connection of place. Work by Indigenous geographers spans myriad research interests, theoretical and praxis orientations, and applications. Just as Indigenous identities are complex, summarizing the breadth of diverse scholarship by Indigenous geographers and scholars, as it impacts Indigenous geographies, is impossible to neatly cohere or homogenize. Between 2012 and 2014, geographers Brad Coombes (Māori), Jay T. Johnson (Cherokee) and Richie Howitt (settler Australian) (2012, 2013, 2014) wrote three Progress in Human Geography reports on Indigenous geogra-

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phies. They highlighted methodological innovations, resource conflicts and land rights, and theoretical developments beyond the post-colonial. Since these reports, and with much groundwork laid by Indigenous communities and geographers such as Coombes and Johnson, Indigenous geographies and geographers have continued along a trajectory that foregrounds resistance, reclamation, and lived experience for change. Cree geographer Michelle Daigle (2016, 2018, 2019a) is engaged in long-standing community-based projects regarding Indigenous food sovereignty and environmental governance. Diné geographer Andrew Curley (2021a, 2021b) examines extractive industry’s role in devising colonial economic policies that exploit Indigenous lands and waters. Sarah Hunt/ Tłaliłila’ogwa is a Kwakwaka’wakw scholar whose work has markedly expanded the scope of political ecology and critical legal geography. Hunt (2018a, 2018b) has expounded the role of the state in perpetuating gender-based violence against Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit peoples. Hunt’s (2014) work also articulates the (im)possibilities of defining ontologies of Indigeneity and situates the structures and processes of Western academe in ongoing legacies of epistemic violence, legacies resultant in the systematic subjugation and delegitimation of Indigenous knowledges and practices. Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg geographer Madeline Whetung (2019) has written about the interconnections of law, gender, and shorelines through infrastructure projects, while Tlingit scholar Anne Spice (2018) has challenged normative ideas of critical infrastructure. Māori geographer Brad Coombes (2007a, 2007b) has written extensively about ontological politics and the meaningful participation of Indigenous peoples in environmental decision making. Cherokee scholar Jay T. Johnson (2008, 2012) has long written about Indigenous sense of place and politics. The Bawaka Collective, a collaborative of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, grounds its work, literally, in geography, deferring lead authorship in academic contributions to the Bawaka Country of north-eastern Arnhem Land, Australia (Bawaka Country et al., 2016). Given that Indigenous survivance is actively threatened by continued violence (both physical and discursive) of states of

coloniality, including the discipline of geography, it might be tempting to characterize Indigenous geographers as united in political resistance. While many Indigenous geographers do identify as being engaged in some form of activism and/or resistance, within and beyond the academy, it would be erroneous and perpetuating of epistemic violence to suggest that Indigenous geographers share a common socio-political lens. This is made evident in the many discussions and debates about how to approach geography’s reckoning with its own colonial history and present.

Indigenous peoples and places in geography’s subdisciplines Indigenous knowledges and practices have been intentionally and systematically relegated to positions and places of inferiority in states of coloniality. The subdisciplines of geography – health, legal, social, cultural, environmental, political, and so on – have ontological and epistemological foundations firmly rooted in Western knowledges and often perpetuated the erasure of Indigenous knowledges. Early health geography (a subdiscipline many of us work in), privileged (and in many cases, continues to privilege) quantitative, biomedical approaches, perpetuating a devaluation of Indigenous health expertise and experience. This narrative traces its origins to medicine as an instrument of colonial violence. In settler colonial and postcolonial societies, colonial violence was frequently enacted under the benevolent auspices of delivering health to local populations. Traditional medicines, knowledges, and practices, honed over thousands of years through deeply relational and holistic healing protocols, were deemed premodern cultural curiosities, or worse, were criminalized and banned altogether, replaced by the services of settler doctors and nurses trained in Euro-privileging institutions. The imposition of ‘modern medicine’ constituted some of the most egregious acts of colonial violence perpetrated against Indigenous peoples and places, resulting in widespread epidemics of infectious diseases, coercive sterilization, and medical experimentation. This legacy continues to grip many health systems, where Christine Añonuevo et al.

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evidence of systemic anti-Indigenous racism is rampant. The work of Indigenous geographers in the subdiscipline of health geography advances fundamental understandings about healing from colonial violence being anchored in reclamation of self-determined Indigenous health expertise, including the resurgence of traditional knowledges and practices, as well as sovereign control over health services delivery and data governance. Māori geographer Naomi Simmonds (2017) uses a mana wahine (Māori women’s) framework to support the reclamation of tikanga, or “protocols and practices” of birth. Simmonds stories the innovative ways Māori women continue to enact tikanga despite hundreds of years of colonial displacement and the institutionalization of birth, which has widely alienated Māori mothers from their homelands. Indigenous geographers across other subdisciplines are rooting scholarship in Indigenous worldviews, kinship systems and law, and cultural knowledges to push against geography’s colonial roots. Indigenous geographers are also creating spaces of engagement that do not always re/focus on coloniality and work across the boundaries of subdisciplines, highlighting the intimate connections of health, place, law, land, culture, politics, and relationalities, to name but a few.

Settler colonialism and Indigenous geography Human geography is steeped in predominantly Eurocentric Anglo-American ways of knowing and being. These geographies are tethered to the geopolitics of mapping as nation building, as discussed when profiling mapping and toponymy, and the violent conquest of Indigenous bodies and land. Settler colonialism is itself a structural determinant of Indigenous health. In white settler societies, state violence against Indigenous peoples (in the form of genocide, land theft, cognitive assimilation, erasure of languages, criminalization of economic, social, and spiritual practices) results in local, national, and international disruption, dispossession, and displacement of Indigenous peoples and their kinship ties and place-based ways of knowing and being. At the same time, the institutionalization of Eurocentric Anglo-American Christine Añonuevo et al.

ways of knowing have rendered perpetrators of such violence invisible, thus normalizing epistemic violence. Through processes of normalizing violence, settler colonialism contributes to dominant narratives of Indigenous peoples as damaged, in need of settler-state wardship, and Crown protectionism. Such racist narratives of settler colonialism naturalize violence on Indigenous communities and bodies and demote Indigeneity into stereotypes that result in financial and material benefit for white settler nation-states, perpetuating dominant myths of white innocence and benevolence. Geographers are becoming more attuned to the complicity of ongoing entanglements of colonial and imperial implications in the discipline. Geographers have increasingly turned to discussions of decolonization and anti-colonial, queer, feminist, and creative frameworks. Geographers must actively de-centre dominant (non-Indigenous, settler, heteronormative, white, male) structures, gesturing instead towards socio-spatial processes and practices of Indigeneity where Indigenous peoples and places have an ontological, epistemological, axiological, and cultural distinction that contributes to the self-determination of lands and territories. Engaging with decolonization requires sustained engagements with Indigenous communities; reciprocal and relational ways of knowing and doing; and active resistance against ongoing settler-state interference. Decolonial research within geography must enliven an ethics of responsibility to dismantle systemic and structural oppression. Geographers are grappling with the messiness of ongoing processes of colonialism and coloniality. If we are to orient to the world in service of social justice, we must put our knowledge production, activism, and scholarly bodies to work with Indigenous communities, Indigenous geographers, and Indigenous scholars, in ways that actualize transformative justice within and beyond the discipline. We must also be mindful not to reify and reproduce whiteness, settler colonial logics of extraction, possession and material and financial capitalist benefit by speaking for or speaking over Indigenous geographers and scholars. Michelle Daigle (Cree) and Juanita Sundberg (white settler) assert that “the discipline of geography will retain its Eurocentricity, coloniality and whiteness unless all geographers begin to do

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the anti-racist and decolonial work historically done by Indigenous, people of colour, women and queer faculty and students” (2017, p. 340). How, then, does the discipline of geography and geographic practice gesture towards transformative action of self and space towards an ecosystem embodying Indigenous feminism, anti-capitalist, queer and Two-Spirit knowing, resurgence and land-based ontologies? Indigenous scholars demonstrate how geographers must reconcile Western epistemological ways of understanding land as ‘environment and/or ecology’ with Indigenous ontological understandings of land as an ancestral and embodied system outside of capitalism. While capitalism exists with colonialism alongside modernity, Indigenous peoples continue to act on principles and values about land and life that have existed since time immemorial. Yellowknives Dene First Nation scholar Glen Coulthard (2014) notes that Indigenous “modes of production” are generative, life-giving, and produce a different way of life from dominant forms of settler colonialism. Coulthard notes that capitalist extractive projects that do not have the free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous Nations should die and be replaced by creating Indigenous alternatives to capitalism. This is a literal and metaphoric grounding that clarifies Indigenous struggle; resistance and resurgence is sustained through land, intergenerational ancestral knowledge, and responsibilities of kinship. Indigenous geographies and knowledge insist that land is an embodiment of a collective past, present, and future. Indigenous feminist theories are also embodiments of countering capitalism and colonialism. Such theories do not seek recognition or equality from nation-states. Instead, they seek autonomy to pursue a generative future. Sámi feminist theorist Rauna Kuokkanen (2007) notes that Indigenous peoples’ struggles for self-determination are also a collective struggle for the future, predicated on the ability to have control over that future as a people. Indigenous women are often at the forefront of resistance against capitalism. Geographic practice must pay attention to Indigenous feminist embod-

iments of agency, resurgence, survivance, refusal and futurity that exist inside and outside of the borders of the academy. Sarah Hunt/Tłaliłila’ogwa, writing with settler colleague Cindy Holmes (Hunt and Holmes, 2015), notes that queer Indigenous scholars play a role in transformative possibilities through an embodiment of relationships in the home and intimate settings. Such relationships found in everyday, familial interactions gesture towards decolonial, queer, Two-Spirit, and trans solidarity through resistance to heteronormativity and cisnormativity, rendering dominant discourses of large-scale settler colonial projects abnormal relative to Indigenous embodiment. How does geographic practice become aligned and accountable to multiple and diverse Indigenous peoples and places, and Indigeneity across time and space led by Indigenous geographers, scholars, and knowledge holders, while recognizing that there is no singular, reducible Indigenous geography, methodology, or worldview? Geo-poetics within the discipline of geography offers creative and fluid possibilities of encoding Indigenous knowledge in distinct artistic methodologies, methods, and cosmological understandings beyond linearity, settler time constraints, and binary categories. Anishinaabe poet Kimberly Blaeser (Blaeser, 2019, p. 34) notes: “in my own creative work, I endeavour through image, language, presentation, and gesture to insinuate these complex bundles within bundles of relationships of my known culture and cosmology”. Such work becomes one form of a means and measure of sovereignty through a “geo-aesthetic” that reinscribes embedded sacred land and cosmological histories, past, present, and future, with land (and water) as teacher, Elder, and spiritual guide. Indigenous scholars, artists, leaders, and activists are reminding us, as geographers, how Indigenous geographies extend well beyond a neatly defined discipline. Indigenous relationalities transcend disciplinary lines to uphold ways of being and relating in spite, in light, in defiance, and in disregard of the disciplinary attempts of geography.

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Conclusions and implications for geographic practices ”Indigenous” as a category is a complex, contested, deeply rooted term of multiplicities. Geography has attempted to engage Indigenous identities through definition, and conventional tools such as map-making and place naming. Indigenous geographers, however, have pushed Indigenous geographies to new spaces of relation to foreground and challenge conventional understandings of key disciplinary topics, such as land, ecology, resources, and ontology. The subdiscipline of health geography shows how Indigenous geographies and geographers transcend neatly defined disciplinary lines while, in other areas of geography, Indigenous geographies are challenging the naturalization of settler colonial structural processes. What we offered in this entry is in no way complete or exhaustive; this entry is a snapshot of “Indigenous” as it has been taken up, ignored, erased, transformed, silenced, tokenized, and revered by geography and geographers. We have attempted to profile the complex and ongoing challenges within the discipline, while holding up the transformative work that is also taking place. We thank those who have taken up this work and hope that many more geographers will take up anti-colonial efforts to think always critically about the very concept of “Indigenous”. Christine Añonuevo, Sarah de Leeuw, Marion Erickson, Monika Krzywania, Laura McNab-Coombs, Omolara Odulaja and Onyx Sloan Morgan

References and selected further reading Bawaka Country, Wright, S. and Suchet-Pearson, S. et al. (2016). Co-becoming Bawaka: towards a relational understanding of place/space. Progress in Human Geography, 40 (4), 455–75. Blaeser, K. (2019). A cosmology of nibi: picto-poetics and palimpsest in Anishinaabeg watery geographies. In E. Magrane, L. Russo, S. de Leeuw and C. Santos Perez (eds), Geopoetics in Practice (pp. 29–47). London: Routledge. Coombes, B. (2007a). Defending community? Indigeneity, self-determination and institu-

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tional ambivalence in the restoration of Lake Whakaki. Geoforum, 38 (1), 60–72. Coombes, B. (2007b). Postcolonial conservation and Kiekie harvests at Morere New Zealand – abstracting Indigenous knowledge from Indigenous polities. Geographical Research, 45 (2), 186–93. Coombes, B., Johnson, J.T. and Howitt, R. (2012). Indigenous geographies I: mere resource conflicts? The complexities in Indigenous land and environmental claims. Progress in Human Geography, 36 (6), 810–21. Coombes, B., Johnson, J.T. and Howitt, R. (2013). Indigenous geographies II: the aspirational spaces in postcolonial politics – reconciliation, belonging and social provision. Progress in Human Geography, 37 (5), 691–700. Coombes, B., Johnson, J.T. and Howitt, R. (2014). Indigenous geographies III: methodological innovation and the unsettling of participatory research. Progress in Human Geography, 28 (6), 845–54. Coulthard, G. (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Curley, A. (2021a). Unsettling Indian water settlements: the Little Colorado River, the San Juan River, and colonial enclosures. Antipode, 53 (3), 705–23. Curley, A. (2021b). Infrastructures as colonial beachheads: the Central Arizona Project and the taking of Navajo resources. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39 (3), 387–404. Curley, A. and Smith, S. (2020). Against colonial grounds: geography on Indigenous lands. Dialogues in Human Geography, 10 (1), 37–40. Daigle, M. (2016). Awawanenitakik: the spatial politics of recognition and relational geographies of Indigenous self-determination. The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien, 60 (2), 259–69. Daigle, M. (2018). Resurging through Kishiichiwan: the spatial politics of Indigenous water relations. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 7 (1), 159–72. Daigle, M. (2019a). Tracing the terrain of Indigenous food sovereignties. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 46 (2), 297–315. Daigle, M. (2019b). The spectacle of reconciliation: on (the) unsettling responsibilities to Indigenous peoples in the academy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37 (4), 703–21. Daigle, M. and Ramírez, M.M. (2019). Decolonial geographies. In Antipode Editorial Collective, T. Jazeel and A. Kent et al. (eds), Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50 (pp. 78–84). Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Daigle, M. and Sundberg, J. (2017). From where we stand: unsettling geographical knowledges

Indigenous geographies  207 in the classroom. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42 (3), 338–41. de Leeuw, S. and Hunt, S. (2018). Unsettling decolonizing geographies. Geography Compass, 12, Article e12376. Gergan, M.D. and Curley, A. (2021). Indigenous youth and decolonial futures: energy and environmentalism among the Diné in the Navajo Nation and the Lepchas of Sikkim, India. Antipode, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​anti​.12763. Hunt, S. (2014). Ontologies of Indigeneity: the politics of embodying a concept. Cultural Geographies, 21 (1), 27–32. Hunt, S. (2018a). Embodying self-determination: beyond the gender binary. In M. Greenwood, S. de Leeuw and N. M. Lindsay (eds), Determinants of Indigenous Peoples’ Health: Beyond the Social (2nd edition, pp. 22–39). Toronto: Canadian Scholars. Hunt, S. (2018b). Researching within relations of violence: witnessing as methodology. In D. McGregor, J.-P. Restoule and R. Johnston (eds), Indigenous Research: Theories, Practices, and Relationships (pp. 282–95). Toronto: Canadian Scholars. Hunt, S. (2022). Unsettling conversations on climate action. The Professional Geographer, 74 (1), 135–6. Hunt, S. and Holmes, C. (2015). Everyday decolonization: living a decolonizing queer politics. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19 (2), 154–72. Johnson, J.T. (2008). Indigeneity’s challenges to the white settler-state: creating a thirdspace for dynamic citizenship. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 33 (1), 29–52. Johnson, J.T. (2012). Place-based learning and knowing: critical pedagogies grounded in Indigeneity. GeoJournal, 77 (6), 829–36. Kuokkanen, R. (2007). Myths and realities of Sámi women: a post-colonial feminist analysis

for the decolonization and transformation of Sámi society. In J. Green (ed.), Making Space for Indigenous Feminism (pp. 72–92). Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing. Louis, R.P., Johnson, J.T. and Pramono, A.H. (2012). Introduction: Indigenous cartographies and counter-mapping. Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 47 (2), 77–9. Reid, G. and Sieber, R.E. (2021). Unavoidable expertise, ‘technocratic positionality,’ and GIScience: eliciting an indigenous geospatial ontology with the Eastern Cree in Northern Quebec. Gender, Place & Culture, 28 (4), 541–63. Simmonds, N. (2017). Honouring our ancestors: reclaiming the power of Māori maternities. In H. Tait Neufeld and J. Cidro (eds), Indigenous Experiences of Pregnancy and Birth (pp. 111–28). Toronto: Demeter Press. Spice, A. (2018). Fighting invasive infrastructures: indigenous relations against pipelines. Environment and Society, 9 (1), 40–56. United Nations (n.d.). Indigenous Peoples at the United Nations. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: Indigenous Peoples. Accessed 21 October 2022 at https://​www​.un​.org/​development/​desa/​ indigenouspeoples/​about​-us​.html. Whetung, M. (2019). (En)gendering shoreline law: Nishnaabeg relational politics along the Trent Severn Waterway. Global Environmental Politics, 19 (3), 16–32.

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40. Infrastructure Infrastructure is everywhere, expanding and receding all around us. Its presence ranges from the obvious, to the covert, to the unthought and the promotional. Where once infrastructure studies focussed primarily on large technical systems (LTS), the field has expanded across disciplines to include a wide range of world-forming objects, activities and processes from everyday practices to macro-phenomena. In the days of LTS, defining infrastructure was a more straightforward affair. Studies focussed on entire systems, like transport and energy, and were concerned with the ‘evolution’ of large, networked infrastructures following a common trajectory from establishment to stabilization and eventual transition, whereby the LTS that replaced it would follow essentially the same trajectory and exhibit the same characteristics. Like the diverse infrastructures under study today, LTS were co-produced with, and co-productive of, society. Still, infrastructure remained at the centre of inquiry and thus so too did particular actors, such as engineers or ‘system builders’. This meant that with few exceptions studies focussed on cases in the Global North, where LTS were already ‘embedded’, engaging in limited ways with the Global South, user interaction, consumption or even politics and power. Today, infrastructure is studied and debated very differently. The infrastructure framework applies to a range of objects, networks, practices and phenomena that include but far exceed traditional LTS or those infrastructures that may ‘displace’ them – for example, wind or solar in the energy sector. In these new readings, social and cultural practices produce infrastructure (Chattopadhyay, 2012). This is not simply about ‘co-production’ but about assemblage and networks. On the cloud, for example, Amoore (2018, p. 12) insists on the ‘intertwined faculties of human and machine’. On China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Alff (2020, p. 815) insists that its ‘materialization “on the ground” is also shaped by the (socio-spatial, discursive) re-positioning of (trans-) local actors’. Each of these and many others like them are in step with Anand’s (2011) concept of pressure in understanding how water is made to flow (or not) through pressures that are human, institutional, his-

torical and physical and so on. Infrastructure thus emerges as deeply relational. It is decentred, ‘provincialized’ and ‘worlded’. Heroic actors and major artefacts lose their pride of place. Old hierarchies are abandoned; the focus moves from the big man to the everyman. While, at the same time, new hierarchies emerge; studies, no longer placing the artefact at the centre, likewise now engage more fully with global networks of power and privilege. Thus, infrastructure studies has not only splintered, it has also bifurcated into two large and internally diverse sets of foci. The first is that of practices, privileging the local scale. The interactions of users, maintenance workers, ‘guerrilla’ technicians and so on are central to what infrastructure becomes, how it functions and the attendant social relations. Infrastructure is no longer limited to formal networks nor is it on a predetermined path to an idealized centralized, universal and uniform network. This transition responds to calls from both Southern urbanism to engage with actually existing processes in Southern cities (Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver, 2014), and from scholars concerned with consumption who underscore the limits of a dominant productivist logic (Bouzarovski, 2018). The second major area of study focusses on macro-processes, with either global reach or at least global pretentions. Logistics, finance capital and the BRI are examples. Nevertheless, across these diverse studies, there are many overlapping perspectives and concerns. On the one hand, many of the key ideas around infrastructure as laid out by Star and Ruhleder (1996) remain current, if not dominant across the field. On the other, studies show that many of the infrastructures and processes examined overlap and are in many respects interdependent (e.g., Monstadt and Coutard, 2019). Overall, infrastructures are approached as relational – connected to a broad range of processes at multiple scales where politics and power are central, but not predetermined. Infrastructures are no longer artefacts, but repositories of past exclusions and struggles over resources and their evolving expressions. That said, the question of how to define infrastructure remains a source of lively debate. One thing that is certain is that infrastructure is not a thing but a process that is continually evolving in interaction with a range of other processes, people

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and artefacts. A standard definition given by Donovan (2015, p. 733), for example, describes infrastructure as ‘the sociotechnical means through which goods, people, and information circulate’, including the relations – legal, economic and political and so on – that frame said circulation. Similarly, Larkin (2013, p. 329) tells us that ‘[i]nfrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter…they are things and also the relation between things’. In this respect, many define infrastructures as conduits of ‘flows’, neglecting completely their dependence on confinement (Furlong, 2022). Such perspectives are also reflected in calls to study infrastructure as both base and suprastructure: to neglect neither the nuts and bolts – the infra, that is, the material structures supporting a nation’s ‘development’ – nor the macro-processes that frame said materiality and its effects (Carse, 2017), an idea going back to Lefebvre (1991, cited in Nemser, 2017). Given this interaction, infrastructure never quite emerges as planned or as promised, with its effects and configurations remaining ever unstable. Yet, its symbolic power remains. It represents ‘promise’ (Anand, Gupta and Appel, 2018), the coming realization of the as yet unachieved goals of economic development, connectivity, speed, integration, public health, social inclusion, equity, modernity and so on. It is the base upon which the ‘future perfect’ will flourish (Hetherington, 2017). Notably, infrastructure ‘enchants’ not only for all that is promised, but also for the many forces that impede such achievements (Harvey and Knox, 2012). While this promised future is rarely realized, where it is realized, it is only for some at the expense of others, and it is generally limited in time. As Trovalla and Trovalla (2015, p. 339) point out, the infrastructures of the development era in Nigeria have given way to blight and disintegration under structural adjustment, leaving many Nigerians to view the promise of infrastructure as ‘irrecoverably lost’ and Nigeria as a country without a future. The network ‘exists primarily as a state of desire’ (Hu, 2015, p. 7). Unsurprisingly then, infrastructure is also seen as rife with paradox and contradiction. As Edwards et al. (2009, p. 365) state: ‘[i]nfrastructure today seems both an all-encompassing solution and an omnipresent problem’. For Howe et al. (2016), it is generative, yet degenerates; it is

fragile under a guise of solidity; and it engenders new risks in an effort to mitigate others. The degenerative nature of infrastructures, their inbuilt and coming obsolescence, does not mean that they are simply abandoned – the refuse of political economies past. Rather, they are repurposed. They continue to live within the emerging infrastructures of today and tomorrow. This has become especially apparent with the spread of digital infrastructures, but is likewise true of the BRI as well as other infrastructures past and present. In recognition of this, definitions of infrastructure increasingly draw on metaphors like the palimpsest and the horticultural technique of grafting. The palimpsest refers to how new infrastructures are written over the old; they follow their same geographical trajectories, spatial organization, and occupy their abandoned warehouses and factories, repurposing them not only for a new technologies and artefacts but also to territorialize emerging trends in political economy and labour relations (Jacobson and Hogan, 2019). This is why the graft is such a powerful metaphor. Developing this idea in relation to the cloud, Hu (2015, pp. 7–8) states that ‘preexisting infrastructures…are like rootstock, while the newer…resemble the uppermost portion, known in horticulture as the scion. Neither half, rootstock or scion, describes the full story; yet it is almost impossible to look at the whole…[a]s a graft, the Internet is always already a historical object, and the next stage of its development is never a complete rupture from its past’. This means that to understand emerging infrastructures, the worlds – infra and supra – upon which they are built, into which they are grafted, must be accounted for. There is no ‘out with the old, in with the new’. The old lives in the new, lending it many of its features and limiting its promise. This is important in thinking through emerging infrastructures and the literatures that frame them. These include: green infrastructures, digital infrastructures, infrastructures of logistics and of finance, and the return of megaprojects including the BRI. These are each grafted onto rootstocks that are infused with pre-existing geographies of inequality and exploitation, by economies of debt and extraction, uneven environmental contamination, ideologies of racial and colonial subjugation, and inbuilt exclusion from the Kathryn Furlong

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promised ‘future perfect’. These are the rootstocks into which our emerging scions are grafted and will continue to take root. Active engagement will be necessary for such effects to be mitigated. They will not simply vanish. There is much overlap not only between the emerging infrastructures – green, digital, mega – and those of the past, but also between these emerging infrastructures. Green infrastructure promises a way out of contemporary environmental challenges – particularly climate change, but also flooding, and exposure to contamination – without any real change in lifestyle (for those with economic means). It is to be the technical manifestation of the sustainable development dream. Still, there is much to watch out for. First, the green energy transition – based on large-scale wind and solar developments – currently rests on two processes with deeply unequal consequences for countries of the Global South, the extraction of rare metals and labour exploitation, both of which appear to be deepening (Meek, 2021; Pitron, 2019). Second, with respect to the creation of ‘water smart cities’, in both Jakarta and Bangalore, the politics of creating green space to mitigate flooding has led to mass evictions from areas considered to be ‘high risk’, when it is the lack of infrastructure in these areas that has made them vulnerable in the first place. Prior exclusion from infrastructure has made these spaces apt for repurposing as ‘nature as infrastructure’ (see Carse, 2012), whereby emerging green infrastructure is grafted onto prior infrastructure inequalities, reproducing them (Batubara, Kooy and Zwarteveen, 2018; Ranganathan, 2015). Still, green infrastructure is much needed. For Castree and Christophers (2015), such transitions will require finance capital. Yet, so far, it remains elusive, as most infrastructure and green projects do not offer the necessary returns on investment to attract finance capital (Dempsey, 2016; Langley, 2018). Where financialization has been active is in fostering the return of big infrastructures. These offer the desired returns through their amenability to financial instruments, from which the real dividends accrue (Allen and Pryke, 2013; Ashton, Doussard and Weber, 2012). Indeed, financialization repeats the exclusions of bond financing, which had the effect of cementing racial segregation in American cities (Jenkins, 2021; Ponder and Omstedt, 2022). Financialization, moreover, Kathryn Furlong

has proven unavailable to cities in the Global South, where infrastructure greening should arguably focus on mitigating the harms of infrastructure inequality through low-cost innovations that work with the realities of non-networked supply (Kooy, Furlong and Lamb, 2019). Indeed, other types of financing mechanisms will be needed to promote solutions that are based on social as opposed to market value. Despite the obvious need for more modest infrastructure solutions – including maintenance and repair, since the 2000s, the megaproject has been spreading through financialization, China’s BRI, and the World Bank’s new economic geography, which focusses on projects of regional scope to promote ‘connectivity’ in the Global South (Wilson, 2011). Here, not much has changed since Flyvbjerg, Bruzelius and Rothengatter (2003, p. 6) called attention to the ‘megaprojects paradox’, whereby ‘more and more megaprojects are built despite the poor performance record’. Indeed, for Easterling (2014, p. 15), such projects go beyond a dam here or a toll road there, to include ‘[s]ome of the most radical changes to the globalizing world’. Infrastructure is able to engage in extensive rewriting of urban space that passes under the radar through a process she calls ‘extrastatecraft’. One such project that passes largely undetected is that of the cloud, with its ever increasing environmental, economic, political and geographic footprint. While apparently non-material and non-territorial, the data centres of the digital era are expanding at an exponential pace into the remnants of the industrial economy. They consume massive amounts of energy and water and produce equally impressive amounts of waste, leading to important transformations of both rural and urban environments. These infrastructures, moreover, contribute not only to connectivity but also to surveillance and repression. This is important, for, as Nemser (2017) argues, infrastructure has been instrumental in the production of racial categories through the violence of enforced segregation and confinement to spaces of ‘concentration’. Today, mass incarceration – including of migrants – reproduces many of these same effects (Clarke, 2020; Mountz et al., 2012) and is intimately tied to digital infrastructures and logistics (Brooks and Best, 2021). These are some of the emerging issues and infrastruc-

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tures that require concerted and complex study today and over the years to come. Kathryn Furlong

References and selected further reading Alff, H. (2020). Belts and roads every- and nowhere: conceptualizing infrastructural corridorization in the Indian Ocean. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 38 (5), 815–19. Allen, J. and Pryke, M. (2013). Financialising household water: Thames Water, MEIF, and ‘ring-fenced’ politics. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 6 (3), 419–39. Amoore, L. (2018). Cloud geographies: computing, data, sovereignty. Progress in Human Geography, 42 (1), 4–24. Anand, N. (2011). PRESSURE: the politechnics of water supply in Mumbai. Cultural Anthropology, 26 (4), 542–64. Anand, N., Gupta, A. and Appel, H. (2018). The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ashton, P., Doussard, M. and Weber, R. (2012). The financial engineering of infrastructure privatization. Journal of the American Planning Association, 78 (3), 300–312. Batubara, B., Kooy, M. and Zwarteveen, M. (2018). Uneven urbanisation: connecting flows of water to flows of labour and capital through Jakarta’s flood infrastructure. Antipode, 50 (5), 1186–205. Bouzarovski, S. (2018). Energy Poverty: (Dis) Assembling Europe’s Infrastructural Divide. Cham: Springer. Brooks, I. and Best, A. (2021). Prison fixes and flows: carceral mobilities and their critical logistics. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39 (3), 459–76. Carse, A. (2012). Nature as infrastructure: making and managing the Panama Canal watershed. Social Studies of Science, 42 (4), 539–63. Carse, A. (2017). Keyword: infrastructure – how a humble French engineering term shaped the modern world. In P. Harvey, C.B. Jensen and A. Morita (eds), Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Routledge Companion. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 27–39. Castree, N. and Christophers, B. (2015). Banking spatially on the future: capital switching, infrastructure, and the ecological fix. Annals of the

Association of American Geographers, 105 (2), 378–86. Chattopadhyay, S. (2012). Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Clarke, M. (2020). Beijing’s pivot west: the convergence of Innenpolitik and Aussenpolitik on China’s ‘Belt and Road’? Journal of Contemporary China, 29 (123), 336–53. Dempsey, J. (2016). Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Donovan, K.P. (2015). Infrastructuring aid: materializing humanitarianism in northern Kenya. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33 (4), 732–48. Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso. Edwards, P.N., Bowker, G.C., Jackson, S.J. and Williams, R. (2009). Introduction: an agenda for infrastructure studies. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 10 (5), 364–74. Flyvbjerg, B., Bruzelius, N. and Rothengatter, W. (2003). Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Furlong, K. (2022). Splintering urbanism @ 20: reengaging contradiction, confinement, and consumption. Journal of Urban Technology, 29 (1), 153–9. Harvey, P. and Knox, H. (2012). The enchantments of infrastructure. Mobilities, 7 (4), 521–36. Hetherington, K. (2017). Surveying the future perfect: anthropology, development and the promise of infrastructure. In P. Harvey, C.B. Jensen and A. Morita (eds), Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Routledge Companion. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 40–50. Howe, C., Lockrem, J. and Appel, H. et al. (2016). Paradoxical infrastructures: ruins, retrofit and risk. Science, Technology & Human Values, 41 (3), 547–65. Hu, T.-H. (2015). A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jacobson, K. and Hogan, M. (2019). Retrofitted data centres: a new world in the shell of the old. Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation, 13 (2), 78–94. Jenkins, D. (2021). The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kooy, M., Furlong, K. and Lamb, V. (2019). Nature based solutions for urban water management in Asian cities: integrating vulner-

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212  Concise encyclopedia of human geography ability into sustainable design. International Development Planning Review, 42 (3), 1–10. Langley, P. (2018). Frontier financialization: urban infrastructure in the United Kingdom. Economic Anthropology, 5 (2), 172–84. Larkin, B. (2013). The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42 (1), 327–43. Lawhon, M., Ernstson, H. and Silver, J. (2014). Provincializing urban political ecology: towards a situated UPE through African urbanism. Antipode, 46 (2), 497–516. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Meek, J. (2021, 15 July). Who holds the welding rod? James Meek on wind power, green jobs and global capitalism. London Review of Books, 43 (4). Accessed 14 October 2022 at https://​ www​.lrb​.co​.uk/​the​-paper/​v43/​n14/​james​-meek/​ who​-holds​-the​-welding​-rod. Monstadt, J. and Coutard, O. (2019). Cities in an era of interfacing infrastructures: politics and spatialities of the urban nexus. Urban Studies, 56 (11), 2191–206. Mountz, A., Coddington, K., Catania, R.T. and Loyd, J.M. (2012) Conceptualizing detention: mobility, containment, bordering, and exclu-

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sion. Progress in Human Geography, 37 (4), 522–41. Nemser, D. (2017). Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Pitron, G. (2019). La guerre des métaux rares: la face cachée de la transition énergetique et numérique. Paris: Editions les liens qui libèrent. Ponder, C.S. and Omstedt, M. (2022). The violence of municipal debt: from interest rate swaps to racialized harm in the Detroit water crisis. Geoforum, 132, 271–80. Ranganathan, M. (2015). Storm drains as assemblages: the political ecology of flood risk in post-colonial Bangalore. Antipode, 47 (5), 1300–320. Star, S.L. and Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: design and access for large information spaces. Information Systems Research, 7 (1), 111–34. Trovalla, E. and Trovalla, U. (2015). Infrastructure as a divination tool: whispers from the grids in a Nigerian city. City, 19 (2–3), 332–43. Wilson, J. (2011). Colonising space: the new economic geography in theory and practice. New Political Economy, 16 (3), 373–97.

41. Labour geographies

Labour agency/precarity

Labour refers both to the practice of working and to the collective body of workers as a social and political class. Dissatisfied with the passive treatment of labour in more structuralist iterations of Marxist geography that emphasized the agential properties of capital, Andy Herod proposed ‘labour geography’ as a distinctive project that would ‘focus principally on the activities of working-class people and attempt to understand…the geography of capitalism from their perspective’ (2001, p. 7; added emphasis). By choosing to focus on workers’ agency in shaping the geographies of capitalism and their own spatial fixes, Herod (1997) conceived of labour geography as an academically and politically distinct project from existing economic ‘geographies of labour’, one that discursively promoted worker power. Yet, from Doreen Massey’s (1984) ground-breaking work on relational differentiation in class relations following industrial restructuring processes, to recent insights from geographical research on value, waste and infrastructural labour (Gidwani, 2015), geographical interest in the everyday worlds of labour, employment and workers’ struggles over the production of economic space both precedes and exceeds the emergence of labour geography as a distinct field of study. Rather than re-treading the terrain of labour geography’s development as a discipline,1 this entry outlines some key new insights and debates that have emerged from the study of ‘labour’ in geography over the last decade, primarily through the theoretical, ontological and methodological approaches that guide the pluralistic discipline of labour geography, as well as its common criticisms. Geographical research on labour today retains some of its root preoccupations with labour agency and trade unionism but has also significantly broadened out to consider new sectors, paths of action, modes of organization and geographical domains (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011). The particular themes considered here are: labour agency/precarity, social reproduction and the labour of care and infrastructural labour. A summation of further directions of research on labour is then offered in lieu of a conclusion.

Geographical analysis of labour has long been concerned with the socio-spatial conditions and place-specific contingencies that enable and disempower labour action. Geographical analysis has contributed to theorizing the spatiality of labour agency in multiple ways by considering how workers collectively use political scale to organize economic landscapes and social hierarchies in their own interest, temporality to navigate opportune internal and external dynamics of labour mobilization, and mobility and migration to rework the micro-spaces of their working lives (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011; Lier, 2007; Rogaly, 2009). Over the last decade, labour geographers concerned with the problematic of labour agency have started to decentre the discipline’s focus on the associational and structural power of organized labour and trade union organizing (Lier, 2007). Recent work on collective forms of labour agency has focused on social movement unionism (Nowak, 2019) and previously unexplored forms of community unionism such as unemployed workers’ centres (Griffin, 2021). Additionally, studies have demonstrated how unorganized, informal, precarious and self-employed workers in global production networks, new service, and gig economies, use everyday decision making, resilience and patterns of reworking to exercise and reclaim individual agency in spaces of production through self-governance (Alford, Kothari and Pottinger, 2019; Anwar and Graham, 2020; Dutta, 2020; Hastings and Cumbers, 2019; Williams et al., 2017). Nonetheless, a long-standing critique of the discipline has been its selective bias towards telling success stories of labour organizing, and thus over-valorizing worker agency to generate a sense of naive optimism that oversignifies localized instances of worker resistance into generalized possibilities for revolution (Hastings, 2016; Mitchell, 2011; Peck, 2018). This has been argued to neglect a ‘material assessment of labour’s geography’, or in other words, the different spatio-temporal substantiations of capitalist coercion through commodification (Mitchell, 2011, p. 567; original emphasis). In recent years, geographers have taken this task at hand, with interventions into how structural violence, unfreedom, and precarity figure as

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a part of labour’s geography and produce different modalities of agency (Cassidy, Griffin and Wray, 2020; McGrath, 2013; Mitchell, 2011, 2013; Strauss, 2018, 2020). Such research has stressed the importance of framing the political potential of labour action in the context of the wider socio-political calibrations shaping working life, including carceral border control regimes and ecological climate crises. Accounting for concatenated oppressions and crises and considering the impact of existing biases in the discipline in favour of paid work and specific articulations of labour have now become a pressing need, both to produce more nuanced embedded understandings of labour agency and to move the discipline forwards (Strauss, 2018).

Social reproduction and the ‘labour of care’ Following from feminist economic geography and the insights of Marxist feminism, geographical research on labour has experienced a movement towards the ontological inclusion of socially reproductive labour, both unpaid and ‘income generating’ within the definition of labour. Although many scholars of social reproduction may not label themselves labour geographers per se, their gendered analysis of the larger structure of social relations within which working people are located have methodologically and empirically expanded the remit of the discipline of labour geography towards ‘working lives’ as opposed to the isolated politics of the workplace (McDowell, 2013) and contributed to geographical research on labour in a number of ways. Methodologically, this has led scholars to build and prioritize practices to discern workers’ voices, and thus their subjectivities, expectations, motivations and decisions from the abstract and disembodied category of labour. Insights from feminist political economy have led to the continued popularity of interpretive and collaborative life history methods and detailed forms of case study analysis in the last decade, as an attempt to address the granular geographies that connect people’s ‘lives as waged workers in a formal workspace with the informal nature of work-life outside’ (Dutta, 2016, p. 1). Advocates of oral history methods in the Debolina Majumder

discipline have argued that the narration of workers’ lived experiences to the researcher can be an ‘agentic act’ that methodologically emphasizes the moral geographies of labour agency (Rogaly and Qureshi, 2017). Engagements with Marxist feminism have also reinforced a focus on the value generated through ‘care work’ generally interpreted. This applies not only to those forms of unpaid care work that women perform at home, but the low-paid and low-status service professions that represent the marketization of such labour on a much larger scale through, for instance, globalized home care markets. Such analyses have contributed to the private household being studied as a site value production, exploitation, class formation and mobilization, and helped parse how the mutual constitution of categories of class, gender and race reconfigure and respatialize social relations of employment transnationally (Kofman and Raghuram, 2015; Pratt, 2012; Schwiter, Strauss and England, 2018). Analyses of the labour of care have also begun to be studied ‘beyond’ its gendered dimensions. Recently, Shah and Lerche (2020) have highlighted the role of waged and unwaged ‘invisible economies of care’ and reproductive labour in the case of the trans-local households of migrant workers in India and how they circle into value generated from production at the migrant’s destination. This not only includes the labour of subsistence farming or simple commodity production at points of origin performed by migrant workers themselves, but also extends a gendered analysis of housework to include the labour performed by kin groups ‘over generations and across spatiotemporally divided households’ (ibid., p. 727).

Infrastructural labour Along with the feminist turn in economic geography that has urged geographers to look beyond traditional typologies of labour and ‘productive work’, combined research on the waste/value dialectic and the infrastructural turn in geography has influenced an emerging body of work on unwaged ‘infrastructural labour’ (Gidwani, 2015). Cross-cutting research on social reproduction and care, infrastructural labour refers to the labour that ‘underwrites the production of capital’s

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“general” and “external” infrastructure’ (ibid., p. 577). This has included the stigmatized labour of waste-picking, processing and repurposing, which sustains the repair and renewal of urban life (Corwin and Gidwani, 2021; Gidwani and Maranganti, 2016); the material and social infrastructural labours through which landlords in urban villages structure a cheap and superfluous migrant workforce (Cowan, 2021); the gendered infrastructural labour critical to the functioning of water infrastructures and household recycling systems (Luthra, 2021; Truelove, 2021); and the peripheral Lumpenproletariat engaged in the value chain of the sustainable energy transition (Stock, 2021). Considered broadly, this new arena of geographical research on the labour of maintenance and repair, has highlighted that though such forms of labour beyond the ‘proper job’ are often rendered invisible and considered peripheral, they sustain everyday life and support the conditions of possibility for capitalist reproduction through networked forms of interdependence. Geographies of infrastructural labour, in other words, reveal the human and non-human practices of work that tie together various sectors of capital and conditions of life in our world today.

Future directions In the last decade, changes in the discipline in terms of the field moving ‘beyond the “core” workers of “core” countries’ (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011, p. 214), have certainly been influential in the process of ‘doing’ labour geography. On the one hand, we are beginning to witness challenges to the discipline’s basic ontological premises: who is a worker and what is work (Strauss, 2018). Nascent interactions with the politics of informal sector work, racial capitalism, social reproduction and varieties of unwaged (but income-generating) labour, have also indicated to geographers of labour the value of constructing bridges with other subsections of human geography outside traditional focus areas. Despite preliminary inroads, however, the theorization of labour in human geography would benefit from further expanding on the politics of non-human labour, the effects of the climate crisis on changing the terms of work (e.g., Parsons and Natarajan, 2021),

racial capitalism and plantation economies (e.g., Ouma and Premchander, 2022), as well as processes of urbanization (e.g., Buckley, 2018). Additionally, calls for a ‘recombinant’ labour geography (Peck, 2018) necessitate further discussion on how the expanding field of labour geography can continue to critically contribute to academic debate and political action by engaging in greater internal and external dialogue. Debolina Majumder

Note 1. For a timeline of the discipline see Coe and Jordhus-Lier (2011).

References and selected further reading Alford, M., Kothari, U. and Pottinger, L. (2019). Re-articulating labour in global production networks: the case of street traders in Barcelona. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37 (6), 1081–99. Anwar, M.A. and Graham, M. (2020). Hidden transcripts of the gig economy: labour agency and the new art of resistance among African gig workers. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 52 (7), 1269–91. Buckley, M. (2018). Labour and the city: some notes across theory and research. Geography Compass, 12 (10), Article e12400. Cassidy, K., Griffin, P. and Wray, F. (2020). Labour, carcerality and punishment: ‘less-than-human’ labour landscapes. Progress in Human Geography, 44 (6), 1081–102. Coe, N.M. and Jordhus-Lier, D.C. (2011). Constrained agency? Re-evaluating the geographies of labour. Progress in Human Geography, 35 (2), 211–33. Corwin, J.E. and Gidwani, V. (2021). Repair work as care: on maintaining the planet in the Capitalocene. Antipode, https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1111/​anti​.12791. Cowan, T. (2021). The village as urban infrastructure: social reproduction, agrarian repair and uneven urbanisation. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4 (3), 736–55. Dutta, M. (2016). Place of life stories in labour geography: why does it matter? Geoforum, 77, 1–4. Dutta, M. (2020). Workplace, emotional bonds and agency: everyday gendered experiences of work in an export processing zone in Tamil

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216  Concise encyclopedia of human geography Nadu, India. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 52 (7), 1357–74. Gidwani, V. (2015). The work of waste: inside India’s infra-economy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 40 (4), 575–95. Gidwani, V. and Maringanti, A. (2016). The waste-value dialectic: lumpen urbanization in contemporary India. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 36 (1), 112–33. Griffin, P. (2021). Expanding labour geographies: resourcefulness and organising amongst ‘unemployed workers’. Geoforum, 118, 159–68. Hastings, T. (2016). Moral matters: de-romanticising worker agency and charting future directions for labour geography. Geography Compass, 10 (7), 307–18. Hastings, T. and Cumbers, A. (2019). ‘That type of thing does give you a boost’: control, self‐ valorisation, and autonomist worker copings in call centres. Antipode, 51 (5), 1456–73. Herod, A. (1997). From a geography of labor to a labor geography: labor’s spatial fix and the geography of capitalism. Antipode, 29 (1), 1–31. Herod, A. (2001). Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism. New York: Guilford Press. Kofman, E. and Raghuram, P. (2015). Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lier, D.C. (2007). Places of work, scales of organising: a review of labour geography. Geography Compass, 1, 814–33. Luthra, A. (2021). Housewives and maids: the labor of household recycling in urban India. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4 (2), 475–98. Massey, D. (1984). Spatial Dimensions of Labour: Social Structure and the Geography of Production. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McDowell, L. (2013). Working Lives: Gender, Migration and Employment in Britain, 1945–2007. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. McGrath, S. (2013). Many chains to break: the multi-dimensional concept of slave labour in Brazil. Antipode, 45 (4), 1005–28. Mitchell, D. (2011). Labor’s geography: capital, violence, guest workers and the post‐World War II landscape. Antipode, 43 (2), 563–95. Mitchell, D. (2013). Labour’s geography and geography’s labour: California as an (anti‐) revolutionary landscape. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 95 (3), 219–33. Nowak, J. (2019). Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India: Popular

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Mobilisation in the Long Depression. Cham: Springer. Ouma, S. and Premchander, S. (2022). Labour, efficiency, critique: writing the plantation into the technological present-future. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 54 (2), 413–21. Parsons, L. and Natarajan, N. (2021). Geographies of labour in a changing climate. Area, 53, 406–12. Peck, J. (2018). Pluralizing labour geography. In G.L. Clark, M.P. Feldman and M.S. Gertler et al. (eds), The New Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography (pp. 465–85). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pratt, G. (2012). Families Apart: Migrating Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rogaly, B. (2009). Spaces of work and everyday life: labour geographies and the agency of unorganised temporary migrant workers. Geography Compass, 3 (6), 1975–87. Rogaly, B. and Qureshi, K. (2017). ‘That’s where my perception of it all was shattered’: oral histories and moral geographies of food sector workers in an English city region. Geoforum, 78, 189–98. Schwiter, K., Strauss, K. and England, K. (2018). At home with the boss: migrant live-in caregivers, social reproduction and constrained agency in the UK, Canada, Austria and Switzerland. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 43 (3), 462–76. Shah, A. and Lerche, J. (2020). Migration and the invisible economies of care: production, social reproduction and seasonal migrant labour in India. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45 (4), 719–34. Stock, R. (2021). Praeclariat: theorising precarious labour geographies of solar energy. Antipode, 53 (3), 928–49. Strauss, K. (2018). Labour geography I: towards a geography of precarity? Progress in Human Geography, 42 (4), 622–30. Strauss, K. (2020). Labour geography III: precarity, racial capitalisms and infrastructure. Progress in Human Geography, 44 (6), 1212–24. Truelove, Y. (2021). Gendered infrastructure and liminal space in Delhi’s unauthorized colonies. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39 (6), 1009–25. Williams, P., James, A., McConnell, F. and Vira, B. (2017). Working at the margins? Muslim middle class professionals in India and the limits of ‘labour agency’. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 49 (6), 1266–85.

42. Landscape Introduction Landscape has long been seen as central to geography. Palka (1995, pp. 64–5), for example, argues that since its emergence as an academic discipline, geography has exhibited a continuing interest in the study of landscape, and for a period running from the late 1890s through to the 1920s, it was seen as the ‘basis for geography’, although in the 1930s it was attacked for being an ‘unsound and unnecessary’ concept, which was too ambiguous to provide the basis for defining ‘the field of geography’ (Hartshorne, 1939, p. ix). Whilst other concepts, notably space, place and people–environment relations, gained prominence over landscape for much of the twentieth century, landscape continues to form a central focus of work for many geographers. Despite, or even because of its significance, the term landscape has been understood and employed in a variety of ways, which have frequently shifted over time and between places. In Anglo-American human geography, at least four perspectives can be seen to have been of particular significance.

Areal perspectives on landscape In geography, the term landscape has often been used to refer to a material space that can be observed and analysed from a singular position: Dickinson (1939, p. 1), for example, stated that landscape means ‘the scene within the range of an observer’s vision’, a definition that can be seen to enact what Cosgrove (1984, p. 16) describes as an ‘areal’ perspective on landscape. Within this approach there is often a focus on the material form of landscapes: Carl Sauer, who explicitly promoted the study of landscape as a distinguishing feature of geography, argued that this term itself could be taken to mean ‘land shape’ (Sauer, 1925, p. 25), although the term landform has often been used to convey this notion. The term ‘morphology’ has often been used in studies employing either term to characterize the observable shape, form or pattern that materials take within an area, and for Sauer, the study of landscape mor-

phology was an entry point into the study of natural and cultural processes or factors (Figure 42.1). Sauer’s conceptualization of the formation of landscapes was strongly influenced by debates surrounding the influence of human activity on environmental conditions. A strong critic of environmental determinism, Sauer argued that human culture was an active agent in the formation of material landscapes, stating that people could be seen as a ‘geomorphological agent’ and as having impacted on ‘organic evolution’, not least through processes of domestication (see Sauer, 1963). Such work inspired a series of subsequent geographical studies, often framed as cultural ecology (Price and Lewis, 1993), although connections have been noted with notions of the Anthropocene (Larsen and Harrington, 2021). Of even greater influence, however, was Sauer’s conceptualizations and studies of cultural landscapes. As illustrated in Figure 42.1, Sauer used this term to refer to landscapes upon which human agency, through culture, had acted. Whilst identifying a series of factors working to shape what he described as ‘natural landscapes’, which were landforms produced before or independent of human activity, culture was identified as a singular factor or ‘shaping force’ (Sauer, 1925, p. 46) involved in the formation of so-called ‘cultural landscapes’, which were seen as expressions of human activity that became manifest in, and gave character to, a landscape or area. As Figure 42.1 also illustrates, Sauer focused his analysis on highly observable elements of landscapes – on houses, on the infrastructures of production and communication, and the physical presence of people – or what he also described as the ‘material cultural complex’, which he defined as the geographical expression of the culture of social groups. Drawing on these arguments, studies emerged of the distribution of highly visible, humanly produced material artefacts, particularly buildings. Kniffen (1965), for example, argued that the houses, barns and outbuildings built by people, rather than by large organizations and companies, could be used to trace the movement of particular cultures and groups through a landscape. Such arguments were pursued in anthropological, archaeological and historical studies, as well as within geography, where they were widely characterized as enactments of a ‘Berkeley

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Source: Based on Sauer (1925).

Figure 42.1

Sauer’s morphological perspective on landscape

school’ of cultural geography, because Sauer and other exponents of the study of cultural landscapes had worked or studied at the University of Berkeley, California.

Symbolic landscape perspectives While Sauer’s studies of landscapes were highly influential, they became the focus of critique by proponents of geography as a spatially focused science, and also, in the 1970s, from what was described at this time as a ‘new cultural geography’ in which a more symbolic conception of landscape was a central, although not sole, component. Cosgrove (1984), for example, argued that the morphological landscape perspective of the Berkeley school was unconvincing as it neglected the various symbolic meanings people give to the material features being studied. One of the clearest illustrations of a symbolic approach to landscape was Daniels and Cosgrove’s (1988, p. 1) description of landscape as ‘a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings’. They added that landscapes could Martin Phillips

be represented via a ‘variety of materials and on many surfaces’, including ‘in paint on canvas, in writing on paper, in earth, stones, water and vegetation on the ground’. Such arguments fostered geographical studies of landscape paintings, the landscapes conveyed in novels and other literacy forms, landscaped gardens, and various rural and urban built landscapes. Research aligned directly or indirectly with ‘humanistic perspectives’ also examined the meanings given by people to their everyday surroundings or landscapes. Such studies resulted in landscape becoming viewed across much of human geography as a symbolic or cultural construct rather than a material spatial form. Within the new cultural geography, landscapes were often portrayed as ‘texts’, in the sense that they were surfaces onto which meanings were written, and from which meanings were read. Attention was often placed on the differences between the meanings being created by different ‘authors’ about a landscape, such as those created by different writers or painters, or between governmental or business organizations and those of resident groups. This focus was often expressed using the notion of landscapes as ‘a way of seeing’

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(Berger, 1972), with attention being focused on the ideas, subjectivities and positionalities of people observing a landscape, and the modes and practices through which observations and accounts were made. Cosgrove (1985), for example, studied the emergence of geometrical perspective as a means to convey three-dimensional distance within a two-dimensional drawing or painting, while studies drawing on post-structuralist interpretations of writing and language often stressed the inter-textual construction of landscapes, whereby meanings attached to one landscape are drawn from other texts (e.g., Barnes and Duncan, 1992). Criticisms emerged around this perspective on landscape, including that its textual focus acted to ‘dematerialize’ landscapes. It was claimed that a focus on symbolic meanings implied, either explicitly or implicitly, that there was nothing to be studied beyond these representations, with the material landscape that had formed the focus of study by geographers associated with the so-called Berkeley school, and other strands of landscape research focused on physical landscape forms, such as cultural ecology, appearing effectively only as a surface onto which meanings were inscribed. Some exponents of symbolic perspectives on landscape did emphasize the need to situate symbolic analysis within studies of material conditions. Cosgrove’s (1985) analysis of perspective, for instance, highlighted how its emergence was bound up with the practices and technologies of commerce, land surveying and warfare. However, despite such examples, dematerialization claims continue to be levelled at symbolic approaches to landscape, not least by advocates of a critical perspective on landscape.

Critical landscape perspectives The symbolic conceptualization of landscapes associated with the ‘new cultural geography’ emerged at the same time as geography in North America and the UK was experiencing the rise of radical or critical geographies. Much of this latter work was presented, not least by some proponents of the new cultural geography, as enacting significantly different perspectives. Duncan and Ley (1982, p. 45), for example, argued that research adopting

a structural Marxist approach gave insufficient agency to cultural relations, presenting these as derived from the ‘outworking of deep economic structures’. Cosgrove (1984, p. 55) was also critical of the ‘architectural analogy’ of an economic base and sought to explicitly promote a symbolic conception of landscape, although as noted earlier, he also argued there was a need to situate symbolic landscapes within wider studies of material practices and relations. He, along with other ‘new cultural geographers’, sought to situate the study of artistic landscapes and landscape gardens within wider social-economic transitions, such as from feudalism to capitalism, changes in modes of agrarian capitalism, and the rise of industrialization. Such studies, and wider ‘cultural turns’ across human geography, fostered ‘critical’ perspectives on landscapes that interpreted the meanings given to them as expressions of relations of power. Many of these studies drew on strands of Marxist thought other than structural Marxism, and in the process often fostered engagements with concepts developed in cultural and media studies, sociology, politics and psychoanalysis, including discourse, hegemony, ideology and identity. Whilst much of this work initially employed some form of class analysis of landscapes, studies influenced by feminism, post-modernism, post-colonialism and other strands of critical theory increasingly raised questions about this focus and promoted recognition of the significance of gender, nationality, race, sexuality and colonial social relations within symbolic landscapes. Henderson (2003, p. 185) has argued that the approaches adopted in many of these studies placed landscapes as ‘an ontological second’ to relations of power, and in some instances implied that no particular ontological existence needed to be given to landscapes, which effectively became a term applicable to any humanly constructed space. Phrases such as economic landscapes, literary landscapes, political landscapes, class landscapes, imagined landscapes and virtual landscapes, for instance, can all be seen as illustrating how landscape can become an abstraction devoid of any distinctive constituents beyond those being framed by some external entity or practice. Whilst it is important to recognize this – what Henderson terms a ‘social space’ use of the term landMartin Phillips

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scape – many studies employing critical perspectives have employed more substantive conceptions of landscape. Mitchell (2000), for example, argues for a materialist and dialectical approach to landscape that sees these as both the product of material human labour and a material actant that shapes and reshapes social processes. In relation to the latter, Mitchell particularly stresses the ‘ideological’ work that landscape representations do through disguising and concealing the work and social conflicts involved in their material production (Figure 42.2). Mitchell (2012, p. 44; original emphasis) explicitly draws together Sauer’s morphological focus and the concern with representations characteristic of the new cultural geography, but supplements this with a focus on landscape as ‘the material basis for, as well as a result of, economic social activity’, which he suggests, in turn, accounts for why landscape is also ‘a central site of struggle’. While Mitchell’s analysis of landscape drew on strands of earlier work, these were all framed through strongly Marxist infused theorization, albeit conjoined with studies of gender, race and nationalism. However, use of theoretical framings that centre analysis through a narrow set of concepts came under criticism in human geography in the 1990s, not least by advocates of post-modernism,

Source: Based on Mitchell (2000).

Figure 42.2

Mitchell’s landscape dialectic

Martin Phillips

and new perspectives on landscape emerged drawing on these arguments, and on a range of other influences, including post-structuralist critiques of representation and strands of phenomenological thought that had also influenced some earlier humanistic studies of landscape.

Lived landscape perspectives Since the 1990s, a series of landscape perspectives have been advanced, using a range of terms, including ‘lived’, ‘non-representational’, ‘performative’, ‘(post-)phenomenological’, ‘processional’ and ‘vitalist’. There are important differences between these perspectives, although they share many common features, including, in many instances, strong critiques of the representational focus of symbolic and critical approaches to landscape. Reference has already been paid to criticisms that this work acted to dematerialize landscape, and to attempts to redress this, but a further level of criticism was advanced by many advocates of these new perspectives. For example, Ingold (1993, p. 154), argued that the notion of a symbolic landscape held unhelpful divisions between ‘mind and matter’, whereby imagined meanings are

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placed over a ‘formless substrate’. Ingold argues that meanings are not ‘attached to’ a landscape but are ‘gathered from it’ (ibid.; original emphasis) in the various practices, or tasks that people conduct within a landscape. Ingold suggests that landscapes could be conceptualized as ‘taskscapes’, or a collection of tasks being undertaken in an area. As such, landscapes are never static in form but are always being made and remade, or as other work has described it, can be seen as performed or processual. Ingold’s focus on practices and performance encompassed viewing and analysing landscape, with the observer/analyst being positioned as a constituent of a landscape. A second element common across many advocates of new perspectives on landscape has been a concern to recognize the material embodiments of practices of observing and thinking about landscape. For Ingold, for example, the processual aspects of landscapes do not cease with the formation of a static form to be observed. Rather, observations of landscapes are always a perception at a specific moment, from a particular embodied viewing position, which are themselves therefore to be viewed as a component of the landscape being observed. Wylie (2003, 2007) has provided illustrations of such arguments through examination of the embodied practices of viewing landscapes and theoretical reflections on the arguments of Ingold, the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty and the post-structuralist Deleuze, all of whom critique the separation of viewing subjects and objects and argued for more embodied and practice-based understandings. Such arguments fostered geographical studies examining a range of embodied practices involving landscapes, including walking, running, cycling, climbing, farming, gardening and so on. The focus on embodied and practice-based understandings has often been conjoined with a third argument – namely, that relations with landscapes are ‘affective’ in character. That is, landscapes impinge on people in embodied ways that create a range of feelings, in both conscious and unconscious ways. Notions of affect, emotion and sensory experiences have been employed to highlight the diverse, multi-sensory, often fleeting and seemingly mundane engagements that people have with the landscapes they inhabit.

Studies drawing on these arguments have examined how landscapes produce a range of different emotions, feelings, atmospheres and memories, including positive and therapeutic affects and senses of anxiety, fear, loss and exclusion. Many of these accounts stress claims that embodied affects precede conscious awareness, and hence are often characterized as ‘non-representational’ in form, although some studies have adopted a ‘more-than-representational’ framing (Carolan, 2008; Lorimer, 2005), suggesting that whilst embodied affects may at times precede and escape representation, this does not mean that representations are unimportant in understanding affects. A fourth feature of many of the new perspectives on landscape is that they argue for examination of more than just human agencies. In part, this reflects a continuation of concerns about dematerialization raised in relation to symbolic approaches, albeit accompanied by some new dynamics, interests and concepts. Ingold (2011, p. 211), for instance, describes landscapes as ‘“cluttered” with every kind of thing, from hills and mountains to animals and plants, objects and artefacts’, while Thrift (2003, p. 309) has argued that descriptions of the countryside, or rural landscapes, need to adopt a ‘baroque sense of nature’, whereby there is a complex range of ‘sensuous materialities’ that act and move in multiple directions such that they never form a stable and coherent whole. This conception contains echoes of Ingold’s (1993) discussion of landscapes as processual, where he argues that although landscapes are often conceived as stable morphological forms, they are actually always in motion and change, albeit often at speeds much slower than perceptible by human observation. Drawing on such arguments, studies have emerged seeking to recognize the agency and affects associated with landscape constituents, including rocks, soils, water, buildings, open space, light and shadow, atmospheric conditions, and how they enable, or afford, particular experiences, forms of practice and affects. Studies have also examined how people interact with other living inhabitants of landscapes, including plants and animals. In many instances, studies stress interconnections between actants, with human practices, affects and landscapes emerging as co-produced assemblages or actor networks. Martin Phillips

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Beyond perspectives Although it is possible to identify distinct conceptualizations of landscape and approaches to studying landscapes within and beyond geography, it is important to recognize that landscape has long formed a focus of conversations between academics and others coming from different perspectives. This positioning has arguably added strength to the term, with many of the different conceptualizations and approaches discussed here having emerged in response to criticisms and emerging ideas associated with earlier perspectives on landscape. There is considerable diversity within the four approaches outlined here, and other foci that lie beyond these perspectives. The work of many human geographers also often straddle or work between these perspectives, as well as there being a plethora of studies focused on the detailed study of various specific landscapes. Martin Phillips

References and selected further reading Barnes, T. and Duncan, J. (eds) 1992. Writing Worlds. London: Routledge. Berger, J. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. Carolan, M. 2008. More-than-representational knowledge/s of the countryside. Sociologia Ruralis, 48, 408–22. Cosgrove, D. 1984. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. London: Croom Helm. Cosgrove, D. 1985. Prospect, perspective and the evolution of the landscape idea. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 10, 45–62. Daniels, S. and Cosgrove, S. 1988. Introduction: iconography and landscape. In S. Daniels and S. Cosgrove (eds), Iconography and Landscape.

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–10. Dickinson, R. 1939. Landscape and society. Scottish Geographical Magazine, 55, 1–15. Duncan, J. and Ley, D. 1982. Structural Marxism and human geography. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 72, 30–59. Hartshorne, R. 1939. The Nature of Geography. Lancaster, PA: Association of American Geographers. Henderson, G. 2003. What (else) we talk about when we talk about landscape. In C. Wilson and P. Groth (eds), Everyday America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 178–98. Ingold, T. 1993. The temporality of the landscape. World Archaeology, 25, 152–74. Ingold, T. 2011. Being Alive. London: Routledge. Kniffen, F. 1965. Folk housing. Annals of the American Association Geographers, 55, 549–77. Larsen, T.B. and Harrington, J.J. 2021. Geographic thought and the Anthropocene. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111, 729–41. Lorimer, H. 2005. Cultural geography: the busyness of being ‘more than representational’. Progress in Human Geography, 29, 83–94. Mitchell, D. 2000. Cultural Geography. Oxford: Blackwell. Mitchell, D. 2012. They Saved the Crops. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Palka, E.J. 1995. Coming to grips with the concept of landscape. Landscape Journal, 14, 63–73. Price, M. and Lewis, M. 1993. The reinvention of cultural geography. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 83, 1–17. Sauer, C. 1925. The morphology of landscape. University of California Publications in Geography, 2, 19–53. Sauer, C. 1963. Land and Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Thrift, N. 2003. Still life in nearly present time. In P. Cloke (ed.), Country Visions. Harlow: Prentice Hall, pp. 308–31. Wylie, J. 2003. Landscape, performance and dwelling. In P. Cloke (ed.), Country Visions. Harlow: Prentice Hall, pp. 136–57. Wylie, J. 2007. Landscape. London: Routledge.

43. Legal geographies

History and theoretical foundations

Introduction Legal geography is an interdisciplinary area of scholarship that focuses on the intersections and co-constitution between law and space and place: that is, how law and legal processes produce space/place, and how particular places in turn influence law. Rather than thinking of law as an abstract, universal, a-spatial set of rules, legal geography examines the ways in which law is situated in place, and how places are shaped by legal practices and processes. Like other forms of socio-legal studies, legal geography starts from the premise that legal ideas and processes must be situated within historical and social contexts. However, legal geography differs from socio-legal studies in that it takes an explicitly spatial perspective, specifically focusing on place and space as produced through legal processes, and vice versa. Legal geography is a multidisciplinary endeavor. It is neither an area of legal scholarship nor simply a subdiscipline of human geography; instead, it encompasses a diverse array of inquiries of scholars from a range of disciplines who foreground law and space in their studies (Braverman et al., 2014). The study of legal geography can be thought of more as a set of questions than a cohesive subfield, a broad critical lens that can be applied to study a wide variety of topics (Bennett and Layard, 2015; Delaney, 2015). For example, scholars interested in political ecology and nature–society relationships may choose to use a legal geography lens to examine the legal processes of environmental regulation, property ownership, and associated power relations. Meanwhile, those interested in urban studies may use legal geography to understand processes of redlining, gentrification, and policing and how these power relations shape place and space. As such, legal geography can be found scattered across many different areas of social science and law, providing a useful tool for thinking about the co-constitution of law and space/place across a wide range of different fields, topics, and scales.

Legal geography is a relatively young field with roots in both socio-legal studies and human geography. Initially in the 1980s and 1990s, socio-legal scholars began examining spatial aspects of law through work on territory, racism, and urban–suburban dynamics, while separately, human geographers began examining legal questions and themes through studies of urban governance and political geography (Braverman et al., 2014). The critical legal studies movement coalesced these lines of work in the 1990s, effectively launching the highly interdisciplinary work that continues today. Scholars using a critical legal studies approach drew from Marxist and post-structuralist lines of thought to critically examine questions of power. There are a number of key thinkers that have shaped the field. For example, Nicholas Blomley’s highly influential 1994 book Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power focused on property, gentrification, and power from a critical legal geographic perspective. David Delaney’s 2003 book Law and Nature examined relationships between non-human nature and law. Other key scholarship that has shaped legal geography includes Don Mitchell’s work on urban public space, Gordon Clark’s examinations of legal theory, and Richard Ford’s scholarship on racialized spatial differentiation (Braverman et al., 2014). Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, legal geography has become both a more established scholarly project, as well as a more diverse and multidisciplinary one. A wide range of scholars including anthropologists, sociologists, and historians are joining geographers and legal scholars in studying relationships between law and place/space. These scholars are studying a broader array of topics beyond legal geography’s initial focus on property and urban space and are using a wider range of theoretical approaches including decolonial, more-than-human, and Indigenous perspectives. For example, Sandy Kedar (2003) uses legal geography to study land dispossession, settler colonialism, and occupation in Israel/Palestine; Irus Braverman (2012) interrogates non-human legalities by examining captivity and zoos; and Betsan Martin, Linda Te Aho and Maria

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Humphries-Kil’s book ResponsAbility (2019) draws from Indigenous legal frameworks around the Pacific to examine environmental governance. Legal geographers incorporate a diverse array of critical, structural, and post-structural social and political theory, as well as legal theoretical frameworks that come primarily out of the American and European law school tradition. Legal geographers also incorporate understandings of legal pluralism, acknowledging law’s multiple sources and critically examining how Indigenous legal systems interact with colonial legal systems (Robinson and Graham, 2018). The formation of research specialty groups within the Law and Society Association and the American Association of Geographers in recent years is evidence of the ongoing formalization of legal geography as an area of scholarly inquiry.

Methods Drawing primarily from human geography foundations, legal geography typically draws from qualitative methods to examine how the law unfolds, enables, hinders, or erases institutional knowledges and state power on a multi-scalar level (Faria et al., 2020, p. 1101). Seeking to disrupt taken-for-granted categories such as the ‘global’, the ‘national’, legal borders, individuals and their (legal and physical) subjectivities, legal geographers use a range of methodological tools to pay attention to multiple dimensions of law and space. Two methodological developments deserve particular attention. First, some legal geographers use primarily archival methods. Digging deep into archival work on legal cases, they analyze law and legal processes, sometimes looking across time and cultures, and often taking a historical perspective to examine legal–geographical relationships in a detailed way. For example, Gorman (2019) uses archival methods to examine US state law decisions, while Schenk (2019) examines negotiations over sharia law interpretations. Through archival research, both show how legal processes may be enacted differently based on gender, class, and other markers of identity, deeply imbued with patriarchal power across time. Second, some legal geographers turn to fieldwork. This work is situated in observation and ethnographic examination

of legal proceedings on geographic topics. For example, Faria et al. (2020) demonstrate what can be gained for legal geography by utilizing the courts as a site for ethnography. They illuminate how the ‘everyday legal goings-on and the trans-scalar structural machinations of state violence’ (Faria et al., 2020, p. 1095) are entangled within current legal proceedings such as migration and asylum cases, corporate fraud, or anti-terrorism trials. Legal geographic methods are often based in qualitative human geography but remain open for development. Faria et al. (2020) advocate for grounded data sets, embodied transcripts, global intimate analyses of legal power, scholar-activism, and striving to ‘study up’ the power hierarchy of legal and policy actors (Brickell, Jeffrey and McConnell, 2021; Nader, 1972).

Contemporary directions in legal geography Environmental governance Recent scholarship on environmental governance draws on legal geography and political ecology methods to examine the ‘environment both as an object of governance and a terrain of legal struggle in the legal arena, the political economic context in which law and legal contexts are embedded, and the material outcomes at stake’ (Andrews and McCarthy, 2014, p. 9). Geographers have used this approach to study topics such as the legal and political context of shale gas extraction in Pennsylvania (Andrews and McCarthy, 2014); the governance of uranium mines in the American West (Benson, 2012); the ‘underground political ecology’ of extractive economies in El Salvador and the Andean countries (Bebbington, 2012); and the capacity of the public trust doctrine to protect hydro-social landscapes in California (Cantor, 2016). This area of legal geography draws on critical theories of property to think about how law shapes particular constructions of nature as property, the types of property uses it legitimates, and where these different uses come into conflict (Blomley, 2003). To understand how and why particular property regimes are applied to particular resources at particular times, law and society

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scholar Heinz Klug instructs scholars to locate historical shifts in the development of property regimes, as well as their ‘social construction’ through the community of users, managers, and policymakers who shape them over time (Klug, 2002). Within this realm of scholarship, geographic methods can help to deconstruct the ‘assumed uniformity of legal norms and the spatiality of legal knowledge’ to move toward a more grounded understanding of the place-based, spatial, political, and social realities of ‘local legal cultures’ (Blomley, 1994, p. 53). Legal geographic scholarship in the area of environmental governance has intersected with science and technology studies in questioning the production of expertise and knowledge. This research reveals that despite claims of objective expertise, the administrative agencies responsible for establishing environmental rules and regulations are not insulated from political influence by special interests such as extractive industries. Instead, they find that ‘administrative rationalism seeks to organize scientific and technical expertise into bureaucratic hierarchy in the service of the state’ in ways that do not change the structural status quo (Dryzek, 2021, p. 89). Geographer Rebecca Lave asserts that while many political ecologists have studied the application of environmental management frameworks and policies that ‘legitimize state or corporate appropriation of local resources’, the field has ‘paid comparatively little attention to the production of [the] environmental knowledge claims… that enable them’ (2012, p. 19; emphasis added). This has prompted a new wave of scholarship that attends to the production of environmental science that enables environmental appropriation, commercialization, and privatization to further deconstruct claims of objective environmental expertise (Lave, 2012). A related area of legal geographic scholarship that questions dominant models of expertise and knowledge production comes from engagement with Indigenous studies. This thread of scholarship, which has important implications for environmental governance, emphasizes legal pluralism and the validity of legal systems other than those rooted in Western legal tradition, and challenges settler-colonial dispossession of land and water (Curley, 2021; Robinson and Graham, 2018).

Race and gender Contemporary legal geographers have addressed how intersectional issues of race and gender are expressed in legal processes, at intersecting scales ranging from the body to international scales. For example, in examining how security within wartime has always been rendered and shifted by the perception of women and children on the ground, Carpenter (2006) deploys an intersectional and multi-scalar analysis of how a layered system of gender-rendered and patriarchal patterns intersects with/in state-led efforts in protecting civilians deeply affected by such policies. As Allsopp reminds us more recently, it is frequently ‘the binary of all the men are in the militias and all the women are victims’ (2017, p. 172) that is orchestrated by elites to address and counter violence in wartime, by calling for more attention to the gender-rendered realities herein. In a similar vein, by combining both feminist geopolitics and the vibrant work of (feminist) geolegalities, Klosterkamp shows that first, male, racialized bodies tend to be classified, charged, and convicted as ‘terrorists’ more frequently than female bodies, and second, that foreign nationals, predominantly Syrians, are disproportionately more frequently and for longer detained in preventive custody than German nationals returning from Syria. Paying attention to these legal geographical renderings that always come most obviously into play on an intersectional level (Crenshaw, 1989; Gorman, 2019; Schenk, 2019) illuminates how law enforcement’s efforts are ‘not simple, static constructs but may be buttressed or distorted by implicit moral frames that “piggy-back” on or “stow-away” inside the norm in question, often contradicting it’ (Carpenter, 2006, p. 2). In this vein, legal geographical work enables us to attend and highlight ‘the law’s place-specific, embodied, lively, and lived geography’ (Faria et al., 2020, p. 1112), by working with and through its spatial and timely dimensions, deeply rendered and shaped by/within/through the state politics at place (Klosterkamp, 2021, p. 9). Law, space, and human rights Much of the critical geographical scholarship that first flew the legal geography flag did so out of an urgent need to call into question

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the implicit relationship between power, law, and rights. Despite recognizable gains in dismantling official forms of legal racism through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the removal of explicitly racist immigration restrictions in 1965, by the 1980s and early 1990s, scholars began to explore the more implicit dimensions of legal racism and the limits to liberal theories of law, to call into question just how far the formal expansion of civil rights went (Brown and Halley, 2002). Geographers began to question what Blomley (1987) called ‘impact studies’ of law, in which law is uncritically accepted at face value and mapped onto cartographic space. Instead, these scholars explored the law as a basis and an outcome of social struggle which depended upon the legal interpretation between everyday life and law (Delaney, 1998). This provocation toward an analysis of law as legal violence and the geographically conditional (rather than unconditional) existence of legal protections was exemplified in Herbert’s (1997) book on the police, which, prompted by the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, revealed the cunning, everyday use of space and law to enable – not limit – their use of force. Delaney (2004, 2010) would later introduce and elaborate upon the concept of the ‘nomosphere’ as precisely this kind of complex, multi-sited, and multi-scalar entanglement of law, space, and power. Legal geographers’ critical engagement with the actually existing world of law as a social practice in the domestic context continues to shape research on the contentious status of the human and civil rights of non-citizens alongside the right immigration enforcement and border controls across the developed world. Alison Mountz’s (2010, 2020) global research agenda on border externalization and ‘offshoring’ examines the ways in which nation-states exploit the legal ambiguities at their edges or on islands to ‘illegalize’ migrants and to ensure that they remain in a precarious legal state as a result of their emplacement. Flores, Escudero and Burciaga (2019) further explore how undocumented youth in the United States develop what they call a ‘legal-spatial consciousness’ as a result of the multiple spaces and scales through which they experience and are forced to navigate the ongoing production of their il/legality. See also Harrison and Lloyd (2011), Varsanyi (2008), and Samers (2004) in the European context. Martin, Scherr and

City (2011) and Heyman (2001) add to this work by exposing the enormous gap between formal categories of law and the intensive creative translation work that, in these cases, attorneys and border patrol officers do to make law function. Although not all these scholars initially identified with the legal geography label, their work drew upon (both in citation and in theory) critical engagements with law, space, and rights and have become recognized as influential sources of inspiration for legal geographers today.

Conclusion We conclude with a review of an overarching theoretical debate within legal geography. The main thrust of this theoretical discussion focuses on how to conceptualize the relationship between law and space. This often includes identifying overlaps between geographic theory and legal theory, but sometimes leads to arguments that there is inherent incompatibility between the two. The central theoretical tension here is typically illustrated as a tension between law’s claim of being a-spatial and a-political as a central strategy of achieving and maintaining hegemony and the critique that, at the same time, that law disavows the socio-spatial world, it is nonetheless busy drawing upon and shaping the socio-spatial world in ways that are spatially uneven and socially unequal. That is, the law does violence in the world and to the world, while at the same time covering its tracks and purporting objectivity. There are several approaches to resolving this tension, which can be described as attempts to integrate (merge the two), assimilate (subsume one with the other), or differentiate (maintain a distinction, perhaps with hierarchy). Integration of law and space involves the argument for continuity between legal and geographic spheres, viewing the two as inextricably co-constituted. David Delaney (2004, 2010) exemplifies this approach to legal geography through his articulation of the concept of the ‘nomosphere’, which aims to conceptualize the inextricable relationship between legal rights and social space. Assimilation of law within geography views law as a superstructural effect of underlying social, political, and economic relations present at any point in history. This

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perspective is most associated with Marxist approaches to critical geography and critical legal studies (Collins, 1984). Differentiation between law and space involves making the argument that, while not entirely disconnected, law is its own unique form of rationality that operates – or aspires to operate – under a distinct logic with its own genealogy embedded within (but not subsumed by) history and geography (Valverde, 2009). Scholarship within legal geography does not always fall distinctly under one of these three categories, and most work can be characterized by theoretical moves that fall under more than one of these rough groupings. Caroline Griffith, Sarah Klosterkamp, Alida Cantor and Austin Kocher

References and selected further reading Allsopp, J. 2017. Agent, victim, soldier, son: intersecting masculinities in the European ‘refugee crisis’. In J. Freedman, Z. Kivilcim and N.O. Baklacıoğlu (eds), A Gendered Approach to the Syrian Refugee Crisis. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 155–74. Andrews, E. and McCarthy, J. 2014. Scale, shale, and the state: political ecologies and legal geographies of shale gas development in Pennsylvania. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 4, 7–16. Bebbington, A. 2012. Underground political ecologies. Geoforum, 43 (6), 1152–62. Bennett, L. and Layard, A. 2015. Legal geography: becoming spatial detectives. Geography Compass, 9 (7), 406–22. Benson, M. 2012. Mining sacred space: law’s enactment of competing ontologies in the American West. Health and Environmental Research (HERO), 44 (6), 1443–1458. Blomley, N. 1987. Legal interpretation: the geography of law. Tijdschrift Voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 78 (4), 265–75. Blomley, N. 1994. Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power. New York: Guilford Press. Blomley, N. 2003. Law, property, and the geography of violence: the frontier, the survey, and the grid. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93 (1), 121–41. Braverman, I. 2012. Zooland: The Institution of Captivity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Braverman, I., Blomley, N., Delaney, D. and Kedar, A. (eds). (2014). The Expanding Spaces

of Law: A Timely Legal Geography. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brickell, K., Jeffrey, A. and McConnell, F. 2021. Practising legal geography. Area, 53 (4), 557–61. Brown, W. and Halley, J. 2002. Left Legalism/Left Critique. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cantor, A. 2016. The public trust doctrine and critical legal geographies of water in California. Geoforum, 72, 49–57. Carpenter, R.C. 2006. Innocent Women and Children: Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians. Farnham: Ashgate. Collins, H. 1984. Marxism and Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crenshaw, K. 1989. Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989 (1), 139–67. Curley, A. 2021. Unsettling Indian water settlements: the Little Colorado River, the San Juan River, and colonial enclosures. Antipode, 53 (3), 705–23. Delaney, D. 1998. Race, Place, and the Law, 1836–1948. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Delaney, D. 2003. Law and Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delaney, D. 2004. Tracing displacements: or evictions in the nomosphere. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22 (6), 847–60. Delaney, D. 2010. The Spatial, the Legal and the Pragmatics of World-Making: Nomospheric Investigations. London: Routledge-Cavendish. Delaney, D. 2015. Legal geography I: constitutivities, complexities, and contingencies. Progress in Human Geography, 39 (1), 96–102. Dryzek, J. 2021. The Politics of the Earth (4th edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Faria, C., Klosterkamp, S., Torres, R.M. and Walenta, J. 2020. Embodied exhibits: toward a feminist geographic courtroom ethnography. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 110 (4), 1095–113. Flores, A., Escudero, K. and Burciaga, E. 2019. Legal-spatial consciousness: a legal geography framework for examining migrant illegality. Law & Policy, 41 (1), 12–33. Gorman, C.S. 2019. Feminist legal archeology, domestic violence and the raced-gendered juridical boundaries of U.S. asylum law. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 51 (5), 1050–67. Harrison, J.L. and Lloyd, S.E. 2011. Illegality at work: deportability and the productive new era of immigration enforcement. Antipode, 44 (2), 365–85. Herbert, S. 1997. Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department.

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228  Concise encyclopedia of human geography Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Heyman, J. 2001. Class and classification at the U.S.–Mexico border. Human Organization, 60 (2), 128–40. Kedar, A. 2003. On the legal geography of ethnocratic settler states: notes towards a research agenda. Current Legal Issues, 5, 401–41. Klosterkamp, S. 2021. Security, mobility, and the body – Syrian insurgent groups’ infrastructures and their geopolitical contestations through/by/ in legal institutions. Political Geography, 84 (3), 1–11. Klug, H. 2002. Straining the law: conflicting legal premises and the governance of aquatic resources. Society and Natural Resources, 15, 693–707. Lave, R. 2012. Neoliberalism and the production of environmental knowledge. Environment and Society, 3, 19–38. Martin, B., Te Aho, L. and Humphries-Kil, M. (eds) 2019. ResponsAbility: Law and Governance for Living Well with the Earth. London: Routledge. Martin, D.G., Scherr, A.W. and City, C. 2010. Making law, making place: lawyers and the production of space. Progress in Human Geography, 34 (2), 175–92. Mountz, A. 2010. Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mountz, A. 2020. The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago.

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Nader, L. 1972. Up the anthropologist: perspectives gained from studying up. In D.H. Hymes (ed.), Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 284–311. Pain, R. 2009. Globalized fear? Towards an emotional geopolitics. Progress in Human Geography, 33 (4), 466–86. Robinson, D.F. and Graham, N. 2018. Legal pluralisms, justice and spatial conflicts: new directions in legal geography. The Geographical Journal, 184 (1), 3–7. Samers, M. 2004. An emerging geopolitics of ‘illegal’ immigration in the European Union. European Journal of Migration and Law, 6 (1), 27–45. Schenk, C.G. 2019. Legal and spatial ordering in Aceh, Indonesia: inscribing the security of female bodies into law. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 51 (5), 1128–44. Valverde, M. 2009. Law’s Dream of a Common Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Varsanyi, M. 2008. Rescaling the ‘alien,’ rescaling personhood: neoliberalism, immigration, and the state. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 98 (4), 877–96.

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44. Marxist geographies

Basic Marxist geography

Introduction Marxism is an approach to analysing human society and changing it, pioneered in the nineteenth century by Karl Marx. The fundamental basis of Marxism is a moral and political aim: the emancipation of humanity from exploitation and oppression through creating a socialist society where all citizens can contribute to collectively planning their material lives and thus to individual self-realization. This political commitment marks off Marxism from other theories of society. Marxism analyses the capitalist system, which now dominates the world, as a coherent system of the production of things and ‘the reproduction of the people’ – that is, how people make their lives day to day in the home and the neighbourhood. But it sees this system as riven by conflicts and contradictions and as failing to meet human needs. It involves the exploitation of the majority of the population by capital, so class conflict is endemic. The practices of capitalist production and reproduction of people systematically undermine themselves, resulting in disruption and crises. These open the possibility for popular struggles and collective solutions. Socialism is therefore not merely a moral ideal but grows out of capitalism and people’s lives within it. Marxism is ‘praxis’, the combination of ideas and action. Geography is an essential part of Marxism. All social practice happens in and through space. Because Marxism is materialist and historical, it is intrinsically concerned with space, not as a thing in itself but as an essential aspect of the social whole (Gough and Das, 2017). In the first section, I set out some basic principles of Marxism in a rather abstract form. In the rest of this entry, I refer to these points as (1) and so on. You may find these quite difficult to understand, but their meaning will, I hope, become clearer in the second section, in which I use Marxism to examine two important issues in contemporary human geography.

1. Society is an integrated whole, a ‘totality’. One can divide this totality into distinct spheres and distinct sets of social relations, but none of these are understandable outside their place within the whole. Marxism therefore avoids the binary divisions that plague mainstream social science: consciousness/materiality; actors/structures; individuals/society; nature/nurture – these are merely aspects of the whole. Similarly, in Marxism, the conventional separate disciplines of ‘economic’, ‘social’, ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ geography are one. Put philosophically, while in non-Marxist thinking, distinct aspects of society are separately constituted and then externally related, in Marxism they constitute each other and are internally related to each other and to the totality (Ollman, 1993). 2. All forms of exploitation and social oppression, and all degradations of humans and the Earth’s ecology, are a part of the social totality, capitalist society. 3. The essential starting point for analysing societies is the reproduction of human life through work. Before capitalism, work was organized and carried out by households (farmers, artisans), which, with an internal division of labour, undertook all kinds of work including caring work. In capitalism, work is split into two distinct types and spaces: waged work in the formal economy, and unpaid ‘housework’ and caring for people in the home. The first is done under the direction of the employer, the second is our own responsibility. The reproduction of people uses wages to buy consumer goods and services produced by firms, transforms them through unpaid work, and, in modern capitalism, uses public services provided by the state. While there is a difference in social relations between waged work and the reproduction sphere and in our feelings about them, the two realms are deeply internally related: the reproduction of people relies on the wage, and firms rely on the reproduction of people to provide labour power (Pain et al., 2001, Ch. 2). 4. In capitalism, firms buy the labour power of workers, the ability to work, for a wage. The firm supervises and controls labour

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within the workplace, to produce more value than the wages paid, a process of exploitation. By selling the goods or services produced, firms thereby reap a profit, surplus value. This is stored by the firm, thus expanding its initial capital. The inherent dynamic of capital is to expand without limit, chewing up more and more of humanity and the ecosystem as it goes (Marx, [1867–83] 1972). 5. In contemporary highand medium-income countries, 90 per cent of the population relies on wages over their lifespan, and are ‘workers’ in the Marxist sense. The power of capital over the working class depends in the first place on the suppression of small-scale farming and artisan production, and the consequent need to be employed for a wage in order to survive. It also depends on the competition between workers to sell their labour power to capital, including competition organized across divisions of gender, racialized groups, age and location. These social divisions are therefore a crucial contribution to the power of capital over workers, and class relations are a crucial part of these social divisions (McNally, 2015). 6. The Earth’s ecosystem (‘Nature’) and the built environment (‘Second Nature’) are necessary aspects of capitalist production and domestic reproduction. At the same time, they are transformed by production and reproduction work. Thus ecological destruction and problems of the built environment are deeply related to capital accumulation and class oppression. 7. The spread of capitalist society across the world has involved ever-increasing flows of commodities, money-capital, production facilities and people, corresponding to capital’s impulsion to expand without limit. These flows tend to create a unified global society. But these flows use differences in capitalism across the world, and serve to further differentiate territories as much as to equalize them: both ‘combined’ and ‘uneven’ development. Uneven development is a product of different changes in basic class relations (for example, pre-capitalism to capitalism) and differentiated forms of capital–labour relations (for example, disciplinary versus cooperative), all affected by place-specific class struggles. Uneven development also Jamie Gough

reflects the capitalist class’s investment strategies (Das, 2017a). 8. In capitalism, the state and society are not two separate systems: the state is embedded in socio-economic life, and arises from society’s contradictions. The state is an aspect of class relations, and class struggle runs through it. It is an aspect of capital accumulation, organizing crucial aspects of production and reproduction. By the same token, the state is subject to all the contradictions and conflicts of socio-economic life. 9. Unlike previous class societies, in capitalism, the ruling class (corporations and their shareholders) is institutionally separate from the state (politicians, civil service, the military). This arrangement enables the state to attend to capital accumulation and class relations as a whole (Clarke, 1991). But to achieve its aims, the state has to deal with particular corporations and particular sections of the working class, with the danger of corruption, special interest lobbying and clientelism, which undermine the coherence and effectiveness of state intervention. A strong ‘progressive’ state favoured by social democracy (such as was common in the 1950s and 1960s) risks politicizing economy and society, from which the state may retreat into weaker regulation, cuts to public services and weaker industrial policy (as under neoliberalism). These contradictions give rise to ever-shifting boundaries between the state, capital and civil society. 10. Capitalism is riven with contradictions (Harvey, 2014). Contradictions are not merely conflicts of interest (the pluralist, social-democratic view) but arise from the combination of interdependence and antagonism between logically connected elements of the totality: capitalist processes undermine themselves (Ollman, 1993). One result is chronic crisis tendencies disrupting both productive accumulation and the reproduction of people. These crises can reimpose the discipline of value onto workers and divide them, but they can also push workers towards collective action against capital and against the state to the extent that it expresses capital’s logic. 11. Since exploitation, social oppressions, the destruction of nature and economic

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crises are intrinsic to capitalist society, they can only be overcome by a socialist society in which the majority of productive resources are publicly owned, planned and managed collaboratively, and developed democratically, to meet human needs. Before proceeding, a word is necessary about two proposals by geographers for new ‘post-structuralist’ versions of Marxism. J.K. Gibson-Graham (1996; the pen name shared by feminist economic geographers Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham) have proposed a model of economics, work and class that focuses on the distribution of income, whether in the form of money or material benefits, between firms and varied social groups. They deny the validity of Marx’s theory of capitalist production of commodities, capital’s control of workers within the workplace to produce surplus value, and the accumulation of capital. The relations of production are replaced by relations of distribution (Das, 2017b, Chs 3 and 4). Their strategic aim is the social-democratic one of a ‘good capitalism’ rather than socialism, through the indefinite growth of a small firm and not-for profit sector, ignoring the overwhelming economic and political power of capital (Eisenschitz and Gough, 2011). Castree (1999) similarly calls for a politics of redistribution rather than production relations. He retains Marx’s distinctions between exchange and use value and between abstract and concrete labour, but, like Gibson-Graham, he denies the importance of capital’s exploitation of labour, the accumulation of capital as value, and their crisis tendencies. Progressive politics is thus no longer dependent on working-class struggle against capital, but is a post-modern negotiation between ever-multiplying identity groups – capitalist pluralism (Smith, 1998). These authors, then, have arguably emptied Marxism of its critical analysis and socialist aims. In particular, they are a poor guide to fighting gender and racist oppressions: see ‘Social oppressions and capitalism’ below.

Marxism for resolving the multiple crises of today The world today is in crisis. There are multiple visible catastrophes taking place before

our eyes, and many that are hidden from view: many parts of the ecosystem; conditions of work, unemployment, poverty; collapse of public services; right-wing populist authoritarian governments; chronic armed conflicts. Human geographers seek to understand the roots of these problems and find strategies to address them. Marxism is uniquely well equipped for this task. Most non-Marxist human geography focuses on a particular social, economic, cultural or political problem and proposes progressive policies to ameliorate or solve the problem. But the narrow focus of this work means that the analysis of the problem is superficial and the policies proposed are ineffective or even counter-productive. This is because the problem is not understood within its wider context: the capitalist system as a whole, the accumulation of capital through production, commerce and finance, and the relations between capital and the 90 per cent of the population who have to work for a living (1 to 4). If analysed in this way, the problem can be seen to be more than contingent, specific and local, but rather to have deep roots in society-wide processes. The progressive policies proposed do not address these roots, and are therefore derailed by them. Connectedly, the policies do not ‘join up’ with other policies, nor form part of an overall strategy to address the oppressions of the capitalist whole. I will illustrate this large claim by considering how human geography usually approaches two important problems, ecology and social oppressions, and how Marxism can provide a deeper analysis of and strategy towards them. Ecological devastation The last 30 years have seen a greatly increased awareness of diverse ecological problems, but also a worsening of these problems, which now threaten the existence of human and non-human life on Earth. The creation of these disasters by capitalism, and its inability to prevent them, shows the barbaric and irrational nature of this system. This is also true of numerous disasters less well known than the climate emergency. Many ecological campaigners, most governments, and much academic work, see the origin of ecological problems and the solution to them in two ways: (a) Humans wish Jamie Gough

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to dominate nature, and are indifferent to the integrity and beauty of nature. They lack knowledge and understanding of large-scale ecosystems, and do not think about the well-being of humans and the natural world in the future. The solution is then to educate the public about ecological deterioration. (b) Firms are unable, or unwilling, to think about their ‘externalities’. The solution is to nudge production and consumption into better paths through state regulation, subsidies and taxation. Marxists criticize these two approaches (Foster, Clark and York, 2011; Moore, 2015; O’Connor, 1998): (a) Blaming the population ignores the social position of workers within capitalism (4). Many consumption decisions such as use of cars are dictated by the goods and services developed over long periods by capital. The pleasures of consumption are compensation for workers’ disempowerment in production. Moreover, workers lack knowledge of the impacts of production on nature because they lack any control over production decisions. (b) Many government policies are too weak (for example, too many carbon credits) or too narrowly focused (not counting carbon of imported goods and air travel) to be effective. Technological solutions are often themselves polluting (diesel cars, electric cars). Governments do not act strongly against the interests of business for the following reasons: ● In capitalism, jobs and the supply of goods and services depends on the profitability of capital, as does government revenue (3, 4). Governments therefore challenge corporate profits at their peril. For example, to tackle urban air pollution would mean reducing the profits of the car, petrol and building industries. ● Polluting products and processes are embedded in massive fixed capital (machinery, transport systems, buildings), which, once installed, are extremely hard to change. Urban air pollution, for example, is embedded in the entire built environment of cities and means of transport; tackling it requires enormous new investment, and complex politics to help the immediate losers. ● A rational response to this problem would be for every new product and process to be examined for its possible ecological and health impacts before it is invested in, and damaging ones banned. But no states Jamie Gough

have ever done this comprehensively, because a central dynamic of capitalism is product and process innovation for competitive advantage and expansion (4). ● Workers in polluting industries usually resist policies that would wind them down. To avoid this resistance, those workers need to be re-employed in new industries in situ. But this requires the state to become a large-scale investor in industry, thus limiting the freedom of capital. ● The consumption of the super-rich accounts for around 30 per cent of pollution. To address this obscenity would require a 99 per cent reduction in their income, only achievable by social control of the corporations whose profits provide their income. ● Both the problem of workers’ ignorance and the problems of controlling capital can only be addressed by the collective organization of the whole population to control major investment decisions. But capitalist rule is based on the fragmentation of workers (5). And popular collective control of investment negates capitalist control, the very basis of capitalism (4). The problems of ecological destruction, then, are rooted in capital accumulation without limit (2, 4, 6), and the disempowerment of workers within capitalism (4, 5, 7). The ecological movement cannot succeed unless it is based on the collective organization of the 90 per cent against capital, to impose ecological necessity over private profit. The end point of this politics is the collective organization of society for the good of humanity and nature – that is, socialism (11). Social oppressions and capitalism Since the late 1960s, women’s and black movements have led to a massive literature analysing sexism and racism in their many forms, including their geographies. Some of this literature has been Marxist (for example, Davis, 1981; Floyd, 2009; Hennessy, 2000; Sivanandan, 1990; Vogel, 1983). But the majority in the last two decades has been within the framework first developed by the sociologist Max Weber. Each social oppression has distinct origins, and these are sep-

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arate from class. Opposing and overcoming social oppressions other than class is understood as having two distinct aspects – what Fraser (1995) terms ‘recognition’ (respectful attitudes, egalitarian ideology) and ‘redistribution’ (money, material resources). The political implications are the following: ● Each socially oppressed group has to fight its own particular fight (though possibly with temporary alliances). ● The fight for recognition can be carried out as a series of ideological/cultural struggles, with no necessary connection to economic or class struggles. ● The economic disadvantage of socially oppressed groups can be rectified by redistribution of income to the specific group, usually by the state. Racial economic injustice is thus addressed through quotas of jobs, money for black businesses, or restitution. Marxism provides a very different approach. Gender oppression is rooted in the internal relations and mutual dependency of the waged and unpaid spheres of work, the economy and social life (3) (McDowell and Massey, 1984; Vogel, 1983). Gender relations meld sexist attitudes, the gender division of labour, and the low income and lack of resources of women; these cannot be unravelled from each other. Combatting the oppression of women therefore involves a simultaneous, inextricable fight against both ideology and material deprivation. And the struggle against women’s material disadvantages cannot be achieved through redistribution of resources from men to women, but requires a fundamental change in social relations – ending the gender divisions of labour and the distinction between waged and unwaged work. Similarly, racism arises from the uneven and combined development of the world economy: the poverty of the Majority World, and the consequent migrations from and within it impelled by both those migrants’ needs for employment and capital’s profitable exploitation of their labour power (7) (Cox, 2016; Sivanandan, 1990). Racial disadvantage within, say, the US, is produced by the combination of racist attitudes with the exploitation of all workers and the inadequacy of housing and public services for all workers. The struggle against these economic oppressions is also in the interests of

white workers. The struggle against racism for Marxists is then not for a redistribution from white to black workers, nor for whites to admit their privilege, but a common struggle against capital that acknowledges and combats the particularly dire situation of many racialized groups. Thus class and social oppressions are not separate, parallel hierarchies, but rather constitute and reinforce each other at the deepest level (1) (McNally, 2015). I hope that these two examples suggest the usefulness of a Marxist approach for analysing problems and developing effective strategies (for two more examples, see Gough, 2021). A Marxist approach can both deepen human geographers’ understanding and provide a guide to becoming politically active around issues that matter to them. Jamie Gough

References and selected further reading Castree, N. (1999). Envisioning capitalism: geography and the renewal of Marxian political economy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 24, 137–58. Clarke, S. (1991). State, class struggle, and the reproduction of capital. In S. Clarke (ed.), State Debate. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 182–203. Cox, K. (2016). Geographies, critical and Marxist, and lessons from South Africa. Human Geography, 9 (3), 10–26. Das, R. (2017a). David Harvey’s theory of uneven geographical development: a Marxist critique. Capital and Class, 41 (3), 511–36. Das, R. (2017b). Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World. Leiden: Brill. Davis, A. (1981). Women, Race and Class. New York: Vintage. Eisenschitz, A. and Gough, J. (2011). Socialism and ‘social economy’. Human Geography, 4 (2), 1–15. Floyd, K. (2009). The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Foster, J.B., Clark, B. and York, R. (2011). The Ecological Rift. New York: Monthly Review Press. Fraser, N. (1995). From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a ‘post-socialist’ age. New Left Review, I (212), 68–93. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996). The End of Capitalism (As We Know It): A Feminist

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234  Concise encyclopedia of human geography Critique of Political Economy. Oxford: Blackwell. Gough, J. (2021). Marxism for undergraduates. Accessed 15 October 2022 at http://​ www​ .jamiegough​.info/​publications/​journal​-article​ -book​-chapters/​marxism​-undergraduates. Gough, J. and Das, R. (2017). Introduction to special issue: Marxist geography. Human Geography, 9 (3), 1–9. Harvey, D. (2014). Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hennessy, R. (2000). Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. London: Routledge. Marx, K. ([1867–83] 1972). Capital. London: Lawrence & Wishart. McDowell, L. and Massey, D. (1984). A woman’s place. In D. Massey and J. Allen (eds), Geography Matters! New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 128–47. McNally, D. (2015). The dialectics of unity and difference in the constitution of wage-labour:

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on internal relations and working-class formation. Capital and Class, 39 (1), 131–46. Moore, J. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso. O’Connor, J. (1998). Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. New York: Guilford Press. Ollman, B. (1993). Dialectical Investigations. London: Routledge Pain, R., Gough, J. and Mowl, G. et al. (2001). Introducing Social Geographies. London: Hodder Arnold. Sivanandan, A. (ed.) (1990). Communities of Resistance. London: Verso. Smith, M.E.G. (1998). Marxist value theory and ‘progressive’ poststructuralism: a reply to Noel Castree. Rethinking Marxism, 10 (1), 100–111. Vogel, L. (1983). Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory. London: Pluto.

45. Migration geographies Introduction This entry concentrates on three urgent contemporary questions regarding the intersection of geography and the field of migration studies. These are: (1) migration and the question of coloniality; (2) migration and the question of (im)mobility; and (3) migration and the question of brokerage. To position this entry as a critical outline, it is worthwhile to provide a brief synopsis of geography’s main contributions to migration studies. At least three recent subfields can be identified. First, through its emphasis on the unequal distribution of wealth, protection mechanisms, jobs and resources, geographical thought offers important explanatory factors for migration. In this respect, geographical contributions vary from systemic interpretations of segmented global labour markets (Sassen, 2000), to agency-oriented approaches on the so-called drivers of migration (Carling and Collins, 2018). A second contribution of geography is its focus on dynamic socio-spatial processes that unfold as a result of migration. This includes the dominant debates on integration/assimilation, the role of locality and urban praxis in these matters (Buhr, 2018), segregation (Phillips, 2007), as well as transnational geographies (Bailey et al., 2002). Finally, geographers have stressed the vital role of geopolitics in understanding migration, including the functioning of state apparatuses, asylum systems and borders (Mountz, 2010; Watkins, 2017). Since there exist already some insightful overviews (Samers and Collyer, 2017; Skop, 2019) on the role of geography in migration studies, I do not delve deeper into the ways these debates evolved over time. Instead, a threefold outline follows that can be considered an invitation for geographers who would like to critically engage with the field of migration studies.

Migration and coloniality The question of colonialism and migration has long been reduced to the general obser-

vation that colonial histories have shaped the migratory pathways of many migrants (e.g., Algerians to France, South Asians to the United Kingdom). In line with this, it is claimed that contemporary migration patterns deviate from colonial pathways because of intensified processes of globalization (Ehrkamp, 2020). Although this general observation is in itself accurate, the question of coloniality goes much deeper than only migration patterns. Rather, it reflects the more fundamental question of how difference is made and unmade through imaginative geographies (Gregory, 1995), not only between societies, but also within societies (Bhambra, 2017a). It indeed relates to questions of how race, citizenship, containment and migration are constructed through colonial legacies (Koh, 2017) and political subordination (Achuime, 2019). The question of coloniality, however, should not be seen as a study subject located outside academia. It is particularly important to understand how academic knowledge production on migration actually reproduces colonial difference. In other words, it is a collective responsibility to challenge the policy-driven categories, labels and language we use to make sense of people’s movements (Dahinden, 2016). We need to unpack why and how academic research collects, claims and grasps ‘migrant stories’ through power-ridden field relations (Aparna, 2020). We need to ask ourselves whose migrations and histories are taken into account – and hence questioned – in the study of migration (Bhambra, 2017b). And we need to acknowledge that much academic research contributes to the positioning of migrants as outsiders of society through analytical gazes on ‘ethnicity’ and ‘integration’ (Schinkel, 2018). When we start from the contestation of this coloniality of migration-related knowledge – as a structure that amplifies certain knowledges over others – we might indeed rewrite entire popular textbooks on migration. The powerful intervention of Ranabir Samaddar is a case in point here (Samaddar, 2020). In his book The Postcolonial Age of Migration, he shared his unease with one of the most widely used textbooks in migration curricula in Europe for the last three decades: The Age of Migration (De Haas, Castles and Miller, 2020). Samaddar’s critique of this conventional textbook has many different angles. It

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involves how The Age of Migration disentangles European nations from their empires, how the authors reduce migration to the managerial language of labour markets and migration systems (and hence do not relate migration with people’s autonomy), and how in the book modes of governing – including securitized borders, containment and humanitarianism – remain underdiscussed. Geographers play – or could play – an important role in addressing the coloniality of knowledge production on migration. It is not just a matter of putting contemporary migratory moves into their historical contexts, it should also be a shift in starting from dominant geographical imaginaries of migration to an understanding of how these imaginaries come to existence. This includes a thorough unpacking of the subjectification of the migrant (Mezzaddra, 2015); the carto-politics of migration maps (Ferrer-Gallardo and Kramsch, 2016; Van Houtum and Bueno Lacy, 2020); the violence of borders (Jones, 2016) and deportations (Slack, 2016; Walters, 2002); the necropolitical character of political inaction (Davies, Isakjee and Dhesi, 2017); the persistence of colonial relations through extractive economies (M’charek, 2020); the role of race and racialization in asylum politics (Picozza, 2021); as well as Eurocentric geo-historical scripts of help and hospitality (Aparna et al., 2020). In addition, as I argue below, addressing dominant geographical imaginaries of migration also implies a break with the sedentarist underpinnings of migration studies.

Migration and (im)mobility Although migration studies have always dealt with human movements, their conceptual underpinnings have traditionally been based on the fixed geography of scales, nation-states and rootings of population (Malkki, 1992). From this ontological standpoint, it is often stressed that ‘only’ 3–4 per cent of the world population can be considered an international migrant. In other words, sedentarist lifestyles are considered the norm as the majority of the world population ‘stays put’. From this sedentarist standpoint, mobility is automatically positioned as the exceptional condition. Mobility, in other words, is the anomaly that unfolds as an in-between phase between static Joris Schapendonk

points of departure and arrival (Schapendonk, Bolay and Dahinden, 2021). This mobility is then explained by the so-called ‘root causes’ of migration (Silvey, 2009) and can only be resolved by integration and assimilation programmes that seek to re-root people. Discussions on transnational migration have destabilized such rooted notions of migration (Ehrkamp, 2020). By considering migrants’ hybrid identities, transnational social networks and multiple homes, transnational migration scholars have destabilized methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002) and rethought the geographical separation of centres and margins (Andrucki and Dickinson, 2015). While many researchers have focused on transnational dynamics from below (e.g., sending remittances, multiple belongings) (Bailey et al., 2002), others have stressed transnationalism from above by showing how the spaces of migration control have expanded (e.g., Collyer and King, 2015). Despite the transnational turn, however, processes of mobility practices have still remained at the margins of our analytical frameworks. This is gradually changing with the mobilities turn. While the mobilities turn is – mistakenly so – taken as a field that uncritically approaches the world as being in flux, it actually offers a relational framework to study mobility and immobility in relation to each other. From this relational standpoint, mobility and stasis are interrelated effects full of inequalities (Cresswell, 2010; Sheller, 2021). In the study of migration, mobility-driven frameworks have contributed to the emergence of at least two sub-debates. First, more researchers direct their attention to mobility practices. The latter includes migrant trajectories (Mainwaring and Brigden, 2016) and post-migration mobilities. These studies allow us to mirror the highly mobile lifestyles of ‘expats’ (who are, of course, also migrants) (Cranston, 2017) with the mobility of less privileged migrants, whose lives can be equally transnational or global (Schapendonk, 2020). In the round, this subfield dealing with mobility practices problematizes the sedentarist metaphysics that presumes that migrants live place-based lives before and after they have reached their destinations (Schapendonk et al., 2021). A second sub-debate has unfolded around the so-called politics of mobility (Hyndman, 1997). It not only considers the unequal dis-

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tribution of mobility rights across the globe, but also looks at (1) how the mobility of some affects the mobility of others; and (2) how mobility regimes produce protracted forms of immobility. With regard to the former, there are studies delving into family relations in a migratory context and studies that differentiate experiences of immobility. Regarding the latter, geographers in general, and feminist geographers in particular, have scrutinized the politics of waiting (Conlon, 2011; Hyndman and Giles, 2011). Other scholars have articulated how ‘keeping certain people mobile’ becomes a governmental technique to restrict people’s attachment to, and belonging, in places like Europe (Tazzioli, 2020). Thus, in different ways, the question of migration and (im)mobility highlights the differentiation of mobility. Consequently, while some argue that the term mobility washes away most of the political and social controversies around particular population movements (Samaddar, 2020), a critical mobilities perspective can actually help to trace and critique relations of power (Davidson, 2021). An (im)mobility approach helps us to understand how some mobilities are ‘migranticized’ and slowed down, while others are promoted and facilitated. It acknowledges the power and lived impacts of discursive labels, such as asylum seeker, irregular migrant, skilled migrant. At the same time, this approach provides space to understand how through mobility tactics, people are actually able to transgress these boundaries. In that sense, ‘migration’ is about pinning down one’s residence and movement, while ‘mobility’ provides more analytical openness (Schapendonk, 2020).

Migration and brokerage The final issue that is key to an understanding of contemporary migration across international borders is the issue of brokerage. Brokerage leads to comfortable migratory processes for the global elite (Koh and Wissink, 2018), and can be a question of life and death for people moving across securitized borders (Slack, 2016). In migration studies, social networks have received a lot of attention for their mediating role in migration processes as they generally lower the financial and mental costs of migration. Recently,

however, there are many other actors and networks discussed that also act as brokers in migration. This includes visa agents, smugglers, recruitment offices, shelter organizations, solidarity groups and lawyers. Studies that stress the commercialized dimension of brokerage often start from the migration industry concept (Awumbila et al., 2019), while studies on migration infrastructures (Xiang and Lindquist, 2014) tend to deal with the interlinked character of brokering by including the commercial, regulatory, technological, humanitarian and social dimensions of migration. Studying brokerage is important since it helps us to move away from the two central foci in migration studies: the migrant and the state (Collins, 2021). It particularly helps to move our gazes away from the individual migrant ‘other’, in order to direct our attention more towards the webs that produce and politicize migration. In this regard, some scholars point to the ways the facilitation of migration across securitized borders – as well as policy discussions on this issue – are highly gendered (Van Liempt, 2011). Others approach brokerage as a form of mobile solidarity (Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013; Squire, 2018). Brokering, however, is not only occurring during actual border crossings, with, for example, language schools, commercialized integration programmes and labour offices, brokering is a crucial (and profit-making) force in the migration apparatus of richer countries around the globe. Even more so, brokering is crucial for those who aspire to move across international borders through visa applications (Hernández-León, 2021). Brokers, thus, shape expectations around good migranthood and deservingness. This also counts for hospitality initiatives and shelter organizations as they produce their own forms of control over people through administration, paternalistic approaches and forms of victimization (Merlín-Escorza, Davids and Schapendonk, 2021). Brokering, thus, might produce a thin line between mobility facilitation and mobility control.

Conclusions As stated in the introduction, geographical knowledge is key to our understanding of migration and mobility across borders. In this Joris Schapendonk

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entry, I have pointed to three pressing issues in contemporary discussions on migration and provided multiple entry points for geographers who are willing to critically engage with the question of migration. This engagement may start from the notion of agency and the autonomy of people on the move, or it may address the complex force fields that make migration such an unequal ground. In both cases, it is important and productive to question the dominant imaginaries of migration that start from the fixed geography of scales, nation-states and rootedness, let alone the fixed imagination of the migrant ‘other’. Joris Schapendonk

References and selected further reading Achiume, E.T. (2019). Migration as decolonization. Stanford Law Review, 71, 1509–74. Andrucki, M.J. and Dickinson, J. (2015). Rethinking centers and margins in geography: bodies, life course, and the performance of transnational space. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 105 (1), 203–18. Aparna, K. (2020). Enacting asylum university: politics of research encounters and (re) producing borders in asylum relations. Doctoral thesis, University of Helskinki. Aparna, K., Kande, O., Schapendonk, J. and Kramsch, O. (2020). ‘Europe is no longer Europe’: montaging borderlands of help for a radical politics of place. Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 10 (4), 10–25. Awumbila, M., Deshingkar, P. and Kandilige, L. et al. (2019). Please, thank you and sorry – brokering migration and constructing identities for domestic work in Ghana. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45 (14), 2655–71. Bailey, A.J., Wright, R.A., Mountz, A. and Miyares, I.M. (2002). (Re)producing Salvadoran transnational geographies. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92 (1), 125–44. Bhambra, G.K. (2017a). Postcolonial Europe: afterword. In L. Jensen, J. Suárez-Krabbe, C. Groes and Z.L. Pecic (eds), Postcolonial Europe: Comparative Reflections after the Empires. London: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 215–20. Bhambra, G.K. (2017b). The current crisis of Europe: refugees, colonialism, and the limits of

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cosmopolitanism. European Law Journal, 23 (5), 395–405. Buhr, F. (2018). Using the city: migrant spatial integration as urban practice. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44 (2), 307–20. Carling, J. and Collins, F. (2018). Aspiration, desire and drivers of migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44 (6), 909–26. Collins, F.L. (2021). Geographies of migration I: platform migration. Progress in Human Geography, 45 (4), 866–77. Collyer, M. and King, R. (2015). Producing transnational space: international migration and the extra-territorial reach of state power. Progress in Human Geography, 39 (2), 185–204. Conlon, D. (2011). Waiting: feminist perspectives on the spacings/timings of migrant (im) mobility. Gender, Place & Culture, 18 (3), 353–60. Cranston, S. (2017). Expatriate as a ‘good’ migrant: thinking through skilled international migrant categories. Population, Space and Place, 23 (6), Article e2058. Cresswell, T. (2010). Towards a politics of mobility. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28 (1), 17–31. Dahinden, J. (2016). A plea for the ‘de-migranticization’ of research on migration and integration. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39 (13), 2207–25. Davidson, A.C. (2021). Radical mobilities. Progress in Human Geography, 45 (1), 25–48. Davies, T., Isakjee, A. and Dhesi, S. (2017). Violent inaction: the necropolitical experience of refugees in Europe. Antipode, 49 (5), 1263–84. De Haas, H., Castles, S. and Miller, M.J. (2020). The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World. London: Red Globe Press. Ehrkamp, P. (2020). Geographies of migration III: transit and transnationalism. Progress in Human Geography, 44 (6), 1202–11. Ferrer‐Gallardo, X. and Kramsch, O.T. (2016). Revisiting Al‐Idrissi: the EU and the (Euro) Mediterranean archipelago frontier. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 107 (2), 162–76. Gregory, D. (1995). Imaginative geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 19 (4), 447–85. Hernández-León, R. (2021). The work that brokers do: the skills, competences and know-how of intermediaries in the H-2 visa programme. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 47 (10), 2341–58. Hyndman, J. (1997). Border Crossings. Antipode, 29 (2), 149–76. Hyndman, J. and Giles, W. (2011). Waiting for what? The feminization of asylum in protracted

Migration geographies  239 situations. Gender, Place & Culture, 18 (3), 361–79. Jones, R. (2016). Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. London: Verso. Koh, S.Y. (2017). Race, Education, and Citizenship: Mobile Malaysians, British Colonial Legacies, and a Culture of Migration. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Koh, S.Y. and Wissink, B. (2018). Enabling, structuring and creating elite transnational lifestyles: intermediaries of the super-rich and the elite mobilities industry. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44 (4), 592–609. Mainwaring, Ċ. and Brigden, N. (2016). Beyond the border: clandestine migration journeys. Geopolitics, 21 (2), 243–62. Malkki, L. (1992). National Geographic: the rooting of peoples and the territorialization of national identity among scholars and refugees. Cultural Anthropology, 7 (1), 24–44. M’charek, A. (2020). Harraga: burning borders, navigating colonialism. The Sociological Review, 68 (2), 418–34. Merlín-Escorza, C.E., Davids, T. and Schapendonk, J. (2021). Sheltering as a destabilising and perpetuating practice in the migration management architecture in Mexico. Third World Quarterly, 42 (1), 105–22. Mezzaddra, S. (2015). The proliferation of borders and the right to escape. In Y. Janssen, R. Celikates and J. de Bloois (eds), The Irregularizaton of Migration in Contemporary Europe. London: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 121–36. Mountz, A. (2010). Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Papadopoulos, D. and Tsianos, V.S. (2013). After citizenship: autonomy of migration, organisational ontology and mobile commons. Citizenship Studies, 17 (2), 178–96. Phillips, D. (2007). Ethnic and racial segregation: a critical perspective. Geography Compass, 1 (5), 1138–59. Picozza, F. (2021). The Coloniality of Asylum: Mobility, Autonomy and Solidarity in the Wake of Europe’s Refugee Crisis. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Samaddar, R. (2020). The Postcolonial Age of Migration. London: Taylor & Francis. Samers, M. and Collyer, M. (2017). Migration. New York: Routledge. Sassen, S. (2000). The global city: strategic site/ new frontier. American Studies, 41 (2/3), 79–95. Schapendonk, J. (2020). Finding Ways Through Eurospace: West African Movers Re-Viewing

Europe from the Inside. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Schapendonk, J., Bolay, M. and Dahinden, J. (2021). The conceptual limits of the ‘migration journey’. De-exceptionalising mobility in the context of West African trajectories. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 47 (14), 3243–59. Schinkel, W. (2018). Against ‘immigrant integration’: for an end to neocolonial knowledge production. Comparative Migration Studies, 6 (1), 1–17. Sheller, M. (2021). Advanced Introduction to Mobilities. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Silvey, R. (2009). Development and geography: anxious times, anemic geographies, and migration. Progress in Human Geography, 33 (4), 507–15. Skop, E. (2019). Geography and migration. In C. Inglis, W. Li and B. Khadria (eds), The SAGE Handbook of International Migration. London: SAGE, pp. 108–23. Slack, J. (2016). Captive bodies: migrant kidnapping and deportation in Mexico. Area, 48 (3), 271–7. Squire, V. (2018). Mobile solidarities and precariousness at City Plaza: beyond vulnerable and disposable lives. Studies in Social Justice, 12 (1), 111–32. Tazzioli, M. (2020). Governing migrant mobility through mobility: containment and dispersal at the internal frontiers of Europe. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 38 (1), 3–19. Van Houtum, H. and Bueno Lacy, R. (2020). The migration map trap. On the invasion arrows in the cartography of migration. Mobilities, 15 (2), 196–219. Van Liempt, I. (2011). Different geographies and experiences of ‘assisted’ types of migration: a gendered critique on the distinction between trafficking and smuggling. Gender, Place & Culture, 18 (2), 179–93. Walters, W. (2002). Deportation, expulsion, and the international police of aliens. Citizenship Studies, 6 (3), 265–92. Watkins, J. (2017). Australia’s irregular migration information campaigns: border externalization, spatial imaginaries, and extraterritorial subjugation. Territory, Politics, Governance, 5 (3), 282–303. Wimmer, A. and Glick Schiller, N. (2002). Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social sciences. Global Networks, 2 (4), 301–34. Xiang, B. and Lindquist, J. (2014). Migration infrastructure. International Migration Review, 48, 122–48.

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46. Military geographies Geography and ‘military’ Military phenomena are inherently geographical, and geography as a discipline has a long history of engagement with military activities. Traditional military geography focuses on the influence of geomorphology, terrain, weather and ecology on the pursuit of military activities, and sees itself as contributory to the pursuit of military activities. Geography as a discipline has a long history of entanglement with military activities; the colonial and imperial projects of nation-states, particularly during the nineteenth century, required both military power and an understanding of the geographies of the places targeted for violent territorial control and resource extraction, and professional connections between the military and geography were consolidated through both institutions and individuals. A more critical contemporary approach to military geographies explores the myriad ways through which military activities and phenomena are geographically constituted and expressed (see Rech et al., 2015 and Woodward, 2019). The category of ‘military’ refers to organizations with state-legitimated authority for the use of lethal violence, and the people and practices involved in those activities. The term ‘military’ has general utility as a descriptor marking out this relationship between the state and lethal forces. Although we focus here on state military actors and actions, it could be argued that paramilitary phenomena and activities could also be viewed through this same geographical lens, despite the non-state basis for such operations. We should also note that military forces are not solely deployed for the exercise of lethal force; peace-keeping and peace support operations, and civil assistance (often in response to environmental hazards), are also significant for many militaries. Indeed, geographers and others have also noted that militaries perform cultural-political work – for example, through specific kinds of representation in popular culture (Basham, 2016; Cree, 2020a). Geographical disciplinary engagements with military activities and phenomena centre on the spaces and spatialities through

which military power operates (and may be resisted). These spaces and spatial relations are multiple and varied; military power is manifest geographically in complex ways, at a range of scales from the individual body to the collective armed force, from the detail of personal kit to the large scale of the battlespace, and from the very public to the very private. Military power across the contemporary world is inextricably rooted in colonial and imperial legacies, neocolonial presents and post-colonial futures, and its shaping of spaces, places, landscapes and environments is constant and always evolving. In this entry, we suggest something of this range through an examination of people, the spaces and places of military activities, and the temporalities of military geographical engagements. We conclude with reflections on the ways geographers might think of the categories of ‘military’ and ‘civilian’, as a consequence of this overview of military geographies.

People and bodies Centring people as a core focus of geography’s engagements with military phenomena and practices prioritizes the idea that military activities and phenomena are the outcome of human endeavour, ultimately under the control of and accountable to people. With a few notable exceptions, the world’s nation-states have established military forces, even if their organization and stated purposes vary greatly. The geographies of military personnel start with observations about their location and distribution; military forces when not operational are always located somewhere, and this fact of location will always have wider economic, social, political and cultural effects on civilian populaces (Ware et al., 2022). Localities that are home sites for an infantry unit may be shaped in very different ways from localities where naval intelligence functions take place, for example. Sites for military training may rotate in and out of use; the consequences for a locality of sequential groups of visiting military personnel will be distinctive. Consideration of military personnel must include an alertness to the demographics of these distinctively structured groups, which are always organized through some kind of

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ranked hierarchy. Gender is a structuring factor across the vast majority of the world’s military forces, and most military forces tend to be numerically dominated by men (see chapters in Woodward and Duncanson, 2017). Women may have access to all roles and jobs in a military, or may be confined to specific functions; broad patterns across time and space have shown the dominance of men in direct combat posts and of women in support functions. This in turn is geographical, because of the ways in which spaces of military operations, training, basing and administration come to be gendered, and the ways in which gendered social relations and military gendered identities play out in place and across space. The heteronormativity pervasive across the majority of military forces will also shape the spatialities of military participation. For some military forces, ethnicity is also a structuring factor in the demography of personnel and there is little evidence that minority ethnic populations in any nation-state are proportionally represented with an all-volunteer force. An intersectional analysis of the gendered and racialized dynamics of military participation will always reveal nuance and detail within broad patterns, as shown, for example in Sasson-Levy’s (2017) comparisons between the United States and the Israeli militaries. There is inevitably a spatiality to these patterns, played out in settings as different as the domestic spaces of barracks blocks or the places of deployment. Military demographics also rest, ultimately, on recruitment; the differences between conscripted and all-volunteer forces can be stark in terms of age, gender and ethnicity. These differences in turn play out geographically; conscription is widely recognized as a process that amongst other things attempts to inculcate within recruits (who are inevitably very young adults) a sensibility around national identity and identification. Recruitment of all-volunteer forces is often a geographically uneven process within nation-states. Bodies and people are mobilized by and for militaries in ways that go far beyond physical participation in the armed forces. Militaries rely on diffuse paid and unpaid labour networks made up of people and communities with varying levels of involvement in the armed forces themselves. The spouses of military personnel, for example,

provide different kinds of labour for militaries that can be material, emotional or discursive (Cree, 2020b; Hyde, 2016), often including childcare, domestic/household duties and emotional support. This (largely unpaid) labour is gendered as it is undertaken mostly by women, and without it many of the common demands of military service, such as long periods of overseas deployment, would not be met. As a result, the nuclear family has historically been recognized as being an ideological linchpin for the functioning of military forces. Military families have their own geographies, which are often transient due to the nature of military participation, although this varies between countries, services and individual families. Local people in communities with a high military presence are also implicated in military practices, often by virtue of their paid employment within expansive local supply chains that support military bases. Military personnel will, at some point or another, leave military service, whether through voluntary retirement, involuntary dismissal, or desertion. Although for most nation-states, reliable national data on patterns of resettlement does not exist, post-military lives have their own geographies (Herman and Yarwood, 2014). Furthermore, although recruitment is universally of physically fit, mentally well, able-bodied people, significant proportions of former personnel live with mental and physical injuries, which additionally shape post-military transitions. Beyond thinking about the role of people, scholarship in military studies has also called attention to the body as a site in and through which military power is practised. Recent work has explored how the embodied self is wrapped up in and entangled with processes of militarization, militarism and war, and how the individual and collective body is implicated in these (see Bulmer and Jackson, 2016; Dyvik, 2016). From this view, the work that militaries do, as well as the sites and bodies that military power occupies, become much more diverse.

Spaces and places Military activities always take place, and this fact is a core focus of military geographical inquiry. Taxonomies of military functions Rachel Woodward and Alice Cree

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have traditionally looked at military spatial effects in terms of land-based activities (for basing, training and, of course, the battlefield), sea and air, although space and cyberspaces are increasingly significant as realms of military engagement. Within those broad categories, most analysts would concur that old-established distinctions between spaces of active operations and of spaces of (relatively undisturbed) life on the home front or behind the lines, have broken down in the twenty-first century. Evolutions in the ways in which armed conflict is conducted, particularly the development of technologies enabling remote airborne operations, are the reason for this. Warfare is always geographical, but the ways in which those geographies are constituted and expressed by armed violence change over time. Contemporary scholarship identifies in particular the extent to which contemporary armed conflict is an urban phenomenon; this has had an enormous impact on the ways in which civilians become caught up in state violence through death, injury, displacement, hunger, disease and disruption of social life. Civilian involvement in military conflict has rendered twenty-first-century warfare inherently biopolitical. Analysts are also increasingly attuned to the environmental impacts of armed conflict and all the activities that make the deployment of military force possible, and linking these explicitly to planetary-wide environmental degradation and climate change (see, for example, Belcher et al., 2020). Globally, we all live with the constant threat of total place annihilation through the potential military use of nuclear weapons, the production of which has its own toxic geographies (Alexis-Martin, 2019). The shaping – environmentally, socially, economically, politically, culturally – of geographical space and of specific places by military activities must be understood as an outcome of all those activities. Military operations rest on support, service and supply functions. Logistics operations and supply chains are key elements of military assemblages, whether it is the supply of bullets for training for operations or soap for use in military base bathrooms to ensure hygiene and health. Supply chains in turn are constitutive of wider geographies of production, transportation and consumption (Cowen, 2014; Khalili, 2020). The defence manufacturing industry and the global trade in arms envelope disparate places associated with the Rachel Woodward and Alice Cree

extraction and processing of raw materials, research and development, testing, production and (increasingly) training in the use of weapons systems. Global financial networks funding the defence industry and arms trade have a recognized geography, and themselves shape place in a variety of ways. In places with concentrated military populations, the knock-on effects of this military presence on the wider community can be significant and varied; for example, access to employment opportunities for local people may be enhanced, but fluctuations in numbers of personnel and families can be challenging for healthcare and education planning and provision (see Ware et al., 2022). A notable feature of twenty-first-century military activities in some capitalist economies has been the wide extension and consolidation of outsourcing of certain functions to private sector companies by military forces. The spread of outsourcing of military functions to non-military personnel, with its own distinctive geographies around labour supply, organization and financing, mirrors patterns elsewhere in the public sector around the provision of public goods such as health, education, utilities and infrastructure. Quite aside from the task of identifying and tracking this economic evolution and its military geographical impacts, it should also be noted how the scale of the turn to outsourcing starts to destabilize the category ‘military’ that we noted at the start of this piece, and we return to this in our conclusion. We cannot straightforwardly distinguish between ‘military’ and ‘civilian’ worlds and people when militaries rely so heavily on the labour and production of non-military workers.

Temporalities and legacies An awareness of temporality and change through space is critical to fully understanding the geographies of military activities (Forsyth, 2019). Globally, contemporary military forces operate in a world shaped by the past imperial ambitions of a handful of nation-states, around resource extraction and trade. They operate in a present shaped fundamentally by a global political economy that prioritizes market-based strategies orientated towards ever-increasing economic growth for some nation-states. They operate too in both

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international and domestic contexts where a sophisticated post-colonial critique of state colonial power and its consequences identifies military priorities and practices over time as a locus for damage to people, societies and environments, with horrendous consequences and lasting legacies, and looks to alternative futures. This awareness of temporality and change has prompted a wealth of research over the years into the meaning of military legacies. Most commonly, this has focused on the memorialization practices undertaken by people and made monumental in stone, and their forms and functions. It is a truism that their meanings change with the passage of time and generations; places determined as a locus for solemn memory may gain or lose their meaning over time. It is also notable that the geographies of military legacies can be understood in quite different ways through the emergence of new media for their apprehension. At the same time, much older forms of human sociality involving people being physically present in place continue, albeit in new forms and, whether marking the repatriation of war dead or providing a public celebration of military institutions, there is always a politics to this social spatiality (McGarry, 2022). A concern with the legacies of militaries and violent military action may point to a linear process of change in which war preparation, war itself, and war’s aftermath occur in a consecutive way. However, it has been noted that these processes and temporalities are in fact entangled. In military terms, the ongoing process of mobilizing and demobilizing military forces is referred to as ‘churn’, but this concept also speaks in broader terms to the cyclical nature of military participation and war-making (see MacLeish, 2020). For example, activities that come ‘after’ war such as practices of recovery for veterans and memorialization of dead service personnel may also be a form of war preparation in that they provide the social, cultural and political conditions for future war-making (Ware et al., 2022). Geographers and others continue to explore how military pasts are intertwined with and help to shape military presents and futures.

Conclusion In this entry, we have examined the people, spaces and places of military activities, and the temporalities that military geographical engagements occupy. Military power is manifest geographically in complex ways; the task of geographical analysis is to explain these complex geographies without losing sight of their origins in the state pursuit of political power through violent means. The idea of militarization, particularly of everyday life, has gained significant traction in geographical analyses of social phenomena in the twenty-first century (see, for example, Dawney, 2020). As analysts of military phenomena, we are increasingly of the view that binary ways of thinking about so-called ‘civil’ and ‘military’ worlds are no longer helpful, and that the idea of militarization can sometimes obscure quite fundamental connections between ‘military’ and ‘civil’ phenomena even whilst it attempts to reveal them (Woodward, Jenkings and Williams, 2016). Work on embodiment has shown that military power works through and is enacted by diverse individual and collective bodies, to the extent that we are all in some way implicated in its functioning. The outsourcing of so many functions of the military to companies in the private sector means that the lines between civilian and military forms of employment are now more blurred than ever. Furthermore, as we look to the future, even the fighting of wars – one of the most fundamental functions of military forces – is likely to happen on increasingly ambiguous ‘cyber’ terrain. Militaries are all around and everywhere, but, of course, they always have been. There is nothing that exists somehow ‘beyond’ the military, and there is no ‘clean’ civilian space. The work that militaries do is becoming more complex, occupying new spaces, and mobilizing bodies in new ways. A future research agenda in this area must be attuned to these complexities, as well as the opportunities for critical engagement they bring (Woodward, 2019). In practice, this will mean pluralizing the sites in which we ‘do’ military geographical research, as well as rethinking our methodological approaches. Creative methods in military research might, for example, help to shed new light on those aspects of militarized cultures that have as yet Rachel Woodward and Alice Cree

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gone unexamined (Cree, 2022). As the geographies of military phenomena evolve, so too must the methodologies we use to unpack and understand them. Rachel Woodward and Alice Cree

References and selected further reading Alexis-Martin, B. (2019). Disarming Doomsday: The Human Impact of Nuclear Weapons since Hiroshima. London: Pluto. Basham, V.M. (2016). Gender, race, militarism and remembrance: the everyday geopolitics of the poppy. Gender, Place & Culture, 23 (6), 883–96. Belcher, O., Bigger, P., Neimark, B. and Kennelly, C. (2020). Hidden carbon costs of the ‘everywhere war’: logistics, geopolitical ecology, and the carbon boot-print of the US military. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45 (1), 65–80. Bulmer, S. and Jackson, D. (2016). ‘You do not live in my skin’: embodiment, voice, and the veteran. Critical Military Studies, 2 (1–2), 25–40. Cowen, D. (2014). The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cree, A. (2020a). ‘People want to see tears’: military heroes and the ‘Constant Penelope’ of the UK’s Military Wives Choir. Gender, Place & Culture, 27 (2), 218–38. Cree, A. (2020b). Sovereign wives? An emotional politics of precarity and resistance in the UK’s

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Military Wives Choir. International Political Sociology, 14 (3), 304–22. Cree, A (ed.) (2022). Creative Methods in Military Studies. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Dawney, L. (2020). Figurations of wounding: soldiers’ bodies, authority, and the militarisation of everyday life. Geopolitics, 25 (5), 1099–117. Dyvik, S.L. (2016). ‘Valhalla rising’: gender, embodiment and experience in military memoirs. Security Dialogue, 47 (2), 133–50. Forsyth, I. (2019). A genealogy of military geographies: complicities, entanglements and legacies. Geography Compass, 13 (3), Article e12422. Herman, A. and Yarwood, R. (2014). From services to civilian: the geographies of veterans’ post-military lives. Geoforum, 53, 41–50. Hyde, A. (2016). The present tense of Afghanistan: accounting for space, time and gender in processes of militarisation. Gender, Place & Culture, 23 (6), 857–68. Khalili, L. (2020). Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula. London: Verso. MacLeish, K. (2020). Churn: mobilization– demobilization and the fungibility of American military life. Security Dialogue, 51 (2–3), 194–210. McGarry, R. (2022). Visualising liminal military landscape: a small scale study of Armed Forces Day in the United Kingdom. Critical Military Studies, 8 (3), 273–98. Rech, M., Bos, D., Jenkings, K.N., Williams, A. and Woodward, R. (2015). Geography, military geography, and critical military studies. Critical Military Studies, 1 (1), 47–60. Sasson-Levy, O. (2017). Ethnicity and gender in militaries: an intersectional analysis. In R. Woodward and C. Duncanson (eds) (2017), The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 125–43. Ware, V., Dawes, A., Pariyar, M. and Cree, A. (2022). The Military in our Midst. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Woodward, R. (ed.) (2019). A Research Agenda for Military Geographies. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Woodward, R. and Duncanson, C. (eds) (2017). The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Woodward, R., Jenkings, K.J. and Williams, A.J. (2016). The UK armed forces and the value of the university armed service units. Political Geography, 161 (1), 32–9.

47. Mobilities Everything moves, from the molecular to the universal. The concept of mobility, the ways that human and non-human elements move from point a to point b, has both material and intellectual aspects to it. Movement happens in and across space, scale and time. Social worlds are made up of the movement of people, goods, ideas and the relationships, and processes between them, and therefore ‘mobility’ has become a key concept of study and theory within geography. Studies explore the qualities of mobility such as friction, speed or stillness; spaces, systems, and infrastructures of mobility; materialities such as bicycles, aeroplanes or carbon emissions; and mobile subjects encompassing migration, transport or policies. Yet, despite the seemingly endless ways that mobility affects daily life, mobility must not be fetishized (Adey, 2006). A geographical perspective on mobility considers the frictions, immobilities and varied constraints that affect movement and the ways that mobility can also be constitutive of space. Mobility happens for different purposes, it is experienced in differentiated ways, and embodied in different forms. The ‘new mobilities paradigm’ emerged in 2006 and is now over a decade old. Its approach to mobilities considers the socio-political functions and effects of, and on, mobility in understanding its relationship with societies and space (Sheller and Urry, 2006). This paradigm organizes thinking about mobility in three ways: in relation to politics, practices and place. Mobility is always political. The differentiation or unevenness of mobility is shaped through a combination of situation, history and decision making, and the importance of attending to the forces, conflicts, debates and people associated with shaping particular mobilities. Who decides who or what gets to move, and who and what do not? Who decides what sort of infrastructure is built where? And under what circumstances are such decisions made? Second, there are specific practices associated with mobility. Mobility is rarely spontaneous; it is often deliberate, whether it is voluntary or involuntary. The practices of mobility are varied: for example, walking, running, driving, flying, shipping and logistics, the movement of ideas through sharing – in person or in virtual space in the media,

schools or homes. In thinking through the practices of mobility we can think about how they might be political. A family taking a weekend walk in the British countryside has a very different meaning and context (getting some exercise and fresh air in ‘nature’) than a family taking an overseas journey in a rubber raft (fleeing a war-torn country for safety). While the history of walking in Britain, for example, is politically associated with struggles over access to land and private property through its modern origins in the Kinder Trespass, which established a ‘right to roam’, hill walking has evolved to connote a very middle-class, British pastime for people interested in nature conservation, health and well-being. Third, mobility always happens somewhere, it is in itself constitutive of space, and is a means by which to move from point a to point b. Therefore, geographers think about the spatial aspects of mobility as relational. Mobility can be a process to move something or someone, such as commuting to work or school. In this sense, mobility is a link between places. But it is also a space in and of itself – the bus, train or car that one might use to commute is a space where things happen – you might be the driver, or if a passenger, you may read, knit, engage in conversation, sleep or undertake any other number of activities. These mundane encounters while commuting are increasingly understood as micro-political spaces of encounter, or ‘ongoing processes of transformation that take place through events and encounters on the move’ (Bissell, 2016, p. 395). Transportation is often the first thing associated with mobilities. Transport mobilities focuses on the modes used to travel, such as walking, cycling, driving, flying and so on. Transportation is connected through space via different forms of infrastructure to ensure the movement of transport happens as smoothly and efficiently as possible. It can be broken down into three areas: travel, commuting, and shipping and logistics. Travel generally happens during non-work hours for non-work functions. It may or may not be regular, and it may or may not be voluntary. It can be for the purpose of leisure such as going on holiday, or migration – changing one’s residence. Commuting is a habitual form of travel, the cyclical movement of people that does not assume a permanent change of residence occurring for the purposes of daily life such

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as regular work, study, religious observance, caring duties and so on. Shipping and logistics focus on moving goods and resources across space and involve multi-modal forms of transport. Shipping is the act of sending something elsewhere, while logistics refers to the planning and infrastructure associated with shipping. Within these various modes and practices of transport, the underlying questions that geographers examine are: ‘how’ and for what ‘benefit’ does mobility occur? Transport infrastructures support modes of transportation including ports (air and sea, train stations) and pathways (roads, railways, flight paths, trails, pavements, waterways, pipelines). They link modes of transport irrespective of purpose, serving both economic and social purposes. Transport infrastructures are grounded forms of mobility in the landscape. These infrastructures, like train tracks or roads, are how people move for commuting or leisure, but also how we move cargo shipments of food or other goods. The quality and capacity of infrastructure investment and the upkeep of it affect how effective and efficient mobilities work globally. Transport infrastructures also incorporate the movement of people. Migration is a key area of mobility studies, relating not only to the movement of people, but also to how migratory movements shape places. Migration mobilities demonstrate how mobility is not a given in everyday life and how and why mobility and immobility are always political (Cresswell, 2010). Migrant mobilities are inherently tied up with territory, borders and sovereignty, and as such are increasingly understood as constitutive of contemporary geopolitics (Hyndman, 2012). For example, the expanding securitization of migration across state borders highlights the processes (e.g., visa applications), technologies (e.g., passports), socialities (e.g., social networks) and infrastructures (e.g., border crossings) of domestic and international politics and how they are imbricated in the development and exercise of state rule and sovereignty. Who has the ability to cross borders, or leave one’s home, and under what circumstances, have always been aspects of migration studies, which is increasingly understood through a mobilities lens. This approach draws out complex interrelations of migration in association with crises such as war, famine, and the climate emergency. Cristina Temenos

Questions of mobility justice are a hallmark of the field (Sheller, 2018). A mobilities approach to transportation, for example, does not simply look at the modal split of transport, it also aims to understand how, why, and to what effect do transportation infrastructures, policies, laws, practices and cultures affect how people live. This approach analyses how power and inequality inform and are affected by the patterns and governance of movement. The racial politics of mobility is one emergent subject. Pushing for a deeper historicization of race within a context of colonial and imperialist governance regimes, work on the racial politics of mobilities examines the racialized experiences of im(mobilities) globally and how such materialities might help inform differential understandings of contemporary mobilities (Nicholson and Sheller, 2016). The racial politics of mobility, and mobility justice more broadly, focus on empirically driven and theoretically informed analysis of questions such as ‘How does the implementation of alternative transport infrastructures affect (or not) access to mobility and in what ways are race, gender and class among other markers of identity differentially affected?’ (Attoh, 2019). The racial disparity of bus ridership in US cities, for example, has profound effects on impoverished, predominantly black, communities, as buses are often ignored by transport activists in favour of flashier forms of public transport, including light rail or the installation of bike lanes, which tend to be routed through middle-class and wealthier (often white) neighbourhoods. Analysing transportation politics through the racial politics of mobility justice helps to explain how links between race and poverty are structurally inscribed. Another focus of mobility justice is the relationship between material mobility infrastructures and forms of ownership and governance of these spaces. The climate crisis is a key driver of mobility in the twenty-first century. Climate refugees from countries such as Kiribati and Bangladesh have already been permanently displaced. Sea-level rise and other environmental changes due to the climate crisis could see up to 200 million people displaced by 2050. The burden of supporting climate refugees is, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), likely to fall on the poorest countries. Therefore, transition to zero carbon fuel sources starting in the Global

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North, which consumes a greater share of carbon, is essential to stem negative effects of human-induced climate change. This transition requires changing fuel and a move away from auto-centred lifestyles. Therefore, decisions over how infrastructures are upgraded, expanded, repaired, demolished and remade are important to assess based on initiatives attempting to achieve a fairer, more socially just world. Commoning mobility is one such approach that articulates a way of thinking about the material and the personal ways that mobility is governed and how it might be thought of as a collective good rather than an individual right or choice (Nikolaeva et al., 2019). Not all mobility is voluntary, but also not all forms of mobility are voluntary. A person might want to commute to work by bicycle, for example, but the road infrastructure may not be safe. Or someone living in Vancouver may want to undertake a work-related trip to San Francisco via train, yet the cost of the ticket may be triple that of a flight and the length of the journey 2–3 days by train vs 2.5 hours by plane. Therefore, someone who may be committed to flying less to reduce CO2 emissions is unable to do so because of how transport infrastructures have been governed in North America. An approach to commoning mobility in this example might be to ask, in what ways can rail infrastructure be governed or regulated to make passenger travel more efficient and cost-effective? Would price caps on train tickets and priority for passenger (over cargo) trains help? Would investment in high-speed rail engender a collective pride and interest in increasing train travel? Would frequent-flyer caps or carbon taxes on flights change the balance of costs in travel? Commoning mobility then shifts thinking away from a focus on infrastructure as the sole object of analysis and brings in relational questions of governance that focus on how political debates about mobility transitions can be reconfigured to increase social justice and equity in mobility globally. A third significant focus of mobilities is the mobility of ideas. In geography, this has crystallized around studies of ‘policy mobilities’. Policy mobilities focus on social processes of circulating models of best practice in policy and planning (McCann and Ward, 2011; Peck and Theodore, 2010). It is concerned with the spaces of knowledge production and circu-

lation, with the actors involved in creating, mobilizing and implementing policies and programmes; and, importantly, policy mobilities is concerned with questions of power and politics involved in the mobilization of best-practice (or worst) knowledge. A mobilities perspective on the transfer of ideas has broadened debates to incorporate acknowledgement that transfer happens through socio-material networks or assemblages, or the drawing together of people, resources and infrastructure for particular purposes (Baker and McGuirk, 2017). Acknowledging that space is more than a container for socio-political processes, this perspective incorporates analyses of how the material world affects, and is affected by, how ideas travel. In so doing, it brings into question the glamorization of free and fast-flowing ideas through different places, and highlights the messy and mundane spaces where ideas are conceived, advocated for, adopted and implemented. These spaces include ephemeral event spaces such as conferences, planning offices, coffee shops and medical services, as well as spaces of social media, galleries and protest sites, to name but a few. This acknowledgement also brings into focus the ways that spaces act as particular ‘moorings’ for ideas – places where policy concepts can be discussed and realized on the ground. Policy tours of best-practice programmes are one example of how space becomes an important mooring point (Cook, Ward and Ward, 2014). Here, planners, politicians and other stakeholders involved in policy implementation travel to places where a particular ‘best-practice’ policy has been enacted. Seeing it first-hand, there are opportunities to engage with other practitioners and programme users and ask questions ‘in the field’, which often has lasting effects on those on the policy tours, increasing the likelihood that they will be open to advocating for and implementing a similar policy or programme in their own city or town. These actors, policy tourists turned advocates, can exert important influence on whether and how a policy is mobilized. In addition to ‘experts’, such as consultants, architects, planners or politicians involved in developing a best-practice policy, ‘ordinary actors’ are just as involved in mobilizing policy knowledge (Baker, McCann and Temenos, 2020). While there are often certain Cristina Temenos

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charismatic figures that become associated with a particular policy, a policy mobilities approach also acknowledges that mobilization happens through a wide range of actors that contribute to legitimizing ‘best-practice’ models in a multitude of ways, including through conference presentations, public talks and university research on particular topics (Jacobs and Lees, 2013). The focus on actors, both the ordinary and the expert, in knowledge mobilization leads to nuanced understandings of the political commitments and how relationships between actors make use of and also constitute social infrastructures of knowledge transfer. Finally, the politics of mobilizing knowledge has been at the heart of critical engagements with policy mobilities since its inception. The question of which ideas are acknowledged as best practice is not straightforward. Specific ideas serve certain interests more than others. For example, the aforementioned prioritizing of cycle lanes and light rail/tram services in urban redevelopment is seen as an important low-carbon intervention, while also allowing cities to claim their infrastructural upgrades, which are accompanied by new trains or a bike-share scheme, are markers of a ‘world-class’ city. Simultaneously, this often comes at the cost of prioritizing less ‘sexy’ bus infrastructure. Bus infrastructure, however, is often cheaper and serves poor and working-class neighbourhoods, while cycle lanes and light rail are often built in wealthier parts of the city. Therefore best-practice infrastructural development models become not only a question of environment or global cachet, but also a question about equity and mobility justice. The politics of mobilizing knowledge also raises questions of how debates on best practice are negotiated in the public sphere in terms of both formal political negotiations and looking at wider de facto political contestations over ideological positioning of right and wrong. For example, the ways that drug policies criminalizing the use of many psychoactive substances are viewed on international and local scales have changed over time. Whether the use of certain drugs should be seen as a criminal or a public health issue has increased in debate over the past two decades. There is ample scientific and policy evidence that a public health approach to drug use is more humane, is linked to better treatment and recovery rates, is linked Cristina Temenos

to lower crime rates, and is cost-effective across a number of financially constrained services including policing, accident and emergency, and public health and social care. However, decriminalizing drug use is still a hotly contested issue at international, national, regional and local governmental levels, thus demonstrating that what might be ‘best practice’ from an evidence-based policy perspective may still fail to mobilize because it is a deeply political issue extending to questions of power and control. Future directions in mobilities research are focusing on issues of justice, power and the politics of movement. Mobilities research is engaging intersecting economic, social, environmental and health crises through relational perspectives on social and material infrastructures of transport, migration and governance. Cristina Temenos

References and selected further reading Adey, P. (2006). If mobility is everything then it is nothing: towards a relational politics of (im) mobilities. Mobilities, 1 (1), 75–94. Attoh, K.A. (2019). Rights in Transit: Public Transportation and the Right to the City in California’s East Bay. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Baker, T. and McGuirk, P. (2017). Assemblage thinking as methodology: commitments and practices for critical policy research. Territory, Politics, Governance, 5 (4), 425–42. Baker, T., McCann, E. and Temenos, C. (2020). Into the ordinary: non-elite actors and the mobility of harm reduction policies. Policy and Society, 39 (1), 129–45. Bissell, D. (2016). Micropolitics of mobility: public transport commuting and everyday encounters with forces of enablement and constraint. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 106 (2), 394–403. Cook, I., Ward, S. and Ward, K. (2014). A springtime journey to the Soviet Union: postwar planning and policy mobilities through the Iron Curtain. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38 (3), 805–22. Cresswell, T. (2010). Towards a politics of mobility. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28 (1), 17–31. Hyndman, J. (2012). The geopolitics of migration and mobility. Geopolitics, 17 (2), 243–55. Jacobs, J. and Lees, L. (2013). Defensible space on the move: revisiting the urban geography of

Mobilities  249 Alice Coleman. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37 (5), 1559–83. McCann, E. and Ward, K. (eds) (2011). Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Nicholson, J. and Sheller, M. (2016). Race and the politics of mobility – introduction. Transfers, 6 (1), 4–11. Nikolaeva, A., Adey, P. and Cresswell, T. et al. (2019). Commoning mobility: towards a new politics of mobility transitions. Transactions

of the Institute of British Geographers, 44 (2), 346–60. Peck, J. and Theodore, N. (2010). Mobilizing policy: models, methods, and mutations. Geoforum, 41 (2), 169–74. Sheller, M. (2018). Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes. London: Verso. Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 38 (2), 207–26.

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48. Music Human geographers exploring music offer important insights into the varied ways social, cultural and economic relationships shape ideas about place, identity and community. A focus on music can tell us much about spatial and social processes behind these ideas in terms of representation, such as the use of music genres and styles to express identity and identification with social groups. More recent work on music’s non-representational qualities has opened up new directions, revealing how experiences of listening, performing and composing shape, mediate and influence what we might mean by place, who we are and where we belong. Music can be associated with particular images, emotions and meanings, as well as shaping social action. Nonetheless, music can also be used to erect boundaries and maintain distinctions between groups of people. Thus, music is not a benign cultural object. Rather its acoustic and aesthetic properties, as well as the emotional and affective responses generated in creating, listening and moving to music, are attributed certain ideological meanings constituted out of various contexts. This in turn indicates that meanings attributed to music, including designations of noise and sound, are expressions of power. Given these broad approaches to a geographical exploration of music, music is then both an object of study as well as providing theoretical and methodological frameworks for discovering such temporal and spatial relations. While these approaches and interest have a relatively recent history in the discipline of geography, from an Indigenous perspective music continues to be a fundamental way of knowing and engaging in relations with the world (Bawaka Country et al., 2020; Robinson, 2020; Wyld and Fredericks, 2015). This perspective is focused on relationality and the responsibilities that are then required that emerge out of the performance of, and attendance to, song and music. However, there are significant ontological differences between Western and Indigenous conceptualizations of song (Robinson, 2020). Music, song and performance are more than aesthetic representations; rather, they bring ‘listeners back into relationship with place not just through its hearing but through its feeling’ (ibid., p. 45). These relations locate

Indigenous people with ancestors, descendants, homeland and its flora, fauna and climate, as well as connections with other homelands (Bawaka Country et al., 2020). This understanding of the relations between music and place is beginning to inform non-Indigenous geographical research, such as in non-representational theory and more-than-human frameworks. Geographical studies of music from the late twentieth century often aligned with studies in anthropology and ethnomusicology and examined music as representative of a group or community through the maintenance of highly patterned and stable sound profiles (Frith, 1996). Geographers initially sought to uncover the spatial diffusion patterns of distinct social groups through differing musical styles and genres (Carney, 1997). Yet, this focus fails to recognize the social and cultural contexts in which music is produced and consumed, nor does it consider the intersections, interactions and collaborations occurring between local and global forms of music production. While there is some correlation between sound structures and social structures (Feld, 1984), there is an underlying assumption that musical structures are linked to specific social groups who create and consume specific music genres. This has been challenged not least because of essentialist assumptions about constructions of identity, but also because it contradicts what occurs in everyday practices of music making and listening (Frith, 1996). Geographers have since turned to examine the ways in which a sense of place is evoked through such things as lifestyle and associated music genres (Connell and Gibson, 2003; Smith, 1997), or the role of music in constituting particular spatial entities such as the workplace, the city, the countryside and everyday life (Bull, 2000). One example is Kong’s (1996) analysis of how Singapore musicians use lyrics, style, instrumentation and the incorporation of ethnic and cultural language groups to express a distinctly Singaporean society. From the late 1990s, scholars began to explore the experience of music as a social process that contributes to the formation of group relations and individuality (Frith, 1996). This rethinking of music and identity corresponded with geography’s post-structuralist framing of place as constituted through various connections and complex social processes within and beyond

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a specified location (Massey, 1994). A place is not simply the site in which music occurs; rather, place is formed and created through music (Leyshon, Matless and Revill, 1998). For example, Valentine’s (1995) study of the music of kd lang and its consumption by a lesbian audience offers insight into how audiences imagine and attribute meanings to place through the consumption of music. The ubiquitous presence of music in everyday life has provided opportunities to examine its role in the constitution, maintenance, regulation and challenge of social situations (Doughty, 2019; Duffy, Mair and Waitt, 2018). Indeed, individuals will use mobile audio technology to mitigate or enhance their navigation of everyday life (Bull, 2000; Waitt, Buchanan and Duffy, 2020). Music, and associated activities such as dance, offer important processes of reappropriation of public space by marginalized groups, as noted with breakdance and caporales – styles of performance specifically choreographed for streets and thoroughfares in urban places (Bertoni, 2019). Other genres, such as rap and hip hop, use lyrics to reflect on and question social and economic decay, police oppression, or life in a drug-dominated cultural milieu (Born, 2013). However, music performance can reinforce hegemonic notions of place, identity and belonging through emphasis on practices of authenticity. This is particularly evident in performances within a festival structure. While these events do provide opportunities for the celebration and challenging of ethnic and cultural identities, an emphasis on cultural authenticity may reflect the concerns of dominant groups who wish to maintain clearly demarcated identities and social hierarchies (Duffy, 2005). Some scholars have argued that while music cannot have an unequivocal relationship with a particular group of people, a ‘local’ authenticity can arise through the incorporation of different genres, musical styles, lyrics and instrumentation (Regev, 1992). Technology and digitization have proved significant tools for this, through enriching our everyday musical worlds and impacting on how we listen, produce and commercialize music (Bello and Garcia, 2021). Notions of localness are emphasized in the work of economic, tourism and urban geographers, who provide insight into music

as an industry and its contribution to local and global economies, as well as how these relations may inform place through planning and regulations. Economic geography’s examination of financial flows across the globe demonstrate that there remains a concentration of key production centres supported by the specialized economic infrastructure more readily available in the Global North (Brandellero and Pfeffer, 2011). In addition to these spatialized economic impacts, the framing of music produced outside that of Western popular forms have served to attribute certain values to different categories of music. ‘World music’, for example, exemplifies the marketing of authenticity aligned with ideas of preserved ‘otherness’ (Connell and Gibson, 2003). Some scholars argue that this interest in music from ‘elsewhere’ has produced a new aesthetic form that has reconfigured space and cultural identity (Erlmann, 1996). Others suggest that while a category like ‘world music’ is more of a marketing strategy staged by the West (Connell and Gibson, 2004), this genre nonetheless can potentially produce sites of resistance (Guilbault, 1997). Music’s connection to place, culture and identity has long been integral to the tourism industry as tourists seek experiences that capture the ‘essence’ of place through traditional performances or festivals (Gibson and Connell, 2005). Vienna and Bayreuth are prominent examples of tourism associated with music, yet examples also include travel to visit sites of music production (Abbey Road Studios), the homes of musicians and composers (‘Graceland’ and Bob Marley’s home in Jamaica), locations mentioned in song lyrics (The Beatles’ song, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, 1967), and festivals (Britain’s Glastonbury Festival, Sydney’s Mardi Gras, rave and house music in Ibiza, and trance in Goa). At the more local level, music festivals and live music venues make important contributions to the cultural and creative identities of cities and neighbourhoods (Waitt et al., 2020), which in turn may drive economic development (Ballico and Carter, 2018; Florida, Mellander and Stolarick, 2010). In response to a range of urban social and planning policies (Fincher and Iveson, 2008), music festivals have become part of strategies to increase opportunities for interaction with Michelle Duffy

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the diversity of people and help minimize social isolation and facilitate greater understanding of difference (Duffy, 2005; Mair and Duffy, 2020). From an economic geography perspective, music scenes are geographically demarcated markets in which music and associated businesses (including performance venues, music production, marketing, the food and beverage industry) are located both through social networks and physical space (Klement and Strambach, 2019). Local music scenes offer opportunities for performance, industry connections, and for developing creative and performance skills (Ballico and Carter, 2018; Gibson, 2002). However, regulations that govern these spaces, as well as development often embedded in broader gentrification changes, can arouse tensions and exacerbate already existing social inequalities, especially through increased commercial and residential rents and property prices (Ballico and Carter, 2018), which in turn can negatively impact on the local music industry (Homan, 2017). Local music scenes, festivals and associated activities have also played a significant role in transforming regional places (Bennett et al., 2020; Brennan-Horley, Connell and Gibson, 2007; Gibson, 2002; Gibson and Gordon, 2018). Framed in terms of regional development strategies, music events are promoted to local authorities working on limited budgets as a means to bring about social and economic benefits (Mair and Duffy, 2018, 2020). Research is needed for a more fine-grained analysis of regional music scenes and industry in order to capture its diversity in terms of music production and forms of consumption (Bennett et al., 2020), as well as the important role of music in sparsely populated areas in creative expression, knowledge sharing and emotional support (Gibson and Gordon, 2018) – especially important in the current context of the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, music geographies until relatively recently most often focused on sound as an object, which has meant an unintentional privileging of visual and textual discourses, such as the score or lyrics, and associated paraphernalia including instruments and promotional material. More recent

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work turns to the emotional and affective characteristics of music, drawing on performativity, embodiment, affect, and non- or more-than-representational theory as a means to access a more nuanced understanding of musical experiences. This approach places emphasis on the ‘being and doing’ of music’s ‘nonrepresentational, creative, and evanescent qualities’ (Wood, Duffy and Smith, 2007, p. 868), and thus the role played by emotions and affective relations in influencing social interactions (DeNora, 2000; Smith, 2000; Wood and Smith, 2004). The qualities of sound – rhythm, tempo, timbre, melody, tone – as well as music’s entanglement with materials, places and processes enable certain sets of relations that ‘bring spaces, peoples, places “into form”’ (Smith, 2000, p. 618). Music as an embodied cultural pursuit demonstrates the emotive power of music to communicate shared collective identities and has long been used by various social groups to help affirm belonging in and to place (Duffy et al., 2011; Gibson and Connell, 2005; Saldanha, 2002; Waitt and Duffy, 2010). Challenges for investigating the experiences of music–place relations is that these are ephemeral and difficult to express in words. Future work in this area is led by cultural geographers who have enriched the insights gained from interviews and participant observation by seeking methods that capture bodily, affective and non-verbal engagement with music. Some have developed practice-based approaches that facilitate a ‘co-intensive sensing’ of emergent space (McCormack, 2008). A focus on listening has led to a range of methodological approaches that more carefully consider the sonic qualities of music, including rhythmanalysis (Edensor, 2010; McCormack, 2002), participant sensing (Wood et al., 2007), sound diaries (Duffy and Waitt, 2011), phonography and field recordings (Gallagher and Prior, 2014), the extra-linguistic elements of communication (Kanngieser, 2012), the non-verbal components of performance (Morton, 2005; Smith, 2000), soundwalks (Gallagher, 2014) and sound mapping (Duffy, Waitt and Harada, 2016). Michelle Duffy

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References and selected further reading Ballico, C. and Carter, D. (2018). A state of constant prodding: live music, precarity and regulation. Cultural Trends, 27 (3), 203–17. Bawaka Country, Suchet-Pearson, S. and Wright, S. et al. (2020). Bunbum ga dhä-yutagum: to make it right again, to remake. Social & Cultural Geography, 21 (7), 985–1001. Bello, P. and Garcia, D. (2021). Cultural divergence in popular music: the increasing diversity of music consumption on Spotify across countries. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 8, Article 182. Bennett, A., Green, B., Cashman, D. and Lewandowski, N. (2020). Researching regional and rural music scenes: towards a critical understanding of an under-theorised issue. Popular Music and Society, 43 (4), 367–77. Bertoni, F. (2019). Resounding heterotopias: breakdance, caporales and the re-appropriation of the city. In K. Doughty, M. Duffy and T. Harada (eds), Sounding Places: More-than-Representational Geographies of Sound and Music (pp. 52–62). Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Born, G. (2013). Introduction. In G. Born (ed.), Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience (pp. 1–69). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brandellero, A. and Pfeffer, K. (2011). Multiple and shifting geographies of world music production. Area, 43 (4), 495–505. Brennan-Horley, C., Connell, J. and Gibson, C. (2007). The Parkes Elvis Revival Festival: economic development and contested place identities in rural Australia. Geographical Research, 41 (5), 71–84. Bull, M. (2000). Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and Management of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Carney, G. (1997). The Sounds of People and Places: Readings in Geography of American Folk and Popular Music. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Connell, J. and Gibson, C. (2003). Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place. London: Routledge. Connell, J. and Gibson, C. (2004). World music: deterritorializing place and identity. Progress in Human Geography, 28 (3), 342–61. DeNora, T. (2000). Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doughty, K. (2019). Rethinking musical cosmopolitanism as a visceral politics of sound. In K. Doughty, M. Duffy and T. Harada (eds), Sounding Places: More-than-Representational

Geographies of Sound and Music (pp. 189–201). Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Duffy, M. (2005). Performing identity within a multicultural framework. Social & Cultural Geography, 6 (5), 677–92. Duffy, M., Mair, J. and Waitt, G. (2018). Addressing community diversity in the role of the festival encounter. In R. Finkel and B. Sharp (eds), Accessibility, Inclusion and Diversity in Critical Events Studies (pp. 9–20). London: Routledge. Duffy, M. and Waitt, G. (2011). Sound diaries: a method of listening to place. Aether, 7, 119–36. Duffy, M., Waitt, G., Gorman-Murray, A. and Gibson, C. (2011). Bodily rhythms: corporeal capacities to engage with festival spaces. Emotion, Space and Society, 4 (1), 17–24. Duffy, M., Waitt, G. and Harada, T. (2016). Making sense of sound: visceral sonic mapping as a research tool. Emotion, Space and Society, 20, 49–57. Edensor, T. (ed.) (2010). Geographies of Rhythm: Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies. Farnham: Ashgate. Erlmann, V. (1996). The aesthetics of the global imagination: reflections on world music in the 1990s. Public Culture, 8, 467–87. Feld, S. (1984). Sound structure as social structure. Ethnomusicology, 28 (3), 383–40. Fincher, R. and Iveson, K. (2008). Planning and Diversity in the City: Redistribution, Recognition and Encounter. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Florida, R., Mellander, C. and Stolarick, K. (2010). Music scenes to music clusters: the economic geography of music in the US, 1970–2000. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 42 (4), 785–804. Frith, S. (1996). Music and identity. In S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity (pp. 108–27). London: SAGE. Gallagher, M. (2014). Sounding ruins: reflections on the production of an ‘audio drift’. Cultural Geographies, 22 (3), 467–85. Gallagher, M. and Prior, J. (2014). Sonic geographies: exploring phonographic methods. Progress in Human Geography, 38 (2), 267–84. Gibson, C. (2002). Rural transformation and cultural industries: popular music on the New South Wales Far North Coast. Australian Geographical Studies, 40 (3), 337–56. Gibson, C. and Connell, J. (2005). Music and Tourism: On the Road Again. Bristol: Channel View Publications. Gibson, C. and Gordon, A. (2018). Rural cultural resourcefulness: how community music enter-

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254  Concise encyclopedia of human geography prises sustain cultural vitality. Journal of Rural Studies, 63, 259–70. Guilbault, J. (1997). Interpreting world music: a challenge in theory and practice. Popular Music, 16 (1), 31–44. Homan, S. (2017). ‘Lockout’ laws or ‘rock out’ laws? Governing Sydney’s night-time economy and implications for the ‘music industry’. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 39, 1–15. Kanngieser, A. (2012). A sonic geography of voice: towards an affective politics. Progress in Human Geography, 36 (3), 336–53. Klement, B. and Strambach, S. (2019). Innovation in creative industries: does (related) variety matter for the creativity of urban music scenes? Economic Geography, 95 (4), 385–417. Kong, L. (1996). Popular music in Singapore: exploring local cultures, global resources and regional identities. Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 14, 273–92. Leyshon, A., Matless, D. and Revill, G. (1998). The Place of Music. New York: Guilford Press. Mair, J. and Duffy, M. (2018). The role of festivals in strengthening social capital in rural communities. Event Management, 22 (6), 875–89. Mair, J. and Duffy, M. (2020). Who has the right to the rural? Place framing and negotiating the Dungog festival, New South Wales, Australia. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 29 (2–3), 176–92. Massey, D. (1994). Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. McCormack, D. (2002). A paper with an interest in rhythm. Geoforum, 33 (4), 469–85. McCormack, D. (2008). Thinking-spaces for research creation. INFLexions, No. 1. Morton, F. (2005). Performing ethnography: Irish traditional music sessions and new methodo-

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logical spaces. Social & Cultural Geography, 6, 661–76. Regev, M. (1992). Israeli rock, or a study in the politics of ‘local authenticity’. Popular Music, 11 (1), 1–14. Robinson, D. (2020). Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Saldanha, A. (2002). Music tourism and factions of bodies in Goa. Tourist Studies, 2, 43–2. Smith, S.J. (1997). Beyond geography’s visible worlds: a cultural politics of music. Progress in Human Geography, 21 (4), 502–29. Smith, S.J. (2000). Performing the (sound)world. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18 (5), 615–37. Valentine, G. (1995). Creating transgressive space: the music of kd lang. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 20, 474–85. Waitt, G., Buchanan, I. and Duffy, M. (2020). Lively cities made in sound: a study of the sonic sensibilities of listening and hearing in Wollongong, New South Wales. Urban Studies, 57 (10), 2131–46. Waitt, G. and Duffy, M. (2010). Listening and tourism studies. Annals of Tourism Research, 37 (2), 457–77. Wood, N., Duffy, M. and Smith, S.J. (2007). The art of doing (geographies of) music. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25 (5), 867–89. Wood, N. and Smith S.J. (2004). Instrumental routes to emotional geographies. Social & Cultural Geography, 5 (4), 533–48. Wyld, F. and Fredericks, B. (2015). Earth song as storywork: reclaiming indigenous knowledges. Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues, 18 (2), 2–12.

49. Nation-state Introduction: state and nation The concept of the nation-state that emerged in seventeenth-century Europe makes important connections between people, land and politics. These complex, divergent and often turbulent inter-relations remain the central concerns of human geography. Indeed, it is the work of human geography to consider and make visible the different configurations of people, place, space, environment, politics and government. We begin here with a consideration of the term nation-state as a relatively recent phenomenon that conjoins two words that each have different and distinct meanings. Bringing them together in ‘nation-state’ blurs this specificity, especially as all three terms are often used interchangeably. Reference to nation, state and/or nation-state often elides the distinctions and obscures the histories, geographies and politics of their emergence. In what follows, we start with a discussion of the state and then move to focus on the nation. The discussion then turns to the emergence of the nation-state in Europe and then colonial and post-colonial state formations drawing out the implications for different populations across the globe. Finally, it considers the value of the notion of the nation-state in contemporary times and what this means for human geography as a field of knowledge. A state is defined through its power to rule a specific territory – its sovereignty. The spatial definition and boundaries of a state territory are subject to international agreement. State sovereignty, its sole authority to govern and defend its territory and its population, is acknowledged, reciprocated and made explicit in diplomatic relations and various agreements and treaties between states as well as through the recognition of passports. The work of the state is both outward-facing to the rest of the globe and international community and inward-facing to its constituent population. The processes of state rule include the creation of a vision and goals, decision making and policy formulation, premised on a social contract with its citizens. Crudely, this entails consent to the authority of the state in exchange for the protection of individual citizen rights.

The wide-ranging economic, political, social, legal and administrative affairs, managed by its bureaucracies, ensure state regulation within its territory. Most significantly, these control finance, taxes, information, law and citizenship. Importantly, the social contract between the state and its citizens gives it legitimate authority to use force within its territorial limits. The police force and army are the main vectors of state violence, legitimated within the law and protected by the sovereignty of the state government. Systems of accountability, integral to good governance, have an important part to play in the legitimation of state regulation and in modulating the use of state power. This depends, however, upon the configuration of different state governments and systems of rule that may be described, for example, as military, democratic, autocratic or dictatorship. These different forms of political leadership operate different modes of communication with, and regulation of their constituent populations. Elections are a common means through which national citizens express their views and preferences about their governments. However, social and news media also have some influence on government policy and practices by offering ongoing commentary and critique of government affairs. The state response to elections, media and public pressure depends on the political regime. In some cases, it can precipitate a change in government, its representatives and personnel or policy, and in others the response might be state violence, the effective silencing of dissent and/ or a coup d’état. While international pressure may be brought to bear on the excessive use of violence, these protests are channelled through the political structures of the very same nation-state. The notion of national sovereignty remains largely intact, even if, as we show below, it is always vulnerable to the vagaries of global politics. The idea of the state, the structures of government and their guiding political regimes are more specified, formalized and rationalized than the concept of the nation. The nation is much more nebulous and fluid. In general, it refers to a group of people who claim particular histories and cultures as central to their national identity. References to common ethnicity, religion and language especially through history, land and kinship/ blood ties, all play a part in the construction

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of a nation. The sense of belonging attached to nation contrasts with the technical and legal specifications, conditions and regulations that states employ to grant citizenship. The distinction is important as the claim to a nation-state implies an overlapping unity, while nation and state rarely map neatly onto one another (Guibernau, 1996). Indeed, Sparke (2016) looks at the geographies of struggle that at once underlie and undermine the hyphen in contemporary nation-states.

Histories of nation-state formation The nation-state has become the model of government across the globe despite the often unstable connection between nation and state (see Sparke, 2016 on the changing idea of the nation-state over time). It is associated with modern forms of liberal democracy that have been intrinsic to the development of capitalism in the Western world. Historically, the idea of a state with authority over its territorial boundaries emerged in Europe in the seventeenth century. The state was rationalized as a social contract between men who freely consented to the authority of the state in exchange for its defence of their rights, in particular the right to property. Although ostensibly ‘neutral’, this social contract held gendered, classed and racialized norms, and importantly, as part of this, was seen only as relevant for peoples in Europe. This normative view of humanity provided a justification for the ‘civilizing mission’ of European colonialism and imperialism beyond its territories (Dean, 2007). This partial and restrictive perspective was mirrored in the field of human geography itself, as it became recognized as a disciplinary field of knowledge in the eighteenth century. The idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ arose against colonial and imperialist endeavours. For Anderson (2006), this imaginary of the nation was integral to anti-colonial movements in the Americas around the end of the eighteenth century. It was then taken up in ‘nationalist’ uprisings across Europe in the nineteenth century. This may be exemplified in the ways that Garibaldi used the idea of nation to unify and consolidate Italy in 1861. As the ‘nation’ emerged as an increasingly recognizable signifier of Máiréad Dunne and Barbara Crossouard

collective solidarity, it became available for manipulation by the state. In Europe by the end of the nineteenth century, the processes of industrialization and urbanization that happened as part of the expansion of capitalism were in full swing. The wholesale movement and displacement of populations across Europe made the metaphor of the ‘nation’ particularly useful for invoking a collective identity (Bhabha, 2004). As a result, this was a time that saw the suturing of the nation to the state through ‘official nationalisms’. These actively produced a shared collective imaginary that brought citizens of the ‘nation-state’ together. State institutions such as education were critical in producing this imaginary through curricular subjects such as history, geography, citizenship and social studies as well as everyday routines such as flying flags and singing national anthems. Such banal practices, integral to the informal curriculum, remain central to the production of a national imaginary (Billig, 1995). As the nation and the state are not coterminous, the constant reiteration of the distinction and uniqueness of the nation is a means to create a sense of unity, to engender deep affective attachments and to consolidate allegiance. Observation of international sports competitions – for example, the Olympics or various World Cups – easily illustrate the affective fervour for the nation with associated anthems and flag-waving. However, the unifying narrative of nation associated with European nation-states papers over fractures of state formation. Examples may be seen in the historic disputes between France and Germany over Alsace-Lorraine as well as the Catalonian struggles for secession from Spain. The inclusions and exclusions of territory and people within nation-states are highly political and sometimes tenuous and as such they are often the locus of conflict and the site of violence.

From colonies to nation-states Social and economic conditions led to imperialist expansion in which European states claimed conquests over lands, especially in Africa and Asia (Dean, 2007). Scientific developments in ‘modernizing’ Europe were integral to the emergence of human geogra-

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phy. As a disciplinary field of knowledge, this brought together Eurocentric beliefs in environmental determinism and scientific racism with the technical knowledge of cartography. This enabled the mapping of land in ways that supported and rationalized the planning, administration and conquest in which colonial states and protectorates were set up to allow exploitation of resources, land and people beyond Europe (Boyle, 2015). At the end of the nineteenth century, the scramble for Africa saw European powers bartering with each other as they defined the territorial boundaries of around 40 colonial states and protectorates (Meredith, 2005). In many cases, territories were defined by straight-line borders drawn on a map irrespective of the allegiances of ethnicity, culture, history, language or kinship of the circumscribed populations. The Joluo people of Eastern Africa, for example, were divided by these arbitrary borders between modern-day Kenya and Tanzania. At the same time, Kenya comprises around 70 ethnic groups. The possibilities of a unifying narrative of national belonging and allegiance for the people within these territorial boundaries would appear to be remote. Colonial administration gave way to independent post-colonial nation-states in the post-World War II period. This process of transition was fraught with complexities over territory and populations, made more complex by the involvement of the departing colonial administrations. The process of independence for British India included its partition along religious lines in 1947, resulting in a Hindu-majority state in India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. This involved calamitous disruptions of land and people, with mass migrations of around 14.5 million people crossing borders amidst violence and rioting in which tens of thousands of women were raped and some 1 million people died (Butalia, 2000). To date, Kashmir in the northern region of the subcontinent remains a disputed territory vulnerable to violent conflict (Dunne et al., 2017). Elsewhere, colonial states formed the basis of newly independent nation-states often led by local elites groomed by the ex-colonial power. These post-colonial nation-states were tasked with modernization through capitalist economic development on very unequal terms (Mignolo, 2007). This saw

a rising demand for raw materials including diamonds, gold and tin and agricultural products like rubber, tea, cocoa and coffee that encouraged trade. However, internationally fixed prices resulted in low returns and limited national income. A complex combination of factors, including changing agricultural practices, poor taxation systems and environmental exploitation for oil and other minerals by external nations or multinational corporations, have produced further instabilities. Economic uncertainties and the reliance on development aid with its conditionalities, including structural adjustment, have left many national governments in a condition of suzerainity, with limited government power to control their state functions. Alongside economic development, nation-building was a key development priority in the establishment and stabilization of post-colonial nation-states. The newly installed state premiers, however, often educated by and inculcated in the ways of the colonials, were not generally supported by populist nationalism. The absence of a unifying national imaginary across populations with different ethnic, cultural and religious affiliations enclosed within often arbitrarily drawn borders has led to constant enmity, protracted violence and instability (Mamdani, 1996). The formation of Nigeria is instructive here as three regions each with distinctive configurations of ethnicity, language and religion were brought together as an independent nation-state in 1960. The differences within and between these regions makes a single narrative of national unity and belonging difficult to articulate in ways that threaten its stability as a nation-state. Attempts at secession in the south-east, incursions from Boko Haram in the north, as well as continual inter-ethnic violence, all present challenges to state government. Similarly, the establishment of Lebanon provides a further example of European colonial legacies. Here the confessional state constitution specifies members of particular religious groups for positions within the hierarchies of government. This has sedimented religious differences and sustained the historical subordination of Muslims in ways that continue to produce national and regional instability (Dunne et al., 2017). A final point here refers to the significant and divisive issue of language that haunts multi-ethnic nation-states. In many Máiréad Dunne and Barbara Crossouard

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post-colonial contexts, the question of the national language(s) has proved very difficult to navigate such that a European colonial language is often adopted, even if alongside selected Indigenous languages. The colonial language is also accorded high status such that fluency is a badge of social distinction. There are obvious educational implications of this in terms of inclusion and exclusion. This is similarly the case for state communications, the languages of bureaucracy and media. Perhaps most significantly, language is neither simple nor transparent. It carries with it histories, rationalities, epistemologies and politics that derive from the context of its emergence and its use. In other words, a colonial language has inherent limitations when it comes to understanding societies and communications elsewhere. More than this, as post-colonial scholars inform us, the use of a colonial language may also saturate and shape the colonized mind and its social and political dispositions (Fanon, 1967; Mbembe, 2017; Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo, 1986). The multiplicity illustrated in this section has direct implications for human geography, shaped as it has been by partial, modern, Eurocentric interests. This evidently needs to be recognized, exposed and critiqued such that diverse accounts and knowledges can be brought to bear on what remains an important and vibrant set of critical concerns about people, place, space, environment and politics.

Contemporary nation-states Nation-states across the contemporary world may be persistently ravaged by instabilities manifest in open conflicts over territorial boundaries and the groups (both ethnic and religious) that are recognized as citizens within them (Larmer and Lecocq, 2018). The contestations that engulfed the Balkans after the collapse of the Soviet bloc are one example of this. Another illustration is the continuing inability of post-colonial nations to sustain any semblance of economic viability in the face of global markets. An example here is a $7 billion loan between China and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In return for its commitment to develop infrastructure such as hospitals, railways and roads, this deal gave China Máiréad Dunne and Barbara Crossouard

exclusive mining rights over DRC’s cobalt and copper reserves, estimated as worth $87 billion. This is a fraction of what the minerals are worth (Andrews, 2021) and indicates how post-colonial nation-states remain subject to neocolonial social, economic and environmental exploitation. Despite the formal protection of their sovereignty within international law, infringements of nation-state borders are constant. These range from ongoing border skirmishes, such as between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, to massive use of force by the West, as in the ‘war on terror’ in the Middle East and Afghanistan. The contemporary refugee crisis, involving a record number of displaced peoples (surpassing 80 million in 2020) is also a reflection of the instabilities that are produced as an effect of the deep inequalities between different ‘nation-states’. Many of the issues discussed above highlight how nation-states are exposed to vulnerabilities that lie beyond their control. The nation-state is ostensibly independent but its freedoms are often radically constrained by global economic and political relations. For some, this has raised questions about the continuing relevance of the concept of the nation-state, and whether, as Beck (2002) suggests, it is now a ‘zombie category’. Information technologies and social media create a global public sphere, as well as exposing nation-states to global market flows and the predations of multinational corporations whose revenues can exceed national gross domestic product (GDP) figures. The proliferation of technology, information and big data provides an important reflexive space for human geography in understanding, tracing, shaping and predicting social and environmental changes in the dynamic, inequitable and yet intersecting global and local contexts. We observe, for example, that politically, economically and socially, the expanding web of multilateral organizations created after World War II impinge in multiple ways upon nation-state sovereignty, the vulnerability of post-colonial nation-states to World Bank economic policies such as structural adjustment being a key example. Nevertheless, it is evident the nation remains a key signifier in a popular imaginary of governments and their citizens. It is recurrently invoked by national leaders as part of the ongoing work to sustain a sense of national unity. This is

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particularly evident in times of threat, where ‘national’ compliance with new forms of regulation is required. The responses to the COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point. By interpellating citizens through an affective commitment to the nation, state regulation becomes a ‘voluntary’ commitment on the part of ‘free’ agents. Perhaps the contemporary resurgence of the ‘nation’ comes from its significance in installing neoliberal rationalities and the reframing of citizenship as individual responsibilization. The relationships between people, land and politics at the heart of human geography continue to be a vibrant locus for research. This rich arena for study needs to reflexively draw on and inform big data and perhaps most critically work to decolonize and vivify its lexicon, discourses and knowledges by generating and including multiple perspectives and narratives of the relations, histories and conditions of people, places and politics across the interconnected globe. Máiréad Dunne and Barbara Crossouard

References and selected further readings Anderson, B. (2006), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (revised edition), London: Verso. Andrews, K. (2021), The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World, London: Penguin Random House. Beck, U. (2002), ‘The cosmopolitan society and its enemies’, Theory, Culture & Society, 19 (1–2), 17–44. Bhabha, H.K. (2004), The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Billig, M. (1995), Banal Nationalism, London: SAGE. Boyle, M. (2015), Human Geography: A Concise Introduction, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Butalia, U. (2000), The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dean, M. (2007), Governing Societies: Political Perspectives on Domestic and International Rule, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Dunne, M., Durrani, N., Fincham, K. and Crossouard, B. (2017), Troubling Muslim Youth Identities: Nation, Religion, Gender, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fanon, F. (1967), The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin. Guibernau, M. (1996), Nationalisms: The Nation-State and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Polity Press. Larmer, M. and Lecocq, B. (2018), ‘Historicising nationalism in Africa’, Nations and Nationalism, 24 (4), 893–917. Mamdani, M. (1996), Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mbembe, A. (2017), Critique of Black Reason, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Meredith, M. (2005), The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, New York: Simon & Schuster. Mignolo, W.D. (2007), ‘Coloniality and modernity/rationality’, Cultural Studies, 21 (2–3), 155–65. Sparke, M. (2016), In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Thiong o, Ngũgĩ wa (1986), Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, London: James Currey.

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50. Nature Nature is in crisis: dangerous climate change; ocean acidification; species extermination and loss of biosphere integrity on continental scales; plastic pollution, from the peaks of the Himalayas to the abyssal ocean floor. There is also crisis posed by over-abundant natures: new pesticide-resistant superweeds reducing agricultural productivity; novel pathogenic organisms (from H5N1 to COVID-19); more unstable and unpredictable extreme weather events (deadly fires, droughts and storms on every continent). There is also a crisis in society’s responses to these processes, from the individual to the international scale. The predominant approach to nature in the social sciences is to treat these phenomena as self-evidently real, to align with modes of scientific knowledge making, and rationally to set about turning a crisis into a problem that can be managed. I will call this vision of nature ‘Anthropocene nature’. While popular in the discipline, it would be an error to think that this is the dominant way geographers understand nature. Of all the social sciences, geography has the richest tradition of interrogating nature; it is no surprise that the current treatment of nature across the discipline remains lively and contested (see Castree, 2013). I begin by elaborating on Anthropocene nature and its place in geography before turning to two groups of geographers who approach nature differently. The first of these two approaches, ‘capitalist natures’, encompasses critical approaches to nature that understand it as inevitably bound up with capital and power (including political economy, political ecology and eco-Marxism). The second approach, ‘recuperative natures’, advances the idea that a liveable future requires new way of living with non-humans, and even decolonizing nature itself. The crisis framing of nature draws on 30 years of integrated global environmental change research, and has gathered rhetorical coherence through the Anthropocene label. This new geological epoch implies that humans have become planetary-scale actors on a geological timescale. The upshot is that there is now no untouched nature left – only anthropogenic nature remains. The two main approaches to delineating the crisis in nature are the planetary boundaries framework and

the Great Acceleration inventory. The first, from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, details nine planetary boundaries, such as freshwater use and altered nutrient flows, which collectively represent the limits of a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ (Rockström et al., 2009). The Great Acceleration inventory collects data on socio-economic drivers (such as gross domestic product or water use) and juxtaposes these with environmental impacts (from greenhouse gas emissions to marine fish capture) (Steffen et al., 2015). As with climate change science, the increasing sophistication, authority and scope of global environmental change research gives a clear diagnosis of cascading environmental crisis. But science does a bad job accounting for the ‘human dimensions’ of planetary change. The generic approach to integrating global environmental change research with human dimensions of real-world problems involves researching and describing coupled socio-environmental systems. Put abstractly, environmental or natural systems, such as sources or sinks of pollutants or nutrients, are described by appropriate scientific disciplines. Their proximate, related socio-economic systems are described by appropriate social science disciplines; drivers, mechanisms and feedbacks between the systems are enumerated. This builds understanding of degrees of vulnerability to environmental change and provides a clear evidence base for adaptation and risk management. Many geographers conduct research in this manner, collaborating with natural and environmental scientists on problems ranging from dryland livelihoods to vulnerability to flood risk, to mountain agriculture in changing climates. Given the urgency of environmental crisis, there are increasingly vocal calls to build on this kind of knowledge of nature to engage policymakers. This all sounds very logical, but the prospects of this form of knowledge to address crisis is hampered by several key elements of its epistemology (or way of knowing). First, coupled socio-environmental systems analysis implies that social systems are analogous to biophysical systems and amenable to the same form of study. In fact, social science does more than identify relevant ‘facts’ – it focuses on questions of ideology, justice, values and so on, fields of inquiry much less, if at all, amenable to quantification. Second, it maintains a distinction between facts and

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values: science provides true and objective knowledge of nature, which is only subsequently interpreted by social actors. This is problematic because normative factors concerning how science works, is funded, its prestige and authority, are elided. Third, it retains an objective and external nature as its object when 30 years of geographic scholarship has maintained that nature is made, materially and discursively, not found – no nature is ever neutral. Geographers do not usually begin from a scientifically knowable single world with nature as a pre-given, but rather from questions of power, ethics and relationships. When it comes to approaching nature, critical geographers are much less interested in scrutinizing the knowledge politics of science and much more interested in analysing the structure of the economy and the effects of unequal power relations. The main charge is that Anthropocene nature, understood through coupled socio-environmental systems analysis, might have superficial descriptive capacity but lacks convincing explanatory power. For more than 30 years, the subfield of political ecology has demonstrated how questions of nature are always questions of power. Put crudely, political ecology would say that the agricultural crisis is caused by the marketization and globalization of industrial agriculture – not an imbalance in global phosphorus or nitrogen budgets. For instance, political ecologists have continued to unearth the way nature is contested in conservation. From early studies of the violent, exclusionary imposition of a cultural vision of colonial nature on to landscapes, through to more recent accounts of how economy-based solutions to biodiversity loss – from ecotourism to payments for ecosystem services – extend the market into nature and create new patterns of winner and loser. As contemporary conservation paradigms broaden to include approaches such as rewilding, land sharing or private conservation, political ecology will continue to show how they produce particular, power-laden visions of what nature should be. Critical geographers would argue that market-friendly solutions for environmental problems merely move the problem around: capitalism thrives on crisis, and loves to turn crisis into new prospects for accumulation.

Political ecology’s epistemological approach to nature differs from Anthropocene natures in that it is dialectic. Drawing on Marx’s writings, the core idea is that society and nature are defined by their mutual interaction; dialectics speak in a language of both/ and, rather than either/or. On a planetary perspective, the society/nature dialectic constitutes what Jason Moore calls a ‘double internality’: nature flows through capital, such that it becomes internal to capitalism; capital flows through nature, such that capitalism becomes internal to nature. In Moore’s account of the last 400 years, ‘rather than separate humans from nature, capitalist civilization has enmeshed individual life-activity into a web of life whose interconnections are much denser, more geographically expansive, and more intimate than ever before’ (2015, p. 12). Moore outlines several kinds of nature that emerge from capitalist world-making processes. At the core are capitalized ecologies, material economies of production and consumption of goods and services, with their attendant ecological footprints. Then there are forms of unpaid work/energy that support the economy: domestic labour, ecological services and so on. Finally, there is the realm of actualizable potential resources: Amazon forest land to be cleared for soybean production, minerals to be mined as glaciers retreat, or medicines to be made to combat novel diseases. Geographers like Moore understand world history as a cumulative series of boom-and-bust cycles in particular instances of capitalist nature and world-making. Contemporary crisis is therefore less a crisis of nature, and more a crisis in the social relations and power dynamics that have sustained forms of capitalist nature over the last few hundred years. One popular way of understanding the breakdown of nature– society dynamics is through metabolic rift. Coined by Marx, the concept of metabolic rift was revisited and extended by John Bellamy Foster and his collaborators (Foster, Clark and York, 2010) and has since been elaborated by many others. The theory suggests that a disjuncture or rift has opened between the flows of energy needed to sustain social organization under capitalism on the one hand, and biophysical processes and cycles of nature on the other. The language of rift indicates a more hybrid than dialectic approach to nature. This is defended by Andreas Malm, Franklin Ginn

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for whom the modern distinction between society and nature names a real difference, a ‘disjuncture and imbalance’ (2018, p. 173), although of course these two poles have, through capitalism, become ‘dysfunctionally integrated’ (ibid., p. 174). For Malm, the roots of planetary crisis are not in the conceptual separation of nature and culture, but in much more material questions of labour and power. Geographers are also interested in how capitalist natures work at other scales. There is a rich history of studying how non-human nature becomes a resource, and for thinking about how that process necessarily involves social, political and economic work. Nature is never straightforwardly integrated as a set of resources into society – along the way different groups come into conflict, be that over extraction rights, protests against toxic pollution or geopolitical competition between nation-states. Resources, then, are not simply brute matter but players in how politics is constituted (Huber, 2019). Timothy Mitchell (2011) has offered one of the most acclaimed interrogations of how energy infrastructure and the material propensities of coal, oil and gas shaped the possibilities of state formation through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Capitalism also intervenes in life itself at the bodily scale. This is seen in studies by geographers on neurocapitalism and the ‘attention economy’, where human responses to stimuli can be marketized. Geographers continue to scrutinize biocapitalism, and the ways in which genetic material becomes capitalized. The idea of using ‘life to manage life’ is increasingly popular in global health discourse: Jamie Lorimer’s (2020) extended study of the political ecologies of microbial interventions in the human microbiome shows how geographers will continue to explore new emergent natures. Animal bodies, such as the broiler chicken, are increasingly shaped at the biophysical level according to the needs of capital (Wallace, 2016), while a wide variety of techniques turn plants into workers (Ernwein, Ginn and Palmer, 2021). Geographers also study the ways non-humans animate capital not just as commodities, but also from capital’s very inception (Barua, 2019). But the subfield of animal geographies goes well beyond studies of our non-human kin’s subjection by capital. Franklin Ginn

Here we move to what I will call ‘recuperative natures’, a form of geographies of nature that emphasizes care over critique. Animal geographies attend to the lived experiences of animals in place, attempting to understand and do justice to the animal’s ‘side’ of society–nature relations (Gibbs, 2020). While this may involve exploring animals’ roles in capitalist economy or as objects of governance, it also refuses to reduce animals to mere objects: it emphasizes the lively capacities of animals to subvert or live beyond any human biopolitical apparatus. Empirical foci are extremely diverse: from insect farming to street dogs in urban India, from dealing with pests to standards in veterinarian practice. For example, in contrast to previously discussed approaches to nature, ‘recuperative natures’ would emphasize not the quantified enumeration of endangered species, nor large-scale policy-driven institutional interventions, but rather the lives of the animals themselves and the forms of care that sustain their geographies. To understand the distinctive aims of animal geographies and ‘recuperative natures’ we need to unpack the underlying philosophy of nature. In contrast to the ‘external nature’ of Anthropocene natures, or the dialectic approach of capitalist natures, this final kind of geography emerges from post-structuralism and is indebted to thinkers such as Bruno Latour (2018), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) and, especially, feminist thinkers such as Donna Haraway (2016). Put simply, nature and non-human life emerges from relations, and is continually being performed – spatial patterns of power, privilege, or exclusion are constructed by the forces of relation, rather than pre-existing or being explicable via some transcendent force such as ‘capital’. Crucially, this kind of post-structuralism refuses hard and fast distinctions between human and non-human life (and thus is closely aligned to post-humanism). Certain ethics follow from this vision of nature: one where care for others follows knots of relation and co-becoming rather than abstract principles. This is a highly relational and contextual ethics of nature. Geography has always had a circumspect relationship with the idea of ‘nature’ itself, but coming years will see a thoroughgoing decolonization of the term. The role of geography as a discipline in creating

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and extending a particular vision of nature under colonialism is well known. The creation of a blank, external field of resources ready to be mapped and manipulated was instrumental in projecting capitalist world ecology. And yet, as a growing number of voices from Latin America and Indigenous thinkers in former settler colonies are asserting, the assumption of a modern duality between culture and nature has always been a parochial worldview. Behind the seemingly neutral idea of nature lies a bloody history of enslavement and exterminism. If the creation of ‘nature’ was a colonial project, then addressing the future of ‘nature’ must reckon with this legacy. One key idea here is that there is not ‘one world’ comprising a single Earthly nature and diverse social interpretations of that nature. Rather there is a ‘world of many worlds’, a pluriverse (de la Cadena and Blaser, 2018). By this, de la Cadena and Blaser mean that the project of imposing a uniform ‘one nature’ on the whole Earth was never wholly successful, and that myriad Indigenous cosmologies never cleaved to any such separation: their animate worlds are not reducible to ‘cultural difference’ (one nature/ many cultures), but are worlds-in-themselves (many natures/many cultures). Attention will continue to fall on the re-emergence of spirits, deities, ghosts, and giving greater credence to embedded modes of life and multiple ways of knowing nature beyond ‘one nature’ approaches (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021). The institutional ground from which geographies of nature are written is shifting. Even as calls to decolonize the discipline gain traction, developments in the university sector will play a growing role in the kind of knowledge of nature geographers produce. In particular, the priorities of funding bodies increasingly turn towards research with direct application and ‘relevance’, as well

as institutional strategies that prioritize responses to ‘real world’ problems. Although alliances and cross-fertilizations between mainstream Anthropocene natures and geographies of nature such as the anti-capitalist or post-humanist strands outlined above are still feasible (Castree, 2021), one likely trend is that these lively heterodox approaches will be squeezed to the margins of geography departments and into the environmental humanities. This is a risk: if the nature of planetary crisis is not self-evident, then neither are the ‘solutions’, and so both critical and recuperative approaches to new natures will be more important than ever. Franklin Ginn

References and selected further reading Barua, M. (2019). Animating capital: work, commodities, circulation. Progress in Human Geography, 43 (4), 650–69. Castree, N. (2013). Making Sense of Nature. London: Routledge. Castree, N. (2021). Making the environmental humanities consequential in ‘the age of consequences’: the potential of global environmental assessments. Environmental Humanities, 13 (2), 433–58. Clark, N. and B. Szerszynski (2021). Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Polity. de la Cadena, M. and M. Blaser (eds) (2018). A World of Many Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota. Ernwein, M., F. Ginn and J. Palmer (eds) (2021). The Work That Plants Do: Life, Labour and

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264  Concise encyclopedia of human geography the Futures of Vegetal Economies. Berlin: Transcript. Foster, J.B., B. Clark and R. York (2010). The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press. Gibbs, L. (2020). Animal geographies I: hearing the cry and extending beyond. Progress in Human Geography, 44 (4), 769–77. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Huber, M. (2019). Resource geography II: what makes resources political? Progress in Human Geography, 43 (3), 553–64. Latour, B. (2018). Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity. Lorimer, J. (2020). The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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Malm, A. (2018). The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. London: Verso. Mitchell, T. (2011). Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso. Moore, J. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Rockström, J., W. Steffen and K. Noon et al. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461 (7263), 472–5. Steffen, W., W. Broadgate and L. Deutsch et al. (2015). The trajectory of the Anthropocene: the Great Acceleration. The Anthropocene Review, 2(1), 81–98. Wallace, R. (2016). Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science. New York: Monthly Review Press.

51. Neoliberalism Neoliberalism refers to a branch of liberalism that promotes the market as the preferred means of regulating social relations and which gained prominence with globalization from the late twentieth century. It combines freedom of business, prices, competition and trade, and is often associated with private ownership and financial austerity. Geographically, neoliberalism can be described as a set of norms aiming to govern local and state institutions through their spatial integration into a global system of economic competition regulated by the free mobility of goods, currency and capital.

How human geography came to study neoliberalism Used marginally since the 1930s, the neoliberal label spread within the Latin American left during the 1980s to denounce the economic liberalization policies implemented there, whether by authoritarian regimes in Chile and Argentina or through the structural adjustment programs prescribed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Neoliberalism began to be used within the academic sphere by critical analysts of these Latin American economic policies and then, from the 1990s, by prominent left-wing intellectuals (Anderson, Chomsky, Bourdieu) involved with activists opposed to economic globalization. In geography, the term initially remained little used by researchers working on international issues or globalization. Critical geopolitics, for example, identified the emergence of a ‘transnational liberalism’ following the end of the Cold War but did not associate this ideology with neoliberalism, except in an allusive and non-conceptualized way (Agnew and Corbridge, 1995). Geographers then left to other disciplines the task of studying the form and the reasons for the links between neoliberalism and globalization. Neoliberalism was nevertheless introduced into the field of human geography in 1994 when several geographers (Peck and Tickell, then Brenner, Jones, MacLeod, Theodore, Ward), at the crossroads of economic geography, urban studies and critical political

economy, envisaged it as a global ideology at the origin of the process of glocalization analyzed by the sociologist Robertson and popularized in geography by Swyngedouw. It is therefore through the analysis of its local manifestations that geographers engaged in the study of neoliberalism, seen as a transnational political-economic regime leading to the reconfiguration of the functions of states and to the interlocal economic competition of local and regional institutions for the captation of capital and profits.

The transnational restructuring of state spaces Initially mobilized to account for the political transformations observable since the arrival in power of Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Reagan in the United States, neoliberalism is considered in many social sciences as a new type of political regime observable in a growing number of countries. Geographers pay particular attention to the analysis of the spatial diffusion of this neoliberal regime. A heartland was initially located in North America and the United Kingdom before the Latin American experience of the 1970s was rediscovered. Areas of extension and pioneer fronts of neoliberalism were also identified in Western Europe, New Zealand and Australia in the 1980s, then in the countries of the former communist bloc, in South Africa and in some emerging countries of South Asia in the following decade. Neoliberal norms seem to be applied ubiquitously to the point of constituting a global vulgate that the economist Williamson popularized through the notion of the ‘Washington consensus’ in the early 1990s. Geographers insist that this regime corresponds not so much to a return to laissez-faire or to an obliteration of the state as to a ‘restructuring’ of its regulatory functions. Neoliberalism implies, first of all, a policy of economic opening of state space, through the liberalization of trade, currency and capital flows. In addition, it implies an internal discipline aimed at offering investors an attractive and agile framework able to cope with the increasingly brutal fluctuations of the global economy. This requires a fiscal policy geared towards controlling public spending and taxes, low inflation and the adoption of

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attractive exchange rates, as well as structural measures such as the deregulation of financial markets and the progressive privatization of the public sector. Labor policies are now aimed at promoting flexibility of work conditions (elimination of indexation and minimum wages, individualization and precaritization of job contracts). Welfare policies are also restructured, now being conditioned to the efforts made by their recipients to remain competitive in the various markets in which they are supposed to be integrated (employment, housing, health). Whilst most social sciences draw similar conclusions, some geographers add that neoliberalism has resulted in a shift from policies aiming to reduce spatial inequalities to urban and regional supply-side policies that are limited to supporting local actors in their efforts to provide a business-friendly environment and to stimulate their competitiveness with respect to transnational companies and investors. The main contribution of geographers to the study of neoliberalism lies in the link they establish between this new transnational political regime and a process of rescaling of public action observed in a large number of countries. This restructuring and production of new scales of public action is reflected in the transfer of responsibilities to local and regional institutions in terms of economic development policies through the multiplication of institutional devolution and decentralization reforms. As Harvey noted as early as 1989, local institutional leaders are encouraged to run their territories as entrepreneurs competing with each other and to provide a ‘good business environment’. In geography and urban planning, particular attention is paid to the study of the neoliberalization of urban policies now devoted to the consolidation of the market value of urban space. A new model of the ‘neoliberal city’ (Hackworth, 2007) is emerging through standardized and seemingly ubiquitous urban development operations. Inner cities are thus subject to urban renewal policies relying on instruments aiming to improve their attractiveness for private investors: the turning of brownfields, waterfronts and decaying areas into neighborhood projects or facilities designed to revitalize their surroundings (shopping malls, technology parks, leisure centers, new transportation infrastructures), the residential regeneration through gentrifiArnaud Brennetot

cation strategies and the launch of marketing policies aimed at consolidating the attractiveness of cities (cultural events, city branding, organization of mega-events). The neoliberalization of cities is also manifested through local policies of financial austerity characterized by the use of public–private partnerships or the privatization of public service missions. Neoliberal urban policies finally aim to re-educate, to exclude or to punish the poorest and most vulnerable populations. In this context, geographers also focus on urban districts, cities and regions suffering from neoliberal policies, condemned to cope with the consequences of deindustrialization, demographic decline, the reduction of collective services and the local concentration of social vulnerabilities. Over time, the analysis of neoliberalism was also extended to broader geographical issues – for example, work on the effects of the rise of neoliberalism on environmental issues (Castree, 2008; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004).

Interpreting neoliberalism Some geographers and social theorists such as Brenner and Jessop have worked across various neo-Marxist theses (Gramsci, Lefebvre, Poulantzas) and the regulation school theoretical framework to provide an explanation of neoliberal policies and restructuring and rescaling processes they induce: according to them, the deployment of neoliberalism is due to the combined crisis in the 1970s of the Fordist mode of production and the Keynesian welfare state regime inherited from the post-war period (Brenner, 2004; Jessop, 2002). This crisis led to the search for a new mode of regulation and to the gradual emergence of a Schumpeterian workfare regime, which corresponds to what is commonly associated with neoliberalism. In the late 1990s, some critical geographers from the previous generation (Harvey, Peet) also engaged in the analysis of neoliberalism. Harvey’s approach, inspired by geohistorical materialism, interprets neoliberalism in a converging way, as a new stage of capitalism aimed at restoring the profitability of capital resulting from the passage from a Fordist economy deployed in relatively compartmentalized national frameworks to a regime of

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globalized accumulation for the benefit of a transnational owning class (Harvey, 2007). The various analyses of neoliberalism carried out in human geography almost systematically contain a critical dimension, their authors reproaching this political economy regime for sacrificing the progressivist achievements of the Keynesian and welfare state period, increasing social and spatial inequalities, leading to a quasi-permanent crisis of regulation of capitalism while exercising a hegemony hindering the search for alternative solutions. During the 2000s, the denunciation of the harmful effects of neoliberalism became a rallying point and a factor of intergenerational cohesion between the various branches of critical human geography (radical geography, feminist and post-modern geographies, critical geopolitics) engaged in the denunciation of the spatial conditions of contemporary societies. Neoliberalism appears as a kind of hegemonic zeitgeist, offering critical geography a subject to fight against and, in so doing, the opportunity to renew itself around the search for alternative solutions such as ‘spatial justice’ or the ‘right to the city’. References to neoliberalism are becoming increasingly numerous in human geography, some of them receiving a large audience. David Harvey’s 2007 Brief History of Neoliberalism, for example, is quickly becoming one of the most cited works written by a geographer in academic literature. However, from the mid-2000s onwards, some researchers started to question the legitimacy of using neoliberalism as a heuristic category. Used in a massive way, neoliberalism appears to be an increasingly malleable and extensive analytical category, to the point of becoming pejoratively amalgamated with everything related to late capitalism. Various researchers, both geographers and non-geographers, accused neoliberalism of being a simplistic, inconsistent, approximate and catch-all concept used for ideological rather than scientific purposes. Neoliberalism is sometimes described as a ‘swearword’ or a ‘rascal concept’. Geographer C. Barnett (2005) even mooted that ‘there is no such thing as neoliberalism!’. Until the formulation of this destabilizing accusation, geographers had considered neoliberalism as a political ideology easy to grasp, broadly corresponding to the pro-market ideas of Hayek and the monetarist theses of the Chicago school. An

ambiguity nevertheless remained concerning the ideological status of neoliberalism, sometimes presented as an intentional project emanating from identifiable actors, sometimes as an impersonal ideological reaction structurally linked to the advent of the post-Fordist mode of production. The work carried out at the time in the fields of the history and philosophy of ideas showed that this current of ideas was much more complex, heterogeneous and difficult to grasp than initially envisioned by most geographers. Alongside specialists in political sociology, comparative and international political economy, the history of political ideas and of economic thought, several geographers engaged in a historiographical and epistemological inquiry aimed at reassessing the scientific use and reference to neoliberalism (Birch, 2017; Cahill et al., 2018; Springer, Birch and MacLeavy, 2016). This transdisciplinary work, in which geographers were strongly involved during the 2010s, led to a genealogic and morphologic analysis of the political ideas promoted within neoliberal intellectual networks since its inception during the interwar period (including the spatial dimension of the neoliberal thought). If they reject the idealistic and quasi-conspiracist perspective according to which neoliberal intellectuals would have succeeded in influencing the political agenda of most of the world’s institutions, geographers involved in the analysis of neoliberal thought have come to a better understanding of its genesis, its variety and its unity, confirming the initial intuition that neoliberalism differs from classical laissez-faire insofar as it postulates that the intervention of public institutions is necessary for the functioning of a free market. These works also highlighted how neoliberal thinkers have, from the beginning, conceived the globalization of markets as an multi-scalar instrument aiming to limit state sovereignty and curb nationalist impulses (Brennetot, 2015). Moreover, this work concludes that, if neoliberalism cannot be considered as a regime resulting from the simple implementation of a predefined political blueprint, it deserves to be retained as a powerful analytical category, on the condition of distinguishing between neoliberal ideas as they are formalized in the field of intellectual production and what Brenner and Theodore (2002) call ‘actually Arnaud Brennetot

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existing neoliberalism’ (AENL) – that is, the way in which neoliberal principles are concretely implemented. These geographers then insist that neoliberalism must be appreciated less as a completely finalized reality than as a process unfolding according to variegated pathways depending on the geohistorical contexts, obstacles and facilities in which neoliberalization occurs. This means that neoliberalism is never realized as a fully realized political program but rather as partially implemented norms embedded in axiologically composite, hybrid and dynamic regimes (Brenner, Peck and Theodore, 2009). This explains the flexibility of neoliberalism, its adaptability and the protean character of its institutional manifestations. It also explains why it is ultimately compatible with a wide variety of political contexts and regimes, from the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s to the conservative governments of the 1980s and the social-liberal ‘Third Ways’ of the 1990s. Insofar as actually existing neoliberalism can no longer be considered in the form of a standard model, its study implies a deepening of empirical investigations and a renewal of the theoretical framework. Regulationist approaches being no longer sufficient to explain the variety of neoliberal forms, the interpretative framework used by geographers is then broadened and made more complex. Neoliberalism appears then as a rationality emerging under the influence of complex combinations of material structures, interests, institutions and ideas, all of which are in constant systemic evolution (Peck, 2010). In this perspective, neoliberal theorists have simply transcribed into an ideological project a collective rationality, incrementally arising from the post-war period in heterogeneous circumstances as a systemic result of the progressive intensification of market interactions at all scales.

The end of neoliberalism? The flexibility of actually existing neoliberalism explains both its pervasiveness and its resilience, giving rise to incredulity and sometimes dismay among those, especially critical geographers, who wanted to end it and initiate alternative political projects. During the 2000s, critical studies of neoliberalism Arnaud Brennetot

had no choice but to note the political weakness of alter-globalist mobilizations and the evidence of the deep embedding of neoliberal norms in geo-institutional systems at all scales, despite the increasingly obvious dysfunctions of economic globalization (visible through the recurrence and amplification of financial crises, the stalemate of multilateral trade negotiations, the weakening of vulnerable populations in the most unequal countries, etc.). From 2008, the Global Financial Crisis provoked by the United States subprime mortgage crisis made some geographers, among many others, believe in the return of the regulatory state and a possible end to neoliberalism. However, the ensuing public debt crisis led to an accentuation of fiscal austerity policies, particularly within the Eurozone, and reinforced the discouraging hypothesis of the apparent unbreakable resilience of neoliberalism (Crouch, 2011). Work was then carried out on the geography of austerity and the apparent inescapable survival of neoliberalism, particularly in cities transformed by the credit crisis. However, this revival proved short-lived, provoking a rapid and unprecedented backlash against neoliberal orthodoxy in the following decade. First, it generated a critical renewal within the alter-globalist left in several countries (Los Indignados in Spain, the Syriza party in Greece, the Occupy movement in other countries). Thereafter, the rise of environmental concerns led to an increasingly destabilizing questioning of the productivist credo underlying neoliberal governmentality. On the right, it symmetrically led to nationalist, sovereignist, protectionist and populist reactions in a growing number of countries, including historical neoliberal leading powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom. All these neo-nationalist movements have in common an opposition to neoliberal globalization, reproaching the elites for having betrayed their nation in favor of foreign interests. In recent years, a growing body of work has focused on the forms and reasons of the geography of discontent against neoliberalization. Research has been conducted on the geopolitical tensions induced by the success of far-right populist leaders engaged in promoting explicitly nationalist agendas, invoking the hardening of borders to protect the nation against external ‘threats’ (illegal migration, ‘unfair’ competition from foreign

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countries) and to recover a supposedly lost sovereignty. Other studies examine the new spatial cleavages that can be observed in electoral practices between large metropolises still attached to liberal internationalism and peripheral areas more sensitive to national populist discourses. The question for human geographers now is whether this transnational realignment of political cleavages underway, marked by a growing opposition between green/alternative/libertarian on the left and a traditionalist/authoritarian/nationalist bloc on the right, is likely to lead to the structural decline of neoliberalism or, on the contrary, if it prefigures new forms of axiological hybridizations allowing neoliberalism to be matched within new geo-institutional fixes with (re-)emerging values such as national sovereignty on the right or ecological transition on the left. In this context of exacerbated ideological tensions and instability, the neoliberal rationality has already demonstrated a deep adaptability, requiring us to leave open the hypothesis of a forthcoming political resurgence. Arnaud Brennetot

References and selected further reading Agnew, J. and Corbridge, S. (1995). Mastering Space, Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy. London: Routledge. Barnett, C. (2005). The consolations of ‘neoliberalism’. Geoforum, 36 (1), 7–12. Birch, K. (2017). A Research Agenda for Neoliberalism. Cheltenham, UK and

Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Brenner, N. (2004). New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brenner, N., Peck, J. and Theodore, N. (2009). Variegated neoliberalization: geographies, modalities, pathways. Global Networks, 10 (2), 182–222. Brenner, N. and Theodore, N. (2002). Cities and the geographies of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’. Antipode, 34 (3), 349–79. Brennetot, A. (2015). The geographical and ethical origins of neoliberalism: the Walter Lippmann Colloquium and the foundations of a new geopolitical order. Political Geography, 49 (6), 30–39. Cahill, D., Cooper, M., Konings, M. and Primrose, D. (eds) (2018). The SAGE Handbook of Neoliberalism.‎ London: SAGE. Castree, N. (2008). Neoliberalising nature: the logics of deregulation and reregulation. Environment and Planning A, 40 (1), 131–52. Crouch, C. (2011). The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hackworth, J. (2007). The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harvey, D. (1989). From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 71 (1), 3–17. Harvey, D. (2007). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jessop, B. (2002). The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity Press. McCarthy, S. and Prudham, J. (2004). Neoliberal nature and the nature of neoliberalism. Geoforum, 35 (3), 275–83. Peck, J. (2010). Constructions of Neoliberal Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Springer, S., Birch, K. and MacLeavy, J. (2016). The Handbook of Neoliberalism. London: Routledge.

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52. Place The sense of place concept is widely used across the social sciences and humanities, in popular and academic writings, in poetry and in the arts. Consequently, there is great variation in how sense of place is defined and in the methods through which it is being studied. In urban design studies, for instance, sense of place is closely tied to the notion of genius loci, a Latin term that today is used to refer to the spirit or atmosphere of a place and that is often connected to discussions on heritage and preservation (Jive´n and Larkham, 2003). Anthropologists have worked to show how sense of place can mediate an intimate connection between Indigenous knowledge and the land (Basso, 1996), whilst environmental studies have suggested that there is a strong correlation between fostering a positive sense of place and advocating for pro-environmental behaviour (Kudryavtsev, Stedman and Krasny, 2012). In geography, the concept has developed in dialogue with these and other disciplines’ engagement with it, but there is also a distinct lineage of humanist geography works that have been key to establishing sense of place as an object of research and theorizing (Seamon and Sowers, 2008). Inspired by a set of key publications in the 1970s, these works answered the call for increased attention towards the affective bond between people and place (Tuan, 1974); for the clarification and nuancing of geographers’ conceptual frameworks of space and place (Relph, 1976); and for developing new modes of knowing the human experience of place (Buttimer, 1976). Still, Edward Relph underlines (1997), sense of place is not a theory or tool invented by geographers, but an innate faculty that helps people make sense of where they are placed. Sense of place is both existential and political. As an analytical tool, it takes the form of a skill to be learned and honed, requiring careful and critical observations of places and the cultural codes embedded within their construction, organization and symbolism. Today, the scope of geographers’ research into sense of place is broad. The concept is used to examine and describe individual and collective perceptions of, meanings about, and attachments to place, and may concern both direct and non-direct experiences of place. Sense of place can therefore speak to

two quite different ways of relating to and experiencing place. On the one hand, it can describe a person or group’s lived experience of a given place, such as the everyday life of their local community. On the other hand, it can speak to perceptions of places one has never visited, such as world metropoles, well-known tourist destinations, or more generic place typologies, such as a prison or a hospital. Increasingly, non-direct experiences of place are virtual, created online and though social media, which warrants the use of methods like digital ethnography in the study of sense of place. The sense of place concept further speaks to how people experience various attributes of place, which can include physical structures, such as the those of the built environment, but also a distinctive place in nature or a cultural landscape. Sense of place can also entail symbolic and spiritual aspects, as well as people’s affective bonds to distinct place types, such as the home, the urban or nature. Sense of place may hence be connected to a feeling of ‘insideness’, which speaks to how a person or group may feel belonging, attachment and involvement in a place, but also ‘outsideness’ in the form of feeling separate or alienated from a particular place (Relph, 1976). Following this, research into sense of place is often broken down into examinations of rootedness, place affiliation, place bonding, place attachment or ‘topophilia’, defined as the affective bond between people and place (Tuan, 1974). In sum, the sense of place concept captures a wide range of research interests in place that share a concern for how the sensorial aspects of spatial experience both stem from and constitute the production of distinct places. Or, as has been a concern in urban studies especially, the production of a form of ‘placelessness’ (Relph, 1976), which is seen to arise as the places of the city are increasingly commodified and standardized, losing the ‘authenticity’ and character seen as constitutive of their uniqueness (Arefi, 1999; Freestone and Liu, 2016). In the 1980s and 1990s, scholars were becoming increasingly aware of how globalization was radically changing place. Extending, deepening and speeding up the flows of not only things economic – like labour, commodities, and capital – but also of culture, people and the political, globalization was seen to change both the significance and composition of place. Amidst this move-

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ment of so-called ‘time–space compression’ (Harvey, 1999), a sense of spatial boundlessness was increasingly identified, leading some to herald the ‘death of geography’, others to describe place as dissolving into accelerating networks of flow and connection. Where previously place had been conceived as bounded and definable, the local community was considered as no longer serving as a stable referent for one’s sense of place and belonging in the world. Writing in response to this development, Doreen Massey (1991) argued for the parallel movement of rethinking place and scaling up sense of place to encompassing the global. From seeing place as a given and bounded area, she held, one should move to consider place as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, the difference being that in the wake of globalization, a larger proportion of those relations were being constructed on a much larger scale than what had previously been the case. Consequently, one would need to cultivate a progressive and outward-looking ‘global sense of place’ that could counteract ethnocentric views on globalization and be conscious of how the local and the global are linked. Crucially, this would also entail a sensitivity towards how globalization does not affect people and places equally; a global sense of place must recognize the uneven distribution of power and wealth that globalization processes entail. A similar type of argument has later been made by Ursula Heise (2008), who in connecting sense of place to ‘sense of planet’ calls for the fostering of an ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ that could merge imaginations of the global, transnational and cosmopolitan with what she identifies as a commitment to the local in environmental thinking and practice. While clearly idealistic, the notions of a global or planetary sense of place point to the important task of the social sciences and humanities to generate ideas that help make sense of the world and our being in it. A more developed sense of global vulnerabilities is, for instance, likely to follow in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the acceleration of time–space came to an abrupt halt, with place geographies shrinking and being contained in ways that call for new examinations into what global connectedness entails for our relationship to place. While they are clearly conceived in response to

globalization, the efforts to rethink sense of place as a global or planetary experience are also relevant to current discussions on the Anthropocene and the idea that humankind has now become a significant geological and morphological force (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). For while scholars have to some extent connected sense of place to climate change, much remains in understanding the profound effects this is having on our ways of being in, and connecting to, place. It has, for instance, been argued that the effects of climate change are experienced most acutely on the scale of the local and that recognizing how this affects sense of place is therefore critical to understanding communities’ susceptibility, resilience and adaptability (Willox et al., 2012). Others have pointed to how reclaiming a local sense of place could provide a starting point for ‘healing’ the distress of environmental loss that global warming brings (Westoby, McNamara and Clissold, 2022). Different from the calls for a global sense of place or sense of planet, however, these approaches do not address the radical relationality of being situated in the place of a local environment and simultaneously affecting and being affected by actions taking place on a much larger scale – that of the atmosphere. This clearly calls for the development of new imaginaries of sense of place, but also for the continued critical examination of grand terms such as the Anthropocene, as this tends to gloss over the uneven distribution of loss and burden, but also opportunity that global warming brings (Davis and Todd, 2017). Examinations into how climate change affects sense of place therefore also need to account for how other markers of difference play into this, including class, ethnicity and gender; and for how the places being affected by it are layered with other histories of change, such as those of rural decay in the wake of deindustrialization, widespread gentrification of urban neighbourhoods, or the many and still active pasts of colonialism and imperialism. For as has been underlined since the coinage of the concept, studies into sense of place are inherently political. They warrant methods and research ethics that are befitting of their complexity, sensitive to the uneven entitlements that people experience in relation to place, and open to examining how sense of place can entail experiences of displacement and alienation as well as attachTone Huse

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ment and belonging. Katherine McKittrick’s (2011) writings on ‘a black sense of place’ is here a case in point. Geographers can also be informed by methodologies being developed in Indigenous Studies, which aim at generating collaborative research practices for studies of place whilst connecting to ongoing projects of decolonization and counteracting previous practices of extractive research (Johnson and Larsen, 2013; Tuck, McKenzie and McCoy, 2014; Wright et al., 2012). A key strength of the sense of place concept is that it highlights the importance of how people experience, perceive and/or attach meaning to place. It grounds studies in the empirical realities of their relationships to place. Still, while this has inspired research across a wide range of disciplines, the conceptual frameworks that accompany sense of place studies have not developed much since the 1970s. The key terms being examined are still much the same and the research being conducted is largely aimed at informing other phenomena, like urban inclusion/exclusion, or environmental attitudes. Examinations into sense of place become a conduit for research into other problematics, while ideas about what sense of place entails are remarkably unchanged. This is, of course, not a problem in and of itself, but can perhaps be explained by the ways in which the concept has been operationalized and how studies largely centre upon the human perspective and on a distinctly human-centric way of ‘doing the sensing’. For future studies, it would be interesting to explore what developments could take place in the meeting point between a concern for sense of place and more-than-human geographies. The more-than-human geography approach takes inspiration from an assortment of research fields, such as human– animal studies, technoscience feminist studies, Indigenous Studies, material semiotics and actor-network theory (see the entry). It is associated with various ‘turns’ in geography towards relational, non-representational, material and performative thinking (Dowling, Lloyd and Suchet-Pearson, 2017), and pushes geographers to think of agency as something not held exclusively by humans, but also by other entities and beings. In the context of studies into sense of place, such entities and beings could, for instance, be animals that co-produce place-based economies, such as domesticated animals partaking in tourism; Tone Huse

technologies like the car and the practices of automobility that it affords; or materialities that enable distinct place typologies and practices to come into being, such as the glass-and-steel skyscrapers of central business districts. Approaches that emphasize the agencies of the non-living can in this way open up new ways of interrogating how the materialities, knowledges and technologies of place are co-constitutive of sense of place. This can include studies of readily recognizable spatial practices, such as those of planning and architecture, but should also include other modalities of producing space, such as those of homelessness and activism, or place-building knowledges that fall outside the locus of Western forms of expertise. Regardless of the case being studied or entities followed, however, opening up sense of place studies to other agencies than those of the human pushes scholars to reconceptualize both how and by what means place is being sensed, by whom, and how the sensorial qualities of a place come about in the first place. Which then also points to a much-overlooked aspect of sense of place studies – namely, time. For while geographers routinely refer to the notion of time–space, empirical explorations of time relative to those devoted to space are few and far between. How does, for instance, the destabilization of seasonal patterns brought on by climate change alter the relationship between temporality and place? How can changes to the ways in which places are organized and ordered alter their rhythms and uses, and consequently the temporalities of the everyday? What technologies of time are today decisive to how we sense and interact with the world around us, perhaps enabling some ways of being in place, while precluding others? In short, how do different perceptions, enactments and materializations of time intersect with and co-constitute sense of place? If we accept that the ‘things’ of place are not passive and given, but active and co-constitutive of place, the ontological realities of place begin to shift. From being an already existing, given thing to be sensed, its unboundedness and connectedness notwithstanding, place is to be seen as something that comes into being through a plethora of practices, human and non-human, as always in the process of becoming, and hence as carrying the potential of being done in more than one way (Blaser, 2014; Law, 2004). This then

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challenges us to shift thinking away from identifying different perspectives to a place’s sensorial qualities and towards recognizing how the different ways of performing, or enacting that place, bring differently constituted versions of that place into being. An example of this could be how land and place play into what Audra Simpson (2014) calls a ‘politics of refusal’. Describing the ways in which the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke have refused American or Canadian citizenship, but instead insist on the territoriality and integrity of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Simpson shows how sense of place is integral to the enactment of land as occupied and thus to the articulation of claims of sovereignty contesting the settler colonial state. This speaks, then, to how geographies of place can be not only radically relational, but also enacted to bring into being distinctive versions of what that place is, the meanings it generates, the attachments it allows for, how it can be perceived and by whom. Connecting inquiries into sense of place to the program of more-than-human geographies raises the stakes of the political aspects to sense of place, as it opens for the contentious question of what realities are better, more just and why. Tone Huse

References and selected further reading Arefi, M. (1999). Non‐place and placelessness as narratives of loss: rethinking the notion of place. Journal of Urban Design, 4 (2), 179–93. Basso, K.H. (1996). Wisdom sits in places: notes on an Apache landscape. In S. Feld and K.H. Basso (eds), Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 53–90. Blaser, M. (2014). Ontology and indigeneity: on the political ontology of heterogeneous assemblages. Cultural Geographies, 21 (1), 49–58. Buttimer, A. (1976). Grasping the dynamism of lifeworld. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 66, 277–2. Crutzen, P. and Stoermer, E.F. (2000). The ‘Anthropocene’. IGBP Newsletter, No. 41, 17–18. Davis, H. and Todd, Z. (2017). On the importance of a date, or, decolonizing the Anthropocene.

ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 16 (4), 761–80. Dowling, R., Lloyd, K. and Suchet-Pearson, S. (2017). Qualitative methods II: ‘more-than-human’ methodologies and/in praxis. Progress in Human Geography, 41 (6), 823–31. Freestone, R. and Liu, E. (eds) (2016). Place and Placelessness Revisited. London: Routledge. Harvey, D. (1999). Time–space compression and the postmodern condition. Modernity: Critical Concepts, 4, 98–118. Heise, U.K. (2008). Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jive´n, G. and Larkham, P.J. (2003). Sense of place, authenticity and character: a commentary. Journal of Urban Design, 8 (1), 67–81. Johnson, J.T. and Larsen, S.C. (2013). Deeper Sense of Place: Stories and Journeys of Collaboration in Indigenous Research. Corvalis, OR: Oregon State University Press. Kudryavtsev, A., Stedman, R.C. and Krasny, M.E. (2012). Sense of place in environmental education. Environmental Education Research, 18 (2), 229–50. Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Massey, D. (1991). A global sense of place. Marxism Today, June, 24–29. McKittrick, K. (2011). On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place. Social & Cultural Geography, 12 (8), 947–63. Relph, E. (1976). Place and Placelessness. London: Pion. Relph, E. (1997). Sense of place. In S. Hanson (ed.), Ten Geographic Ideas that Changed the World. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 205–26. Seamon, D. and Sowers, J. (2008). Place and Placelessness (1976): Edward Relph. In P. Hubbard, R. Kitchen and G. Vallentine (eds), Key Texts in Human Geography. London: SAGE, pp. 43–51. Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tuan, Y.-F. (1974). Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Tuck, E., McKenzie, M. and McCoy, K. (2014). Land education: Indigenous, post-colonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research. Environmental Education Research, 20 (1), 1–23. Westoby, R., McNamara, K.E. and Clissold, R. (2022). Ways of healing in the Anthropocene. Climate and Development, 14 (1), 67–74.

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274  Concise encyclopedia of human geography Willox, A.C., Harper, S.L. and Ford, J.D. et al. (2012). ‘From this place and of this place’: climate change, sense of place, and health in Nunatsiavut, Canada. Social Science & Medicine, 75 (3), 538–47.

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Wright, S., Lloyd, K. and Suchet-Pearson, S. et al. (2012). Telling stories in, through and with Country: engaging with Indigenous and more-than-human methodologies at Bawaka, NE Australia. Journal of Cultural Geography, 29 (1), 39–60.

53. Political ecology Political ecology (écologie politique in French and ecología política in Spanish) is broadly concerned with offering a politicized understanding of nature–society relationships and environmental struggles. According to some of the most classical definitions of the field, it combines the concerns of ecology with ‘a broadly defined political economy’ encompassing both the shifting dialectic between society and land-based resources and within social classes and groups (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987, p. 17). Political ecology also reflects a ‘confluence between ecologically rooted social science and the principles of political economy’ (Peet and Watts, 1996, p. 6). Since its emergence, political ecology has been challenging apolitical understandings of socio-environmental change by explicitly acknowledging that at the core of environmental problems and conflicts lies the uneven distribution of environmental costs and benefits (Adams and Hutton, 2007). The emphasis of the field on the complex dialectics between unequal power relations, political economy and ecology has been evident since its early contributions. These, most notably, include its direct questioning of neo-Malthusian understandings that attributed land degradation, natural resources depletion and food insecurity to overpopulation and the ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Ehrlich, 1968; Hardin, 1968; Meadows et al., 1972). This legacy continues to today, with political ecologists at the forefront of challenging mainstream thinking and depoliticized and technocratic understandings of environmental problems (Adams, 2019; Forsyth, 2004; Robbins, 2019), including ecoscarcity and discourses on ecological modernization’s and the market’s potential to end the biodiversity and climate crisis. Even though geography holds a central place within political ecology, the field is undoubtedly one of the most multidisciplinary, international, polylinguistic and intercultural research fields, marked by its vibrancy, ubiquity and universality (Bryant, 2015b; Robbins, 2019). Not surprisingly, its intellectual and political roots are the subject of a rich and diverse literature characterized by persistent debates over political ecology’s evolution. The origins of anglophone

political ecology are often located in the fields of cultural ecology and ecological anthropology, and in the work of scholars like the geographer Carl Sauer (1941), who was associated with the Berkeley school of cultural geography, and the anthropologist Julian Steward (1955). The English term (political ecology) is attributed to the Marxist anthropologist Eric Wolf, a former student of Julian Steward, who used it in the title of an article published in 1972 to refer to the politics of natural resources management and landed property relations (Wolf, 1972). Overall, and despite the fact that politicized understandings of environmental problems existed long before its emergence, and at least since the late nineteenth century, it is widely accepted that political ecology emerged as a distinct research field in the 1960s–1970s. This is due to a number of interrelated factors, including the intensification of environmental problems; the increasing inability of governments around the globe to offer solutions to them and sufficiently respond to radical ecological movements; and the emergence of a generation of radical scholars, primarily geographers and anthropologists, who have been deeply influenced by the rise of anti-colonial and anti-war movements. As Watts (2015) explains, during that period, drawing inspiration from emerging research on the political economy of peasant societies, a generation of political ecologists emerged expressing a renewed interest in the agrarian question. By mainly drawing on analyses of rural communities in the post-colonial world, political ecologists placed political economy at the epicentre of their research, shifting the focus to issues of class structure, capitalist accumulation, surplus value extraction, relations of production, access to and control over resources, the commodification of land and labour, and social differentiation within peasant communities. Political ecology gained further momentum throughout the 1980s and even though it continued to be characterized by theoretical pluralism, Marxism, dependency and world systems theories, agrarian studies and post-structuralism largely set the basis for the field’s ‘contested institutionalization’ and its ‘embodiment in a pioneering group of modern political ecologists notably in/ from Latin America, Anglo-America, continental Europe and South Asia’ (Bryant, 2015b, p. 17). The intellectual roots of polit-

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ical ecology can therefore be found in the ‘general turn toward Marxist scholarship, post-positivist approaches to nature–society relations, and a broad and growing acceptance of the central elements of feminist and post-colonial scholarship and politics’ (Bridge, McCarthy and Perreault, 2015, p. 6). Classical books of this era that have strongly influenced both political ecology and Marxist geography include David Harvey’s The Limits to Capital, published in 1982, and Neil Smith’s Uneven Development, published in 1984. Importantly, in recent years, there has been increasing attention to other political ecology traditions beyond Anglo-America that have followed a different but parallel trajectory. This is evident in two important collections on political ecology that were published in 2015: the Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology edited by Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge and James McCarthy, and the International Handbook of Political Ecology edited by Raymond Bryant. A significant part of the latter is dedicated to exploring such connections by engaging with French écologie politique, Spanish ecología política, Indigenous and lusophone political ecologies, South Asian urban political ecologies, and political ecology in China and Latin America. These attempts to internationalize and decentre Anglo-American political ecology by giving room to diverse traditions demonstrates that political ecology has developed through continual exchanges with decolonial, anti-colonial and post-colonial perspectives (Leff, 2015; Loftus, 2019; see also Kim et al.’s 2012 collection on other political ecologies). Reasons for limited engagement between the anglophone and other traditions vary, and while these certainly include language and institutional barriers, sometimes there is a range of political, social and academic factors at play. For example, Francophone écologie politique (e.g., Gorz, 1987; Lipietz, 1987) has its own history and trajectory that has often been in tension with the Anglo-American tradition. This is attributed by some to the fact that écologie politique has been seen more as a form of radical environmental activism and less as an academic field. At the same time, the fact that écologie politique has been primarily structured around philosophy and sociology while English-speaking political ecology around Elia Apostolopoulou

geography and anthropology, suggests that limited communication between the two might have also been a classical expression of interdisciplinary barriers (Chartier and Rodary, 2015). Such barriers persist until today and prevent cross-fertilization among fields that, even though they explore similar and interrelated topics and processes, remain divided. Moving into the 1990s, we saw political ecology shifting from its almost exclusive focus on the Global South to including case studies from across the globe, gradually surpassing the barriers between a ‘Third World’ (Bryant and Bailey, 1997) and a ‘First World’ political ecology (McCarthy, 2002), as well as from an exclusive focus on rural areas to also include urban and industrialized areas. The emergence of the field of urban political ecology (UPE), first introduced by Erik Swyngedouw in 1996 in his paper ‘The city as a hybrid’, has been instrumental in this shift. As Swyngedouw wrote: ‘a rapprochement has begun to assert itself between ecological thinking, political-economy, urban studies and critical social and cultural theory. This may provide the ferment from which a new and richer urban ecology or urban political-ecology may germinate’ (Swyngedouw, 1996, pp. 65–6). UPE was further established as a subfield with the publication of a volume entitled ‘In the Nature of Cities’ edited by Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw in 2006. UPE’s emphasis on the way in which nature is socially mobilized, discursively scripted, economically enrolled and physically transformed, to produce socioecological assemblages that support urbanization processes brought about a re-theorization of urbanization as a process of socio-natural transformation and of cities as historical, material, socio-natural assemblages (Keil, 2003; Loftus, 2012; Smith, 2010; Swyngedouw, 2006). Even though both the work of Harvey and Smith has strongly influenced UPE, gradually actor network theory (ANT) and post-humanism also gained momentum within the field (Heynen, 2014). It is worth mentioning that UPE is still expanding and remains at the epicentre of political ecology research as, inter alia, reflected in recent arguments about the importance of urbanization for wider political ecologies (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2015; Apostolopoulou, 2020; Arboleda, 2016) and the need to provincialize

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UPE by integrating insights from Southern theory (Lawhon, Ernstson and Silver, 2014). Another important subfield that emerged in the 1990s is feminist political ecology (FPE). Dianne Rocheleau, Barbara Thomas-Slayter and Esther Wangari in their landmark edited volume published in 1996, invited political ecologists to expand both their analysis of power and their scales of analysis to include gender relations and the household (Elmhirst, 2011). Rocheleau et al. (1996) argued that there are real gender differences in ‘experiences of, responsibilities for, and interests in nature and environments’ that ‘derive from the social interpretation of biology and social constructs of gender, which vary by culture, class, race, and place and are subject to individual and social change’ (p. 3). By linking the concerns of feminist cultural ecology and political ecology with those of feminist geography and feminist political economy, as well as with the analysis of feminist and environmental movements, their aim was to bring an explicit feminist perspective to political ecology. This meant treating gender as a critical variable, along with class, caste, race, culture and ethnicity, in shaping the unequal distribution of access to and control over resources (Rocheleau et al., 1996) that lies at the core of political ecology since its emergence and until today. It also meant acknowledging the necessity to better understand the everyday, embodied and emotional aspects of nature–society relations (Elmhirst, 2015; Sultana, 2015, 2021). Despite the major promise of the field and the existence of important research that followed a feminist approach, some scholars observed that scholarship that self-identified as FPE remained relatively limited (Elmhirst, 2011). Over the last decade though, there has been a resurgence of FPE. This includes research on FPE of the commons and commoning (Clement et al., 2019); FPE critiques of the ‘green economy’ (Harcourt and Nelson, 2015); as well as calls for moving towards post-colonial intersectional analyses (Mollett and Faria, 2013) and decolonization by ‘seeking to understand and to contribute, across worlds gendered otherwise, and not in Northern or Western feminist terms’ (Rocheleau, 2015, p. 55; see also Valadez, 2014). As Sultana (2021, p. 157) argues, situated mappings of FPE show a number of rooted networks currently in operation

that express a commitment to equity and justice and a critical stance on ‘capitalism, patriarchy, globalization, extractivism, enclosures, colonialism, development, and various forms of interconnected oppressions and injustices’ (see also Federici, 2018). The increasing influence of decolonial thinking in the ontologies and epistemologies of political ecology is evident in recent calls for an Indigenous political ecology that would pay attention to ongoing practices of colonialism, Indigenous knowledge systems, governance and self-determination, and decolonizing processes (Middleton, 2015; Mignolo and Escobar, 2010). Political ecology research in the twenty-first century vividly shows that the field’s boundaries are continuously expanding to encompass an almost endless variety of research topics, theories, methods, scales and geographies. Today’s political ecology scholarship includes post-colonial, post-structuralist, Marxist, including eco-Marxism, anarchist, feminist, Indigenous, degrowth, queer, and racial and environmental justice approaches, and expands across space, scale, place and time, generating a political economy of knowledge production that is remarkable in its breadth and depth (Bryant, 2015b). Only a glimpse at the three volumes published over the last decade (Bryant, 2015a; Peet, Robbins and Watts, 2010; Perreault et al., 2015) and the contents of the three dedicated journals in political ecology (Journal of Political Ecology, Écologie et Politique and Ecología Politíca) shows that a growing intersectional complexity in terms of the field’s identity can be identified (Bryant, 2015b). Topics like more-than-human ontologies and multi-species entanglements, radical critiques of market-based environmentalism, green development, neoliberal natures, and neoliberal conservation, green governmentality, the climate and biodiversity crisis, extractivism, degrowth, (de)coloniality, grassroots activism, and alternative sustainabilities, have gained increasing prominence in the last decade. Nonetheless, there are still concerns that certain epistemologies remain marginalized. These are accompanied by increasing calls to learn from and advance different forms of intersectional, interdisciplinary, international, Indigenous, feminist and queer political ecologies to open pathways towards more egalitarian and emancipatory futures Elia Apostolopoulou

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(Apostolopoulou et al., 2021; Heynen, 2018; Sultana, 2021). A final note on the networks of political ecology is significant. Political ecologists have been involved in a number of networks long before the emergence of social media (Batterbury, 2015). In the US, these included the Santa Cruz-based Center for Political Ecology established in 1989 by James O’Connor, the Political Ecology Society (PESO) and the Political Ecology Working Group at the University of Kentucky that was established in 2010 and organizes an annual conference entitled Dimensions of Political Ecology (DOPE).1 In recent years, a number of additional important networks have emerged in Europe often funded by the EU. These include ENTiTLE,2 an EU-funded Initial Training Marie Curie Network coordinated by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, that focused on conflicts, commons, disasters, movements and democracy, and the Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie WEGO-ITN network3 that aims to create an international feminist political ecology network. The Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade (EJOLT) FP7 project4 has also played a key role in documenting environmental conflicts and struggles worldwide. EJOLT aims to support the work of environmental justice organizations and unite scientists, activists and policymakers around issues of uneven ecological distribution and compiles a global database, the Environmental Justice Atlas5 (Temper, Del Bene and Martinez-Alier, 2015), depicting environmental conflicts across the globe. These emerging networks reflect the field’s longstanding concern to surpass the boundaries of academia, and reach communities of practice, social and environmental movements, most notably the global environmental justice movement, and promote a sustained and meaningful dialogue between scholars, communities and activists around socio-environmental and spatial justice and ways to make radically different nature–society relations possible (Apostolopoulou and Cortez-Vazquez, 2019; Escobar, 1998; Healy, Martinez-Alier and Kallis, 2015; Loftus, 2015; Peet and Watts, 1996; Rocheleau et al., 1996). Finally, and importantly, in 2015, an umbrella organization of researchers, groups, projects, networks and nodes was founded Elia Apostolopoulou

entitled the Political Ecology Network – POLLEN.6 By building on the legacy of political ecology as both a field of research and a theory and narrative that mobilizes social movements, POLLEN aims to function as a vehicle to promote, encourage and facilitate research on political ecology and link it with both other fields and disciplines and civil society. POLLEN has nodes from across the globe, including Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, Central and South America and the Caribbean, and Oceania, and keeps expanding, reflecting a growing and promising academic community of political ecology of the twenty-first century. Elia Apostolopoulou

Notes 1. See Bigger and Grabbatin (2012). History of DOPE. Accessed 17 October 2022 at https://​www​ .politicalecology​.org/​node/​3. 2. See ENTiTLE (n.d.). About us. Accessed 17 October 2022 at https://​www​.politicalecology​.eu/​. 3. See https://​www​.wegoitn​.org/​. Accessed 17 October 2022. 4. See http://​www​.ejolt​.org/​project/​. Accessed 17 October 2022. 5. See https://​ejatlas​.org/​. Accessed 17 October 2022. 6. See Political Ecology Network (n.d.). History. Accessed 17 October 2022 at https://​pol​iticalecol​ ogynetwork​.org/​history/​.

References and selected further reading Adams, B. (2019). Green Development: Environment and Sustainability in a Developing World. London: Routledge. Adams, W.M. and Hutton, J. (2007). People, parks and poverty: political ecology and biodiversity conservation. Conservation and Society, 5 (2), 147–83. Angelo, H. and Wachsmuth, D. (2015). Urbanizing urban political ecology: a critique of methodological cityism. In N. Brenner (ed.), Implosions/ Explosions. Berlin: JOVIS, pp. 372–85. Apostolopoulou, E. (2020). Nature Swapped and Nature Lost: Biodiversity Offsetting, Urbanization and Social Justice. Cham: Springer/Palgrave Macmillan. Apostolopoulou, E., Chatzimentor, A. and Maestre-Andrés, S. et al. (2021). Reviewing 15 years of research on neoliberal conservation: towards a decolonial, interdisciplinary,

Political ecology  279 intersectional and community-engaged research agenda. Geoforum, 124, 236–56. Apostolopoulou, E. and Cortes-Vazquez, J.A. (eds) (2019). The Right to Nature: Social Movements, Environmental Justice and Neoliberal Natures. London: Routledge. Arboleda, M. (2016). In the nature of the non-city: expanded infrastructural networks and the political ecology of planetary urbanisation. Antipode, 48, 233–51. Batterbury, S. (2015). Doing political ecology inside and outside the academy. In R.L. Bryant (ed.), The International Handbook of Political Ecology. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 27–43. Blaikie, P. and Brookfield, H. (1987). Land Degradation and Society. London: Methuen. Bridge, G., McCarthy, J. and Perreault, T. (2015). Editor’s introduction. In T. Perreault, G. Bridge and J. McCarthy (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology. London: Routledge, pp. 3–18. Bryant, R.L. (ed.) (2015a). The International Handbook of Political Ecology. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Bryant, R.L. (2015b). Reflecting on political ecology. In R.L. Bryant (ed.), The International Handbook of Political Ecology. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 14–24. Bryant, R.L. and Bailey, S. (1997). Third World Political Ecology. Hove: Psychology Press. Chartier, D. and Rodary, E. (2015). Globalizing French écologie politique: a political necessity. In R.L. Bryant (ed.), The International Handbook of Political Ecology. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 547–60. Clement, F., Harcourt, W., Joshi, D. and Sato, C. (2019). Feminist political ecologies of the commons and commoning. International Journal of the Commons, 13 (1), 1–15. Ehrlich, P. (1968). Population Bomb. London: Ballantine. Elmhirst, R. (2011). Introducing new feminist political ecologies. Geoforum, 42 (2), 129–32. Elmhirst, R. (2015). Feminist political ecology. In T. Perreault, G. Bridge and J. McCarthy (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology. London: Routledge, pp. 519–30. Escobar, A. (1998). Whose knowledge, whose nature? Biodiversity, conservation, and the

political ecology of social movements. Journal of Political Ecology, 5 (1), 53–82. Federici, S. (2018). Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Forsyth, T. (2004). Critical Political Ecology: The Politics of Environmental Science. London: Routledge. Gorz, A. (1987). Ecology as Politics. London: Pluto Press. Harcourt, W. and Nelson, I.L. (eds) (2015). Practising Feminist Political Ecologies: Moving Beyond the ‘Green Economy’. London: Zed Books. Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162, 1243–8. Harvey, D. (1982). The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Blackwell. Healy, H., Martinez-Alier, J. and Kallis, G. (2015). From ecological modernization to socially sustainable economic degrowth. In R.L. Bryant (ed.), The International Handbook of Political Ecology. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 577–90. Heynen, N. (2014). Urban political ecology I: the urban century. Progress in Human Geography, 38 (4), 598–604. Heynen, N. (2018). Urban political ecology III: the feminist and queer century. Progress in Human Geography, 42 (3), 446–52. Heynen, N., Kaika, M. and Swyngedouw, E. (eds) (2006). In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. London: Routledge. Keil, R. (2003). Progress report: urban political ecology. Urban Geography, 24, 723–38. Kim, S., Ojo, G., Zaidi, R.Z. and Bryant, R.L. (eds) (2012). Other political ecologies: introduction. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 33, 29–33. Lawhon, M., Ernstson, H. and Silver, J. (2014). Provincializing urban political ecology: towards a situated UPE through African urbanism. Antipode, 46 (2), 497–516. Leff, E. (2015). Encountering political ecology: epistemology and emancipation. In R.L. Bryant (ed.), The International Handbook of Political Ecology. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 44–56. Lipietz, A. (1987). Green Hopes: The Future of Political Ecology. Cambridge: Polity. Loftus, A. (2012). Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Loftus, A. (2015). Political ecology as praxis. In T. Perreault, G. Bridge and J. McCarthy (eds),

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280  Concise encyclopedia of human geography The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology. London: Routledge, pp. 179–87. Loftus, A. (2019). Political ecology I: where is political ecology? Progress in Human Geography, 43 (1), 172–82. McCarthy, J. (2002). First world political ecology: lessons from the wise use movement. Environment and Planning A, 34 (7), 1281–302. Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens III, W.W. (1972). Limits to Growth. New York: Universe. Middleton, B.R. (2015). Jahát Jat'totòdom: toward an indigenous political ecology. In R.L. Bryant (ed.), The International Handbook of Political Ecology. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 561–76. Mignolo, W.D. and Escobar, A. (eds) (2010). Globalization and the Decolonial Option. London: Routledge. Mollett, S. and Faria, C. (2013). Messing with gender in feminist political ecology. Geoforum, 45, 116–25. Peet, R., Robbins, P. and Watts, M. (eds) (2010). Global Political Ecology. London: Routledge. Peet, R. and Watts, M. (1996). Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements. London: Routledge. Perreault, T., Bridge, G. and McCarthy, J. (eds) (2015). The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology. London: Routledge. Robbins, P. (2019). Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Rocheleau, D. (2015). A situated view of feminist political ecology from my networks, roots and territories. In W. Harcourt and I. Nelson (eds), Practising Feminist Political Ecologies: Moving Beyond the ‘Green Economy’. London: Zed Books, pp. 29–66. Rocheleau, D., Thomas-Slayter, B. and Wangari, E. (1996). Gender and environment: a feminist political ecology perspective. In D. Rocheleau, B. Thomas-Slayter and E. Wangari (eds), Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues

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and Local Experiences. London: Routledge, pp. 3–26. Sauer, C. (1941). Foreword to historical geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 31 (1), 1–24. Smith, N. (1984). Uneven Development. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Smith, N. (2010). Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Steward, J. (1955). The Theory of Culture Change. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Sultana, F. (2015). Emotional political ecology. In R.L. Bryant (ed.), The International Handbook of Political Ecology. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA, pp. 633–45. Sultana, F. (2021). Political ecology 1: from margins to center. Progress in Human Geography, 45 (1), 156–65. Swyngedouw, E. (1996). The city as a hybrid: on nature, society and cyborg urbanization. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 7 (2), 65–80. Swyngedouw, E. (2006). Circulations and metabolisms: (hybrid) natures and (cyborg) cities. Science as Culture, 15 (2), 105–21. Temper, L., Del Bene, D. and Martinez-Alier, J. (2015). Mapping the frontiers and front lines of global environmental justice: the EJAtlas. Journal of Political Ecology, 22 (1), 255–78. Valadez, A. (2014). Saberes femeninos en el ámbito comunitario: contrahegemonía, defensa del territorio y lo cotidiano en la Lacandona. In M. Millan (ed.), Mas allá del feminismo: caminos para andar. Mexico: Red de Feminismos Descoloniales, pp. 145–54. Watts, M.J. (2015). Now and then: the origins of political ecology and the rebirth of adaptation as a form of thought. In T. Perreault, G. Bridge and J. McCarthy (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology. London: Routledge, pp. 41–72. Wolf, E. (1972). Ownership and political ecology. Anthropology Quarterly, 45 (3), 201–5.

54. Politics Geography as a discipline has engaged with politics – or, in other words, the study of power relations, the allocation of resources within society, and the role of policy in enabling this to happen – over a number of years. An early connection was made through the study of geopolitics and by geographical studies of important political forms, such as the state and the nation. More recent research has built on this foundation by studying familiar political forms in creative ways but also by examining politics in more novel guises, such as the politics of the body and the brain, and the politics of the non-human. My aim in this entry is to provide an overview of this rich history and to detail some of the exciting new geographical work being conducted on politics within contemporary human geography. The earliest engagement between geographers and politics came in the form of geopolitics. Geopolitics (see entry in this Encyclopedia) refers to a set of ideas that emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and sought to use geographical ideas as a way of supporting states to govern their own territories more effectively and to engage in international competition over land and other resources (Heffernan, 2000). Geographers’ study of politics during this period was highly instrumental in that it was centred on the realization of a series of practical end goals. British and US geographers such as Mackinder and Bowman, respectively, contributed to the creation of the new political map of Europe following World War I, while German geographers such as Haushofer were responsible for developing many of the academic ideas that underpinned German expansionism into Central and Eastern Europe prior to and during World War II. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, therefore, geographers were closely aligned with the practical politics of the age. This close connection came back to haunt the discipline of geography following World War II, as disgust concerning the human consequences of state expansionism was translated into a suspicion of the role that had been played by geographers in providing much of the academic justification for such expansionism. As a result, political geogra-

phy – the most explicit point of connection between geography and politics – became, as famously described by Berry (quoted in Johnston, 2001, p. 677), a ‘moribund backwater’ within geography. This marginalization of interest in politics in geography was to last until the early 1970s, when separate developments promoted a new engagement with the political. First, work by critical and Marxist geographers, such as Harvey (1973) and Lefebvre (1970), highlighted the role that geographers could play in understanding the links between urban politics and injustices of different kinds. Harvey (1973, p. 306) emphasized the need to study urban politics, viewing the city as not only the culmination of the spatial (in)justices associated with capitalism but also the beginnings of their abolition. In La Révolution Urbaine, Lefebvre (1970) also conceptualized the injustices that characterized urban politics, and highlighted the fundamental changes needed to secure a spatially just society. In both these cases, there was an attempt to reflect on how urban space was implicated in politics and how an alternative, more just, urban politics could be created. The second key development that took place during the 1970s was in relation to the ‘rebirth’ of political geography as a viable and vibrant subject area within geography, with a focus on territory (bounded spaces) and territoriality (attempts to order life through the use of territories) being at the core of this renaissance. Johnston (2001) provides a comprehensive review of the different ways in which political geographers began to engage with notions of territory and territoriality. Sack (1986) showed how territoriality affected various aspects of human life, thus correcting the tendency within much of spatial science to conceive of human activity occurring on ‘flat’ surfaces or spaces, which were devoid of politics. Electoral geographers, such as Gudgin and Taylor (1979), illustrated how territorial aspects of voting – such as the subdivision of states into electoral units of different size – directly influenced the results of elections. Once again, territory, as an explicit manifestation of the link between geography and politics, was seen to matter. Others sought to illustrate at a conceptual level the significance of territory as something that underpinned the power of the state. Gottmann (1973) discussed the importance of

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territoriality as a provider of social cohesion and conditions of production for the state. Mann (1986) went further by foregrounding the symbiotic relationship between the state and its territory. For Mann, states were a distinctive form of political organization because of their dependence on governing territories and, by extension, one could argue that any study of the politics of the state would be incomplete without due consideration being given to its territorial qualities. The above discussion provides a necessarily brief overview of the history of the engagement with politics within geography. For the remaining paragraphs of this entry, I want to outline three more contemporary ways in which politics and political issues are being addressed by geographers and others. First, significant strides have been made in recent years to develop more sophisticated conceptual and empirical understandings of territory and territoriality. Elden (2010, p. 799), for instance, has argued that a state territory above all must be ‘understood as a political technology: it comprises techniques for measuring land and controlling terrain’. State territories, in this sense, are a form of calculation, and any understanding of territory, therefore, needs to highlight different mechanisms for measurement – knowing what is happening within a defined and demarcated space. Political technologies of measurement and calculation are varied. Recent anthropological work on the state has highlighted relatively low-tech and embodied aspects of such techniques of control. Jones (2008) describes the significant role played by government inspectors of factories in the UK in shaping a coherent and governable UK territory during the nineteenth century. Gill (2016), too, has demonstrated the importance of individual state employees and volunteers alike in helping to monitor borders as part of the UK’s asylum system. However, we have arguably entered a world in which political technologies of measurement are becoming ever-more impersonal, automated and high-tech. Amoore (2006) has examined the significance of biometrics as a way of measuring and controlling the flow of people in and out of the US in the context of the so-called ‘war on terror’. Through the use of retinal eye scanning and fingerprinting, certain kinds of mobility and certain kinds of person become acceptable and admissible Rhys Jones

to US territory, while others are excluded. Moreover, there is an automation inherent in the use of such technologies, as data about migrants and visitors are collected and circulated, are subject to algorithmic processing, and are stored in a range of governmental organizations. The above discussion gives the impression of a state territory that is perfectly constructed and perfectly practised political technology. However, many authors have emphasized that state territories are characterized by many gaps. Scott (1998), writing about a state that seeks to make its territory more knowable or ‘legible’, spends considerable time explaining how such attempts are doomed to failure. The abstraction and simplification undertaken by the state to make territory knowable and governable leads to a situation in which the complexities of life cannot be computed or ‘fall off the radar’. The state’s failure to calculate and control also appear in more empirical contexts. Hannah (2009) has studied the census boycott movement in West Germany during the 1980s and views it as an attempt to contest some of the more sinister aspects of the state’s attempt to collect information about its population and to govern its territory more effectively. The second contemporary theme revolves around attempts to study geography in more relational ways, and the implications of this for our understanding of politics. Relationality is based on the premise that humans and other things do not exist as separate entities but rather take on meaning from their relationship with other humans and things. Perhaps the most famous example of this way of thinking in geography arises with respect to the relationality inherent in Massey’s (1994) ‘global sense of place’. For Massey, places are not bounded. They do not exist in isolation from one another. Rather, their distinctiveness comes about as a result of their many interactions and connections with other distant and not-so-distant locations. Territorial ways of understanding places give way here to more relational, networked and topological ways of viewing the world. Importantly, efforts have been made to tease out the political implications of thinking about places – and the world – in such ways. Massey (2004) has stated that there is a need to eschew territorial and parochial forms of politics and to reflect on our sense

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of responsibility for distant others, separated from us by time and space. The need for more effective relational forms of politics in temporal contexts has featured heavily as part of debates around sustainability of course, with the Brundtland definition of sustainable development calling for a form of development in the present that does not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. There are important spatial implications, too, in relation to the need to care for distant others. Amin (2004) has called for a move away from the ‘politics of propinquity’ that characterize territorial states. He demands a new emphasis on a ‘politics of connectivity’ in which people and places imagine creative connections with other people and places – perhaps distant from each other – which share a similar political outlook. We also need to consider the relational connections between humans and non-human others. Work here is beginning to address the potential of these relational connections to develop new kinds of politics ­– ones that are less anthropocentric and arguably more progressive. Kurki (2020), for instance, questions whether a new and progressive form of international relations theory can be developed by bringing non-humans into the orbit of our politics. The emergence of relational ways of thinking does not mean that territory as a concept has become defunct. Some of the more interesting work on relational ways of thinking argues for networked and infrastructural interpretations of territories, constituted on the basis of people, groups, materials, objects and things. Clearly, material infrastructures bring meaning to state territories at the borders of states. Physical demarcations of a state’s boundaries – walls, fences and barbed wire – reinforce in a literal sense the notion that a state’s territory possesses a degree of permanence and stability. Immigration processing and detention centres, too, have also played a significant role in marking the existence of a state’s boundaries in a physical and, of course, embodied sense (Mountz et al., 2012). But material infrastructures permeate and reproduce state territories in additional ways, which extend beyond the border. Infrastructures play a key role in a process of nation- and state-building – infrastructures such as railways, road networks and other

public services, such as health services and education systems. Martí-Henneberg (2017, p. 160) highlights the significance of railways as conduits of nation- and state-building from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The territorial aspect of this process was paramount: ‘the railway network interconnected the states of Europe and helped to integrate their individual national territories and this also had an enormous political impact’. The third set of themes, which highlight the ongoing and creative engagement between geography and politics, relate to work on the politics of the body and the brain. The growing emphasis on studying different kinds of identity politics from the 1980s onwards – or, in other words, a politics that extends beyond class struggle to include different aspects of individual and group identity, such as gender, race and sexuality – signalled, arguably, a rescaling of geographical studies of politics away from the state and the nation to the body as a site of politics and struggle. Work in this area has drawn on the research of Butler (1990). She has shown that a sovereign, stable and authentic identity does not reside in the human body. Rather, identity is viewed as something that is shifting, tentative and performed. It is something that comes about as a result of the relational connections between the human body and a whole host of other people, institutions and things. Gender, in this sense, is viewed as being something that is constructed and performed by individuals, rather than being something that is based on biological differences. These are particularly live debates at the time of writing, as academics, politicians and the public alike seek to think through the implications of such ways of thinking for issues as varied as the incarceration of transgender men and women in prisons, and the regulations that should apply to transgender athletes. Another important way in which political themes are being studied by geographers relates to the embodied nature of emotion and affect. Recent research on emotions and affect have been concerned with the subconscious and embodied interactions between individuals, the environment they inhabit and the material things they engage with. A significant insight of this work is that the affective engagements between individuals, spaces and things sustain power relationships. Nation-states have attempted to use affect Rhys Jones

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as a way of promoting their own political agenda in discursive and territorial contexts, including nationalism as a state ideology. Closs-Stephens (2016) has described these embodied, affective and material aspects of nationalism as things that are akin to national atmospheres. She uses the example of the London Olympics of 2012 as a way of illustrating the significance of these national atmospheres, as places such as the Olympic Stadium became generators of object/body/ emotion relations (particularly happiness, pride and togetherness). The final aspect of contemporary work on the body I want to discuss is based on the growing emergence of the brain as an object of governance. Recent years have witnessed the introduction of a new approach to governance, with policymakers seeking to develop more effective forms of public policy – ones that work with the grain of human cognition. Importantly, this new emphasis on ‘nudging’ (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008) individuals to make better decisions is based on the incorporation of academic insights into how the human brain operates – from academic disciplines such as psychology, behavioural science and neuroscience – into public policy. Increasingly, human subjects are deemed to be irrational in their decision making, with a corresponding need for policymakers to devise policies that can ‘correct’ that irrationality by cajoling individuals to make better decisions, which will improve their health, wealth and happiness. In seeking to address individuals’ irrationality, such policies reframe contemporary forms of neoliberal governance by: recentring power within the state apparatus (with ‘choice architects’ arguably making decisions on our behalf while maintaining the illusion of free will); undermining the significance of rational choice; and creating a new breed of passive subject (Whitehead et al., 2019). Here, the brain and its associated body become, once again, a site of political struggle for the state. The above discussion has shown the history of the engagement of geography with politics, as well as some of the more contemporary manifestations of this engagement. The discussion shows a number of things. First, the nature of the engagement has been broad and varied, with the relatively narrow focus on territory as a core concept being supplemented by a study of other important concepts and issues. Nowadays, geography is Rhys Jones

a catholic and multidimensional subject, so it follows that its current engagement with politics is equally multidimensional. Second, it is clear that the political challenges facing individuals, groups, the environment and other ‘things’ are proliferating, whether in relation to climate change, the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, or the rights of individuals to control their bodies and claim identities. Politics is everywhere and becoming more varied. As such, the scope for geographers to engage with the political are set to become ever-more varied in future. Finally, there has been a shift over time, with geography and geographers increasingly engaging with politics in more critical, radical and progressive ways. Geographers are not just studying varied political processes and forms. They are seeking to change them for the better. Rhys Jones

References and selected further reading Amin, A. (2004), ‘Regions unbound: towards a new politics of place’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86, 33–44. Amoore, L. (2006), ‘Biometric borders: governing mobilities in the war on terror’, Political Geography, 25, 336–51. Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. Closs-Stephens, A. (2016), ‘The affective atmospheres of nationalism’, Cultural Geographies, 23, 181–98. Elden, S. (2010), ‘Land, terrain, territory’, Progress in Human Geography, 34, 799–817. Gill, N. (2016), Nothing Personal? Geographies of Governing and Activism in the British Asylum System, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Gottmann, J. (1973), The Significance of Territory, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Gudgin, G. and Taylor, P.J. (1979), Seats, Votes and the Spatial Organisation of Elections, London: Pion. Hannah, M. (2009), ‘Calculable territory and the West German census boycott movements of the 1980s’, Political Geography, 28, 66–75. Harvey, D. (1973), Social Justice and the City, London: Edward Arnold. Heffernan, M. (2000), ‘Fin de siècle, fin du monde? On the origins of European geopolitics, 1890–1920’, in K. Dodds and D. Atkinson (eds), Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of

Politics  285 Geopolitical Thought, London: Routledge, pp. 27–51. Johnston, R.J. (2001), ‘Out of the “moribund backwater”: territory and territoriality in political geography’, Political Geography, 20, 677–93. Jones, R. (2008), People/States/Territories: The Political Geographies of British State Transformation, Oxford: Blackwell. Kurki, M. (2020), International Relations in a Relational Universe, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1970), La Révolution Urbaine, Paris: Gallimard. Mann, M. (1986), The Sources of Social Power, Volume 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martí-Henneberg, J. (2017), ‘The influence of the railway network on territorial integration in Europe (1870–1950)’, Journal of Transport Geography, 62, 160–71. Massey, D. (1994), Space, Place and Gender, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Massey, D. (2004),‘Geographies of responsibility’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86, 5–18. Mountz, A., Coddington, K., Catania, R.T. and Loyd, J.M. (2012), ‘Conceptualizing detention: mobility, containment, bordering and exclusion’, Progress in Human Geography, 37, 522–41. Sack, R. (1986), Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, J. (1998), Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thaler, R.H. and Sunstein, C.R. (2008), Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Whitehead, M., Jones, R. and Lilley, R. et al. (2019), ‘Neuroliberalism: cognition, context and the geographical bounding of rationality’, Progress in Human Geography, 43, 632–49.

Rhys Jones

55. Population geographies Introducing population geography(ies) Population studies is an interdisciplinary field with contributions from geographers, demographers, sociologists, anthropologists, along with a range of other disciplines. Population geography is distinguished from its cognate disciplines in its focus on the spatial expression of population, including its size, composition and components of change, as well as its substantive focus on migration. Population geography emerged as a distinct subdiscipline of human geography in the mid-twentieth century. Trewartha (1953) was an early proponent, arguing that population had been largely neglected in the field of human geography. According to Trewartha, ‘population geography was the pivotal topical study’ (ibid., p. 79) across a range of spatial scales. Early work in population geography was highly empirical, emphasizing the description and measurement of demographic phenomena (Bailey, 2005; Duncan, 1957). This coincided with (and was informed by) a period of heightened global interest in the ‘problem’ of population and a need for reliable statistics on populations and their components of change (Benjamin et al., 1955). The rapid spread of quantitative geography in the 1960s and the rise of positivism led to a greater emphasis on theorying population geography – for example, the theory of migration (Lee, 1966) and the hypothesis of the mobility transition (Zelinsky, 1971), as well as more sophisticated modelling approaches including spatial interaction models of migration (Olsson, 1965), and multi-regional approaches to demography (Rees and Wilson, 1977). Internal migration – that is, moves between regions within countries – was a major topical focus of geographers at this time, reflecting concerns about rapid urbanization, particularly in the developing world (UNESCAP, 1979), as well as the neglect of migration by demographers in favour of studies of fertility and mortality (van Dalen, 2018). Geographical studies of fertility and mortality were firmly rooted in the demographic tradition, focusing on the

geographic expression of aggregate behaviours (Sporton, 1999). By the late 1970s and early 1980s, radical critique of positivist approaches had taken hold in the social sciences but gained less traction in population geography than in other realms of human geography. One response by population geographers was a re-emphasis on behavioural and micro-level approaches, particularly in migration scholarship (Halfacree and Boyle, 1993). The period stretching into the 1990s and 2000s was marked by considerable internal debate on the future of population geography, with growing calls for greater engagement with theory, a broadening of methodological approaches away from aggregate data sets, as well as an expansion of focus beyond migration (Findlay, 2003; Graham, 2004; Graham and Boyle, 2001). The past two decades have seen the growing pluralization of methods and epistemologies (Finney, 2021), as well as some broadening of substantive concerns beyond migration – for example, the growing interest in immobility (Stockdale, Theunissen and Haartsen, 2018); surplus populations (Tyner, 2013); and spatially contextualized views of the life course (Barcus and Halfacree, 2017). Notwithstanding, population geography remains a largely quantitative discipline with a significant applied dimension.

Defining population(s) A population is conventionally defined as an aggregate set of individuals sharing a common attribute. This is generally operationalized in official statistics as the collection of people in a given geographic area at a specified time – for example, the resident population in Australia as of 30 June 2021. Populations are further classified according to characteristics such as age, sex and ethnicity depending upon the particular research focus. Populations change over time as a result of the demographic components of change: births, deaths and migration, both across (international) and within (internal) national borders. These are linked via the demographic accounting equation:

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Pt + n = Pt + (B – D) + (I – O)

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Where: Pt is the population at a point in time; Pt + n is the population at n intervals in the future; B is births within a given interval; D is deaths within a given interval; I is in-migration; and O is out-migration. The difference between births and deaths in a given interval is termed natural increase or decrease depending upon the direction of the shift. The difference between in-migration and out-migration is termed net migration. For national populations, attention is confined to international migration (i.e., a change in a person’s country of residence). For subnational populations, internal migration is also significant. In addition to changes brought about by the components of population change described above, populations also age every year. Other attributes such as educational attainment and employment status will also vary over time. The demographic formulation of population as expressed above risks treating space as simply a container or another attribute of population. Modern population geography is increasingly adopting an expanded view of population as ‘lives across space’ (Barcus and Halfacree, 2017, p. 1) both shaped, and shaping, the social, cultural, political, economic and environmental context of individual lives (Bailey, 2005).

‘Doing’ population geography(ies) Quantitative data have been central to the ‘doing’ of population geography since the discipline’s inception, with the wealth of available data impacting both methodology and epistemology, which were largely positivist in focus (Finney, 2020). Three principal forms of data have served as the basis for this work: national censuses of population; population registers; and large-scale surveys. Census data have arguably been the most widely used due to their attributional richness and high spatial resolution. A census is defined as ‘the total process of collecting, compiling, evaluating, analysing and publishing or otherwise disseminating demographic, economic and social data pertaining,

at a specified time, to all persons in a country or in a well-delimited part of a country’ (UNSD, 2008, p. 7). A census is differentiated from other statistical collections by its characteristics of individual enumeration, simultaneity and universality within a territory, and defined periodicity (Baffour, King and Valente, 2013). A fundamental feature of censuses is their ability to produce statistics on small populations and small areas with a minimum of sampling error, and the ability to aggregate these data to create bespoke populations and geographies (UNSD, 2008). This feature makes them incredibly useful for geographic analysis. A range of data is commonly collected by censuses, including data on the three components of demographic change: migration (e.g., place of previous residence), fertility (e.g., children born in a household in the last 12 months, children ever born) and mortality (e.g., number of deaths in a household). Information on other socio-economic characteristics is also commonly collected such as ethnicity, religion, education and occupation. For population geographers, censuses provide a wealth of small area data at predictable intervals. These data have been widely used for the measurement of internal migration (Bell et al., 2015), changing population composition (Franklin, 2014), ethnic segregation (Catney, 2016) and spatial disadvantage (Norman, 2010), including the development of geodemographic classifications (Cockings, Martin and Harfoot, 2020; Singleton and Spielman, 2014). Population registers are another source of data widely employed by population geographers. Registers of vital events (i.e., births, deaths and marriages) provide small area data for the analysis of fertility and mortality and its spatial variation. Complete population registers, such as those maintained in Nordic countries and parts of East Asia provide continuous counts of population by age and sex as well as information on births, deaths, migration and family relationships. National statistical offices are increasingly pursuing additional linkage of administrative data sets to increase the attributional richness of these data and an alternative to costly census enumerations (Kukutai, Thompson and McMillan, 2015). A key advantage of population registers is their longitudinal perspective. This has been exploited in the analysis of migration, enabling both life course Elin Charles-Edwards

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framing of migration (Fischer and Malmberg, 2001) as well as relational perspectives – for example, the relationship between migration and local ties (Mulder and Malmberg, 2014). Data from large-scale surveys is the third source of population data utilized by population scholars. It is widely used in regions with less developed statistical systems for the collection of demographic data – for example, the Demographic and Health Surveys programme (Gayawan et al., 2016), as well as for the collection of retrospective and longitudinal data via panels. Demographic surveys generally lack the spatial specificity of the census and register data but yield important insights into national as well as rural–urban differentials in key demographic processes (Lerch, 2019). Similarly, the growing availability of longitudinal survey data has enabled biographical aspects of demographic processes to be more fully investigated – for example, the impact of childhood mobility on subsequent migration behaviours in different countries around the globe (Bernard and Perales, 2021). As in other disciplines, the emergence of ‘big data’, particularly digital data, has impacted the practice of population geography. Existing expertise in the manipulation and analysis of large data sets (e.g., census data), along with skills in geographical information systems (GIS – see the entry in this Encyclopedia), have made population geographers well placed to utilize novel geographical referenced data sets. Facebook data has been used to nowcast immigration to the United States (Alexander, Polimis and Zagheni, 2022) and examine male fertility rates in countries around the globe (Rampazzo et al., 2018). Social media and other digital trace data, including mobile phone records, have been used to generate estimates of temporary and seasonal populations (Silm and Ahas, 2010) not captured by traditional statistical sources. While digital data are captured at a high spatial and temporal resolution, they suffer from bias and often lack the attributional richness of traditional data sets. This is in large part due to the incidental nature of these sources, which were not designed to measure population processes and trends. The emergence of big data, both administrative and digital, has been touted as an alternative to traditional forms of population data, but are unlikely to supplant them Elin Charles-Edwards

completely (Norman, Marshall and Lomax, 2017). Population geography, like its cognate discipline of demography, remains highly data driven. This reliance on quantitative data has led to sustained criticism of population geography being atheoretical and lacking the spatial and relational contextualization to understand lives across space. While positivism remains a dominant approach in population geography, sustained calls for population geographers to engage more deeply with social theory have been heeded, with a significant body of critical scholarship emerging in recent decades, most notably on the themes of migration and spatial mobility (Silvey, 2004). Critical migration studies have drawn on feminist perspectives to explore, for example, the sexualized moral discourses of migrant women in Singapore, using discourse analysis and in-depth interviews (Yeoh and Huang, 2010). Similarly, transnational student migration has been conceptualized using an assemblage framework investigated using in-depth interviews of master’s students in Norway (Lysgård and Rye, 2017). The mobilities turn in the social sciences (Sheller and Urry, 2006) has contributed to a broadening of the topical focus of population geographers away from migration to examinations of topics such as immobilities (Mata-Codesal, 2018) and the heterolocalism of migrant and refugee communities (Fauser, 2017; Hardwick and Meacham, 2005). These studies exploit a range of methods including interviews and ethnographic approaches (Collins, 2010), as well as drawing on quantitative data sets such as censuses in a mixed methods framework. Qualitative approaches have been used to critique the essentialist nature of common categories employed in population statistics such as that of race in suburban America (Skop, 2006). Qualitative and mixed methods provide an avenue for more nuanced understandings of population as both relational and contextualized within space, and has helped shift population geographers away from the traditional demographic view of space as simply a ‘container’ (Bailey, 2005). However, despite a substantial expansion in the use of qualitative approaches in population geography over the past two decades, qualitative and mixed methods remain underexploited in the field of population geography (Finney, 2020).

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Advancing population geography(ies) As the global population nears 8 billion and is expected to approach 11 billion by the end of the century (UNDESA, 2019), population remains a critical topic of both academic inquiry and policy interest. The subdiscipline of population geography has made significant contributions to population studies over the past seven decades, particularly on the topic of migration. The past decade has seen a renewed interest in both the geography of fertility (Coddington, 2021; Fiori, Graham and Feng, 2014) and mortality (Billingsley, 2011). Increased availability of both traditional and novel big data is a boon for population geographers but runs the risk of entrenching geography as ‘spatial demography’. Notwithstanding, there is evidence of an increasing plurality of approaches employed by population geographers and willingness to engage with a broader range of theoretical perspectives such as assemblage theory (Duffy and Stojanovic, 2018) to better capture the contextual and relational aspects of populations. There is now widespread recognition of the need to interrogate both the conceptualization of population (see, e.g., Barcus and Halfacree, 2017) and the essentialist categories sometimes taken for granted by population geographers (Skop, 2006). Given the challenges of future population growth in an unequal, connected and rapidly changing world, geographers are well placed to link population patterns and processes to the broad geographical contexts that impact them, and that they are in turn impacted by. Elin Charles-Edwards

References and selected further reading Alexander, M., K. Polimis and E. Zagheni (2022). ‘Combining social media and survey data to nowcast migrant stocks in the United States’.

Population Research and Policy Review, 41, 1–28. Baffour, B., T. King and P. Valente (2013). ‘The modern census: evolution, examples and evaluation’. International Statistical Review/Revue Internationale de Statistique, 81 (3), 407–25. Bailey, A. (2005). Making Population Geography. London: Routledge. Barcus, H. and K.H. Halfacree (2017). An Introduction to Population Geographies: Lives Across Space. London: Routledge. Bell, M., E. Charles-Edwards and P. Ueffing et al. (2015). ‘Internal migration and development: comparing migration intensities around the world’. Population and Development Review, 41 (1), 33–58. Benjamin, B., E. Grebenik and W.P.D. Logan et al. (1955). ‘Current population problems: with particular reference to the United Nations World Population Conference’. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (General), 118 (1), 12–27. Bernard, A. and F. Perales (2021). ‘Is migration a learned behavior? Understanding the impact of past migration on future migration’. Population and Development Review, 47 (2), 449–74. Billingsley, S. (2011). ‘Exploring the conditions for a mortality crisis: bringing context back into the debate’. Population, Space and Place, 17 (3), 267–89. Catney, G. (2016). ‘Exploring a decade of small area ethnic (de-)segregation in England and Wales’. Urban Studies, 53 (8), 1691–709. Cockings, S., D. Martin and A. Harfoot (2020). ‘Developing a national geodemographic classification of workplace zones’. Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy, 13 (4), 959–83. Coddington, K. (2021). ‘For political geographies of fertilities’. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 39 (8), 1675–91. Collins, F.L. (2010). ‘Negotiating un/familiar embodiments: investigating the corporeal dimensions of South Korean international student mobilities in Auckland, New Zealand’. Population, Space and Place, 16 (1), 51–62. Duffy, P. and T. Stojanovic (2018). ‘The potential for assemblage thinking in population geography: assembling population, space, and place’. Population, Space and Place, 24 (3), Article e2097. Duncan, O.D. (1957). ‘The measurement of population distribution’. Population Studies, 11 (1), 27–45. Fauser, M. (2017). ‘Mixed methods and multisited migration research: innovations from a transna-

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290  Concise encyclopedia of human geography tional perspective’. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 12 (4), 394–412. Findlay, A.M. (2003). ‘Population geographies for the 21st century’. Scottish Geographical Journal, 119 (3), 177–90. Finney, N. (2021). ‘Population geography I: epistemological opportunities of mixed methods’. Progress in Human Geography, 45 (3), 577–85. Fiori, F., E. Graham and Z. Feng (2014). ‘Geographical variations in fertility and transition to second and third birth in Britain’. Advances in Life Course Research, 21, 149–67. Fischer, P.A. and G. Malmberg (2001). ‘Settled people don’t move: on life course and (im-) mobility in Sweden’. International Journal of Population Geography, 7 (5), 357–71. Franklin, R.S. (2014). ‘An examination of the geography of population composition and change in the United States, 2000–2010: insights from geographical indices and a shift– share analysis’. Population, Space and Place, 20 (1), 18–36. Gayawan, E., M.I. Adarabioyo and D.M. Okewole et al. (2016). ‘Geographical variations in infant and child mortality in West Africa: a geo-additive discrete-time survival modelling’. Genus, 72 (1), Article 5. Graham, E. (2004). ‘The past, present and future of population geography: reflections on Glenn Trewartha’s address fifty years on’. Population, Space and Place, 10 (4), 289–94. Graham, E. and P. Boyle (2001). ‘Editorial introduction: (re)theorising population geography: mapping the unfamiliar’. International Journal of Population Geography, 7 (6), 389–94. Halfacree, K.H. and P.J. Boyle (1993). ‘The challenge facing migration research: the case for a biographical approach’. Progress in Human Geography, 17 (3), 333–48. Hardwick, S.W. and J.E. Meacham (2005). ‘Heterolocalism, networks of ethnicity, and refugee communities in the Pacific Northwest: the Portland story’. The Professional Geographer, 57 (4), 539–57. Kukutai, T., V. Thompson and R. McMillan (2015). ‘Whither the census? Continuity and change in census methodologies worldwide, 1985–2014’. Journal of Population Research, 32 (1), 3–22. Lee, E.S. (1966). ‘A theory of migration’. Demography, 3 (1), 47–57. Lerch, M. (2019). ‘Regional variations in the rural–urban fertility gradient in the global South’. PLOS ONE, 14 (7), Article e0219624. Lysgård, H.K. and S.A. Rye (2017). ‘Between striated and smooth space: exploring the topology of transnational student mobility’. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 49 (9), 2116–34. Mata-Codesal, D. (2018). ‘Is it simpler to leave or to stay put? Desired immobility in a Mexican

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village’. Population, Space and Place, 24 (4), Article e2127. Mulder, C.H. and G. Malmberg (2014). ‘Local ties and family migration’. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 46 (9), 2195–211. Norman, P. (2010). ‘Identifying change over time in small area socio-economic deprivation’. Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy, 3 (2), 107–38. Norman, P., A. Marshall and N. Lomax (2017). ‘Data analytics: on the cusp of using new sources?’, Radical Statistics, No. 116, 19–30. Olsson, G. (1965). ‘Distance and human interaction a migration study’. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 47 (1), 3–43. Rampazzo, F., E. Zagheni and I. Weber et al. (2018). ‘Mater certa est, pater numquam: what can Facebook advertising data tell us about male fertility rates?’ Paper presented at the Twelfth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Palo Alto, California. Rees, P.H. and A.G. Wilson (1977). Spatial Population Analysis. London: Edward Arnold. Sheller, M. and J. Urry (2006). ‘The new mobilities paradigm’. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 38 (2), 207–26. Silm, S. and R. Ahas (2010). ‘The seasonal variability of population in Estonian municipalities’. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 42 (10), 2527–46. Silvey, R. (2004). ‘On the boundaries of a subfield: social theory’s incorporation into population geography’. Population, Space and Place, 10 (4), 303–8. Singleton, A.D. and S.E. Spielman (2014). ‘The past, present and future of geodemographic research in the United States and United Kingdom’. The Professional Geographer: The Journal of the Association of American Geographers, 66 (4), 558–67. Skop, E. (2006). ‘The methodological potential of focus groups in population geography’. Population, Space and Place, 12 (2), 113–24. Sporton, D. (1999). ‘Mixing methods in fertility research’. The Professional Geographer, 51 (1), 68–76. Stockdale, A., N. Theunissen and T. Haartsen (2018). ‘Staying in a state of flux: a life course perspective on the diverse staying processes of rural young adults’. Population, Space and Place, 24 (8), Article e2139. Trewartha, G.T. (1953). ‘A case for population geography’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 43 (2), 71–97. Tyner, J.A. (2013). ‘Population geography I: surplus populations’. Progress in Human Geography, 37 (5), 701–11. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) (2019). World

Population geographies  291 Population Prospects 2019: Highlights. New York: UNDESA. UNESCAP (1979). ‘Comparative study of migration and urbanization in relation to development: a framework’. Population Research Leads, No. 6, 1–36. United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) (2008). Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses: Revision 2. New York: UNSD.

van Dalen, H. (2018). ‘Is migration still demography’s stepchild?’. Demos: Bulletin on Population and Society, 34 (5), 8. Yeoh, B.S.A. and S. Huang (2010). ‘Sexualised politics of proximities among female transnational migrants in Singapore’. Population, Space and Place, 16 (1), 37–49. Zelinsky, W. (1971). ‘The hypothesis of the mobility transition’. Geographical Review, 61 (2), 219–49.

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56. Post-colonial geographies Post-colonial is a qualifier that identifies both a context – that is, a country, a city or a political regime after independence from colonial rule – and a theoretical and epistemological perspective on that same or related contexts. Such a perspective not only looks for and makes explicit the conditions of oppression and domination pertaining to colonialism but, crucially, aims at deconstructing the knowledge forms associated with the latter and, in the process, integrates the viewpoint of the oppressed or the colonized. The first is essentially a political and historical marker for describing a period or a place, while the second is an ontological shift to see from the eyes of the hitherto invisible, racialized or exoticized, and integrate their worldviews into a more complete, non-Eurocentric analysis. In the latter sense, ‘post-colonial’ is not merely an adjective but a mode of knowing, and it is the epistemological basis for the field of knowledge known as post-colonial studies, with its ‘impulse to invert, expose, transcend or deconstruct knowledges and practices associated with colonialism’ (Sidaway, 2000, p. 592).

Marker and perspective As a marker, ‘post-colonial’ has the ability to describe the periods that follow very different things, such as imperial, internal or breakaway settler colonialisms (Sidaway, 2000), to be applied to historical and political timelines of very different lengths, and it has been critiqued on both counts. As McClintock (1992) noted: ‘Argentina, formally independent of imperial Spain for over a century and a half, is not “post-colonial” in the same way as Hong Kong (destined to be independent of Britain only in 1997). Nor is Brazil “post-colonial” in the same way as Zimbabwe’ (ibid., p. 87). Controversies and calls for precise definitions are recurrent: for example, when certain authors refer to post-colonial London, Brussels or Lisbon, others will tend to ask ‘Do they not mean “post-imperial?”’ The former may then interject to say that they wish to describe a

‘post-colonialized’ city, where colonialism’s characteristics such as racism or domination no longer exist, regardless of such places being former colonial cities or former imperial metropolises. Similarly, when a reference is made to, say, ‘post-colonial Australia’, is it to define the status regarding British rule or its relationship with Aboriginal peoples? And so on. Still, such plasticity is helpful in the sense that it groups together different contexts that occur after domination and share key traits that could otherwise never be analysed in the same breadth. What the ‘post-colonial’ term needs is to be accompanied by historical and political specificity as much as possible – that is, to be precisely located in historical terms as well as situated in relation to other imperial forms that preceded Western colonialism (e.g., the Roman, Ottoman or Meso-American empires), as well as to contemporary imperialisms (e.g., the USA during the second part of the twentieth century). The ‘post-colonial’ needs to be fully fleshed out and redefined at every use. Which brings us to its theoretical and epistemological lineage. The idea of a post-colonial perspective can be traced back to the early writings of anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon ([1952] 2008) or Albert Memmi ([1957] 2013), who in different ways argued for turning the focus to the lived experience of colonized peoples. Fanon’s practice as a psychiatrist in Algeria had led him to the understanding that there were psychopathologies specific to the colonized. These were rooted in language – that is, in the fact that the ‘Black Man’, in order to be viewed as human (and not subhuman, as colonialism’s culture suggested in all shapes and forms), had to become whiter, a process he embarked on by mastering the language of the colonizer. This, however, led to a double consciousness (Fanon, [1952] 2008) or, as post-colonial theorist Achille Mbembe puts it, a separation from the self (Mbembe, 2017, p. 78). In parallel, colonialism’s impact was felt also by the oppressor: as a psychiatrist, Fanon treated policemen involved in the torture of anti-colonial activists who would perpetuate the cycle of violence at home with their children (Fanon, [1952] 2008). For Fanon, this encapsulated colonialism’s problems, and the fact that colonialism affected both metropolitan and native societies, the colonizer and the colonized, became a recurrent topic in post-colonial studies. Fanon’s writings would

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today be classified as critical psychoanalytical studies (McEwan and Blunt, 2002), but from here he developed a comprehensive social and political analysis on colonialism and the predicaments of decolonized peoples. Despite Fanon, Memmi, the négritude writers such as Aimé Césaire and, later, liberation leaders – intellectuals like Amílcar Cabral and Léopold Senghor – ‘post-colonial’ was not fully conceptualized throughout the early decades of independence of countries after World War II; it was essentially employed to denote a political status. Moreover, its proximity to a Marxist worldview meant the post-colonial label was ‘directed towards the active transformation of the present out of the clutches of the past’ (Young, 2002, p. 4). Later, ‘post-colonial’ and ‘Third World’ countries were increasingly reframed as ‘developing countries’, a seemingly more neutral denomination that in any case implied they lagged behind a (Western) standard. The emergence of ‘development’ could not disguise that, often, the post-colonial space was now the scenario for neo-colonial practices, such as the broad regimes of resource extraction that would culminate in the 1980s’ structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) that relied on privatization, internal devaluation and a resulting precariousness of everyday life that spread across African, Asian and South American countries (e.g., Riddell, 1992).

Early post-colonial approaches Post-colonial approaches were not yet stabilized; they took inspiration from, among others, Paulo Freire’s ([1968] 2000) ideas of ‘critical consciousness’ and a ‘dialogics’ between oppressor and oppressed. It became clear that looking at the knowledges of the oppressed was the key strategy. An early example of the approach (still without using the post-colonial label) was Santos’s (1977) study of the unofficial legal system inside a Brazilian favela and its relationship to the official legal system. The latter, he argued, acts as an instrument of class domination in a society that has been post-colonial for over two centuries but with its social structures having kept a strong trace of colonialism. Santos then showed how the unofficial legal system mimicked the official one in order

to subvert it. A later and more collaborative example is anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s association with Congo/Zaire resident Kalundi Mango to decipher the Vocabulaire de ville de Elizabethville, a document that recorded the ‘Shaba’, or Lubumbashi Swahili language, an oral variety of Swahili used by Africans in the Congo-Zaire region that had escaped linguistic colonial control (Fabian, Mango and Schicho, 1990).

Orientalism and the emergence of post-colonialism in the 1990s The publication of Orientalism by Edward Said (1978) was the decisive moment towards a coherent and fully developed post-colonial perspective. Said defined ‘Orientalism’ as the system of knowledges by which the East was represented, an imagined ‘Orient’ at turns distant, exotic, unified or dangerous, by which the East was, in other words, ‘Othered’. This system encompassed everything, from erudite knowledge down to popular representations, and the role of the ‘Orient’ (amalgamating very different cultures and cultural expressions) was to legitimize the colonial exploitation of its different peoples. There was the need to invert such a state of affairs, and post-colonial literature narrating history and personal events differently, written by authors such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka or V.S. Naipaul (in English), Naguib Mahfouz or Ousmane Sembène (in French) and José Luandino Vieira or Mia Couto (in Portuguese), among many others, had already dovetailed with such a need – in a way, it had filled the lacuna in advance. Post-colonial literary studies then disseminated ‘post-colonial theory’ to other disciplines. Key works in the crossover between cultural studies and other disciplines are Hall’s (1980) research on race; Pratt’s (1992) coinage of ‘contact zones’ as the spaces where white people and cultures encounter the Other, the previous-colonial-now-post -colonial Other; or Gilroy’s (1993) discussion of the ‘Black Atlantic’. Overlapping with this, the Subaltern Studies Group led by Gayatri C. Spivak drew on Gramsci’s ideas of the subaltern amidst hegemonic societies and developed them to encompass the experience of the colEduardo Ascensão

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onized – namely, the Indian subcontinent’s people and subaltern classes. Their project was ‘to rethink Indian colonial historiography from the perspective of the discontinuous chain of peasant insurgencies during the colonial occupation’ (Spivak, [1988] 2010, p. 252); in so doing, they inaugurated a new way of doing historiography, with an attention to local (previously ‘native’) sources, discourses and practices as well as revisiting colonial archives. A related theoretical manoeuvre was Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) call to ‘provincialize Europe’, short for understanding Western knowledge as just one more – and not the central one – among a constellation of others. Chakrabarty’s book was published immediately after the 1990s, the decade that truly saw the emergence of the post-colonial as a lens for different academic disciplines, from anthropology to cultural studies, history and sociology, and as I discuss next – human geography. Thomas’s (1994) Colonialism’s Culture, Bhabha’s (1994) The Location of Culture (1994) or Comaroff and Comaroff’s (1993) Modernity and its Malcontents reassessed the culture of colonialism and underlined its heterogeneity in the ‘imagining’ of dominated peoples. They also emphasized the way colonialism’s culture had always been reworked by colonized peoples in ritual (and other forms) of hybridity, during colonialism and after. An early example of appropriation and subversion during colonialism is the ritual Jean Rouch filmed in his classic documentary Les maîtres fous (1955), where a group of Haouka-professing migrants in Accra (at the time the capital of the Gold Coast, today Ghana) enact the roles of colonial and modernity’s symbols such as the ‘governor’ or the ‘locomotive’, in a hypnotic trance that serves as a coping mechanism for the conditions of coloniality under which they lived.

Post-colonial geographies In geography the post-colonial turn had, first, to come to terms with the fact that, like post-colonial history, ‘any post-colonial geography “must realise within itself its own impossibility”’ (Chakrabarty, 1992, in Sidaway, 2000, p. 593) given that it was developed as a ‘Western-colonial’ science Eduardo Ascensão

and it had been deeply implicated with the colonial enterprise – for instance, by charting territories for exploitation (e.g., the geographical expeditions the British Royal Geographical Society supported). The ‘new’ cultural geography and urban geography were among the subdisciplines that took such need for serious reflexivity more seriously, and the post-colonial city naturally emerged as one of the main locales where post-colonial cultures and practices could be examined and understood. In a way, Marxist geographer Doreen Massey (1991) prompted this line of enquiry by asking about the power geometries of post-colonial places and whether the sense of ‘dislocation’ felt by Westerners regarding the novel presence of cultural imports on their doorstep (such as ‘the pizzeria, the kebab house, the branch of the Middle-Eastern bank’ on Kilburn High Road in London; ibid., p. 24) had not already been experienced by colonized people, with the products and ideas that colonialism had forced on them; and whether the usual ‘characterization of time–space compression represent[ed] very much a Western, colonizer’s, view?’ (ibid.). Such questions were partly answered and partly complicated by other human geographers like Gregory (1994), Jacobs ([1996] 2002) and McEwan and Blunt (2002), among many others, who sketched the ‘geographical post-colonial’ by re-examining colonial representations, the production of space in colonial and post-colonial cities or the geographies of diaspora and transnationality. In the reverse space to Massey’s – not the once-imperial city but the once-colonized city – Kusno (2000) and King (2004) explored the circuits between colonial and post-colonial eras as they are materialized in the hybrid cultures and built environments of post-colonial Delhi, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta. A key moment was Jennifer Robinson’s (2006) call to post-colonialize urban geography and urban studies: by this she meant challenging the Euro-American-centric paradigm of what a city is, how it is defined and how it is lived. Robinson proposed to ‘dislocate accounts of “urban modernity” from those few big cities where astute observers elaborated on the broader concept of “modernity”’ (ibid., p. 65) – she is referring to New York, London, Chicago or Berlin and to urban theorists Louis Wirth, Robert E. Park, Georg Simmel and, to an extent, Walter Benjamin – and instead choose to also see ‘the many

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different ways of being modern’ (ibid.) that exist and are created in post-colonial cities. She calls for observers to consider the novel urban arrangements in these cities not as ‘imitation’ but as valuable to theory as those from the usual suspects. This is possible through what she terms a ‘comparative effort’ that focuses on and between those cities that are ‘off the map’ of hegemonic trends in geographical research and then studying them with a cosmopolitan perspective, one that encompasses the ‘diverse trajectories of people, resources and ideas that make up cities’ (ibid., p. 170). Simone (2004) and De Boeck and Plissart (2004) are among those that look at African cities on these terms: at what makes them work and at how they actually work, and not as ‘failed cities’ in current idiom. Simone (2004) highlights the informal governance arrangements and the provisional networks used to access goods and services he finds in Dakar, or the navigation by youth of the social obligations coming from traditional (sometimes pre-colonial) cultures and the necessary ‘modern’ flexibility to achieve employment in Douala, as elements of city-ness as seen from the Global South. Similarly, De Boeck and Plissart (2004) describe post-colonial Kinshasa as a multitude of over-layered representations – pertaining to pre-colonial pasts, colonial modernities and post-colonial nationalist myths – that people simultaneously resist, shatter and transform, making up an unstable space that is nonetheless intensely experienced as a city. A different branch of the push to theorize from the South concerns research on specific topics initially derived from the usual Euro-American cities but to do it from hitherto unusual locations – for instance, gentrification in Latin American or African cities (e.g., Janoschka and Sequera, 2016; Lemanski, 2014). A final example of post-colonial comparative efforts is Lees, Shin and López-Morales’s (2016) thesis on ‘planetary gentrification’. They focus on the globally disseminated neoliberal regimes of urban dispossession and attempt to uncover them. For that, they resort to a ‘post-colonial urbanism that seeks to unhinge, unsettle, contextualize or “provincialize” Western notions of urban development’ (ibid., p. 7).

From Indigenous political ecologies to the decolonial option Among the other strands in geography to which the post-colonial perspective is important is political ecology, with its reassessment of the relationship between colonialism, nationalism and nature (e.g., Ginn, 2008), and the related integration of Indigenous knowledges and ‘indigeneity’ towards a ‘decolonial’ politics (Mignolo and Escobar, 2010; Radcliffe, 2017). The latter, in reality not that dissimilar to a post-colonial stance, argues that the long processes of coloniality (dating back to the ‘discovery’ of the Americas) and capitalism form a conjoined ‘power matrix’ that needs to be delinked and abandoned in favour of more humanistic and nature-connected forms of organizing the world. It has also been used as an intellectual basis for the removal of symbols and education curricula containing traces of colonialism. In a simplified way, if the post-colonial is an exercise in addition (of voices and perspectives into the practices and analysis of the world), the decolonial may be described as one of subtraction (of colonial elements from those voices and perspectives), the decolonial option seems to come once the limits to post-colonialism are encountered – that is, once it becomes clear that the structural historical forces that shaped modernity, colonialism and extractive capitalism are so obdurate in certain contemporary contexts that no ‘post-’ or ‘addition’ are enough to make them less oppressive or exploitative, and the impulse to cut straight to the elimination of any elements bearing the traces of colonialism becomes irresistible. Human geography is well placed to straddle this divide, in the sense that, as well as to keep studying the space–time compression of contemporary global realities, it is capable of integrating other realities and perceptions into its theoretical body – from pre-Colombian, non-industrial, notions of time to Indigenous notions of space such as those of the Australian Aboriginal or Angola’s Lunda peoples, and everything in between. Eduardo Ascensão

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References and selected further reading Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe: Post-colonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J. (eds) (1993). Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Post-colonial Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. De Boeck, F. and Plissart, M.-F. (2014). Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Fabian, J., Mango, K. and Schicho, W. (eds) (1990). History from Below: The “Vocabulary of Elisabethville” by André Yav: Texts, Translation, and Interpretive Essay. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Fanon, F. ([1952] 2008). Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Freire, P. ([1968] 2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Continuum. Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Ginn, F. (2008). Extension, subversion, containment: eco‐nationalism and (post) colonial nature in Aotearoa New Zealand. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33 (3), 335–53. Gregory, D. (1994). Geographical Imaginations. Oxford: Blackwell. Hall, S. (1980). Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance. In UNESCO (ed.), Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism. Paris: UNESCO, pp. 305–45. Jacobs, J.M. ([1996] 2002). Edge of Empire: Post-colonialism and the City. London: Routledge. Janoschka, M. and Sequera, J. (2016). Gentrification in Latin America: addressing the politics and geographies of displacement. Urban Geography, 37 (8), 1175–94. King, A. (2004). Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity. London: Routledge. Kusno, A. (2000). Behind the Post-colonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia. London: Routledge. Lees, L., Shin, H.B. and López-Morales, E. (2016). Planetary Gentrification. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lemanski, C. (2014). Hybrid gentrification in South Africa: theorising across southern

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and northern cities. Urban Studies, 51 (14), 2943–60. Massey, D. (1991). A global sense of place. Marxism Today, June, pp. 24–9. Mbembe, A. (2017). Critique of Black Reason. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McClintock, A. (1992). The angel of progress: pitfalls of the term ‘post-colonialism’. Social Text, 31/32, 84–98. McEwan, C. and Blunt, A. (eds) (2002). Post-colonial Geographies. London: Continuum. Memmi, A. ([1957] 2013). The Colonizer and the Colonized. London: Routledge. Mignolo, W. and Escobar, A. (eds) (2010). Globalization and the Decolonial Option. London: Routledge. Pratt, M.L. (1992). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Radcliffe, S. (2017). Geography and indigeneity I: indigeneity, coloniality and knowledge. Progress in Human Geography, 41 (2), 220–29. Riddell, J.B. (1992). Things fall apart again: structural adjustment programmes in sub-Saharan Africa. The Journal of Modern African Studies, 30 (1), 53–68. Robinson, J. (2006). Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. London: Routledge. Said, E.W. (1978). Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Santos, B.S. (1977). The law of the oppressed: the construction and reproduction of legality in Pasargada. Law & Society Review, 12 (1), 5–126. Sidaway, J.D. (2000). Post-colonial geographies: an exploratory essay. Progress in Human Geography, 24 (4), 591–612. Simone, A. (2004). For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Spivak, G.C. ([1988] 2010). ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ In R. Morris (ed.), Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 237–91. Thomas, N. (1994). Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Young, R. (2002). Post-colonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

57. Poverty Poverty is the state in which a person lacks the necessary resources to sustain an acceptable standard of living. It is a fundamental but contested concept in social science and public policy, containing as it does normative judgements about the nature of a good society and the scope of the actions that should be taken to pursue that goal. Poverty is deeply geographic in at least three ways (Lister, 2021, p. 81): poor households are found to concentrate in areas that become labelled as poor or deprived places; the characteristics of areas can be said to be poor in the sense that they lack environmental, economic, social or public service resources; and the experience of poverty is bound up with the relationships with(in) the space people inhabit. Accordingly, human geographical studies of poverty (Hopkins, 2021, p. 384) have included studies of the distribution of poor people over space (Fahmy et al., 2011; Glasmeier, 2002), place poverty (Philo, 1995), relational aspects (Elwood, Lawson and Sheppard, 2016) and lived experiences (Kennelly, 2020). In the wake of the 2008–09 Great Recession, geographers have studied and described the spatially differentiated welfare losses resulting from public service cuts (Gray and Barford, 2018). That said, much of the work on the spatial aspects of poverty has been done outside human geography in economics, sociology, development studies and social policy; indeed, human geographers have sometimes gone missing when it comes to the study of poverty (Leyshon, 1995). However, there is evidence of increased human geographical interest in poverty and welfare (Milbourne, 2010) and some possible directions for human geographers are offered at the end of this entry. The concept of poverty is highly contested – scholars, politicians, public, media and people experiencing poverty do not agree on its nature. For some, poverty is about having insufficient food, shelter and clothing to sustain basic physical functioning: the concept of absolute poverty. In this paradigm, it is abhorrent to speak of poverty in high-income countries when millions of people in low-income countries live on subsistence incomes. The competing, dominant perspective is that what resources are necessary and what living standards are acceptable

depend upon the social context: the concept of relative poverty. A classic definition of this is that people are ‘in poverty when they lack resources to obtain the type of diet, participate in the activities and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or at least widely encouraged and approved, in the societies in which they belong’ (Townsend, 1979, p. 31). More recent conceptualizations of poverty have emphasized shame as a fundamental aspect of poverty, building upon the lived experience of people in poverty (Walker, 2014). The capabilities approach (Sen, 1999) attempts to bridge the absolute and relative concepts of poverty. Capabilities are functions that individuals have reason to value, such as the ability to secure food and shelter, to participate in the cultural life of society, or to avoid shame. These capabilities are absolute, but the resources required to realize them are relative. In this paradigm, poverty is capability deprivation, rather than a lack of resources. This approach raises the possibility that poverty as capability deprivation could arise from something other than lack of material resources – for example, the illness of a wealthy person. For most purposes, poverty is conceptualized with a material core as the ‘inability to participate [in society] owing to a lack of resources’ (Nolan and Whelan, 1996, p. 188). Descriptions and studies of poverty require a method of dividing a population into those who are living in poverty and those who are not. There are many approaches to judging the level of resources required to participate in society. Objective approaches are typically used, but subjective approaches ask people whether they judge themselves to be poor. Consensual approaches invite members of the public to decide what level of resources are needed to participate in society; expert approaches rely on the judgements of academic researchers. A further distinction can be made between direct measures of material deprivation, whether a person has access to the material goods required to participate in society – for example, clothing, food and housing; and indirect measures of whether a person has command over sufficient economic resources (i.e., income or wealth) to secure these material goods (Ringen, 1988). Inspired in part by Sen’s capabilities approach, multidimensional approaches to poverty measurement have been developed that include non-material indicators (Alkire et

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al., 2015; Gordon, 2006); these are becoming more commonly used in the Global South. Income is the most often used measure of poverty, as it is relatively easy to measure, does not require decisions to be made about which indicators to use (and how to combine them), has clear causal relations to social outcomes and is directly amenable to public policy measures. The household – typically defined as adults who live together plus any dependent children – is usually used as the unit of account. Incomes accruing to each individual member of the household are added together and assumed to be equally shared amongst members of the household. The World Bank’s poverty line of $1.90 a day is determined by the average price of a minimum quantity of goods and services in the 15 poorest countries, determining that 730 million people, one-tenth of the world’s population, lived in extreme poverty in 2015. High-income countries use higher poverty lines to reflect higher general living standards. In Europe, a common poverty line is 60 per cent of median equivalized household income. Eurostat, the European Union statistical agency, refers to people in households below this income as ‘at risk of poverty’, recognizing the limitations of relying solely on income as a measure of poverty (Atkinson et al., 2002). Although useful for international comparative purposes, this 60 per cent median measure suffers from being arbitrary (why not 50 per cent or 70 per cent?) and does not have a direct link to living standards. One alternative approach is the United States poverty thresholds, which were defined in the 1960s using the cost of a basic basket of food items, multiplying it by three to reflect the proportion of income spent on food by the average household. The US poverty thresholds have been uprated by inflation since the 1960s but have not been adjusted to reflect the reduction in the proportion of income spent on food by the average household, which means that an officially poor household in the US is now relatively much worse off than a poor household in the 1960s. The European and US measures share the assumption of equal household resource sharing, likely resulting in an underestimation of the extent and depth of poverty experienced by women. Research shows that men and women often do not have equal access to household resources, and that mothers in low-income households will Mark Fransham

reduce their resource consumption in favour of their children (Bennett, 2013). The incidence of poverty in a population is typically summarized by the headcount measure, the percentage of the population who are living in poverty at a point in time. This measure is insensitive to the depth of poverty – that is, whether people are living close to the poverty line or far below it. The headcount measure can be supplemented by the average poverty gap, the average distance of poor people from the poverty line, and the average squared poverty gap, which places more weight on people further below the poverty line. Persistent poverty measures are used to identify people who have lived below the poverty line for long periods, and whose living standards might therefore be particularly low. For example, Eurostat identifies people as persistently poor if they were poor in the year of observation and at least two out of the three preceding years. The experience of poverty is highly stratified by age, gender, race or ethnicity and class. Poverty has long been recognized to have a strong link to position in the life course, the risk of poverty being higher in childhood, during parenthood and at older ages. Single adult families with children, mostly headed by women, are at particular risk of poverty due to the difficulties of accessing the labour market alongside childcare responsibilities and the failure of social security systems to respond to the ‘new social risk’ of single parenthood. In many countries, minority ethnic or racial groups are at higher risk of poverty: in the Global North, this is particularly acute in the United States, where blacks and Hispanics have historically been over-represented in the population living in poverty (Creamer, 2020). Measuring the spatial distribution of poverty can be challenging, as methods that are devised to measure poverty at a national level are not always robust for subnational areas. In the United States, model-based estimates of poverty are created by combining survey data with population estimates and administrative records. The United Kingdom has developed indicators based upon administrative data from means-tested social security claims. Poverty mapping aims to visually represent the spatial distribution of poverty, typically presenting the proportion of people in a geographic area (say neighbourhoods, or counties) living below the poverty line in

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a choropleth map. Although popular for use in targeting public policy initiatives, such maps can contribute to the stigmatization of areas and imply uncritically that areas and their resident populations should be targeted as the cause of their own poverty. The spatial distribution of poverty can be quantitatively summarized by using segregation indices, which measure the extent to which population groups are separated from each other in their settlement patterns (Massey and Denton, 1988). The most commonly used is the Index of Dissimilarity, which varies from 0 to 1 and indicates the proportion of the population that would have to move areas to achieve an even distribution. Moran’s I is used as a measure of the extent to which areas with similar levels of poverty are clustered together. The spatial distribution of poverty has been found in many studies to have a stubborn persistence, at country level between regions and at urban level between neighbourhoods (Dorling et al., 2000; Glasmeier, 2002). Typically poverty in the Global North has been associated with ‘inner city’ areas, but recent studies show that there is some change to this pattern. Poor households are increasingly being ‘pushed out’ from economically successful cities with high housing costs, leading at a macro level to increasing rates of poverty in post-industrial towns and rural areas, and at neighbourhood level to a suburbanization of poverty (Hochstenbach and Musterd, 2018) as processes of gentrification take hold in urban centres. The causes of poverty are contextual, multiple and contested but are typically explained using individual characteristics, cultural norms or structural inequalities. The proximate cause of poverty is the inability of households to secure an adequate income from the labour market and social security transfers, and so public policies to reduce poverty typically focus on increasing labour market incomes and altering social security systems. Insufficient labour market income can result from unemployment, but in informal labour markets, or increasingly, liberalized formal labour markets, poverty can be caused by insufficient hours of work or intermittent work. This low work intensity can be a more important explanation for poverty than low hourly wages (Bradshaw and Main, 2016), limiting the efficacy of minimum wage policies as anti-poverty interventions.

These proximate causes have many upstream causes, including the exercise of power, the structure of economic opportunity, the gendered division of labour and the legacy of racism, which can be extremely powerful but less amenable to immediate public policy solutions. Geography can be considered a cause of poverty or simply an expression of structural forces that have their causes elsewhere. From an economic point of view, residential location is a constrained choice that reflects the preferences of the household; the concentration of poor households in certain locations reflects a rational choice by those households given the relative cost of housing and the services available. In this paradigm, high poverty areas are ‘specialized neighbourhoods’ that offer amenities to people living on low incomes (Cheshire, 2009). Alternatively, the theory of area effects asserts that the area of residence has a causal influence on individual social outcomes. Galster (2012) identifies four categories of mechanisms by which area effects are theorized to operate: geographical (local labour market opportunities, transport links, quality of services); social-interactional (cultural norms, peer effects, social disorder); institutional (public and private service provision); and environmental (pollution, crime, access to outdoor recreation). An influential US study (Chetty and Hendren, 2017) that exploited the differing exposures to neighbourhoods between siblings whose family moved area found a positive relationship between neighbourhood affluence in childhood and income in adulthood. Influenced by area effects theory, some national and local authorities have pursued ‘mixed tenure’ housing that aims to improve welfare by reducing the concentration of poor households rather than the risk of poverty itself. More radical schemes have demolished existing social housing, replacing it with mixed-tenure developments. These have been highly controversial with allegations of ‘social cleansing’ by urban local authorities (Lees and Ferreri, 2016). The domains in which area effects exist, and their relative importance with regard to individual risk factors, is a subject of ongoing research and academic debate. Traditionally, quantitative human geography studies have focused on analysing the spatial distribution of poverty, conceptualMark Fransham

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ized and measured as a single variable. This has sometimes had the effect of stigmatizing areas with high poverty rates and representing them uncritically as places in need of intervention that are the cause of their own problems, shifting attention away from the structural processes that operate at larger scales (Crossley, 2017). Future studies could and should move beyond this simple descriptive work and engage with the causal revolution (Pearl and Mackenzie, 2018) to construct more sophisticated accounts of the causes of spatially concentrated poverty (and wealth) and their effects on human welfare, through, for example, a more sophisticated evaluation of area effects (van Ham and Manley, 2012). Geographers could contribute to the development and application of multidimensional poverty measures, understanding how different dimensions of poverty intersect in space, and contribute to the growing literature on the relational nature of poverty by exploring how these relational aspects are experienced in space. Mark Fransham

References and selected further reading Alkire, S., Foster, J.E. and Seth, S. et al. (2015). Multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis: Chapter 1 – Introduction. OPHI Working Paper 82. Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative. Atkinson, T., Cantillon, B., Marlier E. and Nolan, B. (2002). Social Indicators: The EU and Social Inclusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bennett, F. (2013). Researching within-household distribution: overview, developments, debates, and methodological challenges. Journal of Marriage and Family, 75, 582–97. Bradshaw, J. and Main, G. (2016). Child poverty and deprivation. In J. Bradshaw (ed.), The Wellbeing of Children in the UK. Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 31–70. Cheshire, P. (2009). Policies for mixed communities: faith-based displacement activity? International Regional Science Review, 32 (3), 343–75. Chetty, R. and Hendren, N. (2017). The impacts of neighborhoods on intergenerational mobility II: county-level estimates. NBER Working Paper

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No. 23002. National Bureau of Economic Research. Creamer, J. (2020, 15 September). Inequalities persist despite decline in poverty for all major race and Hispanic origin groups. Census.gov. Accessed 17 October 2022 at https://​ www​ .census​.gov/​library/​stories/​2020/​09/​poverty​ -rates​-for​-blacks​-and​-hispanics​-reached​ -historic​-lows​-in​-2019​.html. Crossley, S. (2017). In Their Place: The Imagined Geographies of Poverty. London: Pluto Press. Dorling, D., Mitchell, R., Shaw, M. and Orford, S. (2000) The ghost of Christmas past: health effects of poverty in London in 1896 and 1991. British Medical Journal, 321 (7276), 1547–51. Elwood, S., Lawson, V. and Sheppard, E. (2016). Geographical relational poverty studies. Progress in Human Geography, 41 (6), 745–65. Fahmy, E., Gordon, D. and Dorling, D. et al. (2011). Poverty and place in Britain, 1968-99. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 43 (3), 594–617. Galster, G. (2012). The mechanism(s) of neighbourhood effects: theory, evidence, and policy implications. In M. van Ham, D. Manley and L. Simpson et al. (eds), Neighbourhood Effects Research: New Perspectives. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 23–56. Glasmeier, A.K. (2002). One nation, pulling apart: the basis of persistent poverty in the USA. Progress in Human Geography, 26 (2), 155–73. Gordon, D. (2006). The concept and measurement of poverty. In C. Pantazis, D. Gordon and R. Levitas (eds), Poverty and Social Exclusion in Britain. Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 29–69. Gray, M. and Barford, A. (2018). The depths of the cuts: the uneven geography of local government austerity. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 11 (3), 541–63. Hochstenbach, C. and Musterd, S. (2018). Gentrification and the suburbanization of poverty: changing urban geographies through boom and bust periods. Urban Geography, 39 (1), 26–53. Hopkins, P. (2021). Social geography III: committing to social justice. Progress in Human Geography, 45 (2), 382–93. Kennelly, J. (2020). Urban masculinity, contested spaces, and classed subculture: young homeless men in downtown Ottawa, Canada. Gender, Place & Culture, 27 (2), 281–300. Lees, L. and Ferreri, M. (2016). Resisting gentrification on its final frontiers: learning from the Heygate Estate in London (1974–2013). Cities, 57, 14–24. Leyshon, A. (1995). Missing words: whatever happened to the geography of poverty?

Poverty  301 Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 27 (1), 1021–8. Lister, R. (2021). Poverty (2nd edition). Cambridge: Polity Press. Massey, D. and Denton, N. (1988). The dimensions of residential segregation. Social Forces, 67 (2), 281–315. Milbourne, P. (2010). The geographies of poverty and welfare. Geography Compass, 4 (2), 158–71. Nolan, B. and Whelan, C. (1996). Resources, Deprivation and Poverty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pearl, J. and Mackenzie, D. (2018). The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect. London: Allen Lane. Philo, C. (1995) (ed.). Off the Map: The Social

Geography of Poverty in the UK. London: Child Poverty Action Group. Ringen, S. (1988). Direct and indirect measures of poverty. Journal of Social Policy, 17 (3), 351–65. Sen, A.K. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Townsend, P. (1979). Poverty in the United Kingdom. London: Allen Lane. van Ham, M. and Manley, D. (2012). Neighbourhood effects research at a crossroads. Ten challenges for future research: introduction. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 44 (12), 2787–93. Walker, R. (2014). The Shame of Poverty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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58. Power When thinking about the important contemporary human and environmental challenges that perplex geographers, we might ask why it is that state policies either fail or achieve their aims; or how some global movements appear to be successful while others stumble. The reasons are often to do with power. Despite its centrality to geographical concerns, power is a particularly tricky concept to pin down. The difficulty perhaps lies with power’s double life: it is both widely assumed (Painter, 2008) and yet ‘curiously difficult to specify when we actually focus on it’ (Low, 2005, p. 83). Popular imaginaries of power see it either as a property held in reserve, as a prerequisite for action, or as the outcome of actions. Power can be manifest and palpable in its exercise or else concealed so we may not even appreciate that we are being directed to do something. It might comprise force, or it may involve cooperation. Power can facilitate and constrain or perform both simultaneously. It is regularly concretized as a kind of ‘thing’; however, power only exists in so far as it is an outcome or effect of social relationships and practices (Low, 2005). Human geographer John Allen (2003) helpfully synthesizes thinking on power into three distinct forms each with their own geographies. Allen characterizes power as inscribed capacity, as the mobilization of resources, and as strategies and techniques. Power as an inscribed capacity is inherently possessed by individuals and groups by virtue of their relative position to others within a network. In this way, we ‘have power’ because of the office or official role we hold (by being a police officer, for instance). Power thus gives individuals the potential to control, command or direct the actions of others. Power might alternatively be conceived of as resources mobilized by groups to achieve their ends. For instance, we might have powerful technologies at our disposal. Power hence can be ‘located’ as resources or as decision-making authority at a level of policymaking. Regarded thus, power is held as a stock of resources or as decision-making power residing at a certain scale, exchanged intact between levels of government. This perspective has noticeably spatially loaded

vocabularies in its talk of ‘horizontal’ or ‘vertical’ power relations (Griffin, 2012). Allen (2003) terms this a ‘centred view of power’ where power is understood as being stockpiled at institutional sites such as economic corporations or state institutions. Political geography has traditionally located power within nation-states but political processes do not begin and end with states. Transnational social movements are also prominent actors. In addition, it can be limiting to consider power as residing in a fixed location because such a view does not tell us anything about its eventual consequences or likely success. As Allen argues (2003), the mere existence of a located concentration of resources or decision-making authority does not guarantee that their deployment will be successful or go unresisted. Resources and located decision-making authority represent latent rather than actual qualities of power, where the capacity to deploy power is not held in individual agents’ actions or places but rather in structures and collectives of actors. This last resonates with structural theories developed in sympathy with Marxist theory. For them, power relations are understood to be produced by underlying material inequalities and broader political-economic structures, whilst for Richard Peet (2007) inequalities are reproduced through powerful ideological mechanisms that control people’s minds, livelihoods and beliefs. Disparities do not simply result from a distribution of material resources then. Work in feminist geography investigates how women and LGBTG+ individuals can be oppressed by gendered power in the form of patriarchal discourses. This form of ‘power over’ can be conceived as a negative and constraining force (Allen, 2003). Powerful discourses operating within society impel citizens to embody beliefs and then act accordingly. For example, citizens living in a market economy may assume the view that competition is natural and desirable. In this way, power is not always obviously coercing. This notion relates to the final perspective on power, which understands it to be a diffuse phenomenon realized through the deployment of strategies, techniques and practices. Research understanding power thus draws principally on the legacy of Foucault. For Foucault (1982), power is not ‘located’ geographically, but rather exists in structures of

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knowledge or technologies. This view sees power not held in centralized resources, but rather as an immanent force acting everywhere and from everywhere (Allen, 2003). Foucault reasoned that power and resistance to it are diffused and all-encompassing, and not separate from what they can do. Here, there are no apparent constraints or overt sanctions but only indirect techniques of regulation. The conduct of subjects is shaped by what they imagine to be the truth of their circumstances. Foucault developed the notion of governmentality to conceptualize how citizens govern themselves. Liberal state power is expressed not simply through confinement, violence and domination, but also via practices of calculation like the census and through discourses about what is ‘good’ and ‘right’. Governmentality considers a range of control techniques: from self-policing to the biopolitical command of populations, through to the practices of demographics or public health. Individual conduct is therefore not only steered through techniques and expertise, but also via the desire to regulate oneself. Power thus is generative rather than simply constraining. It cannot be assimilated to economic structural determination and neither does it simply reside in agency. As all these different approaches reveal, the effects of power cannot be read off from geographical configurations like apparent hierarchies. Organizations at the apex of decision making are not automatically the most powerful (Allen, 2003). Analogously, in recent debates on deterritorialization, commentators have demonstrated that cities or regions never simply contain power and that we cannot merely determine the effects of power from any specific territorial arrangement (Painter, 2008). Territories might instead be reproduced by powerful spatial practices like financial manoeuvring in the city or via geopolitical choreographies. Territorialization is arguably better understood as a process made in the exercise of power rather than as a simple topography. Theories that articulate power as either centralized or diffuse not only provide simplistic geographies; they are also unhelpful for understanding multiple dimensions of power. As Allen (2003) explains, power does not just operate through oppression and domination; it may also involve other ‘modalities’, including charisma, seduction, negotiation,

persuasion and inducement. These modalities each have their own geographies. Charismatic individuals often play a part in steering and orientating political debates, but it is a mode of power that cannot be extended indefinitely over space since it thrives on personalized contact. And like manipulation, coercion does not act across great distances since the concealment of intent gives them their spatial reach (ibid.). For all these reasons, it might be more productive to see power as a spatial and relational effect of social interaction. The idea of ‘power geometry’, developed by Doreen Massey (1993), is useful to help us think about how individuals or groups are positioned and connected within networks of space–time flows. Their positions derive relationally from the connections between the productions of power and space. The spatial operations of power are differentially engaged so that different actors have different amounts of freedom and influence. This means that geographically uneven power relations provide individuals, groups and institutions with different sorts and degrees of agency. Power geometry helps us to apprehend the differential, heterogeneous and dynamic ways that different people are bound and constrained across spaces and has become an important approach in geography. It also helps researchers grasp how power is never evenly enacted across space and time and that arranging space–time in particular ways can produce different power effects. Hence, space makes a significant difference to how power works. For example, reconfiguring a space or rescaling a policy might benefit certain individuals or groups or give them new controls. And it may be necessary to redesign a space to achieve the conditions for surveillance. The spatial workings of power have been addressed outside human geography too. For example, power as a networked, dispersed or fluid property is found in the work of key social science figures including Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Latour (1986). And in turn, their ideas have become enfolded into human geography scholarship. Latour (1986) developed actor network theory (ANT) to explain the geographically dispersed nature of agency. ANT understands the world as a multiplicity of different connections – articulations, translations, associations, or mediaLiza Griffin

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tions – between ‘actors’ or actants. For Latour, power is produced and enacted collectively, and it ‘flows’ between actants in a network. Power here derives from the relations and the connections dispersed in the network. It is not a pre-existing ‘stock’ of influence possessed by an individual who then tries to persuade others to perform specific tasks; and it does not flow unidirectionally from a single institution. Networks do not exist in the context of power but instead are the process through which power is created. The ability of actants to be agents is determined by their relations established within the network. For example, important actors become so only when power has flowed through the linkages elevating them to actant status, and only by virtue of the other actors. Understanding what sociologists generally call power means describing the ways in which actors are defined, associated and simultaneously obliged to remain faithful to their alliances. ANT offers a more processual and socio-material perspective on the relations between power, politics and space (Müller, 2015). Biophysical objects therefore become a significant point of departure through which to appreciate how power operates. As in ANT accounts, assemblage thinking similarly attempts to ‘rematerialize’ social and political analysis. Both ANT and assemblage theories possess a sensitivity to the material interventions of matter in how agency and politics (the ‘stuff’ of power) are enacted and constituted (Whatmore, 2006). This contention has become a core idea in contemporary human geography. However, critics maintain that valuing the agency of non-humans in conjunction with human agency ‘flattens out’ power and ignores the unique capacity that humans have for conscious political action. Others have condemned these approaches for not attending to how differences in power around race, gender or class affect who or what is able or unable to form associations (Müller, 2015). Assemblage and ANT thinkers do, nevertheless, appreciate how some actors (or actants operating in networks) wield more power, but instead of assuming its presence and form, would instead seek to understand the circumstances or networks through which it came about. Work in geography has been particularly alert to the unevenness of assemblage power, asking about the unequal emergence Liza Griffin

of ‘matters of concern’ and addressing how not everyone or thing can participate equally. Assemblage thinking has thus become a significant analytical tool in human geography. Both assemblage and ANT perspectives address the spatial dimensions of power through concern over ‘why orders emerge in particular ways, how they hold together, somewhat precariously, how they reach across or mould space and how they fall apart’ (Müller, 2015, p. 27). The idea of assemblage is drawn from Deleuze and Guattari (1987), who argue that assemblages are modes of ordering heterogeneous entities. There are no predetermined hierarchies or organizing principles at work in them and, as such, we should not take their form for granted and instead try to examine their workings and how they came about. We might understand institutions or geographical regions as assemblages. For instance, a UK region like the Southeast of England ‘is made up of bits and pieces of state authority, sections of business and any number of partnerships and agencies’ (Allen, 2011, p. 155). This enables us to see how the actions of actors at apparently local sites might transcend their Euclidean geographical reach. Assemblage thinking therefore attends to power, but its form is not pregiven, and we cannot know it in advance. For instance, assemblage thinkers would not recognize a concept like ‘class’ as a structuring force in its own terms, and instead might say that that it was an emergent property of assemblages. Assemblage approaches have much in common with topological thinking, which is another reason that assemblage resonates in geography. Topology emphasizes that what counts is not ‘metric distance’ but how closely connected entities are. Latour (1996, p. 371) puts it well: ‘I can be one metre away from someone in the next telephone booth, and be nevertheless more closely connected to my mother 6,000 miles away’. Topology allows us to appreciate spatial relations not as fixed relations on a flat surface but in terms of simultaneous connections in which the distant is drawn near. When relationships are understood topologically, ‘presence and absence are reconfigured so that the distance between “here and there” or between “the local and the global” cannot be measured in miles or kilometres’ (Allen, 2011, p. 156). Topology thus accords with Allen’s (2016)

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work on power as a relational effect of social interaction. Here space is a performed result of relational entities. And power relations do not operate in space but instead ‘compose the spaces of which they are part’ (Paasi, 2011, p. 301). Talk of power is habitually spatialized with an implicit understanding that it is either located in a stock of resources, held within a position of authority or diffused as discourses acting upon us ubiquitously. But none of these perspectives fully captures the complex relationship between space and power. Space clearly makes a difference to the nature of power and to its success, and at the same time power’s effects are inherently spatial. Such insights from geographers remind us that space is never simply a backdrop for politics – spaces are made and remade in the exercise of power. Hegemonic actors may, for example, predetermine the future vision for a city preventing radical alternates to be imagined, or they might redefine territories by redrawing geopolitical borders. Despite these insights, the Euclidean imaginary of space as a container for power or as a smooth surface upon which it acts remains remarkably pervasive. And the reasons for this persistence could be bound up with power itself. Visions of horizontal space with its flat surfaces can serve managers of the free market seeking ‘to build their putatively non-hierarchical version of a free world’ (Sparke, 2007, p. 396). Several vocabularies from diverse fields have been crafted to try to undo these simplistic imaginaries, citing ‘power geometries’, ‘topologies’ or ‘mediated associations’ as superior idioms to conceive this important power–space nexus. These have taken us a long way, but perhaps it is only when taking a more interdisciplinary and dialogic approach that pays attention to actual spatial practice, extending beyond the academy with exponents of these different imaginaries meaningfully engaging with one another, that we can get closer to what is at stake (Griffin, 2012). Topology poses a ‘challenge to topographies common to the spatial arrangements of territorial and networked power’ but it does not displace or replace them: ‘each spatial frame has its place in understanding power’s geographies and much depends upon the questions asked about power and its institutional relationships’ (Paasi, 2011, p. 301).

In geography, many researchers are concerned with the discipline’s power over knowledge making and over their research subjects. Feminism addresses this concern by asking us to consider our positionalities reflexively. Geographers interested in science studies argue that by making itself appear universal, science can extend its knowledge claims, thereby gaining influence and power. Calls to decolonize geography emerging from post-colonial debates have also questioned the powerful implications of knowledge production. Geographical knowledge-making practices and forms of knowledge through which the world is known and explained are often embedded in post-Enlightenment Euro-American claims and apparent ‘universal truths’ that are informed by European colonial modalities of power. Post-colonial thinking critically examines how colonial dispossessions and uneven power relations continue to shape the world’s social, spatial and political structures. Decolonization involves divesting institutional and knowledge structures of their colonial power. Like science studies, it calls on scholars not only to draw upon diverse knowledges and theoretical-conceptual frameworks, but also to take inspiration from anti-colonial and non-Western writers and to ‘rethink’ the world from Indigenous spaces and the Global South (Radcliffe, 2017). A further challenge for geography is around researching power itself. The empirical difficulties with investigating power are numerous. You cannot see power, and even its deployment may be difficult to perceive. Immanent discourses are almost ‘in the ether’ so they cannot be simply observed. It might be that the question of power is something that can only be properly addressed empirically, albeit with the help of many, spatially nuanced conceptual tools. Power might be most productively understood as a generic term for a multiplicity of processes and relationships that work differently in different contexts and spaces and that even work to produce space. Power is a contingent, relational and multifarious property or process. It is arguably valuable to acknowledge the multiple varieties and modalities of power that operate differently across space and recognize that power can be deployed in diverse and sometimes subtle ways. And as geographers, we should pay Liza Griffin

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attention to the powerful geographies being evoked in this theorizing. Liza Griffin

References and selected further reading Allen, J. (2003). Lost Geographies of Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Allen, J. (2011). ‘Powerful assemblages?’. Area, 43 (2), 154–7. Allen, J. (2016). Topologies of Power: Beyond Territory and Networks. London: Routledge. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, M. (1982). ‘The subject and power’. In H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 208–26 Griffin, L. (2012). ‘Where is power in governance? Why geography matters in the theory of governance’. Political Studies Review, 10 (2), 208–20. Latour, B. (1986). ‘The powers of association’. In J. Law (ed.), Power, Action, and Belief: A New

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Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge, pp. 264–80. Latour, B. (1996). ‘On actor-network theory: a few clarifications’. Soziale Welt, 47 (4), 369–81. Low, M. (2005). ‘“Power” and politics in human geography’. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 87 (1), 81–8. Massey, D. (1993). ‘Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place’. In J. Bird, B. Curtis and T. Putman et al. (eds), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. London: Routledge, pp. 59–69. Müller, M. (2015). Assemblages and actor‐ networks: rethinking socio‐material power, politics and space. Geography Compass, 9 (1), 27–41. Paasi, A. (2011). ‘Geography, space and the re-emergence of topological thinking’. Dialogues in Human Geography, 1 (3), 299–303. Painter, J. (2008). ‘Geographies of space and power’. In K.R. Cox, M. Low and J. Robinson (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Political Geography, London: SAGE, pp. 57–72. Peet, R. (2007). Geography of Power: The Making of Global Economic Policy. London: Zed Books. Radcliffe, S.A. (2017). ‘Decolonising geographical knowledges’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42 (3), 329–33. Sparke, M. (2007). ‘Acknowledging responsibility for space’. Progress in Human Geography, 31 (3), 395–403. Whatmore, S. (2006). ‘Materialist returns: practising cultural geography in and for a more-than-human world’. Cultural Geographies, 13 (4), 600–609.

59. Psychoanalytic geographies Originating in the late nineteenth century from the works of Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis offers a distinctive way of thinking practically, theoretically and methodically about the structure of the human mind, and of responding to psychic conflict, crisis and distress. Over the last three decades, human geographers have engaged with psychoanalytic approaches in manifold ways: from an early engagement with psychoanalysis in the 1990s to the call for a ‘psychoanalytic turn’ and the formation of a subdiscipline of ‘psychoanalytic geographies’ around the turn of the twenty-first century. Although several contributions in human geography have dealt with psychoanalytic ideas, concepts and methods in the past, the place of psychoanalytic geographies in the broader realm of the discipline still seems ambiguous. What particular area of human geography does psychoanalysis address? What are the spaces and places that psychoanalytic geographies inhabit? At what scale do psychoanalytic geographers operate? This entry engages the absent place, or ‘non-place’, of psychoanalysis in human geography and argues that psychoanalysis, for good reasons, is not suited to have a (distinct) place in geography. Considering the different terrains of human geography, from social, economic, political to cultural geography, one can say that each of them engages a distinct realm, or space, of human activity. Locating psychoanalysis in human geography means thinking across these boundaries. Psychoanalysis cannot be confined to one area of human geography as it is concerned with ‘the human’ as such. However, far from being centered on the individual, psychoanalysis originates from the assumption that the subject is radically decentered. This difference between subject and individual is crucial, since it allows us to engage the human by going beyond the realms of individual behavior, cognition, intention and knowledge. The subject is not situated ‘within’ the individual. It takes place somewhere else – namely, in the unconscious (and the unconscious is located ‘outside’, as I will emphasize below). Psychoanalysis therefore questions the standard representation of the entity called ‘human being’ by

treating humans as fractured, inconsistent and radically disoriented beings who are not masters in their own houses. Stemming from this, psychoanalysis offers a novel approach to various kinds of psychological tensions and conflicts resulting from pleasure, enjoyment, guilt, shame, fear, phobia or hate, and geographers have demonstrated that it makes a difference whether one faces emotions and affects from a psychoanalytic angle or not (Pile, 2010). Considering that psychoanalytic geographers engage even the most inhuman aspects of human life, such as death drive, repetition compulsion, jouissance, anxiety and traumatic neuroses (Callard, 2003), it is hard to imagine a more human geography than psychoanalytic geography. Yet, while it is quite wellknown that there is a philosophical Freud, a sociological Freud, a political Freud, a theological Freud, a literary Freud, a Freud for historians, architects, anthropologists, and film theorists, a geographical Freud still comes somewhat as a surprise, especially for non-geographical audiences. One of the reasons for being taken aback is the role psychoanalysis plays in thinking of space and spatiality. As geographer Paul Kingsbury (2008, p. 53) reminds us, psychoanalysis is spelt ‘psychoanalysis’ and not ‘psycheanalysis’ or ‘psychicanalysis’, and this quiet, yet indelible ‘o’, which is inscribed between ‘psych’ and ‘analysis’ is the mark of an orb, similar to the ‘o’ in the Greek ‘geographia’ wherein the ‘o’ also signals ‘of the world’. Far from being solely interested in the individual, psychoanalysis thus shares, just like geography, a reference to ‘the world’ as its spatial realm of engagement (Kapoor, 2018). However, if geography is the discipline of ‘world writing’, then the question is – what exactly interests psychoanalysis about the world? Following French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, psychoanalysis can be defined as the discipline that engages mainly with ‘what does not work in the world’ (Pohl and Swyngedouw, 2021), whereby ‘world’ refers to the assessed and consciously experienced reality of the subject, a certain socio-spatial order ‘that works’ for the subject. To say that psychoanalysis is concerned with ‘what does not work in the world’ means that psychoanalysis focusses mainly on the psycho-social conflicts, crises, and ruptures that intervene and disturb this order. Take the unconscious as the backbone of psychoanalytic think-

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ing: roughly speaking, the unconscious is a dynamic concept based on a series of disturbing phenomena that otherwise remain unclear and inexplicable. What dreams, slips of the tongue and symptoms, as formations of the unconscious, have in common is that through their salience and insistence they disrupt the (more or less) ‘normal’ functioning of the conscious mental apparatus, and dislocate formerly ‘naturalized’ processes of everyday life and social interaction. In other words, the unconscious unsettles the regular working of the subject’s social order, or world, and points to what does not work in it. It is the hard kernel that sticks to the world like a fishbone in the throat, something that derails the ordinary run of things. If human geography is the discipline of ‘world writing’ and psychoanalysis the discipline that engages with ‘what does not work in the world’, then we are able to extract a sort of minimal definition of psychoanalytic geographies from this by stating that they are mainly concerned with writing (about) the world based on the manifold spaces that unveil the world’s slippery and inconsistent configuration. A psychoanalytically inflected geographer grasps the world as always lacking and marked by antagonism; as an unstable, shifting and necessarily incomplete register, which constantly struggles with its immanent contradictions and never really gets to a point of serenity, harmony and balance. But instead of losing oneself in the constant turmoil of the world, the psychoanalytic geographer rigorously follows the world’s trials and tribulations, and discovers right at the center of its disorder an immanent order and referential frame, which relates to the space of the unconscious. In what ways does psychoanalysis address the unconscious in spatial terms? Against the wide belief that psychoanalysis is all about revealing what takes place deep down in people’s minds, psychoanalytic geographers mainly follow the premise that the unconscious is located in the (social, political, economic, environmental, etc.) spaces ‘outside’ the subject. From the very beginning, blurring the lines between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ space has been one of the prime goals in engaging psychoanalysis in geography (Pile, 1996). For instance, to engage with the materialized and embodied spaces of the unconscious can mean to engage with the inscriptions of fantasies, desires and anxieties into the built enviLucas Pohl

ronment (Pohl, 2022). It can also mean taking a look at how laws and other institutionalized practices as well as racist and colonial landscapes can be considered as spatial effects of repressed thoughts, injunctions, and feelings (Nast, 2000). Or it can mean to engage with public events, such as music festivals or football tournaments, as social spaces through which unconscious tensions are expressed and enacted (Proudfoot, 2010). In other words, the search for the unconscious outside means to understand how our most intimate feelings can be externalized without losing their sincerity and intensity, just as it means to grasp why the subject can perceive its most intimate feelings as peculiarly foreign (Kingsbury, 2007). It means to decenter the realm of subjectivity by searching for it in the social and material environments of societies. Another way of referring to the unconscious as outside follows a more structural definition of the outside. Here, the unconscious is considered as the ‘outer side’ of social reality, its immanent contradiction, similar to the other side of the Möbius strip. As the prefix ‘un-’ indicates, the unconscious does not simply refer to a negation of the consciousness, but has a strange parasitic connotation, which is inherent to the consciousness. Just as the term ‘undead’ traverses the binary opposition between dead and alive, the unconscious relates to a third realm, which is neither a part of the consciousness nor exists independently of it. To grasp the unconscious in this way means to engage with a realm of social life that is neither smoothly internalized nor fully externalized. Paul Kingsbury’s (2019) study of paranormal activities allows us to exemplify this point. The paranormal is certainly not part of society’s normal functioning. Otherwise, it would not be paranormal. However, it would also be misleading to consider ghosts, UFOs, crop circles and monsters such as Bigfoot as existing independently from the realm of human society. Rather, the paranormal should be considered as society’s strange parasitic supplement, something that sticks to society in a similar way as the unconscious sticks to the consciousness. To further engage with the spatial logics of the unconscious, geographers often make use of topological thinking. Topology is essential for many geographers working with psychoanalytic approaches, since it allows them to understand how different, and even contradic-

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tory, matters (like people, events, and places), which are apparently separated in time and space, can be situated (through the subject) in one and the same space. Virginia L. Blum and Anna J. Secor (2014), for instance, emphasize how traumatic experiences function as topological constellations in which ordinary ideas of space (such as distance or location) are distorted and subject to ongoing transformations, while Steve Pile (2014) uses topology to rethink the human–non-human relation by showing how animals and humans are both distinct and intimately interlinked categories. Through topology, it becomes possible to trace the multidimensional intertwinings of psycho-social spatializations as well as to understand how the unconscious disorients the subject from the outside in. Given the topological workings of the unconscious, one can also explain why psychoanalytic geographers do not operate at any particular scale. They do research on bodies (Pile, 2021), microcultures of everyday life (Kingsbury, 2017), on urban struggles over issues such as drug policy (Proudfoot, 2019) and gentrification (Ji, 2021), on geopolitics (Shaw, Powell and De La Ossa, 2014) and climate change (Swyngedouw, 2011) – because the unconscious is without scale. A question that needs to be raised at this point, however, is whether psychoanalysis can emancipate itself from its European origins. In fact, the accusation of Eurocentrism is one of the most long-standing critiques of psychoanalysis. In the early 1980s, philosopher Jacques Derrida (1991, p. 204) argued that ‘there is practically no psychoanalysis in Africa, white or black, just as there is practically no psychoanalysis in Asia, or in the South Seas’. It is fair to say that this no longer holds true. Psychoanalysis today has indeed ‘set foot’ in many different cultural contexts, most notably Latin America, but also South Africa, India, Japan, China, South Korea, and elsewhere. The same is true for psychoanalytic geographies, which have also become increasingly ‘globalized’ in recent years. This raises the issue of the universalizability of psychoanalysis. Despite being aware of the danger in applying psychoanalytic insights indiscriminately, especially to post-colonial concerns, Ilan Kapoor (2018, pp. xxvii–xxix) emphasizes in the introduction to the volume Psychoanalysis and the Global that psychoanalysis can be universalized as long as this

universalism is treated in negative terms. The point then is not to discover some transcendental features common to any social order despite their socio-historical context, but rather to recognize that there is no social order without (contextualized) antagonism. Put differently, the only thing psychoanalysis treats as universal, or global, is that something ‘does not work’ wherever we go. Just as the unconscious is without scale, it is thus also without (strictly defined) borders. This is why psychoanalysis is not limited to any social, cultural or political context. In order to (not) situate psychoanalytic geographies within the broader realm of human geography, one should furthermore insist that psychoanalytic geographies do not stand for themselves, but evolve in close connection to (and in tension with) other geographical strands, such as Marxist, feminist or post-colonial geographies. Feminist geographers, for instance, have engaged with psychoanalysis to explore the interplay of gender, sexuality and space to contribute to the critique of ‘phallocentric’ forms of geographic knowledge (Rose, 1995) as well as to reflect differently on questions of identification and empathy (Bondi, 2003) or anxiety (Proudfoot, 2015) with regard to fieldwork interactions. Marxist approaches in geography, on the other hand, have been supplemented by psychoanalytic thinking with respect to reflections on the death drive of capitalist development (Kapoor, 2015) or the neurotic attempts of neoliberal ideology to encounter the traumatic dimensions of Capital (Wilson, 2014). Similarly, psychoanalytic geographies do not stand in opposition to subdisciplines, such as social, cultural, urban, environmental or political geography. Rather, one can identify psychoanalytic cultural geographies, psychoanalytic political geographies, and all other sorts of psychoanalytic geographies, because when faced from a psychoanalytic standpoint, questions of the cultural, urban, political, or environmental appear in a different light. Psychoanalysis can, for instance, enhance cultural geographers’ understandings of ‘culture’ in terms of what Freud called ‘the uneasiness in culture’ (Kingsbury, 2017). Or it can trigger reflections on what is ‘political’ about political geographies by highlighting the disruptive power of the unconscious (Pohl and Swyngedouw, 2021). Lucas Pohl

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Last but not least, it is crucial that there is not one psychoanalytic geography but many psychoanalytic geographies. Geographers working with psychoanalytic approaches draw their strengths from different ‘schools’ of psychoanalytic theory and practice. While Freud certainly is still the common ground from which most psychoanalytic geographers depart, it does make a difference where one arrives, if one follows the reworkings of Freud by, for instance, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Ronald D. Laing or Donald W. Winnicott. Alongside the often extraordinary differences between these clinicians and Freud’s own writings, there are also a number of different spatial underpinnings associated with these schools, as geographers have successfully demonstrated over the years (for an overview, see Kingsbury and Pile, 2014). In light of these different clinical traditions, there are also various non-clinical, mostly philosophical, engagements with psychoanalysis that shape the theoretical underpinnings of psychoanalytic geographies in different ways: from the Frankfurt School (e.g., Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin), to post-colonial accounts (e.g., Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha) and post-structuralist readings of psychoanalysis (e.g., Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari), to the Ljubljana School of psychoanalysis (e.g., Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič). After this all too brief introduction to the manifold entanglements of psychoanalysis and geography, the reader might be left uncertain about the place of psychoanalytic geographies within the broader realm of human geography. Far from being a matter of concern, this is one of the most significant strengths and potentials arising from working with psychoanalytic ideas, concepts, and methods. Psychoanalysis, if taken seriously, has the potential to intervene in every strand of human geography, at whatever scale, in whatever social, cultural or political context, whether with a look at history, the present or the future. Of course, this does not mean one should apply psychoanalytic thoughts and concepts unconditionally, everywhere to everything and everyone. It always requires a critical examination of psychoanalysis. But starting from this, infinite psychoanalytic geographies are possible, and it remains open as to which other spaces of human geography psychoanalysis will unsettle in the years to come. In this sense, one can only hope that Lucas Pohl

there will never be a definite place for psychoanalysis in human geography. Lucas Pohl

References and selected further reading Blum, V.L. and Secor, A.J. (2014). Mapping trauma: topography to topology. In P. Kingsbury and S. Pile (eds), Psychoanalytic Geographies (pp. 103–16). Farnham: Ashgate. Bondi, L. (2003). Empathy and identification: conceptual resources for feminist fieldwork. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2 (1), 64–76. Callard, F. (2003). The taming of psychoanalysis in geography. Social & Cultural Geography, 4 (3), 295–312. Derrida, J. (1991). Geopsychoanalysis: ‘…and the rest of the world’. American Imago, 48 (2), 199–231. Ji, M.I. (2021). The fantasy of authenticity: understanding the paradox of retail gentrification in Seoul from a Lacanian perspective. Cultural Geographies, 28 (2), 221–38. Kapoor, I. (2015). What ‘drives’ capitalist development? Human Geography, 8 (3), 66–78. Kapoor, I. (2018). Introduction. In I. Kapoor (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Global (pp. xix–xxxiv). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Kingsbury, P. (2007). The extimacy of space. Social & Cultural Geography, 8 (2), 235–58. Kingsbury, P. (2008). Did somebody say jouissance? On Slavoj Žižek, consumption, and nationalism. Emotion, Space and Society, 1 (1), 48–55. Kingsbury, P. (2017). Uneasiness in culture, or negotiating the sublime distances towards the big Other. Geography Compass, 11 (6), Article e12316. Kingsbury, P. (2019). Go figural: crop circle research and the extraordinary rifts of landscape. Cultural Geographies, 26 (1), 3–22. Kingsbury, P. and Pile, S. (eds) (2014). Psychoanalytic Geographies. Farnham: Ashgate. Nast, H. (2000). Mapping the ‘unconscious’: racism and the Oedipal family. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90 (2), 215–55. Pile, S. (1996). The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity. London: Routledge. Pile, S. (2010). Emotions and affect in recent human geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35 (5), 5–20. Pile, S. (2014). Beastly minds: a topological twist in the rethinking of the human in nonhuman geographies using two of Freud’s case studies,

Psychoanalytic geographies  311 Emmy von N. and the Wolfman. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39, 224–36. Pile, S. (2021). Bodies, Affects, Politics: The Clash of Bodily Regimes. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Pohl, L. (2022). Aura of decay: fetishising ruins with Benjamin and Lacan. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 47, 153–66. Pohl, L. and Swyngedouw, E. (2021). ‘What does not work in the world’: the specter of Lacan in critical political thought. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 1600910X​.2021​.1872667. Proudfoot, J. (2010). Interviewing enjoyment, or the limits of discourse. The Professional Geographer, 62 (4), 507–18. Proudfoot, J. (2015). Anxiety and phantasy in the field: the position of the unconscious in ethno-

graphic research. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33 (6), 1135–52. Proudfoot, J. (2019). The libidinal economy of revanchism: illicit drugs, harm reduction, and the problem of enjoyment. Progress in Human Geography, 43 (2), 214–34. Rose, G. (1995). Distance, surface, elsewhere: a feminist critique of the space of phallocentric self/knowledge. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13 (6), 761–81. Shaw, I.G.R., Powell, J. and De La Ossa, J. (2014). Towards a psychoanalytic geopolitics: the militarization of public schooling in the USA. In P. Kingsbury and S. Pile (eds), Psychoanalytic Geographies (pp. 213–26). Farnham: Ashgate. Swyngedouw, E. (2011). Depoliticized environments: the end of nature, climate change and the post-political condition. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 69, 253–74. Wilson, J. (2014). The shock of the Real: the neoliberal neurosis in the life and times of Jeffrey Sachs. Antipode, 46 (1), 301–21.

Lucas Pohl

60. Public space Public space is for living, doing business, kissing and playing. Its value can’t be measured with economics or mathematics; it must be felt with the soul. (Peñalosa, 2001)

(1) Venezuela: groups of bodies joyously dance in circles, a spiritual exaltation, moving from one public plaza to another. The dance is circular, but the plazas are square. Ugueto-Ponce (2017) illustrates these Afro-Indigenous religious processions that animate, transect, destabilize and reclaim the rigid, colonial-era, Spanish-designed ‘plazas’. (2) Singapore: a single artist stands in front of a police station, holding a cardboard sign that shows, only, a smiley face (Ratcliffe, 2020). Still, he is arrested, because in this place, such uses of public space are not permitted. (3) A global pandemic means that city parks are inaccessible, leading to residents interacting with the public via phones and screens. These three tableaus of intersecting shapes and textures, and the embedded tensions between movement and fixity, liberation and subjugation, fear and triumph, encapsulate the complexities, heterogeneous languages, dangers, and beautiful possibilities of public space. There is no single definition or shape of public space. It means different things to different people, and it is used for many, often contradictory, purposes: joy and love; labour and profit; activism and revolution; control and violence; performance and play. For these reasons, public space has never been easy to theorize, because its two component words – ‘public’ and ‘space’ – are likewise, shifting and contested concepts that take no single form. Public space is the field through which humans (and more-than-humans) encounter and relate to each other and the world, form groups, collective identities, cultures, politics and ideologies, demands and actions. Public space contains social relations, in a physical sense, but is also produced and shaped by social relations, relations that extend beyond living things altogether (humans, animals, insects, bacteria and pathogens) and into/ out of the web of materials (e.g., smartphones, satellite beams). The assemblage

of human, more-than-human, material and digital thereby produce, (re)produce, extend and contract, public space simultaneously at intersecting scales (from body to planetary and interstellar), each scale representing myriad possibilities for social, cultural and political formations. The fact that such human–world relations are possible now via globalized virtual infrastructures and digital platforms further complicates any set taxonomy of the shapes, forms and textures of public space. Several questions emerge. Where does public space begin and end, and what (physical) forms can it take? Is there a distinct and fixed demarcation between what constitutes ‘public’ versus ‘private’? This is a blurred and fluid boundary, and understandings/ interpretations of public versus private differ according to global context and local cultures and individualized ability/inability to access specific spaces. How to reconcile local ‘place’ (a physical site, like a street, square, park, beach) with the more amorphous notion of ‘space’ (relations and flows, virtual networks)? Lives and public interactions still depend on physical sites, but many social, cultural and political encounters and interactions happen via virtual space. Finally, how is public space an uneven and contradictory experience – a catalyst for gross injustice and also emancipatory possibilities? Global justice movements gain visibility and power by and through public space, in its many forms. But public space is also the site of state violence, repression and subjugation. What does a decolonized public space look like, or a queered public space? Can such a space exist, where access is truly open, and those on the outside can be in? With these questions, contradictions and debates in mind, the following discussion outlines four key themes that summarize how human geographers frequently theorize public space. These are: (1) the concept that public space is socially produced; (2) that the line between public and private is complex and hybridized; (3) that public space takes many forms across diverse global contexts; and (4) that public space is uneven, but also emancipatory – and that counter-publics form toward a more just society.

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Public space as socially produced and relationally assembled The first theme is that public space is a socially produced, ‘sphere of possibility’, ‘constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny’ (Massey, 2005, p. 9). In other words, it is both a spatial container (a physical site, a place), and it is also constantly shaped by, and is constantly shaping, relations and flows that extend beyond the (physical) edges of a local place. These relations happen at different, overlapping scales, at different speeds, and are shaped by humans, non-humans, objects and materials, senses, affects, symbols. All these things, all these elements, these embodiments, are assembled, component parts of the public space (the street); or, taken as a whole, an ‘assemblage’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). The extension of physical public space (specific sites, places) into, and across, a networked virtual field was theorized by Castells (1996) in his framing of the ‘network society’, or a ‘space of flows’. In the ‘space of flows’, which has evolved into the many virtual platforms and social medias that are now used for work, play, love, or learning (e.g., Zoom, Facebook, dating apps, accelerated further by the COVID-19 pandemic), Castells suggests there is room for both emancipatory openings and the replication of borders, boundaries, inequalities and social exclusions, a dichotomy that mirrors (rather than departs from) public space in a physical sense. These socially networked virtual publics also complicate clean binaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’, since most mainstream virtual platforms are privately owned, operated and for-profit. Furthermore, access to virtual space often relies on paying into network providers (whether that be a mobile phone contract or home-working media products). They are, in other words, hybridized public spaces. However, there are some aspects of virtual platforms that do offer more traditionally ‘public’ possibilities, such as community web networks, free Wi-Fi zones (provided in public space in some cities), and moderated ‘wikis’, which allow for free access to information, media/images and public input/ contribution (such as Wikipedia, a free and crowd-sourced repository of information).

Nonetheless, these virtual public spaces are not physical sites, even with increasingly advanced technologies like augmented reality and gaming simulations that mimic the physical world, and can make differentiating one from the other difficult. Virtual public space is not accessible to all. As Mitchell (1995, p. 123) argues, referring to Hillis (1994): ‘a fully electronic public space renders the marginalized such as the homeless even more invisible to the working of politics’. To summarize, public space is socially produced and relationally networked across physical sites and virtual flows. Physical public spaces are shaped by the ‘network society’, while, likewise, the ‘network society’ still relies on physical sites, infrastructures and users who do not actually live in cyberspace. Yet limitations on access, divides and inequalities, levels of control, surveillance and censorship, profit incentives, and incursions of private into public, are inherent to both physical and virtual public space. Thus, the question emerges, where does the line between ‘public’ and ‘private’ space actually exist, if at all?

Public space versus private space? A Eurocentric dichotomy What makes a space truly public? This is not an easy question, but answers normally consider aspects such as ownership, access and rights (Luger and Lees, 2020). These facets, however, depend greatly on local context and differ significantly accordingly to global settings. Individual property rights and common law, for example, largely determine how space is enclosed, privatized and/or made/ remains public in the Anglo-American sphere and much of the Global North and West. One key differentiator between public and private space is the idea of ‘rights’ – either ‘right’ to public access and use, or ‘rights’ to private enclosure and control. For Lefebvre (1968), access to public space was a vital ‘right to the city’, regardless of what spatial form that space takes. Lefebvre considered public space crucial for political formation, representation and daily joy, offering a scale and visibility that private space cannot. Historically, in the pre-modern age, land ownership in Britain and much of Europe Jason Luger

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(and other contexts, e.g., historic monarchies like Japan or Thailand) was entirely concentrated in the hands of the aristocracy or religious institutions, and most people worked or farmed on land that was not their own (e.g., the feudal system, where a tax would have been paid to the landowner, whether that be a noble, a monarch, or the Church). A ‘commons’ was typically a parcel of land that was set aside for use (often for grazing of animals) for those tenants on the land; thereby, the ‘commons’ came with unique rights and shared responsibilities and is often framed as a ‘public’ space, even if it is not truly publicly owned/operated. Some cities still have ‘commons’ (open fields, parks, gardens, or urban squares) that have their origins in these earlier forms (e.g., Boston Common). The spirit of these historical commons can also be seen in contemporary cooperatives or collectives, where public spaces or facilities are co-owned – for example, some small community parks or gardens. As European empires explored, conquered and colonized, these Eurocentric configurations of land ownership and organization were transferred (in different, but related ways) to Portuguese, Spanish, French and English colonies in North and South America, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, all places that had extant Indigenous cultures with unique conceptions of public space, following multiple path dependencies. Colonialism thereby resulted in hybrid spatial formations, which intermixed Eurocentric approaches with context-specific, Indigenous interpretations. In many Indigenous cultures, the idea of private ownership of land simply did not exist, and spaces of living, working, socializing and politics were communal. In other words, privatization of land, and the constructed binary of public versus private, was imposed and deliberately replicated, governed and maintained by, and for, a (small) elite of property owners, the legacy of which remains today across a vast portion of the world that was, or still is, subject to colonial expansion and settlement. These historical patterns are inextricably woven into contemporary racial/ethnic class and gender disparities of land and property ownership, which also relates to how public space is allocated, controlled and accessed. The line between public and private is sometimes clean and legally bounded (e.g., Jason Luger

‘no trespassing’ or ‘private, keep out!’). But other times, it is much more dynamic and blurred. This zone of hybridity has long existed, but has been heightened by the neoliberal shift across many global contexts in the past half-century or so (Luger and Lees, 2020). Under neoliberalism, privately operated public spaces (sometimes abbreviated as POPOS) and public–private partnerships (between public entities like city or state governments and property sector or financial organizations) have proliferated, producing built environments where public access is only partially available, if at all. Consumption-scapes like shopping centres, for example, have long functioned as semi-public spaces in terms of their ability to foster social interaction, but mostly operate as privately operated entities. More recently, private-sector development and ownership of spaces like parks, squares and even streets and waterfronts have become endemic features of neoliberal urbanism. The same blurred boundaries occur through the privatization or semi-privatization of ‘public’ entities like schools and universities, libraries or other community facilities, transport networks or utility infrastructures. The COVID-19 pandemic brought these blurred lines into stark relief, as restrictions on gathering in public space relegated many around the world to ‘home’ during a period of enforced lockdown. Public interactions continued, via virtual platforms; thus, the hybrid space of the ‘network society’ again appears. Finally, where public and private space begin and end in terms of the natural environment – waters (lakes, oceans, rivers), beaches, mountains, forests – is an ongoing contestation. Attempts to enclose and privatize these ‘green’ and ‘blue’ spaces are often met with public resistance or legal challenges. In summary, the line between public and private is a shifting one, with some origins in pre-modern feudal systems (in Europe) that have been exported (and adapted, modernized) in various contexts through differing path dependencies, culminating in neoliberalism’s privatization of the built environment in the late twentieth century. But we must move beyond the North and West, and such a Eurocentric framing of public and private, to invite a broader and decolonized language of public space.

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From South and East: public space’s many global languages Beyond the West and North, other global contexts have different relationships between public versus private, and different conceptions of how public space is designed, governed and used. China’s unique state capitalism, notably, presents an alternative model characterized by strong state control of public space, and less emphasis on private property. East Asia has other varieties of hybrid state-capitalist models and degrees of authoritarian governance, which give rise to different morphologies of public space. For example, Singapore is a nation where most land and buildings are owned by the city-state government, including squares, plazas and parks. The state allows public assembly and use of these sites, but with restrictive rules that limit the number of people that can gather and the type of gathering that can occur. Protests and activism must be approved, and cannot contain certain themes. Hong Kong exemplifies similar tensions, as seen in recent waves of pro-democracy protests occurring in public spaces like streets and squares that have been increasingly restricted by authorities. Other examples offer more extreme examples of how public space is governed. There are totalitarian states (North Korea) or different hybrids of communism, such as Cuba, where private ownership is generally non-existent (with some exceptions, e.g., foreign resorts that now operate on the island). Religious institutions still own and operate vast swathes of global space, operating in many ways like private companies, but sometimes accessible (and welcoming, or not) to the public for community use, albeit with themes around faith and prayer (e.g., Jerusalem’s Old City, Rome’s Vatican, or Mecca’s complicated webs of public, religious and private space). In South, East and Southeast Asia, many urban residents live in multi-storey buildings that feature ‘void decks’ on the ground, which are open spaces that function as public, community sites for a variety of uses. Returning to Singapore, for example, the ‘void deck’ on the ground floor of most high-rise residential towers is a vital site for public meetings, exercise, performances and socializing. Latin cultures from the Mediterranean across to

Mexico and South America integrate interior courtyards as fundamental social spaces, as does much of the Islamic world, partially as a cooling and shaded response to hot, sunny climates (for example, in North Africa and the Middle East). To summarize, the Eurocentric, capitalist and post-colonial frameworks of public versus private space are instructive, but do not stand for the whole world, and varying social, cultural and political systems approach property (and public space) very differently. Moving beyond the Global North and West, or we should say, looking from the Global South and East, there are variegated and highly locally specific formations and conceptions of what constitutes public space, versus private, and how such spaces might be used.

Public space as uneven and emancipatory: making counter-publics For the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, the political was predicated upon ‘the always-to-be-achieved construction of a bounded yet heterogeneous, unstable and necessarily antagonistic “we”’ (quoted in Donald, 1999, p. 10). This ‘we’ of various political demands – whether those demands be for access to housing; access to infrastructure or clean drinking water; access to democracy and political representation; safety from police violence and racism; recognition of basic humanity and civil rights in relation to gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation; or fairer opportunities in an unequal economy – is formed in and through public space. Public space has tremendous kinetic energy and possibility for political transformations and re-makings. The inherent contradiction is that public space is also where much repression, violence and inequality takes shape and erupts. A street can be the site of police violence one moment, and the site of protest the next. Public space is uneven, at the same time that it is emancipatory. It is frequently inaccessible: the public square may be guarded by state police; it may be inhospitable to the socially marginalized or physically disabled; it may be enclosed by walls. These limitaJason Luger

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tions stimulate great public creativity and the formation of counter-publics, such as the single-man protest in Singapore, prevented from protesting, but still standing there, holding his cardboard smiley face (Ratcliffe, 2020). Or, the circular, Afro-Indigenous religious dances in Venezuela, transforming the rigid, square plaza into animated festivals of rapture and joy. To close, human geography engages with the ongoing process of allowing for such re-makings and counter-hegemonic narratives to emerge. The effort must continue to decolonize public space as a concept and theory, by elevating new languages, readings and understanding to illuminate not only what public space might look like and how it might function, but also, how knowledge is constructed about it. This means leaving any attempts to define public space radically open, maintaining an eye for difference, and allowing for a multiplicity of heterogeneous narratives, ‘always under construction…a simultaneity of stories-so-far’ (Massey, 2005, p. 9). Jason Luger

Jason Luger

References and selected further reading Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Donald, J. (1999). Imagining the Modern City. London: Athlone Press. Hillis, K. (1994). The virtue of becoming a no-body. Ecumene, 1, 177–96. Lefebvre, H. (1968). Le droit à la ville. Paris: Anthropos. Luger, J. and Lees, L. (2020). Planetary public space? Scale, context and politics. In V. Mehta and D. Palazzo (eds), Companion to Public Space (pp. 73–84). London: Routledge. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: SAGE. Mitchell, D. (1995). The end of public space? People’s park, definitions of the public, and democracy. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 85 (1), 108–33. Peñalosa, E. (2001). Speech to the Urban Land Institute. Urban Land Institute Annual Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts, 3 October. Ratcliffe, R. (2020, 24 November). Singapore ‘smiley-face’ activist in one-man protest charged with unlawful assembly. The Guardian. Accessed 9 July 2020 at https://​ www​.theguardian​.com/​world/​2020/​nov/​24/​ singapore​-smiley​-face​-activist​-in​-one​-man​ -protest​-charged​-with​-unlawful​-assembly. Ugueto-Ponce, M. (2017). Curiepe y San Mateo de Cangrejos: pueblos de negros libres y ejemplos contrahegemónicos del pensamiento afrocaribeño. Humania del Sur, 12 (22), 21–42.

61. Race Introduction Race is spatial. The most important geographical intervention with regards to race is to identify and analyse how race, space and nature are mutually, historically produced. Examinations of race in human geography span myriad subcategories, from black geographies, geographies of race and ethnicity, critical geographies, carceral and abolition geographies, geographies of migration, political ecologies, to environmental justice and more. When geographers work on, with, and through the idea of race, they are in interdisciplinary conversation not only with scholarship from sociology, anthropology, political science, critical race theory, international relations and the humanities, but also with social movements and anti-racist politics far beyond the academy. What follows is one slice through a complex, ever-expanding body of work. The work we cite here is skewed towards anglophone and Latin American geographies, as these are the fields we work in, but scholarship on the relations between space, nature and race exists far beyond these language-worlds, with different kinds of politics and intellectual histories. First, though, we offer a critical working definition of race.

Towards a definition of race Race, in Stuart Hall’s (2021) terms, ‘is the centrepiece of a hierarchical system that produces differences’ (p. 33). Yet in defining race, we want to highlight three necessary conceptual movements. First, away from fixity and towards the dynamic, historically and geographically specific processes of racialization. Second, towards the examination of racism as a violent, historical system of disciplinary power. Third, towards an intersectional understanding of race as always produced in articulation with gender, class and other systems of social ordering (see Crenshaw, 1991). While race is an ideology of signifying practices, racism structures lived experience through violent practices of power. Chattel slavery was foundational to the idea of race,

which emerged as the system of domination we know today in the sixteenth century under colonial rule in the Americas. European settler colonialism’s systems of brutal enslavement, dehumanization and genocide were enabled through structures of meanings and categories that produced hierarchy and division within humanity – or more precisely, between humanity and people excluded from that category. The idea of race came to underpin white supremacy, social control and territorial dispossession. While the trans-Atlantic expansion of racialization can be traced back to colonialism, it was in the nineteenth century that race as ‘biological difference’ was cemented by evolutionary science and eugenics. Science came to provide what Stuart Hall (2017) called the ‘regime of truth’ that ‘ma[de] difference function discursively’ (p. 57). Race and racism encompass a historic repertoire of power, techniques and material practices that structure populations in spatial, economic, cultural and political terms, and expose them to premature death. Crucially, for geographers, race, racism and racialization are intrinsically interconnected with the production of space. As Nemser (2017) puts it, in his account of the ‘infrastructures of race’ in colonial Mexico, ‘the racialization processes that began with the Spanish colonial project were routed through a politics of space. That is, not only did race become thinkable in the colonial context primarily through spatial disciplines…but racialization took place in part through physical interventions in the landscape’ (p. 4). For Ruth Wilson Gilmore, racism is ‘the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies’ (2002, p. 261). Once again, political geographies are central to the production of racism itself. Crucially, contemporary work on race in critical human geography has come to recognize not only that race is co-produced with other regimes of power and difference – gender, class and caste – but also that the contemporary history and geography of race and racism must be analysed in lockstep with the contemporary history and geography of capitalism (see, for instance, Robinson, [1983] 2021). The geographical and historical scope of analysis of race, racism and racialization is enormous, and contention abounds. There are ongoing epistemological, ontological

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and political debates over Afro-pessimism (see Olaloku-Teriba, 2018), the notion of ‘caste’ (Carby, 2021), and the concept of race itself (Gilroy, 2000). These exchanges have an important place in human geography, not least because of the powerful but very different influences that scholars such as Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby, Aníbal Quijano, Angela Davis, Saidiya Hartman, Edward Said, Sylvia Wynter, Ochy Curiel, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson and others bring to bear on contemporary human geography. Yet the fundamental insights that race, racism and space are mutually produced, share histories, and must be conceptualized together has become a starting point of enquiry for, and a central tenet of, major subfields of contemporary human geography. We now discuss five threads through which race is deployed, analysed and reconceptualized in contemporary anglophone human geography.

Race, nature and environments Access to nature is racialized, and nature itself is bound up in processes of racialization (Davies, 2021). Geographies of race and the environment include major subfields such as political ecology; geology, racism and the Anthropocene; food geographies; critical resource geographies; health-environment geographies; critical development studies; more-than-human geographies and more. Political ecology articulates environmental change with transformations of political economy, and race is becoming a key element of political ecological critiques of hegemonic power relations and state- and capital-centred environmental policies that further the division, management and commodification of nature. Anti-racist, feminist political ecology, for instance, enables the interrogation of knowledge production about nature through making room for Indigenous and Afro-descended environmental ways of knowing the world and moving away from Eurocentricism and universalism (Heynen, 2016; Mollett and Faria, 2013). Critical resource geographies, meanwhile, enable analysis of how extraction underpins systems of power that structures inequalities around nature and society. These fields are variously informed by post-colonial and decolonial theory, feminism, critical race theory, critiArchie Davies and Nadia Mosquera Muriel

cal political economy and post-structuralist critiques of development, and increasingly by approaches to race that privilege ontology and subjectivity over racial identity (Saucier and Woods, 2016). Research on nature and race is driven by broad research concerns: exposure to harm and waste; the relation between structures of racism and vulnerability to environmental change and disaster; and the politics of race, economic development and neoliberalism. In recent years, various analytical tools have been deployed by geographers to study the interplay between racism and economic development, from racial capitalism (Pulido, 2015) to settler colonialism (Van Sant, Milligan and Mollett, 2021). Political, urban and development geographers analyse how economic development – whether authoritarian, neoliberal, neo-extractivist, or a combination – continues to violently strip Indigenous, Afro-descendant and campesino populations of their lands, cut off access to natural resources and expose racialized populations to injustice, dispossession and toxicity (Valdivia, 2021). Much of this vast literature has unpacked the spatial configurations of structural inequality through the lens of environmental racism and environmental justice.

Race, geography and politics across scales Any vantage point for theorizing race in geography needs to account for the state. One area in which this has become clear is in geographies of borders and migration. Increasingly violent responses to human mobility in Europe and North America have enacted and deepened the racialization of space within a context of resurgent nationalism and authoritarian state governments from Turkey to the USA and Poland. Work on the geography of migration constitutes a broad socio-spatial analysis of how racialization, mobility and territorialization are violently intertwined in contemporary European and North American nationalisms (e.g., de Noronha, 2020), just as ‘incipient transnational migrant spatial formations radically destabilize and contradict the spatial premises and racial conceits of nationalism and Europeanism’ (de Genova, 2021, p. 290). This body of literature provides a geograph-

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ical insight into how biopolitical forms of state sovereignty make racialized groups die for others to live better (Mbembe, 2003). This is reflected in the carceral system, and the exposure of racialized populations to premature death at the hands of the state (Gilmore, 2002). Geographical research on prisons, abolition, policing, race and black resistance to state violence is a vibrant field of contemporary geography (Bonds, 2019; Elliott-Cooper, 2021). Making connections across scales and contexts enables new theoretical insights into the geographies of race. Nicholas de Genova and Ananya Roy, for instance, have established a dialogue across studies of urban poverty and marginalization, and those of migration, to analyse processes of illegalization. They ‘direct poverty scholars to interrogate how the mass incarceration of Black and Brown bodies and the related forms of human caging, especially at the borders, are rooted in the histories of indigenous extermination, migrant illegalization and deportability, and Black criminalisation and disappearance’ (de Genova and Roy, 2020, p. 362). We could point, too, to David Pellow’s (2021) work on the intersections between environmental justice and carceral geographies. The relational dimensions of race, racialization and racism under contemporary capitalism are key sites for future human geographical scholarship.

Space, place, race and black geographies Scholarship on the intersections between race, racialization and urban space have a long history in critical human geography (Harvey, 1972). This work has developed from racialized and classed analyses of space/place through geographical patterns of residential segregation into sophisticated theoretical analyses of the racial dynamics of housing struggles (Roy, 2017), land dispossession (Safransky, 2017) and the ongoing legacies of the plantation in urban space (McKittrick, 2013). Analysis of the mutual production of racial regimes and labour regimes in infrastructural networks (Zeiderman, 2021) is another way in which geographers have

unpacked the ongoing mutual production of race, space and place. In this context, black geographies is a key field addressing the fundamental theoretical and political connections between race and space. The work of Clyde Woods (e.g., 1998) offered foundational insights on black spatial thought, and the territoriality of black politics and identity, particularly in North America, and later McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds (2006) became a landmark work on the territorial dimensions of black struggles for liberation and black women’s geographies. A black feminist pulse has been vital to black geographies, investigating how ‘the shared experiences of women racialised as black in different capitalist domains…demonstrate how tackling the imposition of Western normativity and white supremacy relationally has been central to black women’s ways of living, but also opens up new emancipatory potentialities of the diversity of gendered lives’ (Daley, 2020, p. 795). Emerging work across Latin America and Europe has continued to analyse the spatiality of the black experience as a set of counter-hegemonic modes of inhabiting space and identity – what Bledsoe calls the spatial establishment of […] emergent forms of being’ (2017, p. 31) – and insists on the possibilities of reimagining liberation and contesting the territorialization of white supremacy.

Coloniality and decoloniality Geographers of and from Latin America have in recent years taken forward concepts of decoloniality and the coloniality of power (e.g., Halvorsen, 2019; Radcliffe, 2020; Zaragocín, 2019). Here, race is approached as the distinction between colonizer and colonized (Nemser, 2017), and is reproduced through a global social division of labour (Lugones, 2007; Quijano, 2007). Decolonial literature places the colonial encounter at the foundation of capitalism and the politics of knowledge. This is a rich and productive school, yielding new understandings of the intersections of race, indigeneity and epistemologies of the South, though decolonial scholarship has been critiqued for erasing black thought and inadvertently whitewashing the forms of marginalization it seeks to contest (Terrefe, 2020). How, and whether Archie Davies and Nadia Mosquera Muriel

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the epistemological critiques put forward by decolonial scholars can be put into productive dialogue with black radicalism, such as the recent surge of interest in Sylvia Wynter’s writings (e.g., McKittrick, 2015), is an important area of inquiry.

Whiteness and research While there is a long-standing field of studies of whiteness and white supremacy in geography (Bonds and Inwood, 2016; Pulido, 2015), race is often deployed as a primary analytic when analysing populations outside the canon of whiteness, and ‘race’ is at times conflated with non-whiteness. This can lead to invisibilizing the whiteness of geographic research itself, and the dynamics complicit in keeping geography normatively white (Kobayashi and Peake, 2000). Like anthropology and other human sciences, geography shares a history shaped by colonialism and empire that still shapes power relations in the field (Daley, 2020; Santos, 2021). Faria and Mollett (2016) urge the use of intersectional and post-colonial feminist geography to understand how race is inseparable from the process of generating geographic knowledge production. Race remains embedded in the inner infrastructure of geography departments (Tolia-Kelly, 2017), and practices of research continue to often rely on a normatively white male researcher endowed with freedom of movement, and uninhibited access to places, spaces and landscapes. While the symbolic use of critical scholarship on race in the curriculum is on the rise, many structural issues that are complicit in maintaining institutional racism in universities remain unchallenged (Esson et al., 2017; Tuck and Yang, 2012).

Conclusion Despite the contemporary continuation of inequality, institutional racism and coloniality in the academic discipline (Mahtani, 2014; Noxolo, 2017) and a long disciplinary history of geography’s association with imperialism, racism and settler colonialism, anti-racist scholarship thrives within contemporary geography. But in the UK, at least, the Archie Davies and Nadia Mosquera Muriel

concomitant absence of race in geographical education in schools points to the need for further activist scholarship. As Puttick and Murrey (2020) put it, ‘geography education in England has a problem with race’ (p. 126), ‘the absence of race in school geography is part of the perseverance of racial oppression, in which whiteness remains the unspoken norm’ (p. 128). Though race is a key analytic of contemporary human geography, the need for anti-racist geography to move beyond the university remains pressing. Archie Davies and Nadia Mosquera Muriel

References and selected further reading Bledsoe, A. (2017). Marronage as a past and present geography in the Americas. Southeastern Geographer, 57 (1), 30–50. Bonds, A. (2019). Race and ethnicity I: property, race, and the carceral state. Progress in Human Geography, 43 (3), 574–83. Bonds, A. and Inwood, J. (2016). Beyond white privilege: geographies of white supremacy and settler colonialism. Progress in Human Geography, 40 (6), 715–33. Carby, H. (2021). The limits of caste. London Review of Books, 43 (2). Accessed 18 October 2022 at https://​www​.lrb​.co​.uk/​the​-paper/​v43/​ n02/​hazel​-v​.​-carby/​the​-limits​-of​-caste. Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43 (6), 1241–99. Daley, P. (2020). Lives lived differently: geography and the study of black women. Area, 52, 794–800. Davies, A. (2021). The racial division of nature: making land in Recife. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 46 (2), 270–83. de Genova, N. (2021). On standby…at the borders of Europe. Ephemera, 21 (1), 283–300. de Genova, N. and Roy, A. (2020). Practices of illegalisation. Antipode, 52 (2), 352–64. de Noronha, L. (2020). Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Elliott-Cooper, A. (2021). Black Resistance to British Policing. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Esson, J., Noxolo, P. and Baxter, R. et al. (2017). The 2017 RGS‐IBG chair’s theme: decolonis-

Race  321 ing geographical knowledges, or reproducing coloniality? Area, 49 (3), 384–8. Faria, C. and Mollett, S. (2016). Critical feminist reflexivity and the politics of whiteness in the ‘field’. Gender, Place & Culture, 23 (1), 79–93. Gilmore, R.W. (2002). Race and globalization. In R.J. Johnston, P.J. Taylor and M.J. Watts (eds), Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World (2nd edition). Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 261–74. Gilroy, P. (2000). Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hall, S. (2017). The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (edited by K. Mercer). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Halvorsen, S. (2019). Decolonising territory: dialogues with Latin American knowledges and grassroots strategies. Progress in Human Geography, 43 (5), 790–814. Harvey, D. (1972). Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary theory in geography and the problem of ghetto formation. Antipode, 4 (2), 1–13. Heynen, N. (2016). Urban political ecology II: the abolitionist century. Progress in Human Geography, 40 (6), 839–45. Kobayashi, A. and Peake, L. (2000). Racism out of place: thoughts on whiteness and an antiracist geography in the new millennium. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90 (2), 392–403. Lugones, M. (2007). Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. Hypatia, 22 (1), 186–209. Mahtani, M. (2014). Toxic geographies: absences in critical race thought and practice in social and cultural geography. Social & Cultural Geography, 15 (4), 359–67. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15 (1), 11–40. McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. McKittrick, K. (2013). Plantation futures. Small Axe, 17 (3), 1–15. McKittrick, K. (ed.) (2015). Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mollett, S. and Faria, C. (2013). Messing with gender in feminist political ecology. Geoforum, 45, 116–25. Nemser, D. (2017). Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Noxolo, P. (2017). Decolonial theory in a time of the re-colonisation of UK research. Transactions

of the Institute of British Geographers, 42 (3), 342–4. Olaloku-Teriba, A. (2018). Afro-pessimism and the logic of anti-blackness. Historical Materialism, 26 (2), 96–122. Pellow, D.N. (2021). Struggles for environmental justice in US prisons and jails. Antipode, 53 (1), 56–73. Pulido, L. (2015). Geographies of race and ethnicity 1: white supremacy vs white privilege in environmental racism research. Progress in Human Geography, 39 (6), 809–17. Puttick, S. and Murrey, A. (2020). Confronting the deafening silence on race in geography education in England: learning from anti-racist, decolonial and Black geographies. Geography, 105 (3), 126–34. Quijano, A. (2007). Coloniality and modernity/ rationality. Cultural Studies, 21 (2–3), 168–78. Radcliffe, S.A. (2020). Geography and indigeneity III: co-articulation of colonialism and capitalism in indigeneity’s economies. Progress in Human Geography, 44 (2), 374–88. Robinson, C. ([1983] 2021). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Penguin. Roy, A. (2017). Dis/possessive collectivism: property and personhood at city’s end. Geoforum, 80, A1–A11. Safransky, S. (2017). Rethinking land struggle in the postindustrial city. Antipode, 49 (4), 1079–100. Santos, M. (2021). For a New Geography (translated by A. Davies). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Saucier, P.K. and Woods, T.P. (eds) (2016). Conceptual Aphasia in Black: Displacing Racial Formation. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Terrefe, S.D. (2020). The pornotrope of decolonial feminism. Critical Philosophy of Race, 8 (1–2), 134–64. Tolia‐Kelly, D.P. (2017). A day in the life of a geographer: ‘lone’, black, female. Area,  49 (3), 324–8.  Tuck, E. and Yang, K.W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1 (1), 1–40. Valdivia, G. (2021). Jugarse la vida: urban political ecologies of oil and marronage. Antipode, 53 (6), 1829–52. Van Sant, L., Milligan, R. and Mollett, S. (2021). Political ecologies of race: settler colonialism and environmental racism in the United States and Canada. Antipode, 53 (3), 629–42. Woods, C. (1998). Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. London: Verso. Zaragocín, S. (2019). Gendered geographies of elimination: decolonial feminist geographies in

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322  Concise encyclopedia of human geography Latin American settler contexts. Antipode, 51 (1), 373–92. Zeiderman, A. (2021). In the wake of logistics: situated afterlives of race and labour on the

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Magdalena River. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39 (3), https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1177/​0263775820970945.

62. Radical geographies To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing. (Raymond Williams, Welsh novelist)

For over 50 years, the word radical has been an important and inspirational adjective for geographers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in that time it has also been a contentious one. Far from describing a single, stable and coherent tradition or project, radical geography is and has always been a lively, contested and motley terrain of debate within (and against) the broader discipline. As we will see, what we mean by radical geography is shaped by ongoing epistemological, methodological and ethico-political debates and tensions between radical geographers. My starting point in this entry then is not then to ask ‘what is radical’ in geography – a definitive question that implies a delimiting process of boundary making. Instead, my aim here is to answer the following: what does it mean to produce radical geographical knowledges and what do radical geographies do? The word radical has its origins in the Latin radicalis or roots. This is a necessary but insufficient foundation for radical geography. It is necessary because radical geographical knowledges are about analysing, understanding and exposing the root causes of social and spatial injustices. Grounded in a rejection of positivism and a scepticism of empiricism, though not a rejection of empirics per se, radical geographers seek ‘not only to identify social problems, but also to understand their cause’ (Pickerill, 2019, p. 2). This means more than being attentive to what is happening outside the so-called Ivory Tower on the streets and squares, in factories and distribution centres, and in community spaces and the home. It also entails more than compiling report after report on the empirical conditions of the marginalized, exploited and dispossessed (Harvey, 1972). Rather, it necessitates theorizing that cannot always be fully apprehended by the senses, specifically social and spatial power relations of domination and oppression. As such, radical geographical scholars produce counter-hegemonic ideas, concepts and theory. They work against mainstream orthodoxies and doxas be they in academia or society more widely to represent and explain the world in new and emancipatory ways

(Barnes and Sheppard, 2019). Drawing on some combination of anti-capitalist, abolitionist, anarchist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, feminist, Marxist, post-/decolonial, and queer theory (to name just some currents alphabetically in a far from exhaustive list) radical geographers ‘produce renegade cartographies of change’ (Katz, 1996, p. 487). Yet, whilst necessary, on its own this commitment to exposing injustices and critiquing the conservative and liberal ideologies that justify and normalize them is insufficient for radical geographers. To borrow the powerful phraseology of radical black geographer Clyde Woods (2002, p. 63), if all that radical geographers do is dissect the dynamics of social injustice, they risk becoming ‘academic coroners’; their ‘tools of theory, method, instruction, and social responsibility become so rusted that they can only be used for autopsies’. To avoid this fate, producing lively radical geographies therefore means being normative, activist, and committed to collective transformative change from below and from the broadly defined Left (Blomley, 2006; Pickerill, 2019). At their best, radical geographies do not just speak truth to power (as if those in positions of power are listening or even care what we have to say), they ‘mark and produce alternative subjectivities, spatialities, and temporalities’ (Katz, 1996, p. 490). They are produced through, and help bring into being, communities, coalitions and institutions that proclaim other worlds are possible and that are already busy improvising, building and prefiguring these worlds (Vasudevan, 2015). To summarize, paraphrasing Marx’s famous formulation, radical geographers seek to understand the world so they can change it – so that, at a bare minimum, they can make it more socially just. Yet, as much as this commitment helps to provide some broad coherence to ‘the project’, unresolved questions of exactly how best to do this have been at the centre of ongoing tensions and debates for as long as people have been calling themselves radical geographers. There is, as a brief and partial history of radical geographies makes clear, no agreed-upon blueprint. Radical geographies can be traced back at least to the mid- to late nineteenth century, through the anarchist geographies of Pyotr Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus, as well as other lesser-known names such as Mary Arizona (Zonia) Baber (Peake and Sheppard, 2014).

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Most anglophone rehearsals of the emergence of a distinctive and coherent ‘movement’ of radical geography, however, mark its temporal and spatial origins in 1960s’ and 1970s’ North America (Barnes and Sheppard, 2019; Castree, 2000; Pickerill, 2019). In the midst of a deepening conjuncture of (geo)political and economic crises, with social unrest and social movements growing in number and force, a small number of geographers began to question the ability of their subject – steeped as it was in descriptive empiricism and quantitative positivism – to make sense of and intervene in the rapidly changing world around them. From this frustration with a detached and increasingly irrelevant status quo, flowered countless experiments in alternative geographical knowledge production. Prominent amongst these in the USA were Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography, whose first edition was published at Clark University in 1969 and the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), which began in 1968. To a degree, both in their own way represent lodestones of radical geography: the former as an intellectually ambitious and initially eclectic space of radical theorizing; the latter as an exemplar of a democratic and streets-based participatory geography. As such, if in a somewhat overly simplistic way, they stand in for a fundamental tension ‘between radical geography as an activist project, participating directly on-the-ground in transforming the world, and as a theoretical project, developing a corpus of abstract geographical theory to represent and explain the world’ (Barnes and Sheppard, 2019, p. 21). Yet each was also riven with internal tensions and paradoxes that remain relevant to this day. Antipode was founded in 1969 by staff and students in Clark’s Graduate School of Geography as an alternative space for radical ideas in the discipline and with the stated aim of ‘radical change – [the] replacement of institutions and institutional arrangements in our society that can no longer respond to changing societal needs’ (Stea, 1969, p. 1, cited in Huber, Knudson and Tapp, 2019, p. 96). Early issues of the journal – mimeographed, edited and marketed in makeshift fashion by student volunteers, many of whom were women – reflected the eclectic and vital diversity of a nascent radical movement within geography, covering a wide range of topics from different theoretical and methodJoe Penny

ological standpoints. This initially expansive approach to radical geographies, however, was short-lived, reflecting perhaps more the need for ‘a new journal trying to have enough material to fill its pages’ (Huber et al., 2019, p. 103) than any strong commitment to theoretical, methodological and political pluralism. Soon, as prominent figures within the department, including Dick Peet, took on greater editorial oversight ‘it became clearer that the journal would support only a narrow, masculinist interpretation of Marxism… which was particularly hostile to women inside the classroom, within departmental life, and at academic conferences’ (ibid., p. 104). Despite being central to its material production, women were intellectually and politically marginalized in the pages of the journal; their feminist scholarship and activism all too often dismissed as not radical or revolutionary enough (ibid.). Cindi Katz recalls that she had to fight to assert that ‘the kinds of things we did that were not urban, spatial, Marxist, were also important and radical’ (ibid.). With few alternative outlets publishing radical geographical scholarship, this monistic turn to an analytical Marxism in the pages of Antipode came to shape the wider project of anglophone radical geography as a whole, policing what was and was not accepted as radical and privileging calls for ruptural change at the expense of more ordinary and everyday radical acts. As the current editors of the journal recently reflected on the occasion of its 50th anniversary: ‘As Marxism came to represent a new orthodoxy among radical scholars, some of the openness and creativity that characterized the emergence of radicalism in the discipline was, for a period at least, lost’ (Theodore et al., 2019, p. 3). Since the 1980s, a struggle has raged within radical geography to re-open ‘the project’ to a greater diversity of voices, approaches and geographies. Led by those working, inter alia, from feminist, post-colonial, anti-racist, and queer perspectives this has entailed a deep epistemological, methodological and ethico-political critique of what Cindi Katz (1996) has called radical geography’s Marxist ‘major theory’. Specifically, these currents of minor theorizing have taken to task the privileging within some Marxist geography of totalizing, detached and commanding knowledge (Lawson, 2009) produced individualistically, at a furiously rapid pace, in

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the form of inaccessibly esoteric papers by ‘academic rock stars’ (Todd, 2017). Against this mode of radical scholarship, Leslie Kern and Heather McLean (2017, p. 405) write about their concern to ‘counter patriarchal, colonial, and hegemonic ways of knowing’ that permeate dominant trends in geographic political economy still. They warn us against the constraints of theories that present an abstract and ostensibly objective knowledge about places from nowhere; theory that has largely been decided in advance, that is self-confirming, and so ‘forecloses the possibility of observing or working with radical world-making projects that stand outside of traditional understandings of the political’ (ibid.). This is, it should be noted, by no means a rejection tout court of Marxian analyses and insights. Rather, it is an attempt to squeeze Marxist theory ‘through the pores’ of feminist, post-colonial, anti-racist and queer theory to produce radical scholarship that speaks to the diversity of the actually existing working class, their variegated experiences and material interests (Katz, 1996, p. 490). Methodologically, it is a call to develop ‘modes of engaged, embodied, slow, small-scale, detail-oriented, life-seeking research’ (Kern, 2017, p. 406) in the recognition that radical geographical knowledge is produced collectively, by all sorts of people, and not just by academics ‘from our neck up’ (mrs kinpaisby, 2008, p. 295). An early (albeit imperfect) precursor to this approach, the DGEI was founded in Fitzgerald, an under-resourced black neighbourhood, in the wake of the 1967 Detroit uprising. It was co-directed by Wayne State University geography professor William Bunge and Gwendolyn Warren, a ‘militant high school leaver [and community organizer] from the neighbourhood’ (Warren, Katz and Heynen, 2019, p. 63). The intention of the DGEI was to produce a grassroots understanding of place and to train local residents – including high school students, school leavers and other interested residents – as radical researchers of their own experiences and conditions (ibid.). Mapping the land uses of a square-mile patch of the neighbourhood and drawing an evocative distinction between what they called machine spaces and play spaces, these ‘folk geographers’ worked collaboratively ‘to understand [the area’s]

very fibres of existence so that the political economic historical geographical processes engulfing it might be deflected, rejected, undone’ (ibid.). Promisingly, through the institute, a community-administered and free extension programme was inaugurated with the University of Michigan and Michigan State. Whilst this lasted. university resources were opened up to and placed in the hands of the community, helping if only for a short while to shake up a staid and ‘contented “campus geography”’ (Merrifield, 1995, p. 53). At the time, the DGEI proved an inspiration to a number of geographers in other departments, with expeditions soon following in selected universities across North America and beyond. Today, the DGEI and Bunge have taken on a quasi-mythical status in radical geography circles as exemplars of deeply democratic and transformative praxis and pedagogy. Yet, as Gwendolyn Warren has recently argued, such myth-making obscures as much as it reveals; it says far too little about Bunge’s often domineering, misogynistic and racist attitudes and behaviours, the unequal divisions of labour between participants, and the extractive relations between the academic and ‘folk’ geographers. As much as it has been an inspiration, the DGEI should in equal measure be ‘a cautionary tale for contemporary radical geographers’ (Warren et al., 2019, p. 65). The intention behind expeditions was to subvert the nineteenth-century imperialist geographical logics and practices from which they take their name. Yet as much as the collaborative ethos of the DGEI sought to dissolve the explorer/explored distinction, extractive colonial relations persisted between the DGEI’s overwhelmingly white academic participants and the predominantly black residents of Fitzgerald. Reflecting on her experience, Warren recalls that ‘when Bunge and his students were done doing research in and around Fitzgerald they would go home, and reap the benefits of their work with little regard for the toll it took on her or the members of the communities they were trying to help’ (ibid., p. 68). Here Warren identifies a familiar challenge that academic geographers face when co-producing radical knowledges with people outside the university. Joe Penny

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At their best, participatory and collaborative approaches undermine knowledge hierarchies, extending ‘the processes of theorising and knowing beyond campus spaces, explicitly recognising intellectual labour as a thoroughly social, rather than individual and autonomous, activity’ (Pain, Kesby and Askins, 2012, p. 121). Yet, as they do so, they also face strong institutional pressures to conform to the norms of academic knowledge production that have become ever more competitive, output-oriented and commodified (Pain, 2014). Such pressures, co-mingling with concerns for professional security and career advancement, can all too easily lead to extractive and exploitative relations within participatory and collaborative research processes. As Herzfeld and Lees (2021, p. 296) put it: ‘Too many academics are already building their careers on the backs of deprived communities without full reciprocation’. These vignettes of radical geographical knowledge production highlight enduring tensions between principle and practice. At one level they point to the destructive consequences of what Peake and Sheppard (2014, p. 310) generously call ‘difficult personalities’: people (predominantly white men) whose toxic behaviour inflicts various forms of violence on their colleagues and communities. Beyond these individuals, however, they also signal deeper institutional forces that simultaneously enable sexism, racism and ableism in academic spaces; reward competitive, individualistic, and exploitative research practices; and undermine those seeking to produce slower, more engaged, and care-full radical geographical scholarship and praxis (Mountz et al., 2015). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical geographers in anglophone universities were outsiders who felt embattled and beleaguered within the wider discipline. Although universities were expanding, many had to fight for tenure and, as David Harvey has admitted, some did so in part by playing the professional academic game: by chasing academic esteem, respectability and accolades ‘that over time made our work less accessible’ (Harvey, cited in Huber et al., 2019, p. 109). Undoubtedly, this work helped secure the status of radical geography, such that it ‘is now canonical in mainstream Anglophone human geography’ (Peake and Sheppard, 2014, p. 322). However, arguably, it has also seen radical geographers conform Joe Penny

to the norms of the neoliberal university and so actively diminish the conditions in which they can help effect meaningful change. The sight of former radical geographers becoming grossly overpaid vice-chancellors of British universities and then using their positions of institutional power to wage war on staff and student working conditions is one galling (if not aberrative) outcome of this conformity (Callard, 2018). Another more pervasive concern is the crisis of precarity across higher education sectors. The proliferation of part-time, temporary and insecure contracts not only threatens to evict from academia those who do not gain elusive permanent contracts, making slow and collaborative research a risk for early-career scholars (how can we produce the kinds of ‘sustained, embodied and caring’ research – or care-full research – that Kern and McLean, 2017, p. 410, call for if we in turn are not cared for and sustained by our universities?) (Ferreri and Glucksberg, 2016). They also help perpetuate violence within academic communities, including that of radical geography, by locking ‘us into ever-performing power structures, for the sake of job security’ (Cardwell and Hitchen, 2022, n.p.). To live up to their promise then, radical geographies need to engage as much with struggles within the university as outside. As Mountz et al. (2015, p. 1239) put it: ‘cultivating space to care for ourselves, our colleagues, and our students’ is a political and radical act. Joe Penny

References and selected further reading Barnes, T. and Sheppard, E. (2019). Introduction. In T. Barnes and E. Sheppard (eds), Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and Beyond. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 1–36. Blomley, N. (2006). Uncritical critical geography? Progress in Human Geography, 30 (1), 87–94. Callard, F. (2018, 6 March). #notallgeographers. HHS. Accessed 6 January 2022 at http://​www​ .histhum​.com/​notallgeographers/​. Cardwell, E. and Hitchen, E. (2022, 6 January). Intervention – precarity, transactions, insecure attachments: reflections on participating in degrees of abuse. Antipode Online. Accessed 6 January 2022 at https://​ antipodeonline​ .org/​

Radical geographies  327 2022/​01/​06/​precarity​-transactions​-insecure​ -attachments/​. Castree, N. (2000). Professionalisation, activism, and the university: whither ‘critical geography’? Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 32 (6), 955–70. Ferreri, M. and Glucksberg, L. (2016). Fighting gentrification in the neoliberal university: displacing communities, researchers and the very possibility of critique. Sociological Research Online, 21 (3), 1–7. Harvey, D. (1972). Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary theory in geography and the problem of ghetto formation. Antipode, 4 (2), 1–13. Herzfeld, M. and Lees, L. (2021). Responsibility and commitment in urban scholar-activism: perspectives from an anthropologist and a geographer. Radical Housing Journal, 3 (1), 291–300. Huber, M.T., Knudson, C. and Tapp, R. (2019). Radical paradoxes: the making of Antipode at Clark University. In T. Barnes and E. Sheppard (eds), Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and Beyond. Chichester: John Wiley & Son, pp. 87–116. Katz, C. (1996). Towards minor theory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 14 (4), 487–99. Kern, L. and McLean, H. (2017). Undecidability and the urban: feminist pathways through urban political economy. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 16 (3), 405–26. Lawson, V. (2009). Instead of radical geography, how about caring geography? Antipode, 41 (1), 210–13. Merrifield, A. (1995). Situated knowledge through exploration: reflections on Bunge’s ‘geographical expeditions’. Antipode, 27 (1), 49–70. Mountz, A., Bonds, A. and Mansfield, B. et al. (2015). For slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14 (4), 1235–59. mrs kinpaisby (2008). Taking stock of participatory geographies: envisioning the communi-

versity. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33 (3), 292–9. Pain, R. (2014). Impact: striking a blow or walking together? ACME: An Journal for Critical Geographies, 13 (1), 19–23. Pain, R., Kesby, M. and Askins, K. (2012). The politics of social justice in neoliberal times: a reply to Slater. Area, 44 (1), 120–23. Peake, L. and Sheppard, E. (2014). The emergence of radical/critical geography within North America. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 13 (2), 305–27. Pickerill, J. (2019). Radical geography. In D. Richardson, N. Castree and M.F. Goodchild et al. (eds), The International Encyclopaedia of Geography. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 1–14. Accessed 19 October 2022 at https://​ www​.jennypickerill​.info/​wp​-content/​uploads/​ Radical​-Geography​-IEG​-2019​-Published​.pdf. Theodore, N., Jazeel, T. and Kent, A. et al. (2019). Keywords in radical geography: an introduction. In Antipode Editorial Collective, T. Jazeel and A. Kent et al. (eds), Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 1–13. Todd, Z. (2017). Tending tenderness and disrupting the myth of academic rockstars. Zoestodd. com. Accessed 7 January 2022 at https://​ zoestodd​.com/​2017/​07/​20/​tending​-tenderness​ -and​-disrupting​-the​-myth​-of​-academic​-rock​ -stars/​. Vasudevan, A. (2015). The makeshift city: towards a global geography of squatting. Progress in Human Geography, 39 (3), 338–59. Warren, G., Katz, C. and Heynen, N. (2019). Myths, cults, memories, and revisions in radical geographic history: revisiting the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute. In T. Barnes and E. Sheppard (eds), Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and Beyond. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 59–86. Woods, C. (2002). Life after death. The Professional Geographer, 54 (1), 62–6.

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63. Realism (critical)

rules of science reduces its activity to mere storytelling, and hence negates its power.

Introduction Critical realism (CR) is a philosophy of science; it is a set of logical processes that can be followed for the achievement of a better understanding of the world. We refer to a ‘better understanding’ rather than the ‘final’ understanding, as CR is recursive and developmental in its processes and understanding. Crucially, the ‘world’ we are talking about here comprises both the social and physical worlds (hence its particular relevance to geographers). To be fair, alternative approaches such as positivism would also claim soto voce the same things, but the ‘advertised’ claim is one of universalism, fact and certainty. CR asserts that the world has a ‘depth’ to it, of which we only perceive the surface manifestation, or its nominal form. Sustaining the world as we experience it are processes that create apparent events. The idea of the depth of reality is known as ontology: the thing-ness of things. Ontology is the boundaries around objects that distinguish them one from another. For nominalists (that is, positivists, and pragmatists), the shapes and forms or immediate perception are all there is; and we seek to link them in narrative or statistical relation. On the other hand, critical realists (CRs) state that objects are constituted of linkages of causal structures or processes; this means that ‘analytical objects’ are different to these apparent ones. Simply, CR interrogates – rather than takes for granted – the way in which the world is divided up. Despite the rhetoric of (positivist) science that we generally interpret as one that discusses causes and processes, positivism is based on nominalism and atomism: there is no fundamental relationship between objects, only co-relations; and, correlation is not causation. In positivism, causality can only be implied, and taken as ‘fact’ if the (statistical) probability is high enough. Here we get to the nub of the subtle critique of positivism by CR: that positivism is a ‘diurnal science’ – namely, that the realism of laboratory life is tidied up ‘overnight’ when the research is reported and written up according to the logical rules of positivism (Bhaskar, 1975). And, the rules are vital: not following the

Philosophy The realm of philosophy is foundational; it is a statement of fundamental assumptions in the understanding of the world: in fact, the idea that there IS (or is not) a world outside of our heads. We cannot be agnostic here; anyway, agnosticism is a position that needs justifying. So, it is appropriate that we state our initial assumptions; it is simply due diligence. Sadly, normative positions take many of these points ‘as read’. There are three points to cover here: ontology, epistemology and causality. In normative approaches, ontology and causality are assumed and there is only dispute (in the social sciences) over epistemology. As indicated above, ontology is the ‘deal breaker’ here. The difference between nominalist, and empiricist, views of the world and some form of depth ontology is critical. The former denies the latter. For nominalists ‘what you see is what you get’, and objects are fundamentally assumed to be unconnected (atomistic). On the contrary, CR argues that the ‘real’ is a realm of relationships that underpin and constitute the ‘appearance’ (nominalism):1 appearances are only part of ‘reality’. Two issues flow from this. First, that if there is no real, neither can there be any causality: there are no processes or mechanisms beyond those ‘visible’. Hence, for positivists, causality is only implied, and alternatives ruled out via statistical regularities. As noted above, in common parlance we use causality in a realist sense; but, that is invalid from a positivist perspective. Second, the boundaries of the real – for positivists, this is ‘obvious’: it is the thing in front of us. However, CRs argue about which characteristics of an object we decide constitutes a boundary; taxonomic features can be variable (for example, size, colour, or age). Moreover, what of things that we cannot (currently) see: do they become real when we use a microscope? It will be clear that there is room for debate here, and some perils in measuring the appearance of things: positivism denies this, but the question is central to CR.

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To stay with causality, positivists must imply it via rejecting on the basis of statistical regularity. Moreover, the model of causality is a secessionist one: if one thing, then another. CRs have a far richer palette to explore regarding causality – that different structures and mechanisms can be proposed as generating results (or events), under particular conditions. This approach is called ‘generative’ causality. Finally, we need to discuss epistemology: the narrative of explanation. In the position approach, objects are defined, kept in controlled situations, and acted upon in the hope of identifying a direction and composite concatenation of (the probability of) causality. Much debate has been had in geography based upon the fundamental differences between physical objects such as rocks and people who have consciousness and self-awareness. Positivist geographers must ‘control for’ but not acknowledge consciousness (which is paradoxical). For CRs, and many others, the very ‘thing-ness’ of people is critical in explanation and understanding. Beyond this positivist (anti-humanist) approach the common distinction made about epistemologies is between idealism and materialism: idealists use ‘ideal types’ to argue for generalization (voluntarism), or from ideal types to individuals (reification). CR argues for a position similar to that of structuration theory (see Gregory and Urry, 1985); that is, a recursive movement between ‘actions’ and ‘structures’: each co-informing others. CRs are then able to take a further step, the coup de grâce. They argue that the CR approach to epistemology can also be applied to the physical sciences (while CRs argue that the application of positivism to human subjects is not appropriate, as are the claims of universal application of positivist science to all domains). Formally, this is the application of philosophy and epistemology to all realms termed ‘naturalism’.

or equations that link observable data and outcomes are simply ‘models’ or calculating engines. The model, and the causality, does not ‘exist’, it is not real, as one cannot see it. By contrast, for CRs, this is the essence of the analysis: defining objects, conceptualization of mechanisms, and identifying causality. For CRs, these theories and models are how it is believed the world ‘is’, or must be, for the external appearance to be maintained. So, models and theories for CR are not about computational elegance, but about meaning and explanation. The process for CRs is of first abstracting the key elements of what constitutes a thing: a process that is recursive, but is called a ‘rational abstraction’. The term is commonly contrasted with a simplistic taken-for-granted object or ‘essence’: a ‘chaotic conception’. Rational abstractions that describe things, also seek to explain their ‘emergence’ and appearance. This is where CR proposes mechanisms that account for the outcomes of objects: causality. However, there is a critical step here in defining the mechanisms CR seeks to separate out from the ‘necessary relations’ that constitute the thing, and the ‘contingent relations’ that constitute the occurrence in a particular place and time. Thus, CRs have a way of isolating causal mechanisms and their (in)activation under certain conditions. We can contrast this with the (conditional) ‘contextual’, which does so much work in much social science due to the application of idealist approaches, or structural accounts (and, of course, is much relied upon by positivists). However, in these approaches there is no clear logic for the division between the thing and its context, nor the nature of its relation, unless it is as a probability. A number of practical applications of CR were developed in the field of economic geography in the 1990s (see Cooke, 1989; Lawson and Staeheli, 1990; Sayer, 1984, 2015).

Approaches

Fieldwork

Having completed the ground clearing of basic philosophical positions and mode of explanation, we can progress to putting CR into practice. Again, there is disputation with positivism about the role of models and theories. For positivists, the various narratives

As suggested already, fieldwork is an integral part of CR research, and it is a recursive activity moving between models and observations (which for CRs are all parts of the ‘real’, not separate realms as for the positivist). Clearly, undertaking empirical studies implies data Andy Pratt

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collections and taxonomic definitions (which may contextualize the normative ones, as they were most likely defined under positivist logics). Epistemologically speaking, there are a number of methods that have been developed for particular approaches; in a sense these are implicit realist critiques of positivist naturalism. There is a need for methods that measure the ‘right /relevant’ characteristics of the object. Hence, we have approaches from the anthropological and ethnographic, to the social survey and questionnaire. Each makes assumptions about the ‘object/s’ under investigation, and their relations to other ‘objects’; and these tools seek to apprehend the objects, and sometimes the relationships. Clearly, CR is critical of the boundaries of objects, their relations of connection and causality, and their ‘appearance’, which may be different to their ‘real’ nature. CR will thus focus on investigation of rational abstractions, and causality under particular conditions. Proposed causal mechanisms will be examined and explored. It will be noted that we are avoiding using the positivist term ‘testing’ as this is a method embedded in positivistic approaches; CRs prefer to use the term ‘practical adequacy’. These can be best illustrated by attempts to apply CR to network practices (see, Hsu, 2019; Pratt, 1995; Yeung, 1997). Of course, positivists make claim to fallibility and the rejection of hypotheses and models. However, as we can see, the conditions of acceptance and rejection are contested, and what is a stake is not the same: any equation, versus a ‘real’ model of a causal mechanism. CRs have argued that this confusion of the stated aspirations of positivism and the actuality of research is problematic, leading to what has been termed a diurnal model of science. Positivists commonly refer to causality and thing-ness, and underlying structures, but when they come to account for their research in the formal write up, these points are negated (the original idea is that the day-to-day lab activity is rewritten in the lab book). Positivism is often hailed as a truth-preserving approach that is bound by hypothetico-deductivism (H-D). However, one step that nearly all science aspires to, and seeks to do, is to predict what will happen next. Within the framework of H-D this is a ‘crime’, or conceit, of induction. However, much of it is hemmed around by Andy Pratt

probabilities, it is implied induction, which is fine for other epistemological approaches that do not claim ‘truth’, but is fatal to positivism. Accordingly, CRs are wary of statistical methods that require such an inductive leap, preferring to remain with descriptive statistics, not probabilistic ones. This leads us to another area of particular importance to CRs: statistical sampling. Statistical sampling is utilized by positivists to escape the problem of having to investigate whole populations; the aim is to select a representative sample. This is often linked in the social sciences with questions about structural characteristics, location and proximity, and the timing of an object. This is the struggle to deal with ‘open systems’, and to artificially ‘close’ them to replicate a laboratory condition when dependent and independent variables can be isolated. CR does not have the same problem. CR is an approach based upon open systems; its question of selectivity of the world is based upon causal mechanisms and rational abstractions; and the identification of necessary from contingent relations. CRs argue that many sampling approaches deployed in normative social science constitute chaotic conceptions, and thus any findings will be devalued. This process is the echo of the rational abstraction noted above: what structure constitutes an object that can be isolated from its context?2 This debate has often been discussed in relation to the case study, which is often used as an ideal type, or stands as a sample (irrationally). Again, case studies are important, but it is critical (for CR) that they are rational abstractions and do not sever necessary relations, and correctly identify contingency, and the conditions under which the contingent and the necessary are triggered. CR does not express such outcomes as probabilities, but as potentials (under particular conditions) (see Cox, 2013). Finally, we can note debates about policymaking: a key concern of social and economic geographers. This has two dimensions. The first is to look at the use of systematic studies (which are the basis of ‘evidence-based policymaking’) that are held as the gold standard in the medical sciences. The general approach is to collect as many studies as possible, to provide ‘a bigger sample’, and hence develop more reliable recommendations (given that much policy research is limited to small samples, and specific conditions). Clearly,

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CRs find fault with such a ‘ragbag’ approach; sample sizes are different, overall populations are various, the conditions under which the experiment took place vary. CR approaches have rejected the approach and highlight the individual and unusual, and have focused on redefining wider research programmes based upon the identification of potential causal mechanisms (Pawson, 2006). Another approach to policymaking is to focus on the policy process and to recognize that it is fundamentally a political process; but to identify particular causal mechanisms that may have outcomes – not on the basis of probability – but under particular conditions can be a crucial guide to the resource-allocation decisions of policymakers and politicians. Thus, the CR approach turns away from ‘best practice’ or ‘the one best way’ models that are presented as universal fix-alls derived from positivism, and instead focuses on understanding the local and global mechanisms that generate local events; and, in identifying the capabilities and capacities of local agents/objects to mobilize or activate them (Pratt, 2009).

Discussion CR in geography offers many of the ‘headline’ benefits of positivism, without the shortcomings rooted in (an anti-humanist) naturalism, and the inductive conceit of probability. Moreover, it explicitly focuses on the challenge of identifying causes of events (under differing circumstances). These strengths offer a viable approach to understanding an ‘open systems’ world of both sensate and non-sensate objects. Without doubt, a sound understanding of the basic philosophical principles and logical methods that should be followed to be consistent is important. This will lead to better research and enquiry; it should also help clarify what is being contested by different participants in the debate. CR highlights that there are multiple ways to conduct research. Disputes are often better understood as being about a difference of basic philosophical position, rather than the (correct) application of a method. Moreover, CR highlights a commonly held fallacy of positivism that methods are equally suitable for all epistemologies, or ontologies.

Commonly, we can observe disputes about the use of quantitative or qualitative methods, where a priori one side or the other is rejected; commonly this happens in the case of physical geography and geo-humanities. Here, the dispute regards what best represents a finite object: the (apparent) precision of number, or a quality. Here we are back to the question of ‘thing-ness’. Ontology is clearly a defining characteristic of CR; however, it is but an opening to a whole realm of reality that allows a proposition of causality, and the conditions under which it is enabled. Moreover, CR offers a different way to ‘cut the cake’ of reality based upon not only the ontology, and naturalism, but also on what statistical logic is entailed. In particular, CR rejects the inductive conceit of probability implied by secessionist causality; instead, offering an ontology of rational abstraction and causal mechanisms that are enabled or disabled under particular conditions (or, in particular contexts). Andy Pratt

Notes 1.

2.

There are many variants of ‘realism’ as ontology, I refer specifically to ‘ontological’ forms here. Note, that the term realism (again not ontological) is often used to refer to ‘realpolitik’ – messy tactics and practice – as opposed to neat theories, in international relations for example. This can be referred to as a theoretical sample. Such a sample (a rational abstraction) is logical under CR, but not under other epistemologies (where it may be a chaotic conception).

References and selected further reading Bhaskar, R. (1975). A Realist Theory of Science. Leeds: Leeds Books. Cooke, P. (1989). Localities: The Changing Face of Urban Britain. London: Unwin Hyman. Cox, K.R. (2013). ‘Notes on a brief encounter: critical realism, historical materialism and human geography’. Dialogues in Human Geography, 3 (1), 3–21. Gregory, D. and J. Urry (1985). Social Relations and Spatial Structures. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hsu, J.-Y. (2019). ‘Process-ing with mechanism: the renaissance of critical realism in human

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332  Concise encyclopedia of human geography geography?’. Dialogues in Human Geography, 9 (3), 262–6. Lawson, V. and L.A. Staeheli (1990). ‘Realism and the practice of geography’. The Professional Geographer, 42 (1), 13–20. Pawson, R. (2006). Evidence-Based Policy: A Realist Perspective. London: SAGE. Pratt, A.C. (1995). ‘Putting critical realism to work – the practical implications for geographical research’. Progress in Human Geography, 19, 61–74. Pratt, A.C. (2009). ‘Policy transfer and the field of the cultural and creative industries: what can be learned from Europe?’. In L. Kong

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and J. O’Connor (eds), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives. Amsterdam: Springer, pp. 9–23. Sayer, R.A. (1984). Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach. London: Hutchinson. Sayer, R.A. (2015). ‘Critical realism in geography’. In J.D. Wright (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioural Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 277–80. Yeung, H.W.-C. (1997). ‘Critical realism and realist research in human geography: a method or a philosophy in search of a method?’. Progress in Human Geography, 21 (1), 51–74.

64. Relational geographies Introduction Relationality is an important way of thinking in human geography and the social sciences more broadly, particularly for how we think about the becoming of places and regions. According to relational thinking, the varied processes of spatial stretching, interdependence and flow, combine in situ trajectories of socio-spatial evolution and change, to propose place – the city, region or rural area – as sites of intersection between networked topologies and territorial legacies. The result is no simple displacement of the local by the global, of place by space, of history by simultaneity and flow, of small scale by big scale, or of the proximate by the remote. Instead, it is a subtle folding together of the distant and the proximate, the virtual and the material, presence and absence, flow and stasis, into a single ontological plane upon which location – a place on the map – has come to be relationally and topologically defined. This is complicated stuff for sure! In short, when ‘thinking space relationally’ (Geografiska Annaler, 2004) space is seen as unbounded and formed through imbroglios of flows and networks. Relational space, then, is continuously being made, unmade and remade by the incessant shuffling of heterogeneous relations; its potential can never be contained and its exuberance can never be quelled. What becomes of space always and necessarily eludes the grasp of every will to order (see, variously, Allen, 2016; Amin, 2004, 2007; Amin and Thrift, 2002; Massey, 2005; Mol and Law, 1994; Murdoch, 2006). This entry applauds relationality as ‘thinking space relationally’ (Geografiska Annaler, 2004) but airs caution over the implication of its theorizations. It takes issue not with relational space per se, but with how ‘relational’ is itself theorized and generalized (building on Jones, 2009; Jones and Jessop, 2010; MacLeod and Jones, 2007). It also questions the normative political and policy assumptions made by relationalists. The next section discusses the importance of this ‘relational turn’ by positioning it within the lineage of philosophical approaches to space. Following this, by focusing on the region in geographic

thought, the entry highlights some silences and limits – namely, factors that constrain, structure and connect relational space. The entry acknowledges the relational nature of space, but insists on the connected, sometimes inertial, and always context-specific nature of spatiality (see Harvey, 1996; Jones, 2009; Jones and Jessop, 2010).

The context of relationality The narrative presented in this section is the step-by-step shift in the conceptualization of space from ‘absolute’ to ‘relative’, then ‘relational’ conditions. This is a large but important task to undertake in the limited space available. The absolute (or substantivalist) versus relative debate is well known – it forms the backdrop to geography, aspects of the social sciences dealing with space more broadly, and its evolution over the last century. Both approaches are variously concerned with topography. Absolute space is a condition in which space exists independently of any object(s) or relations: space is a discrete and autonomous container. The job of geography here is to fill containers or pigeon holes with information, through techniques such as cartography and by prescribing categories for data collection and analysis. This approach assumes that things in space have analytical fixity and complete affinity to their spatial reference point, such that distance and scale can be determined without ambiguity: we know who is big and what is small, and who is close to whom. Pre-1950s’ regional geography’s concerns with delimiting natural, climatic and later human regions best illustrates this. The preoccupation with environmental determinism and agency-free landscapes, though, highlights the weaknesses of this approach. Pitched against this is relative space, which rests on two assumptions. First, space can be defined only in relation to the object(s) and/or processes being considered in space and time. Second, there is no defined or fixed relationship for locating things under consideration: a non-Euclidean perspective is adopted, where distance/relationships are relative and change over time and across space. Space, and also time, have ‘positional quality’. In turn, the traditional three dimensions of space, plus a separate one for time, are merged

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into a single, unified ‘spacetime’, with four dimensions. A point in space thus becomes an event or moment in spacetime. The followers of regional science pushed this a stage further by making direct links with general relativity theory – an almost social physics in a spatial context. As with absolute space, relative approaches to space have had limits, which partially explain why human geography is adopting a ‘thinking space relationally’ approach. First, the ‘empirical problem’ of geometry dealing with the ‘complexities of fields and forces’ – that is, what is the source and structure of spacetime and what are the bounded or ‘boundary conditions’ that permit certain activities and relations to take place. In philosophy, writings tackled this conundrum by using process thought to capture the roles of events as active conditions in the ingression of sense-objects into nature (see Jones, 2009). In this context, relational thinking is a paradigmatic departure from the concerns of absolute and relative space, because it dissolves the boundaries between objects and space, and rejects forms of spatial totality. Space does not exist as an entity in and of itself, over and above material objects and their spatio-temporal relations and extensions. In short, objects are space, space is objects, and, moreover, objects can be understood only in relation to other objects – with all this being a perpetual becoming of heterogeneous networks and events that connect internal spatio-temporal relations (see Murdoch, 2006). Relational thinking in spacetime philosophies originated with the work of Leibniz in non-Euclidean geometry and calculus, which critiqued (absolute) substantivalist theories for not analysing fluid dynamics – that is, motion within and between objects and for playing down the ‘inner principles’ of existence. In discussions of Leibniz’s Monadology (1714; the text broadly covering the metaphysics of things) it is suggested that one Monad is said to act upon another and thus to be more perfect when its state explains the state of the other. They are only said to act upon each other. In reality, each Monad unfolds its series of changes from its own inner principle, and in conformity with the development of every other Monad (see Jones and Jessop, 2010).

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Relationalism, geography, and beyond In the 1990s, with social constructionism and post-structuralism and the displacement of topography with topological thinking and its notions of pleats and folds, more recent relational brands have become embedded in the social sciences and human geography through science and technology writings, human/ non-human – nature hybridities, accounts based in actor network theory, world-city networks and topologies, cities more generally, research on mobile objects, Bergson-inspired approaches to the nature of time, discussions on political subjectivities and identity, new theories of local and regional development, and critiques of scale…the list goes on. In short, the spatial project for relational thinkers is to replace topography and structure– agency dichotomies with a topological theory of space, place and politics as encountered, performed and fluid. This is ‘infra-physics’, which replaces systems of coordinates (Einstein etc.) with ‘activities’ for ‘framing’ space, which signifies a ‘baroque’ position in the social sciences – there is no distinction between the individual and his or her environment; that many, perhaps most, relations remain implicit; that entities are made out of a myriad of heterogeneous entities; that these in turn are made out of an infinity of other entities, and so on (see Allen, 2016; Harvey, 1996; Murdoch, 2006). ‘Thinking space relationally’ (Geografiska Annaler, 2004), then, is a hugely empowering perspective. It suggests that space and its orders are always open such that the local is an achievement in which a place is localized by other places and accepts ‘localization’ itself. But this means that no place is closed off. Advocates suggest that the conditions of economic circulation, hypermobility, time– space compression, and cultural insignia warrant a completely new conceptualization of space. Space is no longer seen as a nested hierarchy moving from ‘global’ to ‘local’. This is replaced by the notion that what counts is connectivity. This squares with writings in philosophy, where relationists only recognize the material bodies and the spatial relations between material and are committed to the non-existence of unoccupied places and regions (Amin, Massey and Thrift, 2003; Amin and Thrift, 2002).

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Relationality and its limits Relational space, certainly that brand used in human geography, is heavily normative and it has been used to make arguments about an unbounded politics and a non-territorial form of policymaking and policy delivery (see Jones, 2009). Applying this to ‘the region’ – one of the core concepts in human geography that relational approaches have sought forcefully to redefine and more broadly an ongoing battleground for redefining the discipline – Massey and colleagues, for instance, propose that an adequate understanding of the region and its futures can only come through a conception of places as open, discontinuous, relational and internally diverse; and thinking ‘a region’ in terms of social relations stretched out reveals, not an ‘area’, but a complex and unbounded lattice of articulations (Amin et al., 2003). Drawing on London – only because it came to mind first, not because it is any more relationally constituted than any other place – Amin adds that cities and regions should be seen as places without prescribed and proscribed boundaries and conceptualized as nodes that gather flow/s and juxtapose diversity, as places of overlapping – but not necessarily connected – relational networks, as perforated entities with connections that stretch far back in time and space, and resulting from all of this, as spatial formations of continuously changing composition, character and reach (Amin, 2004, 2007). Bringing both perspectives together, Amin and colleagues propose a ‘relational grammar of politics’ to challenge the contemporary state-driven territorial management practices of devolution and constitutional change (in the UK). This advocates: dispersing some of the political/policy forms and functions of capital/global cities into provincial regions by using mobile and travelling political performances; creating alliances between places/ regions to foster ‘external connectivity’; and nurturing a ‘cosmopolitan regionalism’ that replaces regional identities, and their deemed-to-be parochial senses of belonging (a ‘politics of territorial confinement’), with a ‘politics of local and trans-local engagement’. The latter is a distinctly non-territorial project because performing/performed politics takes place in and across territory, as opposed to being a politics of territory, and this harnesses

an important practice of democracy in a relational world (Amin et al., 2003).

Conclusions Given that all territories are mutually constitutive and reflective of dynamic social, economic and political action, the relational programme has considerable appeal. Moreover, given the prominence of global spaces and networks of flows, it is reasonable to claim that economic and cultural geographies will increasingly be imagined and performed in and through an intricate geometry of trans-border (though never placeless) networks. A relational approach to space and place, then, would seem a promising theoretical avenue to explore the contemporary mobile world and its circuits of commodities, people and ideas. Nonetheless, the advocates of ‘thinking space relationally’ seriously overstate their case (MacLeod and Jones, 2007). Despite the multiple potentials of space flagged in relational thinking, factors can constrain and structure space. All things considered ‘potential’ do not necessarily become ‘an actual’. This needs to be considered more carefully by relational advocates, as do issues of connection (Jones and Jessop, 2010; Joseph, 2018). First, while relationalists present a convincing case of, for example, the London/ South East as a region of relational topologies with regard to various maps of trans-regional and trans-national economic flows and interchange, this is only part of this region’s ‘story’, and of a unique (English) region at that, given its long-established international networks. Other regions and places for that matter might lend their weight to different theoretical perspectives and also perform more conventional territory-based political, economic and cultural strategies. The obvious danger of translating uniqueness into one-region-tells-all scenarios is certainly an issue for relational thinkers critically to consider (Jones, 2009). Second, relational thinking implies openness that often belies the lived-experience of many. Contextual forces within advanced capitalism (such as class, race and gender) are considered important for framing and allowing certain possibilities and opportunities to exist. To ignore this runs the risk of lapsing Martin Jones

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into spatial voluntarism. Economic geographers draw our attention to the importance of power relations and actor-specific practices in the making of relational economic spaces. Concerns with the spatial relations of permanence (material and discursive) follow from this, concerns with which relational thinkers seem uncomfortable. Work on regions and identity, for instance, has pointed out that many everyday realpolitik acts of regionalization and/or regionalism – as, for instance, in state forces classifying a region as a ‘problem’ or local activists campaigning for devolved government and cultural rights – often distinguish a pre-existing or aspirant spatial scale or territorially articulated space of dependence through which to conduct their actually existing politics of engagement. In other words, when performing their practical politics, agents imagine and identify a discrete, bounded space characterized by a shared understanding of the opportunities or problems that are motivating the very nature of political action. However, for relationists, we should not assume that there is a defined geographical territory out there over which local actors can have effective control over and can manage as a social and political space. In a relationally constituted modern world in which it has become normal to conduct business – economic, cultural, political – through everyday trans-territorial organization and flow, local advocacy must be increasingly about exercising nodal power and aligning networks at large in one’s own interest, rather than about exercising territorial power. In short, there is no definable regional territory to rule over (see MacLeod and Jones, 2007). This statement does not pay sufficient attention to how regions are being constructed and mobilized in and through territorially defined political, socio-economic and cultural strategies (Paasi, 2010). On this, much of the political challenge to devolution prevailing across Europe and elsewhere is being practised and performed through an avowedly territorial narrative and scalar ontology – albeit often enacted through topologically heterogeneous trans-regional and cross-border networks of ‘fluidity’ and circulation. Contrary to the beliefs of relational approaches to space, then, mobility and fluidity should not be seen as standing in opposition to territories and we should, therefore, not be forced to adopt a ‘networks versus territories’ scenario. Martin Jones

On the one hand, networks should not be seen as non-spatial and without ‘geographical anchors’, and on the other hand, territories and scales should not be viewed as closed and static. This behoves us to make analytical distinctions between ‘territory’ (appropriated enacted space), ‘territoriality’ (the sum of relations between subjects therein), and ‘territorialization’ (the process through which these relations are established). Relational thinkers appear to create a crude caricature, whereby all non-relational thinking is conveniently displaced into notions of static space and deemed to omit much of the topology of economic circulation and network folding that is characteristic of contemporary capitalism (Amin, 2004). This non-territorial trap plays down the fact that territories are not frozen frameworks where social life occurs (Jones, 2009). Rather, they are made, given meanings, and destroyed in social and individual action. Furthermore, territorialization involving social and political action: the question here becomes how far territorialized forms of political power can be folded or bent without losing identity. Relational thinking rarely questions whether ‘topology’ – a concept from mathematics that described the geometry of relations whose qualitative structure is robust to various kinds of transformation or ‘folding’ – has certain properties that ensure that its relational constituents and coordinates return to their spatial form, thus limiting the open-endedness inferred by geographers (MacLeod and Jones, 2007). The rare exception to this is work of Whatmore (2002) – who posits relationally that territory and its governance are in practice ‘plastic achievements’, and research thereafter needs to focus attention on the tangle of socio-material agents and frictional alignments in which it is suspended and to recognize that they harbour other possibilities. The challenge for relational thinking is to address Allen’s (2012) call for a ‘more than relational geography’, which questions what kind of regional entities are being made and sustained. This entry suggests an urgent need to engage with this and specifically think about notions of ‘plastic space’ to take forward debates on a more than relational geography of regions, where regions are flexible but not totally arbitrary, constrained by contextual realities forged in and through time as the plasticity of institutional combinations. The plasticity work of Malabou (2008,

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2010) can be deployed here to raise important questions on the limits to seeing the regional world through always elastic deformations and the stretching of objects and relations (see Jones, 2014). Martin Jones

References and selected further reading Allen, J. (2012). A more than relational geography? Dialogues in Human Geography, 2, 190–93. Allen, J. (2016). Topologies of Power: Beyond Territory and Networks. London: SAGE. Amin, A. (2004). Regions unbound: towards a new politics of place. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86, 33–44. Amin, A. (2007). Re-thinking the urban social. City, 11, 100–114. Amin, A., Massey, D. and Thrift, N. (2003). Decentering the Nation: A Radical Approach to Regional Inequality. London: Catalyst. Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2002). Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Cambridge: Polity. Geografiska Annaler (2004). The political challenge of relational space: the Vega symposium. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86, 3–78. Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, Nature and Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell.

Jones, M. (2009). Phase space: geography, relational thinking, and beyond. Progress in Human Geography, 33, 487–506. Jones, M. (2014). Kapoorian geographies of relationality: the Baroque, topological twists, phase space in action. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 46, 2585–603. Jones, M. and Jessop, B. (2010). Thinking state/ space incompossibly. Antipode, 42, 1119–49. Joseph, J. (2018). Beyond relationalism in peacebuilding. Journal of Intervention and Peacebuilding, 12, 425–34. MacLeod, G. and Jones, M. (2007). Territorial, scalar, networked, connected: in what sense a ‘regional world’? Regional Studies, 41, 1177–91. Malabou, C. (2008). What Should We Do With Our Brain? New York: Fordham University Press. Malabou, C. (2010). Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. New York: Columbia University Press. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: SAGE. Mol, A. and Law, J. (1994). Regions, networks and fluids: anaemia and social topology. Social Studies of Science, 24, 641–71. Murdoch, J. (2006). Post-Structuralist Geography: A Guide to Relational Space. London: SAGE. Paasi, A. (2010). Regions are social constructs, but who or what ‘constructs’ them? Agency in question. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 42, 2296–301. Whatmore, S. (2002). Hybrid Geographies. London: SAGE.

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65. Religion Geographers of religion typically study ‘religious’ in relation to ‘secular’ spaces. These terms are highly contested in theology and religious studies, raising ontological questions about what geographers study (Tse, 2014). Because geographers seek to produce spatial accounts of the ‘religious’ in relation to the ‘secular’, the questions about what constitutes ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ tend to be considered in terms of spatial imaginaries and material manifestations. There is a constructivism to how geographers do such work, especially because of the move within cultural geography in the 1980s toward considering ‘culture’ as a set of practices that narrate meaning in specific sites. However, what geographers seem increasingly curious about is not whether the sacred and the religious are constructed. Instead, they have debated how the secular is composed and contested from various ontologies, although they are often also not willing to proclaim that existence is fundamentally sacred either.

Irruptions of the sacred: cultural geographies of religion Pierre Deffontaines’ (1948) Géographie et réligions is usually taken as one of the earliest attempts to elucidate the relationship between geography and religion. Reflecting the methods of cultural geography in the mid-twentieth century, Deffontaines focused on the diffusion of religious phenomena across landscapes and their relevance to seemingly non-religious activities in the modern world. In particular, he highlighted how the religious observance of seasons coincided with ‘exploitation’ of the natural environment in farming practices and other kinds of ecological cultivation. Deffontaines’ work significantly influenced discussions of the relationship between religion and space within and beyond geography. In Mircea Eliade’s (1959) religious studies classic, The Sacred and the Profane, Deffontaines receives credit for demonstrating the salience of sacred space in modern times. Within geography, such insights prompted some nervousness about the boundaries between the secular work of social

science and the possibilities of commitment to a sacralized ontology. Lily Kong (1990) described the vexed conversations that Erich Isaac (1965), among others, were having at this time as a debate over geography’s relationship with what is described in German as Religionwissenschaft. If indeed human geography was a social science, then its relationship with religion needed to be differentiated from producing theological accounts of space. As Chris Park (1994) helpfully put it, geographers articulated a difference between ‘religious geography’ (which viewed space from the lenses of certain religious commitments) and ‘geography of religion’ (which sought to understand from an outsider’s perspective how religions interacted with secular space). Even amidst this debate, numerous studies from various vantage points in cultural geography proceeded, acknowledging what Eliade had called the irruption of the sacred. Wilbur Zelinsky (1961) argued that ‘culture-regions’ of the United States could be understood by tracking church membership and mapping the cultures of the denominations, churches, and sects that dominated various regions. Paul Wheatley (1971) demonstrated that ancient Chinese urban hubs in fact started out as ritual centres that became important to the economic geography of the empire. David Sopher (1967) theorized that geographies of religion permeated modern secular space so much that political ideologies, such as communism and fascism, could be thought of as belief systems that were quasi-religious. Yi-Fu Tuan (1974) attributed the phenomena of topophilia, the love for place, to meanings that humans ascribed to space that once was religious and ritualistic in practice. James Duncan (1990), through the ancient Kandyan kingdom in modern Sri Lanka, showed how rival ideologies of kingship that gave rise to differing visions of how the royal city should be structured had everything to do with the relationship between the king and the spiritual world. Each of these studies differed on the conception of ‘culture’ in cultural geography. Older studies were beholden to an understanding of culture as a ‘superorganic’ agent that acts on the landscape (Duncan, 1980), while the ‘new cultural geography’ much preferred to see it as a negotiation of practices and ideologies on the part of actual persons. But what is strikingly similar among them is

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that their understanding of religion was not limited to religious communities. Instead, they sought to understand what Kong (2001) called the ‘politics’ and ‘poetics’ of religion – the way that religious agents may contest each other over visions of space that are informed by understandings of the transcendent – in secular space. Later work in this vein examined secular spaces like schools (Dwyer and Meyer, 1996; Qian and Kong, 2017), museums (Kong, 2005), homes (Woods, 2013), and spaces of death and bereavement (Maddrell, 2016). Noting that this remarkable consistency sets geographies of religion apart as a distinctive approach to religious studies, Kong (2001, p. 226) argued for the study of religious space that goes ‘beyond the officially sacred’. What was interesting, Kong stressed, was that religion and the ‘sacred’ always seemed to be irrupting in spaces that could be described as ‘secular’ in a modern sense: governed by states, with markets and media circulating through them, fragmenting and remaking communities. The task of geographers of religion was to understand how religion kept irrupting in such contemporary contexts.

Embodiment in neoliberal secular cities: post-secular rapprochement and its critics Beyond the officially sacred, geographers began to scrutinize how bodies performed religiosity in unexpected spaces. For example, Claire Dwyer (1999) examined ‘alternative femininities’ in the veiling practices of young Muslim women in Britain. Noting that these women were neither performing an official narrative of Islam nor conforming to conventional feminist practices of liberative gender equality, Dwyer illustrated how the practice of veiling for her research subjects revealed how they chose to articulate themselves as young, Muslim, British women. Anna Secor’s (2004) research in Istanbul similarly showed how wearing the veil allowed religious women in a secular city to reclaim urban space as their own. Peter Hopkins (2007) theorized the intersection of social geographies for young Muslim men in Scotland as a negotiation of religious identity

in relation to their lives in other communities and networks they inhabit. Individualized habits as described above reveal how that personalized faith was restructuring the practice of religion and repositioning how religious practitioners engaged social structures and secular spaces. Elisabeth Olson (2006) demonstrated that the structural critiques of liberation theology, mostly from within the Roman Catholic Church, were giving way to a more individualistic practice of faith and self-fashioning that aligned itself with Pentecostalism and evangelicalism. Justin Wilford (2013) examined how megachurches in fact operated at the scale of small groups that enabled church members to reframe their mentalities about social fragmentation in their own lives. Valentine et al. (2013) also considered how personal practices of Anglican Christianity might challenge institutional narratives about how bodily desires should be expressed in social space. This focus on the relationship between religious subjectivity and space has led to reflection on the highly privatized times of the political economic moment called ‘neoliberalism’, which, for David Harvey (2005), manifests when the welfare state’s provision of social services is rolled back for the private sector, along with a moralistic narrative of personal responsibility, to fill the gaps in social needs. Jason Hackworth (2012) argues that private action and personal responsibility are privileged, opening the door for faith-based organizations to contribute to the making of neoliberal societies. This conversation is part of a turn to the idea of ‘post-secular cities’ (Beaumont and Baker, 2010), where neoliberalism ushers in a ‘post-secular’ age, in which religious and spiritual convictions are taken seriously in the construction of civil society because they fill service gaps left by governments. Of note is how these interventions by faith-based organizations are not limited to service of their religious constituencies only, which Paul Cloke and Justin Beaumont (2013) refer to as ‘post-secular rapprochement’. By filling a welfare gap left by the neoliberal state, people from a variety of faith and non-faith backgrounds will encounter these spaces, leading to opportunities for inter-religious and post-secular conversation. Cloke, May and Williams (2017) note Justin Tse and Lily Kong

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that such rapprochements do not entail any restructuring of society leading to social justice. Instead, they offer short-term stop-gap measures for social needs, filling the gap ‘in the meantime’ in the ‘mean times’ of neoliberalism. This vision is consonant with Wilford’s (2013) theorization of geographies of religion in contemporary society as ‘sacred archipelagos’, island pockets of religiosity in an ocean of the secular. Two major critiques of the post-secular – arguably the most fraught word currently within geographies of religion – have emerged. David Ley (2010) observes that the ‘post-secular’ does not refer so much to a shift within society itself – that is, religion is not making a new intervention into neoliberal society. Rather, there has been a refocus in the scholarship on the presence of religion in everyday life, because scholars have observed the more pronounced gaps in welfare. Lily Kong (2011) also notes that, in order for a society to be ‘post-secular’, it must have experienced a wave of secularization first. Such a narrative is Eurocentric, as Asian and Eastern European societies have very different relationships with the stories of the secular as told in the North Atlantic. The way forward for Kong is to invite geographers to investigate the salience of religion in societies restructured by global forces but to be circumspect about the labelling of these phenomena as ‘post-secular’.

Questions of ontology: the secular as constructed As even the older cultural geographies of religion suggest, there has been long-standing interest in theorizing spatial ontology, to ask at an existential level what space is. In the broader currents of geography, ontological debates persist (see, for example, the debates on ‘scale’; Marston, Jones and Woodward, 2005). Debates about the post-secular have led geographers of religion to ask whether the ‘secular’ and its spatial conditions are also a constructed concept. Justin Tse (2014) introduces the notion of ‘grounded theologies’, a situation in which neither ‘religious’ nor ‘secular’ spaces can be considered without attending to the ways that theological narratives, as stories of transcendent forces, circulate through most acts of Justin Tse and Lily Kong

placemaking. As Veronica della Dora (2018) notes, this radically positions ‘sacred’ ontologies as possibly inherent to space while positioning the secular as the constructed arena in which they must now operate in the modern world. In this way, she argues that perhaps a better word than the ‘post-secular’ to describe the contemporary situation is ‘infrasecular’, that religious phenomena now must operate under the secular in various modes. However, Elizabeth Olson, Peter Hopkins, Rachel Pain and Giselle Vincett (2013) also observe that sometimes sacred practices do break through dominant stories about how societies have secularized, and in those cases, the ‘post-secular’ might be more appropriate. Considering ‘religiosity’ and the ‘sacred’ as ontologically original categories is also not a new phenomenon within geography. Julian Holloway (2003) has long argued that Eliade’s understanding of the sacred as ‘irrupting’ into secular space presumes that it is the sacred that is constructed, not the secular. But for New Age practitioners, the spiritual networks that they make presumes that the networks of spirits are actually agentic, that they are not made-up fictions and projections. More recently, Nadia Bartolini, Sara McKian and Steve Pile (2018) have argued that at the level of everyday practice, the category of ‘religion’ should be differentiated from the ‘sacred’ and the ‘spiritual’. Religiosity, for them, refers to an institutionalized form of the sacred that may or may not speak to the actual lived practices and experiences of persons and objects in the world. ‘Spiritual geographies’, as they prefer for geographers to call what they do, map the ways that persons and objects experience supernatural, paranormal, and spiritual forces and agents regardless of institutional affiliation and narrative. In this way, Robert Saunders (2013) also observes that ‘neo-paganism’ might be a way that religion is being decolonized from its institutional centricity so that long-suppressed practices might emerge in new ways in contemporary society. These ontological questions also signal the return of a certain moral attentiveness in geography (Olson, 2018). Paul Cloke (2011) has long argued that when geographers make ethical judgments about the phenomena that they study, they are delving into stories of good and evil that might be rooted ‘theo-ethics’, an account of morality anchored

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in theological narratives. Banu Gökariksel and Anna Secor’s (2012) project on veiling fashion among Muslim women considers the moral and ethical dilemmas of thinking through an object narrated within Islam as a statement of modesty that is now becoming practised as a story of self-expressive cosmopolitanism. So too, Dominic Wilkins (2021) asks geographers to renew focus on religion in political ecology, the environmental and economic networks that shape contemporary spaces through the movement of objects and bodies through physical geographies. Clearly, geographers of religion do not take religious phenomena and institutions as their sole object of study. Situating them within the modern conditions of the ‘secular’, the progress of the discipline has led geographers to question at an existential level the very terms that they use to figure out the relationship between ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’. The field is coalescing around a conversation about how to think through these terms in non-binary ways so as to offer a geographical account of the persistence of spiritual, theological, paranormal, supernatural, and otherwise moral phenomena, institutions, and practices in an age said to be secular. Justin Tse and Lily Kong

References and selected further reading Bartolini, N., McKian, S. and Pile, S. 2018. Spaces of Spirituality. London and New York: Routledge. Beaumont, J. and Baker, C. (eds). 2010. Postsecular Cities: Space, Theory and Practice. London: Continuum. Cloke, P. 2011. Emerging geographies of evil? Theo-ethics and postsecular possibilities. Cultural Geographies, 18 (4), 475–93. Cloke, P. and Beaumont, J. 2013. Geographies of postsecular rapprochement in the city. Progress in Human Geography, 37 (1), 27–51. Cloke, P., May, J. and Williams, A. 2017. Geographies of food banks in the meantime. Progress in Human Geography, 41 (6), 703–26. Deffontaines, P. 1948. Géographie et réligions. Paris: Gallimard. della Dora, V. 2018. Infrasecular geographies: making, unmaking and remaking sacred space. Progress in Human Geography, 42 (1), 44–71. Duncan, J.S. 1980. The superorganic in American cultural geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 70 (2), 181–98. Duncan, J.S. 1990. The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dwyer, C.L. 1999. Veiled meanings: young British Muslim women and the negotiation of differences. Gender, Place & Culture, 6 (1), 5–26. Dwyer, C.L. and Meyer, A. 1996. The establishment of Islamic schools: a controversial phenomenon in three European countries. In W.A.R. Shadid and P.S. van Koningsveld (eds), Muslims in the Margin: Political Responses to the Presence of Islam in Western Europe. Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishing House, pp. 218–42. Eliade, M. 1959. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (trans. W.R. Trask). New York: Harcourt. Gökariksel, B. and Secor, A. 2012. ‘Even I was tempted’: the moral ambivalence and ethical practice of veiling-fashion in Turkey. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102 (4), 847–62. Hackworth, J. 2012. Faith Based: Religious Neoliberalism and the Politics of Welfare in the United States. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Holloway, J. 2003. Make-believe: spiritual practice, embodiment, and sacred space.

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342  Concise encyclopedia of human geography Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 35 (11), 1961–74. Hopkins, P.E. 2007. Young people, masculinities, religion and race: new social geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 31 (2), 163–77. Isaac, E. 1965. Religious geography and the geography of religions. In E. Isaac, Man and the Earth, University of Colorado Studies, Series in Earth Sciences, 3. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, pp. 1–14. Kong, L. 1990. Geography and religion: trends and prospects. Progress in Human Geography, 14 (3), 355–71. Kong, L. 2001. Mapping ‘new’ geographies of religion: politics and poetics in modernity. Progress in Human Geography, 25 (2), 211–33. Kong, L. 2005. Re-presenting the religious: nation, community, and identity in museums. Social & Cultural Geography, 6 (4), 495–513. Kong, L. 2011. Global shifts, theoretical shifts: changing geographies of religion. Progress in Human Geography, 34 (6), 755–76. Ley, D. 2010. Preface: towards the postsecular city? In J. Beaumont and C. Baker (eds), Postsecular Cities: Space, Theory and Practice. London: Continuum, pp. xii–xiv. Maddrell, A. 2016. Mapping grief: a conceptual framework for understanding the spatial dimensions of bereavement, mourning and remembrance. Social & Cultural Geography, 17 (2), 166–88. Marston, S.A., Jones, J.P., III and Woodward, K. 2005. Human geography without scale. Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers, 30, 416–32. Olson, E. 2006. Development, transnational religion, and the power of ideas in the high provinces of Cusco, Peru. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 38 (5), 885–902. Olson, E. 2018. Geography and ethics III: whither the next moral turn? Progress in Human Geography, 42 (6), 937–48. Olson, E., Hopkins, P., Pain, R. and Vincett, G. 2013. Retheorizing the postsecular present: embodiment, spatial transcendence, and challenges to authenticity among young Christians

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in Glasgow, Scotland. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103 (6), 1421–36. Qian, J. and Kong, L. 2017. When secular universalism meets pluralism: religious schools and the politics of school-based management in Hong Kong. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 108 (3), 794–810. Park, C.C. 1994. Sacred Worlds: An Introduction to Geography and Religion. London and New York: Routledge. Saunders, R. 2013. Pagan places: towards a religiogeography of neopaganism. Progress in Human Geography, 37 (6), 786–810. Secor, A. 2004. ‘There is an Istanbul that belongs to me’: citizenship, space, and identity in the city. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94 (2), 352–68. Sopher, D.E. 1967. Geography of Religions. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Tse, J.K.H. 2014. Grounded theologies: ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ in human geography. Progress in Human Geography, 38 (2), 201–20. Tuan, Y.F. 1974. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia University Press. Valentine, G., Vanderbeck, R.M. and Sadgrove, J. et al. 2013. Transnational religious networks: sexuality and the changing power geometries of the Anglican Communion. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38 (1), 50–64. Wheatley, P. 1971. The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Wilford, J. 2013. Sacred archipelagos: geographies of secularization. Progress in Human Geography, 34 (3), 328–48. Wilkins, D. 2021. Where is religion in political ecology? Progress in Human Geography, 45 (2), 276–97. Woods, O. 2013. Converting houses into churches: the mobility, fission, and sacred network of evangelical house churches in Sri Lanka. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31 (6), 1062–75. Zelinsky, W. 1961. An approach to the religious geography of the United States: patterns of church membership in 1952. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 51, 139–93.

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enliven how representations are understood and approached.

The Treachery of Images is a painting of a pipe by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. Beneath the pipe, Magritte wrote ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (‘This is not a pipe’). Some rebutted that it plainly was a pipe, to Magritte’s amusement: ‘The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not?’ The painting makes the impossibility of representation self-evident and as its title suggests, representations are deceptive. They are always re-presentations: objects of themselves, shaped by the hands and minds of those who (re)produce them. Representations are, therefore, never neutral. As such, they are performative – they do things. Think, for instance, about how media representation of nationalities, cultures or identities affect how people understand themselves and others. Alternatively, look at the countless battles for political representation across history, where how, what and who we represent shapes what is seen as possible and appropriate. Consider the fury of some 16- and 17-year-olds who did not have a vote in the United Kingdom’s 2016 Brexit referendum, despite the vote dictating whether their lives would be spent as European citizens. We also imbue representations with meaning, establishing social and cultural norms. How, for instance, do we know that a running stickman indicates an emergency exit or that a red light means stop? Representations are therefore clearly of social, political and cultural concern, cross-cutting all human geography subdisciplines. Indeed, the Greek origins of the word geography are geo (earth) and graphia (writing). ‘Earth writing’ entails translating our understanding of the earth into representations (Gilmartin, 2004). When we research, as we are geo-graphing, we are invariably representing – even if we are unpicking representations themselves. In what follows, we trace human geography’s approach to representation, situating it within the social sciences and broader philosophical shifts. We journey through how representations were often taken at face value prior to the 1970s, explain the subsequent ‘crisis of representation’, and end on recent work in cultural geography that has sought to

The crisis of representation The influx of quantitative approaches in 1950s’ geography shifted the discipline away from providing detailed accounts of places towards abstracted representations based on seemingly ‘objective’ and ‘transparent’ mathematical modelling. It was thought that rigorous, robust and objective investigation could produce exacting data, unimpacted by the messiness of the social world. However, amidst growing unease about social and economic inequality, radical geography emerged, pursuing research that could respond. For instance, in Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution, William Bunge (1971) produced an alternative representation of the city by mapping spaces of death and spaces dominated by machines, while David Harvey (1973) pointed to the existence of alternative Marxist theories and representations of social justice in the city. Following Harvey’s intervention, the work of Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre ([1974] 1991) began to find traction. Lefebvre’s work on space brought the question of representation to the fore, moving between ‘conceiving space through representation and living place through actual sensual experience and representational meaning’ (Merrifield, 1993, p. 525). Humanistic approaches (which argued that science was incapable of attending to creative and imaginative human lives) also ushered in more phenomenological approaches to representation, increasing appreciation for the subjectivity of knowledge production and the contestable nature of representations therein. Nonetheless, the ‘politics of representation’ remained a marginal concern in the discipline until the 1980s (Scott, 2009). The 1980s saw post-structuralism spread across the discipline and social sciences, resulting in representational certainty becoming destabilized. As Gibson-Graham (the pen name shared by feminist economic geographers Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham) have argued (2000), the most direct antecedent to post-structuralism was the structuralist work of Ferdinand de Saussure ([1916] 2011), who led early work on semiotics – the study of meaning systems and signs. Saussure’s

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key idea was that meaning is made through ‘signs’ that society creates and interprets. Consider the running figure we see on emergency exit signs again. This is a ‘signifier’ that indicates the concept of an emergency exit – the idea ‘signified’ in our minds. A sign is this packaging together of signifiers (the running figure image) and signifieds (emergency exits). The key point for Saussure is that this relation is arbitrary. There is no natural reason why we might represent emergency exits with this image – it is instead socially constructed and a shared convention. The implication is that representation is questionable and socially produced, and this reflection deeply influenced post-structural thought. Post-structuralists, however, were highly sceptical of attempts by the likes of Saussure and Marx to trace underlying social structures (Gibson-Graham, 2000). Post-structuralists instead view meaning as always unfinished and see academic knowledge production itself as a social process. Scholars cannot, therefore, step back to assess whether representations are a ‘true reflection’ of the world or detect underpinning structures or foundations. These considerations led to the ‘crisis of representation’ that gained disciplinary traction in the late 1980s (Cosgrove and Jackson, 1987). The crisis of representation was emblematic of a widespread acknowledgement that representations are not undistorted mirrors of the world but ‘creatures of our own making’ (Gregory and Walford, 1989, p. 2). Researchers were increasingly obliged to critically reflect on how they read, write and make sense of the world. Continental philosophy heavily influenced human geography’s approach to representation in the 1980s, particularly the work of Michel Foucault (1977) on discourse and power. Whilst discourse might colloquially refer to common parlance, for Foucault, discourse went beyond speech, writing, images and other representations or ‘texts’. Rather, discourses circulate and form part of the context within which representations occur. They are akin to common sense – shared understandings about the world and things in it. Socially constructed ideas become repeated and embodied, establishing societal norms. These discourses affect how people think of themselves and others (their subjectivity), day-to-day life, what is represented, and how things are represented. Amy Barron and Joe Blakey

Representations or texts, therefore, bear the imprints of discourse, which is why scholars subject them to discourse analysis.1 Consider, for instance, Dittmer’s (2012) work on the Captain America comic books, where he shows how comic book representations reinforce American identity. For example, in one scene, the reader is subjectively put in the place of a 9/11 victim, leaving no doubt as to which side the reader is on in the ‘war on terror’. Representations can equally challenge discourses. Think, for instance, about Banksy’s ‘Dismaland’ – an apocalyptic ‘bemusement park’ built inside the walls of a derelict seaside resort in the UK. Through an eclectic combination of artworks, this exhibition sought to subvert consumerism, celebrity culture and immigration laws. Alternatively, consider the British anti-Brexit political campaign group ‘Led by Donkeys’ who, through sharing archived public statements by pro-Brexit politicians, highlighted how contemporary government discourse and the unfolding reality of Brexit was at odds with their previous statements. Resonating with Foucault’s concern, ‘feminist, postcolonial and anti-racist movements sparked an interrogation of “who speaks” and much ethical/political energy was devoted to understanding how the content [and form] of representations expressed and reproduced social structures’ (Anderson, 2019, p. 1120). Feminist geography began to question representation at its roots as a gendered epistemological position and criticized the claims of certain geographers to identify a privileged representation of spatial realities (Rose, 1993). The later rise of post-colonial literature encouraged scholars to interrogate the relationship between how we represent and its political consequences. For post-colonialists, the focus should not be on the veracity of representations, but on the partiality of representations and the entwinement of individuals’ interests and their (in)capacities to represent or be represented (Barnett, 2006). Questions of what, who and how we represent, how they are judged, and their relations with affect, sensation and the political have also been considered by geographers working with theories of aesthetics (Blakey, 2021; Hawkins and Straughan, 2015). This crisis of representation also ushered in methodological critique across the social sciences. Ethnography became heavily

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concerned with critical reflexivity, positionality and performativity, following critiques of realist modes of writing wherein an all-knowing narrator would remark upon a culture with assumed objectivity (Reed-Danahay, 2002). In collapsing the boundary between researched and researcher, auto-ethnography became seen as a radical way to close this gap between ‘researchers as agents of signification and…research subjects as objects of signification’ (Butz and Besio, 2009, p. 1671). Human geography also witnessed a turn towards creative methods and descriptive writing practices, seen as better able to attend to the messiness of the world than off-the-peg approaches (Geertz, 1973; von Benzon et al., 2021).

The cultural turn The disciplinary rise of feminist, post-colonial and Foucauldian approaches are part of a ‘cultural turn’ in human geography. Often associated with ‘new cultural geography’,2 it refers to ‘a set of intellectual developments that led to issues of culture becoming central’ to the subdisciplines of human geography in the 1980s (Barnett, 2009, p. 134; Simpson, 2020, p. 18). Ushering in a concern for how the world is socially constructed, it collapsed the distinctions between high and popular culture and between art and everyday life and led to under-represented people and places becoming the focus of research. Such social constructivist approaches can be distinguished from other paradigms by ‘a preoccupation with the structure of symbolic meaning’ (Anderson and Harrison, 2010, p. 4), which led to the argument that ‘meanings are contextual, specific, and contingent’ and, that it is because of culture that ‘things happen differently in different places’ (Barnett, 2004, p. 42). This literature was concerned with ‘the symbolic and material violences of representations’ and demonstrated how particular representations (re)produced unequal, classed, gendered and racialized power relations (Anderson, 2019, p. 1120). Critical interpretations of landscapes as repositories of meaning, for instance, have analysed the materiality of cities (monuments, statues, street names and buildings), landscapes of war that represent the inhumanity of violence,

and the practices through which landscapes are maintained. The aim was to highlight landscape’s ‘often hidden but always powerful capacity to harm and damage’ and to show how culture is spatially constituted (ibid., p. 1121). Such social constructivist analyses, however, have been critiqued as a type of ‘discursive idealism’ resting on a Euro-modern version of culture (Dewsbury et al., 2002, p. 438). Everything became treated as a text to be critically analysed, wherein the researcher was seemingly able to interpret the broader, underpinning discourses (Anderson, 2019). New cultural geography grew increasingly cynical of this approach, which risked overlooking the emergent, processual, and more difficult-to-represent aspects of life. Following Thrift, Lorimer argues that there was a ‘deadening effect’ of cultural geography: a ‘tendency for cultural analyses to cleave towards a conservative, categorical politics of identity and textual meaning’ (Lorimer, 2005, p. 83). Cultural geography, it seems, had ‘over extended a representational analysis of representations’ (Anderson, 2019, p. 1121).

Non-representational approaches Non-representational theories take a different tack. Emerging alongside the turn to practice and performativity across the social sciences, non-representational theories are concerned with thought-in-action and treat representations as volatile (Kobayashi, 2009). These approaches understand that the world is always more-than its representation, for it exceeds any rational deduction or understanding because it is always in process (Dewsbury, 2010). Non-representational theories are concerned less with extracting meaning from life, as with social constructivist approaches, but are themselves part of life ‘as it happens’ (Thrift, 2008, p. 2). They therefore focus on how life is lived (presentations) rather than deducing a master narrative (re-presentations). The approach is termed non-representational to ‘deny the efficacy of representational models of the world’ rather than representations themselves (Thrift, 1996, p. 6). Defined by Thrift (1996) and developed throughout the early to mid-2000s by other Amy Barron and Joe Blakey

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human geographers, non-representational theories connect a range of philosophies to highlight how spaces, times and subjectivities emerge through dynamic, embodied and relational practices. This heterogeneous lineage means non-representational theories are not coherent or easily definable. Many scholars prefer to consider non-representational theories as a particular ‘style’ of research (Dewsbury et al., 2002), promoting continuous ways of writing the world to avoid flattening its richness (Thrift, 1996). Non-representational theories have, however, received criticism surrounding the concept of affect. Affect has many definitions, but the Spinozian interpretation prevalent amongst non-representational approaches can broadly be understood as the transpersonal capacity to affect and be affected (Anderson, 2006, p. 735). The need for affect arises out of a concern that representationalist practices overly distil experience into discrete emotions. Critique largely stemmed from feminist geographers (see Colls, 2012), who took exception to the transpersonal qualities of affect that they perceived to reinforce earlier masculinist tendencies to distance the personal and emotional. Others have argued that non-representational geographies risk being misinterpreted as anti-representation (Castree and MacMillan, 2004). However, 15 or so years after these critiques, there is now a large body of literature that attends to the likes of emotion, and representations more generally, through non-representational approaches (Barron, 2021a, 2021b). Despite the prefix, non-representational theories are concerned with representation.3 The point is that they focus on what representations do rather than attempting to unpick them. They do not suggest that representations are insignificant or wrong. Rather, they argue that ‘it is the belief that [the representational system] offers complete understanding…that is critically flawed’ (Dewsbury, 2003, p. 1911). They call for representations to be understood as generative of difference and not the re-presentation of the same (Simpson, 2020). Representations are not the object of analysis because they are understood through the relational assemblages within which they are entangled and emerge. Anderson (2019) introduced the term ‘representations-in-relation’ to describe how social and cultural research had moved Amy Barron and Joe Blakey

away from understanding representations as semiotic systems of meaning to instead understanding representations as they happen. Barron (2021a, p. 661), for instance, uses non-representational theories to ‘offer an understanding of older age that is not pre-given or free-standing, but as something which can emerge, gather and disperse in relation with materialities as well as diffuse atmospheres, affects and emotional resonances’. In such a reading, representations are recrafted, resisted, performed and embodied in the flow of everyday life. Non-representational approaches are therefore the latest theoretical turn to directly address the role of representation in the 70-odd years we have outlined. However, even this encyclopaedia entry is a representation, so take from it what you will. Amy Barron and Joe Blakey

Notes 1.

Whilst post-structural scholars have drawn heavily upon Foucault, those in the Marxist tradition have more readily drawn upon Gramsci (see Lees, 2004). 2. The ‘new’ in new cultural geography refers to a distinction drawn with the well-established cultural geography of the Berkeley school (Simpson, 2020). 3. Some have advocated for ‘more-than-representational’ to avoid this misapprehension (Lorimer, 2005).

References and selected further reading Anderson, B. (2006). Becoming and being hopeful: towards a theory of affect. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24 (5), 733–52. Anderson, B. (2019). Cultural geography II: the force of representations. Progress in Human Geography, 43 (6), 1120–32. Anderson, B. and Harrison, P. (2010). The promise of non-representational theories. In B. Anderson and P. Harrison (eds), Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 1–36. Barnett, C. (2004). A critique of the cultural turn. In J.S. Duncan, N.C. Johnson and R.H. Schein (eds), A Companion to Cultural Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 38–48. Barnett, C. (2006). Postcolonialism: space, textuality, and power. In S. Aitken and G. Valentine

Representation/al  347 (eds), Approaches to Human Geography. London: SAGE, pp. 147–59. Barnett, C. (2009). Cultural turn. In D. Gregory, R.J. Johnston and G. Pratt et al. (eds), The Dictionary of Human Geography (5th edition). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 134–5. Barron, A. (2021a). The taking place of older age. Cultural Geographies, 28 (4), 661–74. Barron, A. (2021b). More-than-representational approaches to the life-course. Social & Cultural Geography, 22 (5), 603–26. Blakey, J. (2021). Accounting for elephants: the (post)politics of carbon omissions. Geoforum, 121, 1–11. Bunge, W. (1971). Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company Inc. Butz, D. and Besio, K. (2009). Autoethnography. Geography Compass, 3 (5), 1660–74. Castree, N. and Macmillan, T. (2004). Old news: representation and academic novelty. Environment and Planning A, 36 (3), 469–80. Colls, R. (2012). Feminism, bodily difference and non‐representational geographies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37 (3), 430–45. Cosgrove, D. and Jackson, P. (1987). New directions in cultural geography. Area, 19 (2), 95–101. de Saussure, F. ([1916] 2011). Course in General Linguistics. New York: Columbia University Press. Dewsbury, J.D. (2003). Witnessing space: ‘knowledge without contemplation’. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 35 (11), 1907–32. Dewsbury, J.D. (2010). Language and the event: the unthought of appearing worlds. In B. Anderson and P. Harrison (eds), Taking Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography. New York: Routledge, pp. 147–61. Dewsbury, J.D., Harrison, P., Rose, M. and Wylie, J. (2002). Enacting geographies. Geoforum, 33 (4), 437–40. Dittmer, J. (2012). Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Allen Lane. Geertz, C. (1973). Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture. In C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, pp. 3–30. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2000). Poststructural interventions. In T.J. Barnes and E. Sheppard (eds),

A Companion to Economic Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 95–110. Gilmartin, M. (2004). Geography and representation: introduction. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 28 (2), 281–4. Gregory, D. and Walford, R. (1989). Introduction: making geography. In D. Gregory and R. Walford (eds), Horizons in Human Geography. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–8. Harvey, D. (1973). Social Justice and the City. Oxford: Blackwell. Hawkins, H. and Straughan, E. (2015). Geographical Aesthetics: Imagining Space, Staging Encounters. London: Routledge. Kobayashi, A. (2009). Representation and re-presentation. In R. Kitchen and D. Gregory (eds), The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Volume 11 (2nd edition). London: Elsevier, pp. 347–50. Lees, L. (2004). Urban geography: discourse analysis and urban research. Progress in Human Geography, 28 (1), 101–7. Lefebvre, H. ([1974] 1991). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Lorimer, H. (2005). Cultural geography: the busyness of being more-than-representational. Progress in Human Geography, 29 (1), 83–94. Merrifield, A. (1993). Place and space: a Lefebvrian reconciliation. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 18 (4), 516–31. Reed-Danahay, D. (2002). Turning points and textual strategies in ethnographic writing. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 15 (4), 421–5. Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Scott, H.V. (2009). Representation, politics of. In R. Kitchen and D. Gregory (eds), The International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography, Volume 11 (2nd edition). London: Elsevier, pp. 351–6. Simpson, P. (2020). Non-representational Theory. London: Routledge. Thrift, N. (1996). Spatial Formations. London: SAGE. Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge. von Benzon, N., Holton, M., Wilkinson, C. and Wilkinson, S. (2021). Creative Methods for Human Geographers. London: SAGE.

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67. Risk The study of risk has been present in human geography since the 1940s, beginning with Gilbert F. White’s (1945) seminal dissertation entitled Human Adjustment to Floods. Risk is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as: ‘[Exposure to] the possibility of loss, injury, or other adverse or unwelcome circumstance; a chance or situation involving such a possibility’. Risk does not only entail negative occurrences, but also positive ones. Fundamentally, risk is formulated through two key considerations: probability and consequence. Probability constitutes the likelihood of an event occurring, while consequence is the size or catastrophic potential of the event. Therefore, risk as a concept encompasses not just hazards themselves as harmful entities, but also the chance of hazards occurring. Risk is also separate from uncertainty. In risk, decision makers are aware of all outcomes and consequences, while uncertainty indicates unknown probabilities or consequences (Knight, 1921; Park and Shapira, 2017). Risks are inherent and unavoidable in human society, taking place all the time, everywhere. They can be single entities, or systemic in nature (Renn and Klinke, 2004). To function in society, individuals, organizations and governments make decisions to mitigate the impact of or adapt to the risk. In more formal settings, risk analysis can help to understand risk and overcome potential negative impacts. The Society for Risk Analysis (SRA, 2018) divides the various elements of academic study of risk into five main areas: (1) the fundamentals of risk analysis; (2) risk assessment; (3) risk perception and communication; (4) risk management and governance; and (5) solving real risk problems and issues.1 The fundamentals of risk analysis pertain to the study of risk as a science. It focuses on the various types of uncertainty such as aleatory and epistemic uncertainty, risk metrics and how risk is measured, and key related concepts such as hazards, vulnerability, opportunity and reliability. As defined by Aven, Renn and Rosa (2011), the fundamentals of risk are divided into three main areas: (1) ‘risk as a qualitative concept based on events, consequences, and uncertainties’; (2) ‘risk as a modelled, quantitative concept’; (3)

‘risk measurements’, or descriptions (Aven and Flage, 2020, pp. 2131–2). Risk cannot be solely understood through one of these groupings, instead relying on quantitative and qualitative methods of understanding. Risk assessment is a major part of societal, business and individual interaction with risk. This is largely aimed at understanding the negative harms of a particular activity or hazard to protect individuals and organizations. Of course, assessments of risk have been made by civilizations over thousands of years, dating back to 3200 BCE in Mesopotamia (Covello and Mumpower, 1985). More recently, risk assessment as a scientific discipline has developed since the 1970s and 1980s (Aven, 2016). Risk assessment in the modern era uses both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. However, many different methods are applied both between and within different industries, with Tixier et al. (2002) finding 62 differing methodologies within the industrial plant sector alone. In epidemiology and toxicology, for example, risk assessments broadly consist of (1) hazard identification; (2) exposure assessment; (3) dose-response modelling; and (4) risk characterization. Both monitoring and communication are also applied throughout the risk assessment process (Villa et al., 2016). Uncertainty is a key part of risk assessment, often evaluated using a probabilistic analysis.2 Risk assessments are designed to be an impartial process that solely evaluates risk, serving as a key informing entity of risk management strategies in many developed nations (National Research Council, 1983). In nations including the US and UK, risk assessments are used in a wide variety of industries and situations, including auditing, biodiversity, the environment, food safety and pharmaceutical industries. The validity, effectiveness and impartiality of risk assessments as a method of evaluating risks has long been debated, especially regarding the use of more quantitative methods of risk assessment in isolation (Duckett et al., 2015), the appropriate use of expert opinions (Mosleh, Bier and Apostolakis, 1988), or questioning the argued apolitical nature of risk assessment itself (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1983). The relationship between risk and resilience has been a well-established question for risk assessors and human geographers (Adger, 2000). Resilience denotes the extent

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to which systems can cope with and overcome impacts, focusing on preparation ahead of an event to protect from future harms (van der Vegt et al., 2015). Some have questioned the need for risk assessment alongside resilience analysis (Greenberg et al., 2020). However, Aven (2019) asserts that resilience can and should be an integral part of risk assessment and management, helping to broaden the scope of risk assessment. Resilience should therefore not be separate from risk assessment as a topic when evaluating risk. In human geography, research has shifted towards understanding the influence of vulnerability on the impact of hazards (Adger, 2006). Vulnerability is defined as ‘the conditions determined by physical, social, and environmental factors or processes which increase the susceptibility of an individual, a community, assets or systems to the impact of hazards’ (United Nations, 2016, p. 24). Vulnerability has traditionally focused on location-based characteristics that may influence the impact of a hazard. However, critiques of this largely engineering-dominated approach to vulnerability have instead argued for greater attention to political or social impacts (Cutter, 1996). Researchers here have instead argued that the influence of non-natural factors on vulnerability and risk are much more influential in determining risk outcomes and are multidimensional, encompassing characteristics such as gender, class and socio-economic status (Adger, 2006; Blaikie et al., 1994). Although risk assessors traditionally view risk as an object, risks are socially constructed. At the individual level, risks are created by social interactions rather than through assessment of risk alone (Burgess, 2014). This social construction on an individual level, termed risk perception, can influence decision making or policy support (Siegrist and Árvai, 2020). Individuals do not have the mental processing capacity or time to evaluate every risk decision they may make, and have different priorities, values, cultural traits and demographic characteristics that shape their perception of risk. As such, individual perceptions and risk calculations under uncertainty are often based on mental shortcuts called heuristics that rely on pre-conceived biases founded in emotion and affective response (Slovic et al., 2004; Tversky and Kahneman, 1974), often leading

to divergence from expert opinion (Starr, 1969). Risk perceptions are shaped by risk characteristics including dread, uncertainty, voluntariness and immediacy (Fox-Glassman and Weber, 2016; Slovic, 1987). Public perceptions and risk–benefit calculations may therefore vary from risk to risk: while individuals perceive handguns as higher risk than motor vehicles, more Americans die every year on roads than in firearms-related incidents (Fox-Glassman and Weber, 2016; Mokdad et al., 2004). Risks can also be socially amplified or attenuated by ‘amplification stations’ such as the news media or government (Kasperson et al., 1988, p. 181). Overall, risk perceptions are shaped by (1) hazard characteristics; (2) risk perceiver characteristics; and (3) heuristics that inform risk decisions (Siegrist and Árvai, 2020, p. 2191). Risk communication is an important tool to engage stakeholders such as the public on risks they may face. It has moved past simply being a tool to provide information to change behaviour (also known as the knowledge-deficit model of behaviour change) to one that pushes for deliberation and real public engagement on issues that affect them (Owens, 2000). Despite this, many organizations including governments still see risk communication primarily through a knowledge-deficit model lens (Renn, 2014). Risk communication can be impactful in three main ways (Fiorino, 1990): (1) in a normative manner, with no real persuasive aim other than to inform and engage the public because of the democratic nature of society; (2) instrumentally, where risk communication is used to improve or reach the goal of risk management or to legitimize decisions; or (3) with a substantive rationale, where risk communication aims to learn from lay perspectives and engage stakeholders in multidirectional dialogue. When evaluating and designing pragmatic risk communication strategies, care should be taken to consider the audience, messenger and message (Rickard, 2021). While consideration of audience may involve an assessment of individual characteristics and risk perceptions, research into messengers predominantly focuses on the impact of trust in those communicating and the method by which messengers communicate on risk communication (Balog-Way, McComas George Warren

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and Besley, 2020; Lofstedt, 2005). Message attributes include the impact of positive or negative framing, psychological distance and how uncertainty is expressed (Balog-Way et al., 2020). For governments and policymakers, risk must be managed to protect the public from harm. This has become more important with the development of the Risk Society, as the modern era and growth of new technologies and risks has heralded a need for further intervention to protect populations from side-effects (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1990). Risk governance and management therefore go beyond simply analysing risk, involving the decision-making process of organizations or governments and incorporating stakeholder views and the general context in which the risk is occurring, be that social, political, legal or economic, towards a risk decision (Renn, 2008). Because risks must be managed, various regulatory regimes have emerged across the world, developing into risk-based regulation. Risk-based regulation manages potential harms using risk frameworks, functioning on the principle that no risk can be fully eliminated but should instead be minimized (Wildavsky, 1979). This approach is particularly popular in the US and UK. However, debates have emerged about the use of cost– benefit analysis in decision making over more precautionary methods of regulation. The precautionary principle argues that in the face of uncertainty, incomplete information or insufficient resources, a more cautious approach to regulation is necessary to avoid harms. Further, the burden of proof of safety falls on the risk creator, rather than to be determined by public entities (Sunstein, 2005). The precautionary principle has been employed more often by the European Union in decision making (Vogel, 2012), leading to conflicting regulation, trade disputes and the creation of non-tariff barriers between the EU and the US on a wide range of substances, products and activities in recent decades (Lofstedt, 2003; Majone, 2002). These confrontations and debates are unlikely to be resolved in the near future and so remain an important area of study for risk governance at a global and national level (see Bradford, 2020).

George Warren

Human geography, despite its vital relationship with the development of the study of risk, has experienced a growing divide between itself and the discipline of quantitative risk assessment. The use of participatory methods in the creation of risk assessments can be an effective way of bridging disciplines to reduce risk (Pelling, 2007). Conversely, research in disciplines such as risk communication has been criticized by authors such as Wardman (2008) and Demeritt and Nobert (2014) for not being aware of how its often cross-disciplinary recommended methods may interact with ‘the imprints of broader scientific, political, economic, or social theory’ (Wardman, 2008, p. 1621). To avoid conflicting or impracticable recommendations, risk communicators should engage with human geographers more to better account for theories across multiple disciplines in their research. Although interdisciplinary approaches can be difficult to effectively manage, their importance in questioning prevailing assumptions, attitudes and methods are vital in developing future conceptualizations and applications of risk-based research in human geography (Demeritt, 2009). George Warren

Notes 1.

2.

‘Solving real risk problems and issues’ integrates findings from the other areas of risk research outlined above to address and overcome a wide range of risk issues (SRA, 2018), and will not be discussed in much detail here. See Aven (2016) for a more in-depth discussion on uncertainty in risk assessment.

References and selected further reading Adger, W.N. (2000). Social and ecological resilience: are they related? Progress in Human Geography, 24 (3), 247–64. Adger, W.N. (2006). Vulnerability. Global Environmental Change, 16 (3), 268–81. Aven, T. (2016). Risk assessment and risk management: review of recent advances on their

Risk  351 foundation. European Journal of Operational Research, 253 (1), 1–13. Aven, T. (2019). The call for a shift from risk to resilience: what does it mean? Risk Analysis, 39 (6), 1196–203. Aven, T. and Flage, R. (2020). Foundational challenges for advancing the field and discipline of risk analysis. Risk Analysis, 40, 2128–36. Aven, T., Renn, O. and Rosa, E.A. (2011). On the ontological status of the concept of risk. Safety Science, 49 (8/9), 1074–9. Balog-Way, D., McComas, K. and Besley, J. (2020). The evolving field of risk communication. Risk Analysis, 40, 2240–62. Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: SAGE. Blaikie, P., Cannon, T., Davis, I. and Wisner, B. (1994). At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters. London: Routledge. Bradford, A. (2020). The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burgess, A. (2014). Social construction of risk. In H. Cho, T. Reimer and K.A. McComas (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Risk Communication. London: SAGE, pp. 56–68. Covello, V.T. and Mumpower, J. (1985). Risk analysis and risk management: an historical perspective. Risk Analysis, 5 (2), 103–20. Cutter, S.L. (1996). Vulnerability to environmental hazards. Progress in Human Geography, 20 (4), 529–39. Demeritt, D. (2009). From externality to inputs and interference: framing environmental research in geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34 (1), 3–11. Demeritt, D. and Nobert, S. (2014). Models of best practice in flood risk communication and management. Environmental Hazards, 13 (4), 313–28. Douglas, M. and Wildavsky, A. (1983). Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Duckett, D., Wynne, B. and Christley, R.M. et al. (2015). Can policy be risk-based? The cultural theory of risk and the case of livestock disease containment. Sociologia Ruralis, 55 (4), 379–99. Fiorino, D.J. (1990). Citizen participation and environmental risk: a survey of institutional mechanisms. Science Technology and Human Values, 15 (2), 226–43. Fox-Glassman, K.T. and Weber, E. (2016). What makes risk acceptable? Revisiting the 1978 psychological dimensions of perceptions of

technological risks. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 75, 157–69. Giddens, A. (1990). Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Greenberg, M., Cox, A. and Bier, V. et al. (2020). Risk analysis: celebrating the accomplishments and embracing ongoing challenges. Risk Analysis, 40, 2113–27. Kasperson, R.E., Renn, O. and Slovic, P. et al. (1988). The social amplification of risk: a conceptual framework. Risk Analysis, 8 (2), 177–87. Knight, F. (1921). Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. Des Plaines, IL: Hart, Schaffner & Marx. Lofstedt, R. (2003). The precautionary principle: risk, regulation and politics. Process Safety and Environmental Protection, 81 (1), 36–43. Lofstedt, R. (2005). Risk Management in Post-Trust Societies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Majone, G. (2002). The precautionary principle and its policy implications. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 40 (1), 89–109. Mokdad, A.H., Marks, J.S., Stroup, D.F. and Gerberding, J.L. (2004). Actual causes of death in the United States, 2000. Journal of the American Medical Association, 291 (10), 1238–45. Mosleh, A., Bier, V.M. and Apostolakis, G. (1988). A critique of current practice for the use of expert opinions in probabilistic risk assessment. Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 20 (1), 63–85. National Research Council (1983). Risk Assessment in the Federal Government: Managing the Process. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Owens, S. (2000). ‘Engaging the public’: information and deliberation in environmental policy. Environment and Planning A, 32 (7), 1141–8. Park, K.F. and Shapira, Z. (2017). Risk and uncertainty. In M. Augier and D. Teece (eds), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management. London: Palgrave Macmillan, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1057/​978​-1​-349​-94848​ -2​_250​-1. Pelling, M. (2007). Learning from others: the scope and challenges for participatory disaster risk assessment. Disasters, 31 (4), 373–85. Renn, O. (2008). Risk Governance: Coping with Uncertainty in a Complex World. London: Earthscan. Renn, O. (2014). Four questions for risk communication: a response to Roger Kasperson. Journal of Risk Research, 17 (10), 1277–81. Renn, O. and Klinke, A. (2004). Systemic risks: a new challenge for risk management. European Molecular Biology Organization, 5 (S1), S41–S46. Rickard, L.N. (2021). Pragmatic and (or) constitutive? On the foundations of contemporary risk

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352  Concise encyclopedia of human geography communication research. Risk Analysis, 41 (3), 466–79. Siegrist, M. and Árvai, J. (2020). Risk perception: reflections on 40 years of research. Risk Analysis, 40 (S1), 2191–206. Slovic, P. (1987). Perception of risk. Science, 236 (4799), 280–85. Slovic, P., Finucane, M.L., Peters, E. and MacGregor, D.G. (2004). Risk as analysis and risk as feelings: some thoughts about affect, reason, risk, and rationality. Risk Analysis, 24 (2), 311–22. Society for Risk Analysis (2018). Core Subjects of Risk Analysis. Accessed 20 October 2022 at https://​www​.sra​.org/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2020/​ 04/​SRA​-Core​-Subjects​-R2​.pdf. Starr, C. (1969). Social benefit versus technological risk. Science, 165 (3899), 1232–8. Sunstein, C.R. (2005). Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tixier, J., Dusserre, G., Salvi, O. and Gaston, D. (2002). Review of 62 risk analysis methodologies of industrial plants. Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 15 (4), 291–303. Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. Science, 185 (4157), 1124–31. United Nations (2016). Report of the Open-ended Intergovernmental Expert Working Group

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on Indicators and Terminology Relating to Disaster Risk Reduction. Accessed 29 October 2022 at https://​digitallibrary​.un​.org/​record/​ 852089​?ln​=​en. van der Vegt, G.S., Essens, P., Wahlström, M. and George, G. (2015). From the editors: managing risk and resilience. Academy of Management Journal, 58 (4), 971–80. Villa, V., Paltrinieri, N., Khan, F. and Cozzani, V. (2016). Towards dynamic risk analysis: a review of the risk assessment approach and its limitations in the chemical process industry. Safety Science, 89, 77–93. Vogel, D. (2012). The Politics of Precaution: Regulating Health, Safety, and Environmental Risks in Europe and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wardman, J.K. (2008). The constitution of risk communication in advanced liberal societies. Risk Analysis, 28 (6), 1619–37. White, G.F. (1945). Human Adjustments to Floods. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Wildavsky, A. (1979). No risk is the highest risk of all. American Scientist, 67 (1), 32–7.

68. Rural geographies Introduction The ‘rural’ evokes a wide range of thoughts, feelings and ideas. When we think of the term rural, a certain image, place or opinion comes to mind; however, if you were to compare this with someone else, they would probably hold a different view to yours. The fact that the rural holds numerous meanings as well as functions makes it a difficult concept to define, and as such there is no universally accepted definition. The rural can in fact be defined in multiple ways. Within human geography scholarship, the rural is associated with a number of different subject areas, broadly coined as rural geography, which encompasses topics such as tourism, development, housing, agriculture and sustainability, to name but a few (Woods, 2011). As such, there have been a number of different conceptualizations of the rural and this diversity has been seen as a both a strength, as it reflects the breadth of the discipline, and a weakness, due to the ‘dizzying array’ of definitions that now exist (Cromartie and Bucholtz, 2008, p. 29). Understanding what the rural is, and in turn what it represents in today’s world, is critical in recognizing the contemporary nature of rural societies, and how the diverse and complex nature of these spaces should be used to frame the richness, rather than add to the complexity of this space. Therefore, in order to understand how the rural can be defined today, this entry will explore previous approaches that have defined the rural, before proposing a basis for conceptualizing the rural that recognizes three central facets to its definition: time, location and discourse. In doing so, it will provide a basis for conceptualizing the rural that is representative of the context within which it is being examined.

rural’. Similarly, processes such as planetary urbanization and the work of Henri Lefebvre ‘noted that there is now no longer anything in the world outside the urban’ (Wilson and Jonas, 2018, p. 1576). The distinction between the rural and the urban is a binary that is entrenched within the discipline, and is often used as a way of distinguishing between the city and the country. This dichotomy is incredibly powerful as it can be traced back to classical times and has become embedded in our culture and society, which can be seen through the organization of human geography into ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ geography (Woods, 2011). When exploring the relevance of the rural today, it is clear that the rural continues to be an area of great significance to our society, with a large proportion of our food supply continuing to be produced in these areas as well as our energy supply, through the location of renewable energy sources. More recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a marked increase in interest in rural areas, with restrictions on travel meaning more people travelling to rural spaces to escape the confines of their property. This desire for rural living is also reflected in the UK rural housing market with this desire for open space and the possibility of remote working resulting in a rise in the demand for and price of rural property. Furthermore, the rural today is facing a number of challenges throughout the world. For example, in the UK, the problem of digital connectivity remains a pertinent issue, while in the Global South, for example in Southeast Asia, the impacts of climate change are impacting the cultivation of crops and consequently the food supply (Maharjan and Joshi, 2013; Park, Freeman and Middleton, 2019). Understanding that rural areas across the world face different challenges demonstrates the global nature of this concept and its interconnection with wider global processes: Rural areas are as much exposed to global trends…as any modern metropolis. The cachet of the rural is on the rise. What people do, feel and encounter in rural domains and how global relations flow through such locales do hence merit sustained and serious attention. (Hillyard, 2020, p. 3)

The relevance of the rural today Before this entry explores the previous literature surrounding the conceptualization of the rural, there has been a great debate about whether the rural should even be studied at all, with Keith Hoggart (1990) famously arguing that we should ‘do away with the

Therefore, although the rural is difficult to define, it is not possible ‘to do away’ with it,

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as it continues to hold both an imaginative, material and functional space within society (Cloke, Marsden and Mooney, 2006).

Previous conceptualizations of the rural There is a vast literature that has attempted to define the rural, which has resulted in a number of different approaches and subsequent definitions being generated. I will explore three central approaches that have shaped the discipline: descriptive, political-economy and social representation. First, a descriptive approach to defining the rural focuses upon geographical and socio-spatial characteristics that claim to distinguish rural areas from urban areas. An advocator of this approach was the human geographer Paul Cloke (1977) who developed an Index of Rurality for England and Wales. He argued that creating this index formulated ‘previously subjective ideas into one concise statement of rural–urban differentials’ (ibid., p. 44). This approach introduced objectivity into the conceptualization of the rural through the use of statistics, and this method can still be seen in many definitions of the rural today across the globe. For example, in England this approach remains the platform through which the government categorizes a rural from an urban settlement, known as the Rural Urban Classification. Similarly, the United States Department of Agriculture uses a Beale code, a Rural-Urban Continuum Coding system, which places counties into categories based on their population densities. In Japan, areas that do not meet a certain population density threshold are classified as rural and are then further divided into three categories: flat farming area, mountainous farming area and hilly farming area. Running alongside the emergence of this approach was the political-economy approach, which still has a strong presence in the discipline today. A political-economy approach emphasizes that the rural is composed of ‘complex interweaving power relations, social conventions, discursive practices and institutional forces that are constantly combining and recombining’ (Cloke, 2006, p. 24). The adoption of a political-economy approach in rural geography recognizes the structures and wider power relations that Niamh McHugh

exist between the rural and the state. In doing so, it provides researchers with the conceptual tools to recognize the rural as both a multi-authored and multi-faceted space. The transformation of rural areas towards multiple sites of production can be clearly seen in the case of many rural areas in the Global North as well as in the Global South, as rural areas are not just areas associated with agricultural production. Rural areas have become increasingly more versatile in contemporary times, and rural spaces serve as sites for multiple services such as leisure and tourism, cultural and natural amenities, and environmental production, all of which are broadly associated with processes of agricultural restructuring (McMichael and Kim, 2019). In more recent investigations of the rural, a political-economy approach has showcased how there are ‘complex networks of capital investment’ that are at work in rural areas, which can be seen through the examination of investment flows involved in purchasing residential properties (Nelson and Hines, 2018, p. 1473). Furthermore, in the case of the Global South – for example, in Southeast Asia – the adoption of technology and recent mechanization of agricultural processes has led to the commodification of rural livelihoods, which is of concern as it has been evidenced to create inequality and exploitation in these areas (Belton and Filipski, 2019). The final approach that will be discussed is that of social representation. Often associated with the work of human geographer Keith Halfacree (1993), this approach is based on the work of social psychologist Serge Moscovici and arose from the recognition that ‘the rural and its synonyms are words and concepts understood and used by people in everyday talk’ (ibid., p. 29). This approach has been critical in recognizing that the rural is a place that holds multiple meanings, both imaginatively and physically. One of the most popularized examples of this approach is that of the rural idyll. The rural idyll is incredibly powerful as it has the ability to influence people’s perceptions of the rural. This is because the rural idyll can reduce multiple constructions of rurality into a singular meaning, that being idyllic (Shucksmith, 2018). Critically, these representations are often conceptualized by those who do not reside in rural spaces. As a result, the rural idyll has been heavily

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criticized due to its ability to mask social problems, and the association of the rural as an escape from modern-day life does not reflect the experiences of contemporary rural societies and the challenges they face, such as affordable housing, and access to healthcare or education: ‘The countryside is both a place to escape to, and from – being a context in which people enjoy wealth and advantage but also endure poverty and inequality’ (Gallent and Gkartzios, 2019, p. 17).

Conceptualizing the rural in today’s society Exploring these previous attempts at defining the rural leads to the identification of three central facets that have influenced the way in which the rural has been defined: time, location and discourse. First, time has been a critical factor in influencing how the rural has been defined. Tracing back through previous definitions of the rural, it can be seen that defining the rural has evolved as a reflection of processes of rural restructuring and theoretical development in rural geographical scholarship (Little, 2017). Jonathan Murdoch has made use of the phrase ‘post-rural’ to denote how there are many rural experiences, and rather than trying to define what the rural is, it focuses upon encompassing people’s experiences and what they perceive ‘rural’ to be. However, Murdoch, alongside other geographers such as Andy Pratt, argues that some of these experiences are more powerful than others and as such not all experiences are seen or heard. What is key is that rural areas change, they evolve, they are dynamic spaces that are not only sites of agricultural production, but are increasingly becoming post-productivist spaces, ones that are being commodified and as a result being restructured (see the work of Murdoch and Marsden, 2013; Murdoch and Pratt, 1993). The multi-functional space that the rural has become has in turn reinforced the importance of understanding how people view and subsequently how they value rural areas. This is of great importance as there are conflicting views of the rural and how it should be managed, which is further compounded by those who hold these views and impose them, who often

are not located in these areas. For example, there are debates that surround the purpose of rural areas in the UK and whether rural areas continue to be a space for agricultural production or be rewilded for environmental purposes. Similarly, in developing nations, the threats posed by climate change in tackling poverty and hunger in these regions are being addressed by financial solutions such as the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a global institution within the UN based outside these regions in Rome. Throughout this entry, it has been emphasized that ‘one size does not fit all’, and so the experiences of the UK do not reflect all rural areas around the world, which brings us on to the next factor, location. Not only is there heterogeneity amongst rural areas within the UK, there is a breadth of different experiences and associations of the rural across the Western world and the Global South. The concept of comparative urbanism championed by Jennifer Robinson (2006) can equally be applied to rural areas, with Kumar and Shaw (2020) highlighting ‘ordinary countrysides’ to express how rural areas are incredibly distinctive and as such one size does not fit all. Furthermore, the emergence of comparative urbanism was in part a reaction to the dominance of Western thought and experiences, which has recently been echoed in rural studies. Recent work by Gkartzios, Toishi and Woods (2020) highlighted the dominance of the English language in the production of rural scholarship and in turn the need to explore other accounts of rurality in non-Anglophone contexts. This is no more the case when exploring the different range of terms that are used interchangeably with the term rural, such as country, countryside, rurality, wilderness and so on. Expanding this beyond the English language, more terms emerge – for example, a farmer in France is known as a paysan, which literally translates to peasant or countryman. This highlights that although we may use similar words, their meaning can differ. In Japanese, words for ‘rural’ are seen as dismissive or derogative, while there is a much more romanticized association of the term in the context of England. Therefore, the richness that this term creates and holds reinforces the importance of exploring and understanding the rural in a variety of differNiamh McHugh

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ent locations, ones that go beyond the English language and the Western world. Finally, the discourse through which the rural is examined directly influences how it is defined. This can be conceptualized as ‘discourses of rurality’, which represent how different groups and bodies within society perceive and in turn define the rural. For example, academic, policy, lay and popular discourses of the rural are all different to some degree. Throughout this entry the views of academia have been prevalent in exploration of the term. While assessing how the rural is defined in a policy context, especially in the case of Western nations, such as the UK and the USA, there is a clear alliance with descriptive approaches focusing on measures such as population. Conversely, in the case of Brazil, for example, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IGBE) defines a rural area within a municipality outside its urban boundary, which reinforces the importance of context as well as location in developing a definition of the rural.

Conclusion In sum, it can be seen that the rural is a space that is continuously evolving and due to its multi-faceted nature, it is geographically, economically and culturally distinct from urban areas as well as other rural areas. Exploring the approaches discussed above showcases that there is not a singular ‘rural’, but in fact multiple conceptualizations and meanings associated with the rural. Rather than seeing this as a weakness, it shows how rural areas today continue to be sites of great significance and interest to the discipline, and in order to take advantage of this richness, definitions of the rural should be reflective of the context they are being examined in. This entry has proposed the facets of time, location and discourse to provide a helpful framework to assist with this process, so that rural areas continue to be represented and explored in geographical studies, and crucially beyond the experiences of the Global North. Niamh McHugh

Niamh McHugh

References and selected further reading Belton, B. and Filipski, M. (2019). Rural transformation in central Myanmar: by how much, and for whom? Journal of Rural Studies, 67, 166–76. Cloke, P. (1977). An index of rurality for England and Wales. Regional Studies, 11 (1), 31–46. Cloke, P. (2006). Conceptualizing rurality. In P. Cloke, T. Marsden and P. Mooney (eds), Handbook of Rural Studies. London: SAGE, pp. 18–29. Cloke, P., Marsden, T. and Mooney, P. (eds) (2006). Handbook of Rural Studies. London: SAGE. Cromartie, J. and Bucholtz, S. (2008). Defining the ‘rural’ in rural America. Amber Waves, 6 (3), 28–35. Gallent, N. and Gkartzios, M. (2019). Defining rurality and the scope of rural planning. In M. Scott, N. Gallent and M. Gkartzios (eds), The Routledge Companion to Rural Planning. London: Routledge, pp. 17–27. Gkartzios, M., Toishi, N. and Woods, M. (2020). The language of rural: reflections towards an inclusive rural social science. Journal of Rural Studies, 78, 325–32. Halfacree, K. (1993). Locality and social representation: space, discourse and alternative definitions of the rural. Journal of Rural Studies, 9 (1), 23–37. Halfacree, K. (1995). Talking about rurality: social representations of the rural as expressed by residents of six English parishes. Journal of Rural Studies, 11 (1), 1–20. Hillyard, S. (2020). Broadlands and the New Rurality: An Ethnography. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing. Hoggart, K. (1990). Let’s do away with the rural. Journal of Rural Studies, 6 (3), 245–57. Kumar, A. and Shaw, R. (2020). Transforming rural light and dark under planetary urbanisation: comparing ordinary countrysides in India and the UK. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45 (1), 155–67. Little, J. (2017). Gender and Rural Geography. London: Routledge. Maharjan, K.L. and Joshi, N.P. (2013). Climate Change, Agriculture and Rural Livelihoods in Developing Countries. Tokyo: Springer. McMichael, P. and Kim, C. (2019). Japanese and South Korean agricultural restructuring in comparative and global perspective. In P.D. McMichael (ed.), The Global Restructuring

Rural geographies  357 of Agro-Food Systems. New York: Cornell University Press, pp. 21–52. Murdoch, J. and Marsden, T. (2013). Reconstituting Rurality. London: Routledge. Murdoch, J. and Pratt, A.C. (1993). Rural studies: modernism, postmodernism and the ‘post-rural’. Journal of Rural Studies, 9 (4), 411–27. Nelson, P.B. and Hines, J.D. (2018). Rural gentrification and networks of capital accumulation – a case study of Jackson, Wyoming. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 50 (7), 1473–95. Park, S., Freeman, J. and Middleton, C. (2019). Intersections between connectivity and digital

inclusion in rural communities. Communication Research and Practice, 5 (2), 139–55. Robinson, J. (2006). Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. London: Routledge. Shucksmith, M. (2018). Re-imagining the rural: from rural idyll to Good Countryside. Journal of Rural Studies, 59, 163–72. Wilson, D. and Jonas, A.E. (2018). Planetary urbanization: new perspectives on the debate. Urban Geography, 39 (10), 1576–80. Woods, M. (2011). Rural. London: Routledge.

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69. Scale In geography, scale is a crucial way of conveying the idea that socio-spatial patterns and processes not only vary from place to place but also can be hierarchically differentiated (Herod, 2011). For example, physical geographers construct maps that strive to capture how certain environmental processes tend to operate at discrete hierarchical scales, such as in the case of a local river catchment area, a climate region, or continental-scale tectonic processes. In a similar vein, spatial scales of particular interest to human geographers range from the very local, such as spaces of the body or neighbourhoods, to the global, such as international flows of capital or the spread of urbanization across continents and throughout the planet. These hierarchical scales, in turn, can be mapped, measured and analysed in order to reveal underlying causal mechanisms and societal processes. For example, in pioneering studies of voting behaviour, Cox (1968) used statistical techniques, such as spatial correlation, not only to show how patterns of working-class voting behaviour can vary from one region to another but also to demonstrate that such regional variations reflect spatial factors, such as the geographical proximity of voters, rather than national political party affiliation. Scale is not only a useful tool for analysing human spatial behaviour and describing locational outcomes, but can also help to frame theoretical narratives about the unfolding of different political processes in the wider economy and society. For example, Taylor (1982) developed a framework for describing and analysing different political-geographical processes operating at, respectively, the scale of reality (the world economy), the scale of ideology (the nation-state) and the scale of experience (the locality). Taylor’s work has been highly influential in political geography and cognate social science disciplines because it illustrates how scale is a powerful analytical device for theorizing the international political economy in terms of spaces and flows as well as their interconnections. Building on these ideas, Smith (1984) showed how the global space of capitalism is internally differentiated into hierarchical territories corresponding more or less with the international, national and urban scales. Using scale as a conceptual lens

with which to illustrate processes of uneven development, Smith demonstrated that the production and differentiation of scale is not only a result of globally uneven capital flows but also that seemingly separate scales have become increasingly interconnected through the ‘see-saw’ movement of capital across territory. Most scales that geographers deal with seem to occupy fixed hierarchies, which correspond more or less with the different ‘levels’ (i.e., scales) of the state, thereby implying that higher scales tend to dominate, or even determine, what happens at lower scales. Bulkeley (2005) suggested, however, that power does not necessarily cascade in a unidirectional fashion downwards through the state territorial hierarchy. Instead, political processes can operate in both directions. Moreover, scalar politics often involves both state and non-state political actors, governance arrangements and networks. This multi-directional aspect or ‘relationality’ of scale has spurred geographers into questioning the efficacy of the concept of scale for explaining complex societal processes that operate across geographical spaces, including, but not limited to, state territories and political actors. Relational thinking has prompted some scholars to argue that, since political processes operate around and through networks populated by actors located at different sites, the presence of such networks and sites serves in effect to flatten space, making scale a poor way of representing how certain societal – whether social, political, cultural or economic – processes unfold across the landscape (Marston, Jones and Woodward, 2005). Nonetheless, Jessop, Brenner and Jones (2008) argue that, notwithstanding its limitations, scale should be used alongside other concepts like territory, network and place to capture the diversity and complexity of unfolding spatial patterns and processes. Ontologically, scales are not pre-given entities that exist apart from their social and material context and substance. Since scales are socially and politically constructed, they reflect how power is distributed across society and the state, seemingly in a hierarchical fashion. The concept of state rescaling describes how state powers shift up, down and across the state territorial hierarchy largely in response to the challenges of designing socio-regulatory structures to

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manage globalization and the resulting geographies of uneven development (Brenner, 2004). On the one hand, the rescaling of the state may have empowered local and regional business actors to organize new spaces of state and governance at the regional scale in order to attract capital investment circulating in the wider (national or global) economy (Jones and MacLeod, 2004). On the other, Calzada (2020) shows how all sorts of insurgent regionalist movements and claims for citizenship have colonized city-regional spaces especially across the devolved territories of Europe. Such divergences in state scalar restructuring and political mobilization prompted Harrison (2008) to contrast ‘centrally orchestrated’ regionalism with ‘regionally orchestrated’ centralism. As regions, cities and places become more interconnected, scale empowers spatial interests in new and different ways, many of which serve to blur the received distinction between scale understood as a hierarchy and scale viewed as a network. Cox (1998) compares how spatial interests result in, respectively, ‘spaces of dependence’ and ‘scales of engagement’. While spaces of dependence refer to the specific material interests that form around places and territories (for example, local business investments in buildings and infrastructure), scales of engagement are the spaces of networking and political action used to draw down resources to resulting territories of interest (e.g., local businesses lobbying national government for additional public expenditures on infrastructure). In some cases, it is necessary to organize new scalar powers and infrastructural capacities inside the state. In others, scalar politics involves a struggle for access to new powers and resources residing outwith extant scales of the state. In each case, both hierarchical and networked representations of space and scale are implicated. Kurtz (2002) argues that the state’s use of scale as a regulatory tool can discipline and exclude certain place-based societal groups and actors, thereby contributing to environmental injustices rather than promoting progressive transformational change. Scale is therefore often used to represent contentious political processes occurring outside received scales of the state and the global economy. Examples include struggles around Indigenous rights (Silvern, 1999) and climate

activism (Kythreotis et al., 2021). The latter example is worth exploring in more depth in order to show how social and environmental groups strive to organize and develop strategies around different scales in their effort to secure resources and negotiate with corresponding state territorial structures. Climate governance – in terms of climate mitigation and adaptation – can be understood in terms of horizontally networked processes stretching across different state territories. For instance, international and national territorial agreements on how to address global climate change can be the result of the decisions of quite diverse and often distanced localities working collaboratively across space through various networks (Adger, Arnell and Tompkins, 2005). However, the climate governance landscape is complicated by processes of state devolution, whereby powers and responsibilities relating to climate change shift between different territorial structures (national, regional and local) of the state. When action at one scale is constrained, there are opportunities for stakeholders to manoeuvre strategically at other scales to create greater climate policy integration at, across and between hitherto quite separate and disconnected scales of governance (Urwin and Jordan, 2008). Framing climate adaptation as scalar politics potentially offers a more productive way of representing the complex processes of climate policymaking by highlighting how political negotiation and contestation occurs around vertical and horizontal interconnected state territorial structures. Not only do state and non-state actors at the urban scale respond to climate policy framed at the international scale but also climate actions at the urban scale can influence how nation-states respond to pressures to internationalize state territory and address domestic challenges of devolution and territorial distribution. Hence in this instance, examining how climate adaptation governance is enacted at different scales helps to expose some missing interconnections between the urban, national and international scales, demonstrating how different kinds of climate-change knowledge are geopolitically mobilized at different scales of climate governance (Kythreotis et al., 2020). Moreover, using scale as a lens on climate activism has helped to expose a theoretical and practical disconnect between local-scale

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activism and formal international climate policymaking. This has prompted North (2011) to differentiate between ‘prefigurative’ grassroots action, which is undertaken at the community or local scale, and ‘outward’ activism, which involves international non-governmental organizations and environmental groups lobbying governments at national and international scales. The recent upwelling of subnational climate activism in the United Kingdom certainly highlights how new civil forms of climate governance could contribute to more rapid and equitable state policy responses to climate change at national and international scales (Kythreotis et al., 2021). Additionally, the recent mobilization and success of new (urban) forms of climate activism in catalysing a new global discourse of climate emergency is significant in as much as it highlights a civil society-led reaction to the major weakness in the way national states have politically ratified the Paris Agreement in international negotiations of the Conference of the Parties. Notwithstanding the growing influence of local-to-global climate activism, there remain inherent challenges of upscaling from local or urban action to the national and international scales and building more effective political alliances across diverse territories in order to meet national, and therefore, global climate targets through the Paris Agreement (Kythreotis et al., 2020). For instance, the recent COP26 held in Glasgow highlighted ongoing tensions between nation-state climate policy imperatives and reaching an equitable consensus amongst all participating nation-states at the international scale. India wanted to tone down language on the ‘phasing out’ of coal to merely ‘phasing down’ in the text of the Glasgow Climate Pact. This was reluctantly agreed upon by other so-called less developed countries, resulting in a weakened global climate agreement. In this instance, the continuing power of the nation-state, through the realpolitik of global climate politics and governance, illustrates the powerful ways in which scale remains an important analytical device for geographers striving to make sense of the contemporary politics and policy of climate change. In summary, we have explored some of the contrasting ways in which human geographers deploy scale in order to animate and analyse spatial patterns and societal processes. Our

particular focus has been on exposing the complexity of political processes operating both within and around scalar hierarchies and networks commonly associated with the international system of nation-states and the world economy. Scale is a way of showing how society and the state are organized into semi-fixed yet at the same time quite unstable territorial hierarchies, ranging from the international and national to the regional and local. It has also become a useful concept for studying the scalar dynamics of all sorts of contemporary social, environmental and political struggles. The concept of scale helps to convey the idea that space is organized, contested over, and differentiated not simply hierarchically around pre-given socio-spatial structures like the nation-state and the global economy but also horizontally through networks and activism. Andrew P. Kythreotis and Andrew E.G. Jonas

References and selected further reading Adger, N., Arnell, N.W. and Tompkins, E. (2005). Successful adaptation to climate change across scales. Global Environmental Change, 15 (2), 77–86. Brenner, N. (2004). New State Spaces: Urban Governance and Rescaling of Statehood. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bulkeley, H. (2005). Reconfiguring environmental governance: towards a politics of scales and networks. Political Geography, 24 (8), 875–902. Calzada, I. (2020). Emerging citizenship regimes and rescaling (European) nation-states: algorithmic, liquid, metropolitan and stateless citizenship ideal types. In S. Moisio, N. Koch and A.E.G. Jonas et al. (eds), Handbook on the Changing Geographies of the State (pp. 368–84). Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Cox, K.R. (1968). Suburbia and voting behavior in the London Metropolitan Area. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 58, 111–27. Cox, K.R. (1998). Spaces of dependence, spaces of engagement and the politics of scale, or: looking for local politics. Political Geography, 17 (1), 1–23. Harrison, J. (2008). Stating the production of scales: centrally orchestrated regionalism, regionally orchestrated centralism.

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Scale  361 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32 (4), 922–41. Herod, A. (2011). Scale. London and New York: Routledge. Jessop, B., Brenner, N. and Jones, M. (2008). Theorizing socio-spatial relations. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26 (3), 389–401. Jones, M. and MacLeod, G. (2004). Regional spaces, spaces of regionalism: territory, insurgent politics and the English question. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 29 (4), 433–52. Kurtz, H. (2002). The politics of environmental justice as a politics of scale. In A. Herod and M. Wright (eds), Geographies of Power: Placing Scale (pp. 249–73). Oxford: Blackwell. Kythreotis, A.P., Howarth, C. and Mercer, T.G. et al. (2021). Re-evaluating the changing geographies of climate activism and the state in the post-climate emergency era in the build up to COP 26. Journal of the British Academy, 9 (s5), 69–93. Kythreotis, A.P., Jonas, A.E.G., Mercer, T.G. and Marston, T. (2020). Rethinking urban adaptation as a scalar geopolitics of climate governance:

climate policy in the devolved territories of the UK. Territory, Politics, Governance, https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1080/​21622671​.2020​.1837220. Marston, S.A., Jones III, J.P. and Woodward, K. (2005). Human geography without scale. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30 (4), 416–32. North, P. (2011). The politics of climate activism in the UK: a social movement analysis. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 43 (7), 1581–98. Silvern, S.E. (1999). Scales of justice: law, American Indian treaty rights and the political construction of scale. Political Geography, 18, 639–68. Smith, N. (1984). Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. Blackwell: Oxford. Taylor, P. (1982). A materialist framework for political geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 7 (1), 15–34. Urwin, K. and Jordan, A. (2008). Does public policy support or undermine climate change adaptation? Exploring policy interplay across different scales of governance. Global Environmental Change, 18 (1), 180–91.

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70. Segregation Segregation refers to the separate, uneven access to various socio-spatial resources by different social groups (Massey and Denton, 1993). Such resources commonly include segregated housing, education, employment, public transport and healthcare access, as well as wider amenities such as recreational facilities or supermarkets. This entry considers segregation across these various resources, detailing current thinking on their causes, measurement, impacts and rectification through desegregation. The entry concludes by recommending directions for future research. Despite initial theorization that segregation is a naturally occurring phenomenon (Park, 1928), human geographers have since determined that segregation is the socio-spatial manifestation of inequality caused by structural, institutional and individual factors (Massey and Denton, 1988, 1993). By considering the impact of social relations, power and identity on the materiality and spatiality of social stratification, human geographers identified that capitalist economic structures restrict socio-spatial resources among different social class groups, thereby causing segregation. However, segregation due to capitalist structures has since been examined across various other identity-related markers of difference, including culture, ethnicity, age, gender identity, religion, tribe or caste, indigeneity, disability status and sexuality. Further advancements now demonstrate that segregation is caused by the complex entanglement, or intersectionality, of various social relations emerging from capitalism, including classism, racism, sexism and so on (Hopkins, 2019). Segregation is also caused by institutions. While once easily attributable to permitted and legalized systems of segregation such as Euro-American slavery, Jim Crow in the US and South African Apartheid, institutional causes of segregation are contemporarily evidenced as policy and procedural bias (Massey and Denton, 1993). Through their focus on spatial and demographic changes, human geographers have evidenced, for example, that segregation occurs through state-mandated land use changes and spatial planning practices that cause exclusionary environments such as expensive suburban and gated communi-

ties, or poor segregated housing estates and inner-city areas; redlining practices that limit the availability of socio-spatial goods (such as banks, healthcare and supermarkets); and practices such as over-policing in segregated locations that ultimately restrict disparately incarcerated groups’ access to socio-spatial resources (Sibley, 1995). Human geographers have further identified that the ideologies underpinning institutions’ actions and decisions, and the people employed within them, cause segregation. This work emerged following the cultural turn in human geography in the late 1980s/ early 1990s and brought to the forefront the role of institutions in producing and maintaining segregation by attributing values and representations of inferiority or superiority to places and identity groups (Slater and Anderson, 2012). While individuals within institutions (e.g., teachers, employers, policymakers, etc.) have long been identified as agents of segregation, newer work examines the nuances and complexities of how and why specific ideologies shape the decisions and practices of individuals (e.g., Goetz, Williams and Damiano, 2020). Ideology also underpins the segregation-inducing actions of individuals situated outside of institutional settings. While a somewhat disputed phenomenon (Phillips, 2007), the self-segregation of dominant groups through ‘white flight’ from neighbourhoods, transport or schools, following the arrival of minority groups represented as inferior, can also cause segregation (Massey and Denton, 1993). Practices of self-segregation have also been evidenced among marginalized groups, who do so to mitigate the negative implications of stigmatization (Peach, 1996). However, self-segregation by dominant social groups is reliant on both economic means and ideologically mediated preferences, while voluntary segregation by marginalized groups is highly contested given the structural and institutional constraints that mould agency and consequently segregation. Accordingly, through their critical attention to scale, human geographers have identified segregation as the product of interwoven institutional, structural and agentic factors (Massey and Denton, 1988). Such a theorization deviates from scholarship in disciplines that fail to consider the structural causes of agency-mediated segregation. Contemporary

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human geography studies continue to centre criticality and complexity in their understandings of causes of segregation, as evidenced by studies that, using assemblage theory, consider how networked, complex human/ non-human interactions, mediated by structures and institutions, impact dispositions and behaviours that cause segregation (e.g., Richmond, 2018). Since initial observations of segregation and the subsequent development of the seminal standardized index (Duncan and Duncan, 1955), different ways of classifying and measuring segregation patterns between two or more different identity groups have emerged. This remains a focus for human geographers partly due to the distinct social contexts that segregation emerges from given the interplay of structural, institutional and agentic factors (Massey and Denton, 1993). Furthermore, indices are spatially dependent as, although research has overwhelmingly focused on segregation within inner-city environments, segregation also occurs in suburban, rural and online locations, demonstrating links between different spaces (Dong et al., 2020; Logan and Burdick-Will, 2017). Additionally, despite the generalizability of some indices across socio-spatial domains, field-specific indices continue to emerge. Moreover, indices have continued to develop because, although it is commonly agreed that five features (evenness, exposure/isolation, centralization, clustering and concentration) indicate the presence and intensity of segregation (Massey and Denton, 1988), the rigidity of these parameters is increasingly contested. For example, while it has been argued that a homogeneous concentration of 90 per cent or above of a specific social group represents a severe degree of segregation (see Slater and Anderson, 2012), empirical evidence notes multi-group diversity, including heterogeneity in ethnicity or class, in highly segregated environments (Reardon et al., 2008). This, alongside work on the intersectionality of segregation (e.g., Hopkins, 2019), challenges homogeneous concentrations as an indicator of extreme segregation. Given the interrogation of homogeneity and rigidity, while census records have long been the data source for measuring segregation, their predefined and essentialized identity categories, alongside technological developments, have led to innovative, digital data sources, such

as consumer register data, being used to infer more nuanced demographical information on identity and concentration in segregated environments (see Lan, Kandt and Longley, 2021). Furthermore, the attention to identity complexities and concentration has resulted in segregation being considered at different or multiple geographical scales (Reardon et al., 2008). Consequently, contemporary analyses identify and measure segregation not only at macro (e.g., national and regional) and meso (e.g., segregation within a school, workplace or neighbourhood) levels, but also at smaller spatial levels such as block- and street-level analysis. Equally, contemporary human geography attention to mobilities and movement challenges isolation as a tightly defined feature of segregation. A clear distinction between isolation and exposure becomes blurred when considering, for example: the interaction of groups segregated in one socio-spatial domain, such as their neighbourhood with non-segregated entities of the same kind, or with alternate socio-spatial environments such as public transport or education amid their everyday activities (Wong and Shaw, 2011); or the fluidity of neighbourhood boundaries, such as the deterritorialized favelas (Richmond, 2018). Consequently, given the complexities and nuances of segregation, newer indices such as the segregated mobility index (Candipan et al., 2021) have emerged. Notably, this attention to mobility highlights the infrequency of census data collection, leading to an increased use of real-time, big data that can capture instantaneous movement or isolation using mobile applications such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) or geotags (ibid.). Through their focus on place and space through integral concepts, such as mobility, boundaries and scale, human geographers have been exemplary in producing segregation measurement tools that may otherwise have been overlooked. Yet, given these considerations and the different contexts from which segregation emerges, long-standing challenges in measuring segregation relate to a lack of uniformity (Reardon et al., 2008). The impacts of segregation, as the unequal access to various socio-spatial resources by different identity groups, may be experienced positively or negatively (Massey and Denton, 1993). The benefits of socio-spatial segreTia Ndu

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gation for privileged social groups include access to high-quality infrastructure, institutions, amenities and goods, which help to maintain or improve their social positioning and access to necessary resources. However, the segregation of privileged groups creates isolation from such environments and widespread access to poorly invested in, low-quality, social goods for marginalized groups, thus increasing socio-economic divides. Human geographers have also evidenced wider spatially determined impacts for marginalized groups, including poor health and lower life expectancy (ibid.), as well as disproportionate exposure to crime, over-policing and police brutality (Sibley, 1995). More recently, in light of the global COVID-19 pandemic, focus has turned to examining the disparate susceptibility to negative pandemic impacts across different socio-spatial domains for different segregated groups (e.g., Finn and Kobayashi, 2020). Due to the creation and maintenance of poverty or wealth, the segregation of privileged and marginalized groups has various cultural implications, including favourable or detrimental representations attributed to privileged or marginalized environments as places of good or ill repute (Slater and Anderson, 2012); the reinforcement of values of inferiority or superiority attributed to identity groups occupying different segregated places (Massey and Denton, 1993); social exclusion and low mainstream political clout for segregated groups considered culturally or biologically inferior and stronger collective political power for privileged groups (ibid.); and the internalization or rejection of representations of inferiority or superiority, leading to different senses of place and belonging among different groups (Sibley, 1995). Given the negative cultural impacts, contemporary implications for segregated neighbourhoods deemed inferior also include their state-led gentrification when the rent gaps created through their stigmatization and managed decline are exploited for capitalist profit (Lees, 2008). Gentrification often results in the spatial dislocation of marginalized groups from their homes and neighbourhoods by more privileged social groups moving into the newly invested in, physically renewed neighbourhoods and homes (ibid.). Displaced groups may end up in other segregated areas far from their original neighbourhood and often experience other Tia Ndu

detrimental impacts across health, education, income and social capital (ibid.). The environmental impacts for marginalized segregated groups are of significant concern and include disparate exposure to negative environmental factors, detrimental income and health disparities due to such hazards, and the reinforcement of segregation as those fleeing environmental conditions often end up in other segregated neighbourhoods (Henrique and Tschakert, 2021). Recent human geography investigations also include uncovering historic environmental injustices faced by segregated groups, evidencing disparate access to ecological protections, and exposing ‘climate gentrification’ in which the rich move to protected areas, displacing the segregated poor in less resilient neighbourhoods (ibid.). By considering place/space, human geographers have demonstrated that the impacts of segregation are not only socio-economic, -political and -cultural, but -spatial, with the interactions of these impacts across socio-spatial domains ultimately reinforcing deprivation for marginalized groups, thus impeding their social and geographical mobility (Yinger, 1997). Furthermore, while segregation may produce positive impacts for marginalized groups, including protection from racial harassment, access to culturally relevant amenities and proximity to co-ethnic social capital that can aid economic opportunities (Peach, 1996), such isolation may limit access to mainstream institutions such as the labour market and the true nature and degree of such benefits remain contested (Phillips, 2007). Given the severity and extensiveness of negative impacts and disputed evidence on the benefits for marginalized groups, especially in relation to class and ethno-racial segregation, various protests for justice have emerged across the globe (Dikeç, 2017). To resolve the uneven access to resources by different social groups, desegregation has been attempted through various approaches. While states across the globe have sought desegregation through the enactment of equality legislation forbidding forced isolation, state intervention through direct eviction and gentrification-induced displacement is often pursued. Although such desegregation approaches do not necessarily increase social contact/mixing, and have no empirical basis, they reinforce segregation through displacement to other segregated neighbourhoods,

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and can result in micro-level forms of segregation within socially mixed spaces, such as through ‘poor floors’ and segregated leisure facilities within mixed housing developments. Given the structural and institutional nature of segregation, human geographers have employed various desegregation strategies, including facilitating and documenting emancipatory activism through protest, and conducting scholarship that evidences the need for non-neoliberal, non-colour-blind and participatory policy reforms (Gaffikin and Morrissey, 2011; Phillips, 2007). Political economy human geographers also seek desegregation through attention to the organizing of alternative economies for equitable socio-spatial resource allocation (Lima and Jones, 2020), similar to emerging but isolated work from decolonial human geographers (e.g., Windle, 2022). Cultural ideologies, such as racial and class inferiority or superiority, have long been barriers to desegregation (Massey and Denton, 1993). While strategies of cultural assimilation/integration that would ultimately lead to the economic and spatial integration of marginalized groups have long been heralded as a solution for segregation, such strategies have since been identified as insufficient for tackling the systemic factors that cause segregation (Phillips, 2007). Yet, policymakers continue to focus on assimilation-like strategies such as ‘social cohesion’, ‘social mixing’, ‘social capital’ and ‘aspirations building’. Consequently, cultural human geographers have sought desegregation by identifying everyday activisms by stigmatized individuals in exclusionary places that challenge dominant misrepresentations (e.g., Alderman and Inwood, 2016), and by elucidating institutionalized cultural misrepresentations and values attributed to people and places (e.g., Frost, Catney and Vaughn, 2022). Human geographers also challenge the Eurocentric, discriminatory ideologies of researchers themselves, as the studies produced can be politicized and used by institutions to defend and maintain segregation. Such criticality extends to the labels used to represent segregated groups and places and the ideologies that underpin the concepts (e.g., ‘segregation’) employed in research to uncover their explanatory bias (e.g., Phillips, 2007). Contemporary debates include whether desegregation in and of itself is

a necessary outcome if efforts fail to critically challenge the systemic factors that human geographers have identified cause segregation (Frost et al., 2022). Since initial observations and theorizations, human geographers have, and continue to, excel in demonstrating the variability, interconnectedness and complexities of segregation through their employment of spatial perspectives. However, future research on the causes, measures and impacts of segregation must seek to synthesize and evaluate literature from across different socio-spatial domains to produce a more concise knowledge base on which existing and new theories can be advanced. Furthermore, while human geographers are successfully informing quantifiable analyses of segregation with critical theories and concepts such as mobilities and assemblage, future research must seek to surpass evidencing static outcomes and identifying indicators, by ensuring that findings from critically informed measurement studies re-inform the qualitative theorizations on the causes of segregation on which they are predicated. By employing critical lenses to reimagine the possibilities of segregated environments understood to be dynamic and open to (re)construction through spatialized practices of resistance, human geographers are challenging socio-spatial boundaries through place-based interventions across different scales, including individual, community and institutional levels, to support socio-spatial mobility. However, future research must recognize and bridge epistemological, ontological and political divides that prohibit wider collective action across geographical and demographic difference. This requires critical collective reflection among human geographers in order to produce a platform on which discussion, convergence and collaboration between different approaches occurs, and should be a strategic direction for human geography scholars researching segregation and desegregation. Tia Ndu

References and selected further reading Alderman, D.H. and Inwood, J. (2016). Mobility as antiracism work: the ‘hard driving’ of

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366  Concise encyclopedia of human geography NASCAR’s Wendell Scott. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 106 (3), 597–611. Candipan, J., Phillips, N.E., Sampson, R.J. and Small, M. (2021). From residence to movement: the nature of racial segregation in everyday urban mobility. Urban Studies, 58 (15), 3095–117. Dikeç, M. (2017). Urban Rage: The Revolt of the Excluded. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dong, X., Morales, A.J. and Jahani, E. et al. (2020). Segregated interactions in urban and online space. EPJ Data Science, 9 (20), 1–22. Duncan, O. and Duncan, B. (1955). A methodological analysis of segregation indexes. American Sociological Review, 20 (2), 210–17. Finn, B.M. and Kobayashi, L.C. (2020). Structural inequality in the time of COVID-19: urbanization, segregation, and pandemic control in sub-Saharan Africa. Dialogues in Human Geography, 10 (2), 217–20. Frost, D., Catney, G. and Vaughn, L. (2022). ‘We are not separatist because so many of us are mixed’: resisting negative stereotypes of neighbourhood ethnic residential concentration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48 (7), 1573–90. Gaffikin, F. and Morrissey, M. (2011). Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Goetz, E.G., Williams, R.A. and Damiano, A. (2020). Whiteness and urban planning. Journal of the American Planning Association, 86 (2), 142–56. Henrique, K.P. and Tschakert, P. (2021). Pathways to urban transformation: from dispossession to climate justice. Progress in Human Geography, 45 (5), 1169–91. Hopkins, P. (2019). Social geography I: intersectionality. Progress in Human Geography, 43 (5), 937–47. Lan, T., Kandt, J. and Longley, P. (2021). Measuring the changing pattern of ethnic segregation in England and Wales with consumer registers. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 48 (6), 1591–608. Lees, L. (2008). Gentrification and social mixing: towards an inclusive urban renaissance? Urban Studies, 45 (12), 2449–70. Lima, J.F. and Jones, A. (2020). Placemaking as an economic engine for all. In C. Courage,

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T. Borrup and M.R. Jackson et al. (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking. London: Routledge, pp. 14–26. Logan, J. and Burdick-Will, J. (2017). School segregation and disparities in urban, suburban, and rural areas. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 674 (1), 199–216. Massey, D.S. and Denton, N.A. (1988). The dimensions of residential segregation. Social Forces, 67 (2), 281–315. Massey, D.S. and Denton, N.A. (1993). American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Park, R.E. (1928). Race and Culture. New York: The Free Press. Peach, C. (1996). Good segregation, bad segregation. Planning Perspectives, 11 (4), 379–98. Phillips, D. (2007). Ethnic and racial segregation: a critical perspective. Geography Compass, 1 (5), 1138–59. Reardon, S.F., Matthews, S.A. and O’Sullivan, D. et al. (2008). The geographic scale of metropolitan racial segregation. Demography, 45 (3), 489–514. Richmond, M.A. (2018). Rio de Janeiro’s favela assemblage: accounting for the durability of an unstable object. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36 (6), 1045–62. Sibley, D. (1995). Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West. London: Routledge. Slater, T. and Anderson, N. (2012). The reputational ghetto: territorial stigmatisation in St Paul’s, Bristol. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37 (4), 530–46. Windle, J. (2022). School segregation in Rio de Janeiro: geographical, racial and historical dimensions of a centre–periphery dynamic. Comparative Education, 58 (1), 91–105. Wong, D.W.S. and Shaw, S.L. (2011). Measuring segregation: an activity space approach. Journal of Geographical Systems, 13 (2), 127–45. Yinger, J. (1997). Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost: The Continuing Costs of Housing Discrimination. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

71. Sexualities Just as sexuality is a core part of life, it has also been continually present within geographical thinking, whether through population or demographics, or earlier feminist work on the family (Brown and Browne, 2016). More explicit sexualities work emerged in human geography from feminist work and the wider cultural turn, and gained further traction in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in relation to the urban. The increased attention to sexualities in relation to the urban saw new engagements with queer economies and the pink pound. Alongside this, queer theory developed in the 1990s and over the last two decades has resulted in clearer distinctions between ‘queering’ – a method through which to critique heteronormative structures – and that which is queer because it focuses on LGBTQ+ identities. Emerging work also pays particular attention to transgender and gender-diverse identities. There is also growing engagement with counter-queer movements, or heteroactivism. In this way, sexualities are porous and find academic footing in a range of geographical subdisciplines. Geographies of sexualities have become increasingly synonymous with LGBT geographies, with a significant focus on sexual identities and practices outside of cis-heteronormativity – the assumed norm of cis-gendered heterosexuality and the wider socio-political structures and discourses that privilege those identities over others. Heterosexuality is pervasive throughout geography as a whole, and aside from some notable pieces (see Hubbard, 2008; Wilkinson, 2013), few who focus their work on heterosexualities identify with the geographies of sexualities, which would explain the overall shift to a more LGBT+ focus within the discipline. There are some new developments that focus on heterosexuality, including Krishnan’s (2021) recent work highlighting the geographies that emerge from public sex practices of young women in Chennai, South India, which offers new critical additions to understandings of heterosexuality within the geographies of sexualities. Urban-focused sexualities work in the 1980s largely centred on gay ghettos, particularly in the US. Larry Knopp used a Marxist framework to engage with this urban gay

ghettoization, generating a geography of sexualities before the subdiscipline had formed and gained legitimacy (Knopp, 1990; Lauria and Knopp, 1985). Mapping Desire (Bell and Valentine, 1995) published some of the earliest and now classic work on lesbian and gay geographies covering gender performance and embodiment, rural and urban sexualities, and resistance. Two years later, Queers in Space (Ingram, Bouthillette and Retter, 1997a) collated key sexualities work from multiple disciplines, highlighting the important influence of transdisciplinary work on the spatiality of sexualities. Gay spatialities gained legitimacy largely through urban-focused work from key gay geographers who lived and were interested in these areas, and as such there was a growing interest in queer economies surrounding these spaces (Knopp, 1997). Much of this earlier work centred on the territorialization of gay – and sometimes lesbian – space. Rothenberg’s (1995) work argued for the need for a different approach to lesbian spaces. She refuted the argument that lesbians had not contributed to gentrification, using Park Slope, in Brooklyn, as an example. Likewise, Podmore (2006) discussed lesbian urban spaces and communities in Montreal, arguing that they were more social and community networks than commercial sites, which may explain their decline in the 1990s as queer community and territorialization emerged. The work of Valentine and Podmore made significant interventions about how lesbian geographies and gay geographies differ, and was developed in Gieseking’s (2020) recent work, which engages with lesbians and gender non-conforming individuals in New York using ‘constellations’ as a framework. Gieseking (2020, p. xvii) conceptualizes lesbian and non-conforming urban spatialities as fleeting, creating patterns and networks that connect much like the imagined lines within constellations of stars. In doing so, Gieseking offers a conceptualization of lesbian–queer urban space that moves away from the focus on fixed and property-driven understandings of the urban, and argues for the significance of cross-generational embodied stories and fleeting spaces in spatializing the lesbian–queer urban. Each participant’s map represents a constellation of overlapping spaces of personal and collective importance, and it is within these networks of commerce and community that lesbian and queer spaces

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are shaped. These developments not only reflect a move away from rigid and fixed spaces and times, but also beyond the cis gay and lesbian focus of earlier work that had long been critiqued for its ignorance of other non-cis-heterosexual genders and sexualities. Over the past two decades, work in both the geographies of sexualities and queer geographies has been filled with discussion of norms and normativity. Homonormativity is the social phenomenon where heterosexual ideals are upheld and applied within LGBT culture – for example, gay marriage is made legal and acceptable in society but must conform to heteronormative principles like monogamy. Whilst the original conception was focused on the geopolitical relationship of the heteronormative on gay lives, resulting in the perpetuation of heterosexual values such as monogamous long-term gay marriages, recent work has moved to discuss homonormativity in relation to prevailing queer norms, particularly regarding leisure and consumption and who can identify as homonormative (Di Feliciantonio, 2017). Lisa Duggan (2002) first described this relationship within sexualities work, popularizing the term ‘homonormativity’. In Duggan’s conception of this word, she describes it in relation to the politics of heteronormativity, arguing that through the progression of LGBTQ+ rights – particularly in the anglophone North – there has been a perpetuation of heteronormativity. Duggan therefore defines homonormativity as: ‘A politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption’ (2002, p. 179). Over the past two decades there has been increasing engagement with homonormativity and along with it the divergence of its meaning (Puar, 2006). Yet homonormativity has been criticized for its lack of distinction between ordinary experience and homonormative experience, its heavy metropolitan viewpoint (Brown, 2012), its essentialization of the queer subject, and its disregard of racialized queer experiences, relationships and contexts (Haritaworn, 2009), as well as its centring of the anglophone North (Agathangelou, Bassichis and Spira, 2008). Building on discussions of homonormativity a theory of homonationalism emerged. Mel Jones

Puar (2007) originally presented homonationalism to describe the use of the growing acceptance of LGBT rights, often in Western countries, as a barometer for judging national sovereignty (often in relation to the majority world). It presented a challenge to assumptions of sexuality in relation to the nation-state that we have all been conditioned by, specifically in the Western anglophone North. Puar (ibid.) argued that despite a prevailing heteronormative society, queer sexuality is employed on national and international scales in ways that shape citizenships and wider geopolitical relationships (DasGupta, 2019). Homonationalism emphasizes the geopolitical influences that sexualities have on wider scales. As LGBT+ rights have progressed in many nations, the geopolitics of sexualities has changed. This progression of LGBT+ rights has been employed against other nations to critique their governance (Rao, 2020). Consequently, the geographies of sexualities are evidenced as more than the spatialities of LGBT+ sexualities, but also within the tensions between heterosexuality and LGBT+ sexualities. Nash and Browne’s (2020) recent work on heteroactivism highlights the interconnectedness of both LGBT+ rights movements and anti-LGBT+ resistances with the continued imagined sexual citizenships of Western nations. They highlight the tensions and entanglements of heterosexuality and LGBT+ sexualities regarding national imaginations, challenging the notion that LGBT+ rights in Western nations are a homogeneous and uncontested socio-spatial reality. Consequently, the narrative on sexualities within geography has developed from a primary focus on oppression and resistance to a geopolitics that increasingly engages with the interrelationships of these sexualities and not just the sexualities themselves. The relationship between sexualities and queer theory is messy and intertwined. Butler (1993) argued that queer theory was a site of ‘collective contestation’ (p. 19) and that queer as a term can never be fully owned, only reused, and evolved. With roots in lesbian and gay studies, queer theory developed out of sexualities work that refused heterosexuality as a barometer for sexual formations and social relationships and developed into a wider understanding that sexualities are not essential truths but are made and acted out from a myriad of socio-cultural relationships. Through this discourse, queer became

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acknowledged in varied and dualistic ways – queer as a signifier of identities outside of cis-heterosexuality (LGBTQIA+ identities) – and queer as a theoretical mode of thinking that questions norms. Browne (2006) grapples with this messiness of queer, discussing its use as an expression of more expansive and fluid sexualities, as well as a way of theorizing that which is beyond the norm. She problematizes this by revealing the slipperiness of queer in this context, as defining queer as different poses many questions about whom is allowed to claim queer and if ‘queer’ is even claimable. Browne’s (ibid.) central argument is that queer geographies are neither the same as or distinct from geographies of sexualities. She states: ‘If queer geographies are not merely the contemporary versions of geographies of sexualities, but in fact occupy a marginal and potentially critical position in relation to geographies of sexualities, then both of these geographies have a productive part to play’ (Browne, 2006, p. 891). Subsequently, concepts of queer have run alongside geographies of sexualities work, acting as a mode by which to problematize the way we approach the expansive nature of sexualities. What remains is how queer can continue to be productive within sexualities work without becoming so expansive that it loses all meaning. A critique throughout sexualities work is that the prevailing discourse has often focused on the Anglocentric world and perspective. Sexualities work developed over time from focusing primarily on the spatial scales of the urban and rural (Shuttleton, Watt and Phillips, 2000) to the broader scales of national and global citizenships (Binnie, 1997; Brown, 2006). However, with a heavy focus on lesbian and gay experiences in the metropolitan minority world, earlier sexualities work helped perpetuate a global hegemony of gay identity and ontology that is ignorant of the expansive understandings of sexuality from other non-Western social worlds. Human geographers have focused on the spatial aspects of sexualities and then contradicted this priority by projecting anglophone experiences onto the majority world. Decolonizing these geographies has been increasingly called for as attempts are made to address these contradictions. Tucker (2009), for example, argues that heteronormativity is a regulative power that relies on other systems

and structures to function. Using the example of Cape Town in South Africa, he shows that queer visibilities are unavoidably influenced by the processes of race classification and apartheid. Rodó-de-Zárate (2016) evidences how academic language itself surrounding sexualities, including the word queer, is not easily translatable to non-anglophone and non-academic worlds, posing the question of whose knowledge is valued in citation and revealing LGBT+ knowledge productions that are continually made invisible. Eaves (2017) discusses the queer black geographies of the American South arguing for the interrelatedness of knowledge, power and space that seeks to move beyond statically fixing black experiences and subjects. She critiques geographical thinking that engages with black and queer experiences only in relation to fixed spaces, times and events – for example, the civil rights movement – and draws on black geographical discourse to engage with the wider interconnectedness of racial and queer experiences and places. It is clear that the politics of coloniality and post-coloniality have continued to shape the trajectory of sexualities work. As entanglements of queer have given more nuance to sexualities research, more attention has been given to LGBTQIA+ identities that exist outside of the cis gay, lesbian, and to an extent bisexual, focused work of earlier sexualities research. Even in the 1990s, critique was given that ‘queer theory presents a canon written largely by white and decidedly Eurocentric males and therefore excessively reflects their ideas’ (Ingram, Bouthillette and Retter, 1997b, p. 7). In Transforming Gender, Sex and Place, Johnston (2018) discusses work on transgender, gender-variant, and intersex people that has developed within sociology and is now being taken on board within human geography. Johnston argues that there is an important solidarity relating to gender between engagements with cis lesbian, gay and bisexual experience and trans and gender variance, as each challenge and negotiate binary gender, although she warns that some uses of LGBTQ+ acronyms have failed to engage beyond the LGB and are counterproductive in these discussions, highlighting that whilst trans is interconnected to sexualities it also has its own spatialities. Transgender geographies challenges previous work on both gender and sexualities Mel Jones

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that focused on cis-binary experiences by critiquing the binary and engaging beyond it. Doan (2007) discusses queer urban space, examining the mutual expectations of gay and straight people that reinforce a binary view of gender, creating more complex spaces for transgender and gender-variant people. Doan argues that whilst trans people can take advantage of LGBT+ safe spaces, these often do not live up to their needs and often continue to reinforce a heterosexual understanding of the gender binary, revealing the ways in which trans geographies are both entangled with, and distinct from, geographies of sexualities. A prevailing critique from trans social scientists and geographers has been that trans experiences – and intersex experiences – are often reduced to ‘the site in which to contain all gender trouble’ (Stryker, 2004, p. 214). Rosenberg and Oswin’s (2015) work on incarcerated trans people not only covers areas of research long neglected by human geographers, but also challenges queer theories’ theoretical framing of trans people that reduces them to mere concepts of gender trouble. Todd’s (2021) work makes an explicit call for attention to the everyday realities of trans people, arguing for the importance of engaging with the mundane, everyday and affirming experiences of trans and gender-variant people. By arguing for more explicit focus on trans lived experience beyond theoretical assumptions made by queer theory, they draw out the intersections of materiality, embodiment and socio-cultural relationships involved with trans lives themselves that go further than the theoretical. It marks a movement within and alongside sexualities work that challenge preoccupations with cis heterosexual– homosexual binaries. Numerous other gaps within geographies of sexualities are increasingly being addressed. For example, Jukes’ (2018) work on asexuality calls for a new framework – ‘asexual theory’ – that does not place asexuality outside of sex and sexuality, or see it as a lack, but instead engages with the erotic outside of explicit sexual practices. Mel Jones

Mel Jones

References and selected further reading Agathangelou, A.M., Bassichis, M.D. and Spira, T.L. 2008. Intimate investments: homonormativity, global lockdown, and the seductions of empire. Radical History Review, 100, 120–43. Bell, D. and Valentine, G. (eds) 1995. Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities. London: Routledge. Binnie, J. 1997. Invisible Europeans: sexual citizenship in the New Europe. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 29 (2), 237–48. Brown, G. 2012. Homonormativity: a metropolitan concept that denigrates ‘ordinary’ gay lives. Journal of Homosexuality, 59 (7), 1065–72. Brown, G. and Browne, K. (eds) 2016. The Routledge Research Companion to Geographies of Sex and Sexualities. London: Routledge. Brown, M. 2006. Sexual citizenship, political obligation and disease ecology in gay Seattle. Political Geography, 25 (8), 874–98. Browne, K. (2006). Challenging queer geographies. Antipode, 38 (5), 885–93. Butler, J. 1993. Critically queer. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1 (1), 17–32. DasGupta, D. 2019. The politics of transgender asylum and detention. Human Geography, 12 (3), 1–16. Di Feliciantonio, C. 2017. The political economy of gay sex under homonormativity: bareback, PrEP and welfare provision. Society + Space, 31 October. Doan, P.L. 2007. Queers in the American city: transgendered perceptions of urban space. Gender, Place & Culture, 14 (1), 57–74. Duggan, L. 2002. The new homonormativity: the sexual politics of neoliberalism. In R. Castronovo and D.D. Nelson (eds), Materializing Democracy: Towards a Revitalized Cultural Politics (pp. 175–94). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Eaves, L.E. 2017. Black geographic possibilities: on a queer Black South. Southeastern Geographer, 57 (1), 80–95. Gieseking, J.J. 2020. A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers. NYU Press. Haritaworn, J. 2009. Queer mixed race? Interrogating homonormativity through Thai interraciality. In K. Browne, J. Lim and G. Brown (eds), Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practices and Politics (pp. 101–12). Farnham: Ashgate. Hubbard, P. 2008. Here, there, everywhere: the ubiquitous geographies of heteronormativity. Geography Compass, 2 (3), 640–58. Ingram, G.B., Bouthillette, A. and Retter, Y. 1997a. Queers in Space: Communities, Public

Sexualities  371 Places, Sites of Resistance. Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Ingram, G.B., Bouthillette, A. and Retter, Y. 1997b. Lost in space: queer theory and community activism at the Fin-de Millénaire. In G.B. Ingram, A. Bouthillette and Y. Retter (eds), Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance (pp. 3–16). Seattle, WA: Bay Press. Johnston, L. 2018. Transforming Gender, Sex, and Place: Gender Variant Geographies. London: Routledge. Jukes, J. 2018. Towards asexual theory: practising a queer accountability of the non-sexual. Master’s thesis, University of Sussex. Knopp, L. 1990. Some theoretical implications of gay involvement in an urban land market. Political Geography Quarterly, 9 (4), 337–52. Knopp, L. 1997. Gentrification and gay neighborhood formation in New Orleans. In A. Gluckman and B. Reed (eds), Homo Economics: Capitalism, Community, and Lesbian and Gay Life (pp. 45–59). New York: Routledge. Krishnan, S. 2021. Where do good girls have sex? Space, risk and respectability in Chennai. Gender, Place & Culture, 28 (7), 999–1018. Lauria, M. and Knopp, L. 1985. Toward an analysis of the role of gay communities in the urban renaissance. Urban Geography, 6 (2), 152–69. Nash, C.J. and Browne, K. 2020. Heteroactivism: Resisting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans Rights and Equalities. London: Zed Books. Podmore, J.A. 2006. Gone ‘underground’? Lesbian visibility and the consolidation of queer space in Montréal. Social & Cultural Geography, 7 (4), 595–625. Puar, J.K. 2006. Mapping US homonormativities. Gender, Place & Culture, 13 (1), 67–88.

Puar, J.K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rao, R. 2020. Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rodó-de-Zárate, M. 2016. Feminist and queer epistemologies beyond academia and the anglophone world: political intersectionality and transfeminism in the Catalan context. In G. Brown and K. Browne (eds), The Routledge Research Companion to Geographies of Sex and Sexualities (pp. 179–88). London: Routledge. Rosenberg, R. and Oswin, N. 2015. Trans embodiment in carceral space: hypermasculinity and the US prison industrial complex. Gender, Place & Culture, 22 (9), 1269–86. Rothenberg, T. 1995. ‘And she told two friends’: lesbians creating urban social space. In D. Bell and G. Valentine (eds), Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (pp. 165–81). London: Routledge. Shuttleton, D., Watt, D. and Phillips, R. (eds) 2000. De-centring sexualities: Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis (Vol. 6). Hove: Psychology Press. Stryker, S. 2004. Transgender studies: queer theory’s evil twin. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 10 (2), 212–15. Todd, J.D. 2021. Exploring trans people’s lives in Britain, trans studies, geography and beyond: a review of research progress. Geography Compass, 15 (4), Article e12556. Tucker, A. 2009. Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape Town. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Wilkinson, E. 2013. Learning to love again: ‘broken families’, citizenship and the state promotion of coupledom. Geoforum, 49, 206–13.

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72. Social geographies Conceptualizations of the social that adopt a worldview emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in six volumes of Man and the Earth by French social geographer and anarchist scholar Elisée Reclus (Clark and Martin, 2013). It was not till the end of the twentieth century, however, that social geography began to be recognized as a strong branch of human geography in the Anglo-American world. This reshaping of the social was possible through the leadership and thought of white feminist geographers who centred difference in understanding social relations and spatial structures. The work unfolded through research that explored identity politics, socio-spatial difference, oppression, poverty, inequalities and social justice (Buttimer, 1971; Fincher and Jacobs, 1998; Jackson, 2000; Massey, 1984; Panelli, 2004; Peach, 2002; Smith et al., 2010; Valentine, 2001). In countries of the Global South such as India, colonial thought regulated the framing of the social within the discipline of geography, which formally emerged in universities in the early twentieth century (Kapur, 2004). The mapping and/or analysis of caste, class, language, religion, ethnographic studies of tribal groups and, more recently, gender continue to be important in explorations by geographers situated in India (Kumar, 2004; Thakur et al., 2012). The decolonial desire to expand understandings of the social focuses on insights beyond the Anglo-American world, but is often driven by diasporic/white scholars situated in the Western academy or scholars in elite institutions of the Global South who enjoy the privilege as well as the opportunity to write across worlds. The social is reframed through these encounters but there are ethical issues, particularly when the Western academy drives the research agenda. Histories and geographies of human and more-than-human encounters across worlds have the potential to diversify understandings of the social. The challenge, however, has always been to infuse the social with thinking that takes the risk to move beyond dominant understandings of what Doreen Massey (2005, p. 131) identifies as ‘human activity and human relations’. In the SAGE Handbook of Social Geographies, Susan Smith and co-authors (2010) focus on the relevance and urgency in articulating renewed

understandings of the social, but regret that Anglo-American intellectual traditions and explorations continue to be privileged. This entry responds to this concern amid social futures that are entangled with the ongoing crises of racial capitalism, internal/settler colonialism, black/brown vulnerabilities, climate change, the sixth mass extinction and the COVID-19 pandemic that are multi-scalar as well as trans-scalar. Although this crisis of the social can be attributed to ‘white’/ male mastery that has immersed us in the Anthropocene and the Virocene, these new epochs also expose the dangers of thinking of the social in terms of human exceptionalism. Therefore, even though all humans are not equally implicated in the onset of these geological eras and are differentially vulnerable, attention to deep time and a long view illuminate ‘socionatural realit[ies]’ (Dujardin, 2020, p. 1060) or the entanglement of the social with biophysical and ecological systems. The privileging of ‘universal man’ and human sociality, however, continues to make it difficult to grasp or see ourselves as part of the deep time of the Earth and engage in experimentation that would provide a long view of the social. At this juncture, the discipline of geography that crosses the boundaries of the physical and the human matters more than ever. Geography that acknowledges its imperial histories and shifts its white/anglophone male gaze is well placed to examine the politics of knowledge production, nurture and co-create futures in ways that strengthen social justice as well as justice beyond humanity. Amid the virtual shutdown of the ‘entire body social’ by the SARS-CoV-2 we are called to ‘move geography forward’ (Castree et al., 2020, p. 412). As geographers or the ‘multiply situated we’ (Jazeel, 2017, p. 334) immersed in the nested crises of the Virocene and the Anthropocene, new situated, relational, fractured, contested, embodied and decolonized understandings of the social emerge from queer, black, Latinx, Indigenous and Southern ‘adventures of thought’. The risk, however, is the cultural appropriation, extraction, freezing and the ‘lust’ for these knowledges as well as the transformation of research subjects to objects of knowledge who enrich understandings of the social in the Western academy. White responsibility often guards such knowledge through gatekeeping but sometimes has the unintended effect of

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masking the guilt and the possessive nature of whiteness. Polyvocal understandings of the social create openings for the voices of those historically considered ‘lesser humans’, but who constitute the majority of the world’s population. Rather than designate these developing worlds as ‘minor’, Head, Klocker and Aguirre-Bielschowsky (2019, p. 397) make the political decision to frame these social worlds as Majority worlds. If we are to think of the possibilities for justice that entangle the diversity of human worlds but also move beyond humanity, then following Achille Mbembe (2021, p. 83), we can no longer think of the social merely in terms of ‘human life, human activity and human understanding’ that produces the realms of society/nature and nature/culture. We need to refresh epistemologies and ontologies of the social and this entry attempts to do this by illuminating capacious themes that might drive these new understandings.

justifying ongoing histories of dispossession, extractive exploitation and events of dehumanization including racism, Islamophobia, homophobia and casteism (McKittrick, 2021; Sharma, 2017). The whiteness of geography and its collusion with histories of imperialism that frame colonial encounters implicates the discipline in knowledge production about the social (Kobayashi and de Leeuw, 2010). White feminist geographers respond by focusing on intersectionality or the multiple, fractured and shifting nature of identity. Intersectional identities suggests that the ‘loci of enunciation’ is not fixed and provides breathing spaces for vulnerable bodies. Black, Indigenous and minority feminists, however, have long questioned the dominance of white liberal feminism and continue to ask: ‘We are different, but can we talk?’ (Raju, 2002, p. 173). But how do we talk in biosocial worlds where our being is threatened by human–viral co-becomings?

Encounter: moving forward

Pandemic sociality and vulnerabilities

Human encounters produce private and public spaces (including digital spaces) as social sites of throwntogetherness, bodily exposure, differential vulnerability, conviviality and everyday equalities (Amin, 2012; Fincher et al., 2019; Massey, 2005; Nayak, 2010). Fincher et al. (2019, p. 207), in their exploration of multi-cultures in settler colonial cities, focus on encounter as an ontology, epistemology and methodology to advance a politics of ‘being together in difference as equals’, or everyday equalities. Sociality emerges through relational encounters of making home, working, travelling by public transport and creating publics in Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto and Los Angeles. The ongoing danger in societies with white majority cultures, however, is to be encountered as a stranger or a person that can be read – quick glances, longer stares and instantaneous judgements fix and cement social identities (Amin, 2012; McKittrick, 2021). These judgements have effects and violent outcomes when gender, race, phenotype, ethnicity, indigeneity, dis/ability, sexuality, religion, age, class and caste, for example, are read off skins and bodies. Places that are home to these bodies are deemed uninhabitable,

Wendy Brown (2021) illuminates how the virus as discursive and material is ‘inextricable from society’ but also the economy, politics and knowledge. In other words, anglophone/Western universities rendered financially fragile during the pandemic cannot rely on competition between ‘walled-off disciplines’ (ibid.) to explore the social but on encounters with natural sciences and plural worlds that decentre colonial legacies and voices of privilege to expand zones of the inhabitable. This politics of the inhabitable and the possibilities of becoming otherwise has always been central to exploration of the social within the multiple strands of radical black, Southern and feminist thought. Poverty, unemployment, racism and (un) natural disasters such as the cyclones, fires, floods, drought and the SARS-CoV-2 virus draw attention to bodily vulnerabilities, social inequalities but also what is framed as uninhabitable in the many ‘Souths of the world’ (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018, p. 15; see also McKittrick, 2021). Rather than a bounded socio-spatial place, the Global South is described as an ‘inherently awkward’ term but no doubt also useful in drawing attenMichele Lobo

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tion to ‘spatially differentiated hierarchies of knowledge’ as well as racial hierarchies that privilege Angloness and whiteness (Hunter, 2020, p. 1239). Quarantine, social distancing and lockdowns initially produced silent cities in the Global North; social encounters in viral atmospheres were safer when digitally mediated. In cities like Melbourne, space and time felt stretched rather than compressed and for white-collared workers space–time paths shrunk in contrast to those employed in the health, retail, mining and on-demand delivery sector (Bissell, 2020). This mobility contrasts with the social lives of the super-rich including sports and movie celebrities who move in and out of lockdown cities. As the Delta variant turned more virulent in cities of the Global South such as Mumbai, enforced sociality unfolded in overcrowded hospitals and slums. In Dharavi, one of the largest slums in Mumbai, non-governmental organization (NGO) voluntary workers distributed food to ward off starvation. As the Omicron variant spreads, those with the privilege of vaccination certificates expand the sphere of the social through their mobility. In unequal cities, affectively engineered videos illuminate a ‘nature comeback’ story and digital spacetimes provide comfort.

Digital spacetimes Geography’s affective, material, processual, open and fragile understandings of spacetimes draw on transdisciplinary theoretical and methodological insights to produce cutting-edge explorations of the social (Amin, 2012; Bissell, 2019; Fincher et al., 2019; McCormack, 2013; Thrift, 2004). A sense of curiosity but also an ethics of shared responsibility make visible the intersections of the social with nature but also the economy, the cultural, the political, the biological, the technical and the digital. Smartphones, on-demand digital platforms and artificial intelligence are transforming leisure, work as well as consumption practices and taken-for-granted understandings of urban sociality that rely on face-to-face encounters (Bissell, 2020; Straughan and Bissell, 2021). Bissell (2020) reviews recent research to argue that immersion in digitally mediated encounters strengthens platform capitalism but also produces sharing economies and Michele Lobo

reshapes everyday practices of individuals. Through a focus on the socio-technical, in particular, the affective bodily experience of digital on-demand food consumption, the research illuminates changing aspects of the social. Micropolitical encounters and a view from the Antipodes draws attention to the diffuse nature of power that produces both enablement and constraint – bodily discomforts, orientations, vulnerabilities but also reorientations (ibid.).

A view from the Antipodes: Indigenous, diasporic and Southern articulations of the social Smith et al. (2010) identify the Antipodes as a site with exciting developments where Indigenous perspectives have the potential to challenge ideas rooted in frameworks produced by the Global North. Feminist geographies attuned to difference and a politics of possibility would perhaps suggest that Antipodean framings of the social will always be partial and situated and unfold amid ‘intolerable intersectional burdens’ (Ho and Maddrell, 2021) even though the focus is on abundant multispecies futures (see also Collard, Dempsey and Sundberg, 2015; Sultana, 2021). These burdens borne by Indigenous peoples and ethnic/ ethno-religious minority migrants of colour including international students, refugees and asylum seekers suggest there are hierarchies of being produced through intersections of phenotype, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, for example. But bodies that inhabit differential vulnerabilities demonstrate the capacity to ‘go on’ and dream about social futures that have ‘nothing to do with whiteness’ (Amin, 2002, p. 977). The inhabitation of place in white settler societies like Australia (and elsewhere) and places in the Global South does not seek to contest dominant Western meanings of sociality that are all-too-human, but emerges from cultural protocols, everyday practices, encounters and activism that centre belonging to Country or worlds both ‘here’ and ‘there’ (Bawaka Country et al., 2020; Simpson, 2017). In Aboriginal English meaning, Country is material, affective and spiritual and encompasses the sky, sea, rocks, wind,

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trees, spirits of ancestors and all beings; it is not just the environment (Bawaka Country et al., 2020; Cavanagh, 2020). After the Black Summer or forest fires of 2019/20 in Australia, Indigenous geographer, Bundjalung, and Wonnarua Aboriginal woman, Vanessa Cavanagh (2020), grieved for the burned ‘grandmother tree’ or Angophora costata (Sydney red gum) that was part of kinship networks that connected her to Country. These human–animal relations, animal ethics and multispecies thinking stimulate ongoing conversations on nature, more-than-human natures, care and shared responsibilities for abundant futures, humanimal and earthly co-becomings (Collard et al., 2015; de Silva and Srinivasan, 2019). Indigenous sociality in Australia as well as other white settler/colonized nations such as Abya Yala and Turtle Island (The Americas and Canada) have drawn attention to these co-becomings that are possible through healing and listening to Country that unsettles land/ocean, terrestrial/ aerial and surface/subterranean divides.

Decolonizing the social and habitable planetary futures The subterranean and geological optics in geography draw attention to a shift from socio-political to geosocial relations to explore the materiality of deep time, extractive economies, black/brown inhumanity and white comfort, which have a colonial history (Yusoff, 2018). The Black Lives Matter, Indigenous, Southern and asylum seeker movements know the terror of and inhumanity of this pain that continues in the many Global Souths of the world under the banner of neoliberal capitalism, internal colonialism, post-colonial racism and border politics (Burragubba, 2020; Shiva, 2018). It is difficult to overlook this sociality in toxic landscapes and carceral archipelagos. Inspired by black feminist scholarship, including the work of Sylvia Wynter, Yusoff (2018) calls for quiet acts of insurgence that are possible when the senses become theoreticians. Emotional geographies, embodied knowledges and diasporic literacies contribute to this insurgence by highlighting struggle but also collective memories, ideas, imaginations and ways of planetary living that sustain curi-

osity and generosity in decolonizing possible futures (McKittrick, 2021; Yusoff, 2018). But it calls for conceptual understandings of the social that follow wayward lines and unfolding puzzles that might emerge when we stray from well-worn paths and engage with the turbulence of emerging intellectual traditions and experimental methodologies (Ahmed, 2014; Escobar, 2020; Lobo, 2022; Tuwihai-Smith, 2021; Yunkaporta, 2019). The journal Social & Cultural Geography recently celebrated 20 years and plays an important role in advancing theoretical and empirical debates on the social by strengthening contributions from authors and places that are yet to be well represented (Bissell, 2019). Michele Lobo

References and selected further reading Ahmed, S. (2014). Willful Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Amin, A. (2002). Ethnicity and the multicultural city: living with diversity. Environment & Planning A: Economy and Space, 34, 959–80. Amin, A. (2012). Land of Strangers. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bawaka Country, Suchet-Pearson, S. and Wright, S. et al. (2020). Bunbum ga dhä-yutagum: to make it right again, to remake. Social & Cultural Geography, 21 (7), 985–1001. Bissell, D. (2019). Social & Cultural Geography at 20 years: looking back, thinking forward. Social & Cultural Geography, 20 (1), 1–3. Bissell, D. (2020). Affective platform urbanism: changing habits of digital on-demand consumption. Geoforum, 115, 102–10. Brown, W. (2021). From exposure to manifestation. Los Angeles Review of Books. Accessed lareviewofbooks​ .org/​ 27 June 2021 at https://​ article/​quarantine​-files​-thinkers​-self​-isolation/​ #​_ftn4. Burragubba, A. (2020). When I speak, I speak for the land. Overland, 240, 15–18. Accessed 10 June 2021 at https://​overland​.org​.au/​previous​ -issues/​issue​-240/​feature​-when​-i​-speak​-i​-speak​ -for​-the​-land/​. Buttimer, A. (1971). Society and Milieu in the French Geographic Tradition. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally. Castree, N., Amoore, L. and Hughes, A. et al. (2020). Boundless contamination and progress in geography. Progress in Human Geography, 44 (3), 411–14. Cavanagh, V. (2020, 24 January). Friday essay: this grandmother tree connects me

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376  Concise encyclopedia of human geography to Country. I cried when I saw her burned. The Conversation. Accessed 27 May 2021 at https://​theconversation​.com/​friday​-essay​-this​ -grandmother​-tree​-connects​-me​-to​-country​-i​ -cried​-when​-i​-saw​-her​-burned​-129782. Clark, J. and Martin, C. (2013). Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Elisée Reclus. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Collard, R.C., Dempsey, J. and Sundberg, J. (2015). A manifesto for abundant futures. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 105 (2), 322–30. de Silva, S. and Srinivasan, K. (2019). Revisiting social natures: people–elephant conflict and coexistence in Sri Lanka. Geoforum, 102, 182–90. Dujardin, S. (2020). Planning with climate change? A poststructuralist approach to climate change adaptation. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 110 (4), 1059–74. Escobar, A. (2020). Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fincher, R., Iveson, K., Leitner, H. and Preston, V. (2019). Everyday Equalities: Making Multicultures in Settler Colonial Societies. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Fincher, R. and Jacobs, J.M. (1998). Cities of Difference. New York: Guilford Press. Head, L., Klocker, N. and Aguirre-Bielschowsky, I. (2019). Environmental values, knowledge and behaviour: contributions of an emergent literature on the role of ethnicity and migration. Progress in Human Geography, 43 (3), 397–415. Ho, E.L.E. and Maddrell, A. (2021). Intolerable intersectional burdens: a COVID-19 research agenda for social and cultural geographies. Social and Cultural Geography, 22 (1), 1–10. Hunter, M. (2020). Race and the geographies of education: markets, white tone, and racial neoliberalism. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 110 (4), 1224–43. Jackson, P. (2000). Social geography. In R.J. Johnston, D. Gregory, G. Pratt and M. Watts (eds), Dictionary of Human Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 753–4. Jazeel, T. (2017). Mainstreaming geography’s decolonial imperative. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42 (3), 334–7. Kapur, A. (2004). Geography in India: a languishing social science. Economic and Political Weekly, 39 (37), 4187–95. Kobayashi, A. and de Leeuw, S. (2010). Colonialism and the tensioned landscapes of indigeneity. In S.J. Smith, R. Pain, S.A. Marston and J.P. Jones III (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Social Geographies. London: SAGE, pp. 118–38. Kumar, A. (2004). Social Geography of India. Lucknow and New Delhi: Institute

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for Sustainable Development and Anmol Publications. Lobo, M. (2022). Breathing spaces of fearlessness and generosity in the Anglophone/ Western University. Geographical Research, 60 (1), 136–37. (Special Issue: Decolonising the University edited by M. Lobo and D. Rodriguez.) Massey, D. (1984). Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production. New York: Methuen. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: SAGE. Mbembe, A.J. (2021). Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization. New York: Columbia University Press. McCormack, D.P. (2013). Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McKittrick, K. (2021). Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mignolo, W. and Walsh, C.E. (2018). On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics and Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nayak, A. (2010). Race, affect, and emotion: young people, racism, and graffiti in the postcolonial English suburbs. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 42, 2370–92. Panelli, R. (2004). Social Geographies: From Difference to Action. London: SAGE. Peach, C. (2002). Social geography: new religions and ethnoburbs – contrasts with cultural geography, Progress in Human Geography, 26 (2), 252–60. Raju, S. (2002). We are different, but can we talk? Gender, Place & Culture, 9 (2), 173–7. Sharma, M. (2017). Caste & Nature: Dalits and Indian Environmental Politics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Shiva, V. (2018). ONENESS vs the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom. Geelong: Spinifex. Simpson, L. (2017). As We Have Always Done. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, S.J., Pain, R., Marston, S.A. and Jones III, J.P. (2010). Introduction: situating social geographies. In S.J. Smith, R. Pain, S.A. Marston and J.P. Jones III (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Social Geographies. London: SAGE, pp. 1–49. Straughan, E.R. and Bissell, D. (2021). Curious encounters: the social consolations of digital platform work in the gig economy, Urban Geography, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​02723638​ .2021​.1927324. Sultana, F. (2021). Climate change, COVID-19, and the co-production of injustices: a feminist reading of overlapping crises. Social & Cultural Geography, 22 (4), 447–60. Thakur, B., Costa, F.J., Dutt, A.K. and Wadhwa, V. (2012). Facets of Social Geography:

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73. Space

‘Geography as geometry’: calculating spatial extents and Space is undoubtedly one of the most com- distributions

monly used keywords of geography, jostling with concepts like place, environment, landscape, earth, region, milieu, territory and world in the spatial lexicon of the discipline. It is commonly used with little thought given to its etymology, and yet the shear breadth of associations, difficulties of translation, and close links with spatial conceptions from geometry and philosophy has left some scholars with a sense that it is too abstract, universal and unrooted to remain useful. The English word can be traced back to the Latin terms spatium and spatior and the French terms espace and espacer, although it also incorporates senses of enclosure associated with the German term raum and key spatial qualities associated with the Greek concepts of topos (place), chōra (room, region or receptacle) and kenon (void) (Casey, 1997). As both a verb and a noun, space has long had a close association with practices of measurement, calculation and positioning, and this is reflected in some of the most commonly discussed ‘species’ of space that have their origins in mathematics, philosophy and physics. These include Euclidean space (space that accords with the propositions and axioms relating to points, lines, planes and solid forms documented by the Greek mathematician Euclid); Cartesian space (ideas of space as coexistent with matter, and of three-dimensional volumetric spaces as plottable using coordinates, after René Descartes); absolute space (the idea that space is fixed, uniform, infinitely extended and exists independently of matter, after Gassendi, More and Newton); and relative space (the notion that space is not absolute and is relative to the positioning of two or more things, after Leibniz). These different spatial properties and qualities – of boundlessness, containment, dimensionality, uniformity, materiality and relative positioning – underpin many uses of the concept in contemporary human geography.

Before the 1950s, relatively few anglophone geographers positioned their research as being explicitly concerned with space. Geo-graphy, as earth-writing, was concerned with describing, measuring and understanding earthly processes and forms, including the human habitation of various landscapes and places. The situation started to change in the USA and elsewhere in the 1950s, with the forging of a new quantitatively focussed geography that was funded by government bodies and military agencies, and promoted by university administrators and ambitious young scholars intent on creating a more rigorous ‘spatial science’ (Barnes, 2004). With the representation of people, places and things as geometric points or areas on uniform planar surfaces, and the calculation of actual, potential or probable distributions or flows using complex mathematical, statistical, mapping and computational techniques, so geography was increasingly approached as geometry by these so-called ‘space cadets’. Their attempts to classify, aggregate, quantify and map spatial properties, movements, relations and objects required the establishment of standardized universal units (e.g., ‘man’ as ‘1’), which inevitably erased the differences between individuals and reinforced dominant norms. Spatial science, like geometry, appeared timeless and placeless, drawing upon ‘universal’ mathematical and statistical techniques that enabled scholars to separate out the spatial dimensions of things from their temporality, materiality and cultural and political contexts, resulting in accusations of ‘spatial separatism’ (Sack, 1974). Nevertheless, spatial science, regional science and emergent fields such as time geography were highly varied and often unjustly grouped as a single ‘type’ of approach. For example, despite accusations of ‘spatial separatism’ and of emphasizing stasis above change, many scholars recognized the need for dynamic spatial models that could account for movement over time, including key individuals such as William Bunge, Peter Haggett and Torsten Hägerstrand.

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Perceiving and inhabiting spaces Spatial scientists figured and enumerated spaces that were isolated from human perceptions, experiences and bodies. In contrast, there has been a long history of philosophers and, more recently, psychology, sociology and geography scholars reflecting upon how humans know, perceive and experience spatial properties and forms. In his later ‘critical’ writings, Immanuel Kant famously conceived space as a subjective and representational ‘pure intuition’ that pre-exists all external perceived objects, and his thinking acted as a key influence and point of critique for several generations of scholars in psychology, physiology and psychophysics who were concerned with how humans perceive, sense, understand and behave in space. What also emerged alongside these studies were a series of philosophical traditions concerned with the spatialities of human life and existence, most notably phenomenology and existentialism. These ranged from Edmund Husserl’s philosophical investigations of ‘lived spaces’ and people’s intentional actions directed at particular objects, to Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutic philosophy of ‘being-in-the-world’ that emphasized the relational ‘withness’ of human beings who were intricately entangled with objects in particular environments (Merriman, 2022). The pioneering phenomenology and existentialism of Buber, Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Schütz and others underpinned a new humanistic geography that emerged in the early 1970s as a direct counterpoint to positivist approaches underpinned by mathematical and statistical techniques. Geographers like Anne Buttimer, Edward Relph, David Seamon and Yi-Fu Tuan focussed on human perceptions, experiences, values and attitudes, drawing out the different qualities people have attributed to particular spaces and places that are taken as meaningful embodied constructions or representations. In Tuan’s writings, space was frequently held in binary tension with place, with the former being approached as an abstract, open, dynamic ‘container’, and the latter as a static, stable, organized and specific construction (Tuan, 1977). Several generations of human geographers have followed Tuan in eschewing the abstract associations of space, focussing on embodied and situated

practices and concepts like place and environment, but other humanistic geographers – including Buttimer and Seamon – maintained a concern with space by focussing on the ‘lifeworlds’ of people and the ‘time–space routines’ and ‘body ballets’ of individuals moving through the world (Seamon, 1980).

Space and power Humanistic geographers positioned ‘people’ (in different figurations) at the centre of spaces and spatialities, examining how human actions not only shape spaces, but also how embodied practices produce or perform spaces and spatialities in different ways. In response, left-leaning radical and Marxist geographers emphasized the many political, economic, social and environmental structural constraints that could shape, limit or determine how spaces and spatialities are produced and performed. For example, the disciplinary histories of geography and cartography are peppered with examples of how spatial knowledges, representations and technologies have been harnessed for political and economic ends by states, military regimes, colonial administrators, development agencies, capitalist profiteers, and traders of all kinds. This ranges from the use and abuse of spatial modelling and planning by the German Nazi Party, to the assumption by colonial administrators that blank spaces on maps were terra nullius. Writing in his landmark text The Production of Space in 1974, French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre argued that space was not simply a passive container for social and political actions, but assumed an ‘active…role’ in capitalist networks of production (Lefebvre, [1974] 1991, p. 11). Space, he argued, could be thought of as ‘perceived – conceived – lived’, and this conceptual triad brought a focus on people’s everyday embodied spatial practices together with an attention to the measurement, calculation and engineering of space by state planners, scientists, engineers and politicians. Lefebvre’s insistence that space was a social and political production resonated with the writings of Marxist geographers such as David Harvey, Ed Soja, Neil Smith and Milton Santos writing in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In the case of David Harvey, he had Peter Merriman

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maintained a keen interest in ‘social space’ and particularly anthropological approaches to space since writing about geometry and spatial modelling in the late 1960s (Harvey, 1969, 2006), while Soja (1980) famously called for a spatialized Marxism that focussed on a ‘socio-spatial dialectic’. Marxist approaches to socio-spatial structures also underpinned a revitalized regional geography and localities research programme. In Spatial Divisions of Labour (1984), Doreen Massey joined others in insisting that society and space must always be thought together, while in her later writings from the early 1990s she critiqued traditions of political theory and philosophy that had aligned politics with time and constructed space as a static and apolitical realm (Massey, 1992). Massey insisted that space and time must always be thought together as ‘four-dimensional’ or multi-dimensional ‘time–space’ or ‘space–time’, and this became a common refrain amongst anglophone human geographers and social theorists throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including Anthony Giddens, David Harvey and Nigel Thrift (see Merriman, 2012). By the time her book For Space was published, Massey was advancing a relational approach to space–time that was heavily influenced by post-structuralism as well as Marxist thinking, approaching space and place as dynamic, hybrid becomings, as ‘always in process’ and ‘a product of interrelations’, and as exuding a ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2005, pp. 9, 119, 141). Another strand of thinking on space and power that has influenced anglophone human geography has been the writings of Michel Foucault. In the 1960s and 1970s, Foucault outlined a series of histories of institutional and disciplinary spaces that shaped geographic thinking on the spatialities of power relations. Foucault conceived power as a relational effect of the ordering of bodies and architectures into distinctive configurations, as well as insisting that power relations must always be accompanied by practices of resistance. Power was no longer conceived as ‘possessed’ or ‘dispensed’, and Foucault’s relational approach to power relations inspired a large number of geographers interested in the spatialities of power, ranging from historical studies of specific disciplinary spaces and institutions, to more conceptual Peter Merriman

investigations of power, politics and resistance (Crampton and Elden, 2007).

Spatial practices, otherness and difference Space is commonly approached in both academia and everyday life as a ‘noun’ or thing. It is understood as something we occupy, plan, measure or represent in equations, paintings, poems, music or maps. Space is understood as a figured or material realm, but humanistic and Marxist approaches show that there are other ways of approaching spatial relations and qualities that do not render space inert, material or separate from bodies. These and other approaches can lead us to ask whether Western geometric conceptions of singular, dimensioned space may distract our attention away from the myriad of spatial relations and qualities that are performed by actors in different societies. To answer this question, it is useful to examine work in anthropology, human geography, feminism and post-colonialism that has approached space or spatiality differently. Over the past century and more, many leading anthropologists have undertaken research on how spatial relations, sensations and qualities are understood in different cultures. This has included extensive ethnographic research exploring non-Western spatial ontologies, and the ways that different cultural groupings structure, sense and attribute meanings to the spatial realm. Treatments of space and spatiality are evident throughout the vast array of anthropological traditions, from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology to the later practice-attuned anthropologies of Pierre Bourdieu, Nancy Munn, Michel de Certeau and Tim Ingold. What many recent phenomenological and post-structuralist anthropologies of non-Western spatial practices highlight is the peculiarity of Western geometric abstractions of space. Since the Enlightenment, Western scholars have tended to see space in the abstract as prior to the construction of place, but do we have to imagine things this way? ‘[W]hat if things are the other way around? What if the very idea of space is posterior to that of place, perhaps even derived from it? What if local knowledge… precedes knowledge of space? Could place

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be general and “space” particular?’ (Casey, 1996, pp. 16–17). Just as Bruno Latour has challenged the ethnocentrism of Western anthropologies of modernity by stating that the culture/nature binary is a false divide and that ‘we have never been modern’ (Latour, 1993), so one could highlight the peculiarity of Western conceptions of space, and argue that there have never been spaces or space-times (Merriman, 2012). Over the past few decades, post-colonial theorists and scholars of race and ethnicity have significantly advanced debates about the often violent and oppressive spatial practices that have marginalized non-white and non-Western subjects, and destroyed other ways of inhabiting, representing and practising spaces and places. Post-colonial theorists have not only sought to expose and undermine such spatial practices but they have also embraced real and metaphorical spaces of marginality, bordering, hybridity, betweenness, contact and encounter from which to resist and speak back. Cultural theorists such as Paul Gilroy have focussed on the black Atlantic spaces and routes through which hybrid cultural identities emerge, while scholars inspired by Homi Bhabha have outlined the ‘third spaces’ situated in the interstices between binary subject positions. These spaces are often inhabited by subjects who experience marginality in multiple ways, and important research has focussed on spaces of intersectional disadvantage and advantage, whether experienced by black British women, Chicana lesbian women, or young working-class white men. In parallel with the development of post-colonial theories of space and spatiality, feminist thinkers and queer theorists have explored how constructions of space are shot through with gendered power relations and heteronormative assumptions. Feminist geographers have followed Donna Haraway in arguing for ‘situated knowledges’ that avoid assumptions of a universal (often masculine) voice from nowhere, while the feminist poet and essayist Adrienne Rich advanced similar claims in her assertion that we must always position our lived experience in ‘my body’, not in an abstract body ‘in general’. Over the past few decades, feminist scholars have advanced explicitly feminist spatial theories that build upon the writings of leading feminists such as Butler, Haraway, Cixous, hooks,

Anzaldúa and Young, and geographers such as McDowell, Rose and Gibson-Graham. Research on sexuality and sexual difference presents similar challenges to spatial theorists and practitioners who may make heteronormative assumptions; encouraging them to understand the multiplicity of ways in which spaces are constructed and experienced, and trace how spatial practices are categorized, normalized, excluded and offer the potential to resist. Experiences of difference, otherness and sameness may emerge in parallel or overlapping ways, being performed through multiple practices, and not merely being limited to the kinds of singular ‘heterotopias’ envisaged by Michel Foucault in his structuralist essay ‘Of other spaces’ (Foucault, 1986).

Spacing worlds: non-representational geographies and performance With the rise of post-structuralist, processual and non-representational approaches to space and spatiality in human geography, there has been an increasing focus on spacing as a dynamic, mobile and performative action that is inseparable from embodied mobile practices, creative experiments, the liveliness of matter, and the unfolding of events. While some post-structuralist geographers such as Nigel Thrift (1996) have focussed on space–time contexts as dynamic and multiple achievements, others, such as Marcus Doel, have adopted a more radical approach, rejecting a focus upon points, lines and volumes in order to approach spacing as an action that relates to the minimal spatial element of the ‘open fold’ (Doel, 2000). Post-structuralist geographers have taken their inspiration from a broad range of philosophers, ranging from Bennett, Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, to Derrida, Irigaray, Latour, Manning, Massumi and Baudrillard. They focus on a wide range of spaces, themes and foci, becoming attuned to spaces of affect, difference, habit, performance, mobility, atmosphere and vibrant materiality, rather than the relative distances, dimensioned spaces and statistical distributions plotted by spatial scientists and geometers. It might seem, therefore, that post-structuralist approaches have come a long way since the quantitative approaches Peter Merriman

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of spatial scientists. Yet a fascination with non-Euclidean geometry, chaos, complexity and topology is evident in both post-structuralist approaches to space and spatial science traditions. What’s more, Euclidean, Cartesian and Newtonian approaches to space are so engrained in everyday Western techniques of measuring, quantifying, building and dwelling that they cannot easily be ejected or cast to one side. Space and spacing ‘matters’. Space and spacing ‘counts’. And, of course, practices of spacing are lively, animate, resonant and generate atmospheres. Where might future research be heading? There is no doubt that relational, performative and topological conceptions of space and spatiality continue to be a key concern of many contemporary human geographers, but I hope to have demonstrated how such conceptions are inseparable from geometric and arithmetic understandings of space. It also remains vital that scholars attempt to look beyond Western and particularly anglophone conceptions of space and spatiality, appreciating other spatial languages, figurations and ontologies, and contributing to efforts to de-colonize the discipline. Peter Merriman

References and selected further reading Barnes, T.J. (2004). ‘Placing ideas: genius loci, heterotopia and geography’s quantitative revolution’. Progress in Human Geography, 28 (5), 565–95. Barnes, T.J. and Minca, C. (2013). ‘Nazi spatial theory: the dark geographies of Carl Schmitt and Walter Christaller’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103 (3), 669–87. Casey, E.S. (1996). ‘How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time: phenomenological prolegomena’. In S. Feld and K.

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Basso (eds), Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 13–52. Casey, E.S. (1997). The Fate of Place. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Crampton, J. and Elden, S. (eds) (2007). Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography. Farnham: Ashgate. Doel, M. (2000). ‘Un-glunking geography: spatial science after Dr Seuss and Gilles Deleuze’. In M. Crang and N. Thrift (eds), Thinking Space. London: Routledge, pp. 117–35. Foucault, M. (1986). ‘Of other spaces’. Diacritics, 16 (1), 22–7. Harvey, D. (1969). Explanation in Geography. London: Edward Arnold. Harvey, D. (2006). ‘Space as a keyword’. In N. Castree and D. Gregory (eds), David Harvey: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 270–93. Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. London: Prentice Hall. Lefebvre, H. ([1974] 1991). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Massey, D. (1984). Spatial Divisions of Labour. London: Macmillan. Massey, D. (1992). ‘Politics and space/time’. New Left Review, 196, 65–84. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: SAGE. Merriman, P. (2012). Mobility, Space and Culture. London: Routledge. Merriman, P. (2022). Space. London: Routledge. Sack, R.D. (1974). ‘The spatial separatist theme in geography’. Economic Geography, 50 (1), 1–19. Seamon, D. (1980). ‘Body-subject, time-space routines, and place-ballets’. In A. Buttimer and D. Seamon (eds), The Human Experience of Space and Place. London: Croom Helm, pp. 148–65. Soja, E. (1980). ‘The socio-spatial dialectic’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 70 (2), 207–25. Soja, E. (1996). Thirdspace. Oxford: Blackwell. Thrift, N. (1996). Spatial Formations. London: SAGE. Thrift, N. (2008). Non-Representational Theory. London: Routledge. Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and Place. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

74. Time In what has been conceived as a spatial subject, many may ask what the importance of time is. It is quite simply that without time we cannot study change. (Thrift, 1977, p. 65)

Nigel Thrift has long advocated for time to be at the forefront of research in human geography, a discipline long preoccupied with space and the so-called ‘spatial turn’. Thrift further proposed a complication of our understanding of time that would mirror the complexity of space already acknowledged in research: ‘So just as there are many spaces within spaces, so there are many times within times. It is not until we realize this essential multidimensionality that we can realize the importance of time to geographic theory. We need to dynamize the lifeworld we study’ (Thrift, 1977, p. 69). In fact, as it will become apparent throughout this entry, time from a human geography perspective stems directly from the need to decipher the complex workings of change and its impact. Initial conceptualizations of time sought to categorize it following distinctive lines of compartmentalization: ‘Parkes and Thrift (1975) offer frameworks for understanding urban time and space. Urban Big Time (UBT) is defined as time and space structured at the macro level (e.g., in excess of a duration of one year). Individual changes in time and space, known as Urban Small Time (UST), naturally occur in society wherever and whenever within UBT. The difference between objective UBT and subjective UST informs the “degree of reality” attached to the formal time and space planned for’ (Petrusak, Perry and Hassevoort, 2017, pp. 522–3). But as I seek to demonstrate below, time and its distinctive temporalities were further complicated by geographers such as Massey (2005) and Soja (1996). Time was increasingly dislocated by accounts of everyday life, a temporal marker that is often invoked but less often properly untangled. In what follows I first dig more deeply into theorizations of time in human geography and beyond, in order to account for and indeed populate the discipline’s blind spots.

Reclaiming space from time and time from space: revisiting Soja and Massey To focus on time in relation to space from a geographical perspective involves revisiting the work of Doreen Massey and Edward Soja, and their inspired readings of the works of Henri Lefebvre. I propose a revindication of their work inasmuch as their projects propose understandings of space and time radically open and opposed to universalist essentialisms; this is crucial in unveiling the multiplicity of processes in a given place at a given time. Soja’s (1996) reworking of Lefebvre’s (1991) triad through his conceptualization of Thirdspace offers the possibility of an epistemological combination of several posts (post-colonialism, post-structuralism, post-feminism and importantly, post-modernism). Embedded in its theoretical discussions, the book revises ‘spatial practice, representations of space and spaces of representation’ as the three ‘moments of social space’ (Soja, 1996, p. 65), focusing on the last category or spaces of representation – that is: Combining the real and the imagined, things and thought on equal terms, or at least not privileging one over the other a priori, these lived spaces of representation are thus the terrain for the generation of ‘counterspaces’, spaces of resistance to the dominant order arising precisely from their subordinate, peripheral or marginalized positioning. With its foregrounding of relations of dominance, subordination, and resistance; its subliminal mystery and limited knowability; its radical openness and teeming imagery, this third space of Lefebvre closely approximates what I am defining as Thirdspace. (Ibid., p. 68)

Soja states that: ‘Everything comes together in Thirdspace: subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history’ (ibid., pp. 56–7). It is ‘the space of radical openness, the space of social struggle’ (ibid., p. 68). It is through this reworking of space, finally, that temporalities are thus opened up within it.

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Soja’s proposition comes from the reclaiming of space from epistemological traditions that provided far too much weight to time in the sense of historicism. His call is echoed by Massey (2005, p. 71), who denounces too the ‘imposition of a single universal’. Soja’s Thirdspace breaks with two-dimensional propositions and positions itself against unhelpful essentialisms: In what I will call a critical strategy of ‘thirding-as-Othering’, I try to open up our spatial imaginaries to ways of thinking and acting politically that respond to all binarisms, to any attempt to confine thought and political action to only two alternatives, by interjecting an-Other set of choices. In this critical thirding, the original binary choice is not dismissed entirely but is subjected to a creative process of restructuring that draws selectively and strategically from the two opposing categories to open new alternatives. (Soja, 1996, p. 5)

Importantly ‘if time is to be open then space must be open too. Conceptualising space as open, multiple and relational, unfinished and always becoming, is a prerequisite for history to be open and thus a prerequisite, too, for the possibility of politics’ (Massey, 2005, p. 59). If Massey does not directly draw on Lefebvre as Soja does, her take echoes the proposition of Thirdspace. Doing away with binaries through an-Other alternative allows us to think of space as a process of establishing both centre and periphery (Soja, 1996, p. 30): Whenever faced with such binarized categories (subject-object, mental-material, natural-social, bourgeoisie-proletariat, local-global, centerperiphery, agency-structure), Lefebvre persistently sought to crack them open by introducing an-Other term, a third possibility or ‘moment’ that partakes of the original pairing but is not just a simple combination or an ‘in between’ position along some all-inclusive continuum. This critical thirding-as-Othering is the first and most important step in transforming the categorical and closed logic of either/or to the dialectically open logic of both/and also. (Soja, 1996, p. 60)

This proposal, which Soja interestingly frames as a ‘moment’, is a process through which other established binaries can be radically opened up, which is highly relevant in the context of human geography’s entrenched Clara Rivas-Alonso

dichotomies: Global North and South, formality and informality, urban and rural (as Massey, 2005, p. 159, points out: ‘It may be the extremity of cities which provokes for some a reimagining, but the in-principle nature of the spatiality is not confined to the urban’). These binaries, following Soja and Massey, are never taken for granted and are unpacked as processual constitutive trajectories of becoming. Through this revisiting of Soja and Massey’s work, an interesting proposal becomes apparent: space was being reclaimed through their work, but it was such a new kind of space where/when time could be part of it, thus allowing for a reclaiming of a new kind of time at work through their new kind of space. Soja (1996, p. 57) speaks of an ‘all-inclusive simultaneity’ and Massey (2005, p. 9) of a ‘contemporaneous plurality’. As Massey states, discussing post-structuralist positions in relation to structuralisms, ‘Ironically, temporalisation has opened them up to spatiality – or, at least, it has the potential to do so. It has imbued those structures with temporality and cracked them open to reveal the existence of other voices’ (Massey, 2005, p. 42). More explicitly, she asks us to think of time and space together, as ‘the imagination of one will have repercussions (not always followed through) for the imagination of the other’; moreover ‘space and time are implicated in each other’ (ibid., p. 18). Massey (2005) describes time-spaces as having a form of social organization that attempts to regulate ‘the range and nature of the adventures and chance encounters which are permissible. Each is a way of dealing with the multiple becomings of space’. Thus, ‘developing a relational politics around this aspect of these time-spaces would mean addressing the nature of their embeddedness in all those distinct, though interlocking, geometries of power. If entities/identities are relational then it is in the relations of their construction that the politics needs to be engaged’ (ibid., p. 180). It is through analysing the time-space of social organization that research can unpack the moment and place of becoming. Imagining space as ‘always in process, as never a closed system’, affords us the possibility of an ‘open interactional space’ where ‘there are always connections yet to be made, juxtapositions yet to flower into interaction (or not, for not all potential connections have to be established), relations

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which may or may not be accomplished’ (ibid., p. 11). This space, now time-space, is a ‘space of loose ends and missing links. For the future to be open, space must be open too’ (ibid., p. 12). Imagining space as such, propels us to think of all the different possible futures available at once (here/now). The everyday is invoked by Soja as it was by Lefebvre: ‘Everyday life was presented and represented as the place where alienation and mystification were played out, enacted, concretely inscribed. It was also, therefore, the place where the struggles to demystify human consciousness, erase alienation, and achieve true liberation must be located’ (Soja, 1996, p. 41). Again, the everyday, or what is considered a marker of temporality is here conceptualized as place. Surprisingly, Massey does not explicitly talk about the everyday and yet time-space as the site of social reproduction constitutes the everyday. She does speak about the place and the event as: ‘what is special about place is precisely that throwntogetherness, the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now (itself drawing on a history and a geography of thens and theres); and a negotiation which must take place within and between both human and nonhuman’ (Massey, 2005, p. 140). She refers to the ‘temporary constellation’ of place: ‘This is the event of place in part in the simple sense of the coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes rather than a thing. This is place as open and as internally multiple. Not capturable as a slice through time in the sense of an essential section. Not intrinsically coherent… It is simply a coming together of trajectories’ (ibid., p. 141). Massey is able to infuse everydayness with the complex and radical openness of simultaneity and contemporaneous plurality. This alters thoroughly the ways we understand everydayness through place as an event in the here/now and related to the there/ then. The everyday becomes as plural as place. In this sense one could wonder whether the everyday and the event are finally different ways of naming the same process of social organization through time and space.

Beyond the everyday Having reviewed Massey and Soja’s work, we have reached an understanding of time-space

that is unbound, in a constant process of becoming through different trajectories that are always and necessarily socially bound: ‘Geography is always socially produced. And so every landscape can reveal sedimented and contentious histories of occupation; struggles over land use and clashes over meaning, rights of occupancy, and rights to resources’ (Katz, 2008, p. 16). As an operational concept, way of seeing and political proposition, this everyday allows us the opportunity of political engagement: Its temporality is at once daily, generational, and the longue durée. Its spatiality is similarly varied; it has no single scale such as the household or the community, but rather is everywhere bound dialectically to production. It is not reducible to consumption, ideology, or the making of a labor force, but embraces all of these and more in a fluid congeries of material social practices with three aspects – political economic, cultural, and environmental – that are accomplished by social actors in multiple social contexts associated with the state, the workplace, the household, and civil society. (Katz, 2008, p. 18)

This openness affords us the possibility of going beyond, a beyond inspired by Bhabha’s (1994) conceptualization deeply rooted in the need to allow temporalities as a way of emancipation: ‘Beyond’ signifies spatial distance, marks progress, promises the future; but our intimations of exceeding the barrier or boundary – the very act of going beyond – are unknowable, unrepresentable, without a return to the ‘present’ which, in the process of repetition, becomes disjunct and displaced. The imaginary of spatial distance – to live somehow beyond the border of our times – throws into relief the temporal, social differences that interrupt our collusive sense of cultural contemporaneity. (Bhabha, 1994, as cited in Soja, 1996, p. 143)

Dwelling in the beyond, as Bhabha (1994) says, means ‘to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality; to touch the future on its hither side. In that sense, then, the intervening space “beyond” becomes a space of intervention in the here and now’ (Bhabha, 1994, as cited in Soja, 1996, p. 144). I propose a way of going beyond eveClara Rivas-Alonso

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rydayness through a revision of the relevant literature that updates efforts to conceptualize time-spaces. May and Thrift (2001) have proposed a reworking of time-space as follows: ‘the more difficult challenge is in fact to think in terms of a multiplicity of space-times or what, in a conscious attempt to move still further away from any separation of the two, we have called TimeSpace’ (May and Thrift, 2001, p. 3). With important implications in terms of how we investigate TimeSpace, May and Thrift invoke the rhythmanalyst figure from Lefebvre: Since a rhythmanalyst was closer to the lived, she or he will be ‘more aware of times than of spaces, of moods than of images, of the atmosphere than of particular spectacles. He not only observes human activities, but he hears (in the double meaning of the word of noting and understanding), the temporalities in which these activities take place’ (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 229). Lefebvre, then, wants to think TimeSpace in new ways, ways which will provide a kind of psychoanalysis of the intricate space-time of the everyday lived by keeping his ‘ears open’ to rhythm and texture which are the modes of existence that systems or networks ‘assume at those times when they are not being actualised through practice, when they enter into representational spaces’ (Lefebvre, 1991a, p. 118). Unactualised relationships awaiting their moment. A spectral haze of the undone and yet to be done. (May and Thrift, 2001, p. 31)

A sensorial perspective thus allows for further insights into the building of everyday rhythms, even when arrhythmic, in ways that make visible whatever goes on beyond the event. The non-rhythm (and as there is no repeated identical moment the non-rhythms might be more common than initially made out to be) in its extreme form can be conceptualized as state of emergency: ‘The “state of emergency” would be a perpetual interruption of chronology, a kind of timeshift that never ceases to take place’ (May and Thrift, 2001, p. 34). This state of emergency already foretells the quality of TimeSpace to seem far more closed and narrower than here is conceptualized. Still, interdisciplinarity advances the promise of a redemptive politics: ‘How can we inhabit the present as if it were a place, a home rather than something we pass in a mad scramble to realise the future? Clara Rivas-Alonso

Somewhere here there is a politics, part feminist, part ecological, part visionary which can help us to stop and ponder what we are doing’ (May and Thrift, 2001, p. 37). Dodgshon’s (2008) take on the different concepts and approaches to time in human geography identifies how ‘we can no longer draw on an overarching concept of time’ (p. 1) but helpfully guides us through its varied conceptualizations towards a set of implications: ‘the first concerns whether space-time remains hyphenated or, alternatively, is hybridized into a unidimensional form, while the second concerns the extent to which we can clarify how our experience of all time as flat-time, or as something accessed only through the space-timeMANIFOLD of the “extended present” affects our analytical use of time’ (p. 13). Drawing on Lefebvre, Edensor (2010) also recovers rhythmanalysis as ‘a useful tool with which to explore the everyday temporal structures and processes that (re)produce connections between individuals and the social’ (p. 2). Sharma’s (2014, p. 12) concept of temporal insurgencies that ‘would disrupt first and foremost how the temporal order is policed and secured’ resonates with the arrhythmias brought up by Kern (2016, p. 445) as a disordering power. Interestingly, this further pushes us to question the uncritical use of everyday as a temporal marker, when clearly it can mean many different things at once (see Edensor, 2010), as already demonstrated. Recently gentrification studies have started enriching human geography accounts that take into account time: ‘The literature on the changes to social space wrought by gentrification has rarely paid explicit attention to time, although transformations in the use patterns of space are always also temporal, and rhythms of everyday life are experienced in and through space’ (Kern, 2016, p. 453; see Lees and White, 2020). If gentrification has been conceptualized through a narrative of spatial struggle, when in fact it is as much temporal as it is spatial (Kern, 2016), it only mirrored the wider human geography literature. Researching the rhythms of place necessarily means drawing on conceptualizations of social reproduction that elevate everydayness as a dimension of becoming (Katz, 1992). The gentrification of the everyday has been touched upon (Hodkinson and Essen, 2015), though not enough: as Paton (2014, p.1) states: ‘An important point which gets

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overlooked is that gentrification is everyday and enduring’. Increasingly, this void is being attended to, especially in relation to intimate practices of survival (Lees, Annunziata and Rivas-Alonso, 2018; Lees and White, 2020), but a reclaimed notion of time as a central dimension in gentrification theory has only recently begun to be looked at (Degen, 2018; Kern, 2016; Pain, 2019; Phillips et al., 2021; Sakızlıoğlu, 2014). There is still a lot of work to be done, especially as struggling to engage with urban planning timelines (in terms of slowness, limbo, waiting) becomes a creative way of surviving those conditions (in the sense of more than just living through them). This is crucial given that so many inhabitants are facing a future on hold, accounting for time in our geographical analysis can help understand how dwellers claim the opening of horizons for themselves. Clara Rivas-Alonso

References and selected further reading Bhabha, H.K. (1994), The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Degen, M. (2018), ‘Timescapes of urban change: the temporalities of regenerated streets’, The Sociological Review, 66(5), 1074–102. Dodgshon, R.A. (2008), ‘Geography’s place in time’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 90, 1–15. Edensor, T. (2010), ‘Introduction: thinking about rhythm and space’, in T. Edensor (ed.), Geographies of Rhythm: Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. 1–18. Hodkinson, S.N. and Essen, C.E. (2015), ‘Grounding accumulation by dispossession in everyday life: the unjust geographies of urban regeneration under the private finance initiative’, International Journal of Law in the Built Environment, 7 (1), 72–91. Katz, C. (1992), ‘All the world is staged: intellectuals and the projects of ethnography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 10 (5), 495–510. Katz, C. (2008), ‘Bad elements: Katrina and the scoured landscape of social reproduction’, Gender, Place & Culture, 15 (1), 15–29.

Kern, L. (2016), ‘Rhythms of gentrification’, Cultural Geographies, 23 (3), 441–57. Lees, L., Annunziata, S. and Rivas-Alonso, C. (2018), ‘Resisting planetary gentrification: the value of survivability in the fight to stay put’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108 (2), 346–55. Lees, L. and White, H. (2020), ‘The social cleansing of London council estates: everyday experiences of “accumulative dispossession”’, Housing Studies, 35 (10), 1701–22. Lefebvre, H. (1991), The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell. Massey, D. (2005), For Space, London: SAGE. May, J. and Thrift, N. (2001), ‘Introduction’, in J. May and N. Thrift (eds), Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, London: Routledge, pp. 1–43. Pain, R. (2019), ‘Chronic urban trauma: the slow violence of housing dispossession’, Urban Studies, 56 (2), 385–400. Parkes, D.N. and Thrift, N. (1975), ‘Timing space and spacing time’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 7, 651–70. Paton, K. (2014), Gentrification: A Working-Class Perspective, Farnham: Ashgate. Petrusak, J., Perry, T.E. and Hassevoort, L. (2017), ‘Somewhere to be permanent for a minute: time and space perceptions of older adult men experiencing chronic homelessness in Detroit’, Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 27 (6), 515–29. Phillips, M., Smith, D., Brooking, H. and Duer, M. (2021), ‘Re-placing displacement in gentrification studies: temporality and multi-dimensionality in rural gentrification displacement’, Geoforum, 118, 66–82. Sakızlıoğlu, B. (2014), ‘Inserting temporality into the analysis of displacement: living under the threat of displacement’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 105 (2), 206–20. Sharma, S. (2014), ‘Because the night belongs to lovers: occupying the time of precarity’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 11 (1), 5–14. Soja, E.W. (1996), Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-and-Imagined Places, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Thrift, N. (1977), ‘Time and theory in human geography: Part I’, Progress in Human Geography, 1 (1), 65–101.

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75. Transport geographies Transport is central to everyday life. While it is a system, it is also an idea, connected to imaginings of development, modernity and progress. It is unequally shared, accessed, practised and experienced; embodying a luxurious lifestyle for some, while impoverishing others. It creates connections between people and places, but also puts up barriers. For these, and many other reasons, transport is a key concern for geographers. While transport geography is a human geography subdiscipline, the boundaries that separate it from other subdisciplines and disciplines are porous. It has close links to social, cultural, economic, political and historical geography, as well as engineering, planning, economics, sociology and psychology. For decades, geographers have demonstrated how a road, a new type of fuel, an airport, or a change in speed limits reflect social, political and economic agendas, but also in turn shape them. But transport is also more than an object of geographical study. The movement of living beings, objects, policies, finance and data, are themselves a lens through which to engage with ideas about space, place and scale. As it embraces a dual role of documenting and critiquing the spatialities of transport and mobilities, contemporary transport geography is changing. Rather than providing an overview of the breadth of the subdiscipline and its historical development, this entry focuses on four themes that we believe reflect these changes. We seek to show how transport geography is at the centre of contemporary social, economic and political challenges, while also demonstrating the value of working in open-ended and open-minded ways, often at the edges of our field, continuously ‘trespassing’ across various (sub)disciplinary boundaries (Pucci and Vecchio, 2019). We highlight new directions that trespassing transport geographers can and do take, and also aim to foreground relevant scholarship by those who may not necessarily see themselves as transport geographers. This latter kind of research is proliferating, not least because diverse societal processes (political decision-making; health crises; economic relations) manifest themselves in transport and mobility in vivid ways.

The rest of the entry is organized around four themes: (1) climate breakdown; (2) technological change; (3) transport justice; and (4) freight and logistics. Inevitably, there is much overlap between these themes, and many others would have warranted similar prominence. For instance, transport geography has a long-established concern with gender relations (Pratt and Hanson, 1991), as well as a more recent one with decoloniality, reflected more widely across the discipline (Noxolo, 2017). Our aim has been to engage with, and represent, these concerns across the four themes. Since systems of transport are largely complicit in climate breakdown through carbon emissions, and impacted by the climate crisis through, for example, extreme weather events, there is much that (transport) geographers can contribute, including but also exceeding thinking on ‘mitigation’ and ‘adaptation’. From travel practices (e.g., commuting, care and tourism), to infrastructure developments (including repair and maintenance) and policy regimes, there is a need to understand and communicate the relationships between transport, emissions and weather events in ways that attend to their spatio-temporal characteristics and complex interactions with other domains including housing and energy systems. Much has been made of countries being locked into high-carbon automobility and pathways to avoid car dependence in rapidly growing cities (Cavoli, 2021). Research has successfully described the multilevel governance arrangements and decision-making that contribute to private car dominance, often at the expense of buses, trams, light rail, walking and cycling. For a period of time, the ‘peak car’ phenomenon was thought to challenge the dominance of automobility, by suggesting that travel behaviours were moving away from car dependence. Yet, Ottelin, Heinonen and Junnila (2014) found that some high-income urbanites might travel less by car in their day-to-day lives, but then fly more frequently on holiday, showing that the intersections between different types of travel (trip purpose, mode, distance) matters when thinking about emissions reductions. Beyond cities, significant questions remain about the transport options and travel practices in less densely populated areas, with differentiated impacts by age, gender and income (Zhao and Yu, 2020), and the socio-economic implica-

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tions of potential lock-in to high-carbon (and high-cost) modes in order to access essential services, employment and/or education. While road transport remains significant, not least because of its contribution to direct greenhouse gas emissions, there is space for greater attention to be paid to air and water modes too. Aviation and shipping involve a different set of challenges around governance, attribution and responsibilities, with decarbonization measures described as ‘woefully inadequate’ (Bows-Larkin, 2015, p. 681). Dominated by longstanding assumptions that aviation contributes to economic development and spatial integration, airport development and expansion continues in countries around the world. However, Tolcha, Bråthen and Holmgren (2020) have shown heterogeneous and context-specific causal relationships in countries in sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting a more complex situation. Specifically, economic development rarely benefits those on the lowest incomes; Njoya and Nikitas (2020) show an uneven distribution of benefits from aviation in South Africa, accrued and retained by wealthy, highly skilled ‘elites’. This is mirrored globally, with growing evidence that hypermobile elites generate the vast majority of aviation-related emissions. Tourism-transport remains in a complex entanglement with aviation, with the growth of low(er)-cost air travel opening up new tourism markets, but also leading to tourism becoming an important source of income for many, particularly small island communities such as those in the South Pacific and Caribbean regions. Questions thus need to be positioned at the intersection of equity, development and decarbonization, yet to date, these issues largely sit in separation. Geographers are particularly adept at dealing with and responding to complex challenges; abating transport-related emissions, and preparing for the impacts of imminent climatic events requires engagement across the spectrum of geographical subdisciplines and beyond. Transport geography has always paid close attention to technological change, reflecting the centrality of technological objects, from motorcycle engines to turnstiles, in the accomplishment of mobility (DeLyser and Greenstein, 2017; Muñoz, 2020). In the last two decades, however, the subdiscipline’s enthusiasm for (socio-technical) innovation

has increasingly coexisted with cautious, critical, and even radical perspectives on new technologies (Davidson, 2020). For example, recent work has examined the potentially detrimental societal and environmental impacts of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), as well as the ways in which the history of CAVs has been told unproblematically as a linear history of progress (Hopkins and Schwanen, 2021). Such healthy scepticism is not limited to the topic of vehicle automation. It extends to the framing of bus rapid transit as a ‘silver bullet’ of sustainable urban mobility (Wood, 2015), and to the neglect of gender, age and disability in large-scale transport infrastructure projects (Adom-Asamoah, Amoako and Adarkwa, 2020). As transport geographers increasingly engage with fields including science and technology studies, anthropology, and gender studies, the focus of transport research widens to encompass a richer understanding of technology beyond innovation. Take the example of electric vehicle (EV) development, a key aspiration of many climate mitigation initiatives. A growing body of research has contextualized EVs within processes of non-renewable resource extraction (e.g., for the manufacture of batteries and chassis), and global circulations of second-hand internal combustion cars (as fleets in wealthier locales are electrified). Increasingly, geographers scrutinize the ‘newness’ of new technologies at different spatial scales of analysis, and take seriously processes such as repair, maintenance, disposal and ruination. A more nuanced view of innovation – one that acknowledges that new technologies are not politically neutral, that they are embedded in wider and multi-directional processes of change, maintenance and waste generation, and that their impacts are both uneven and contingent – may still appear marginal within transport geography. Transport geographers whose work is orientated towards optimizing technologies, identifying the ‘best’ ones, or facilitating their adoption, remain highly, and arguably more, influential. Examples include understanding the impacts of transit-oriented development, or identifying how the built environment constrains the take-up of ridesourcing (e.g., Yu and Peng, 2019). As current research engages with the wider – political, cultural and socio-technical – contexts of Debbie Hopkins and Anna Plyushteva

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transport, it is easy to lose from view this type of work. However, it plays an important role in upholding a spatialized understanding of transport technologies, which are often framed in policy and research in universalized and abstracted terms. The socio-technical and the geospatial, just like the qualitative and the quantitative, remain complementary if not necessarily sufficiently linked, in transport geography. The third theme we turn to is transport justice. As outlined above, transport networks, technologies and policies simultaneously embody and shape social and spatial relations. As a result, the inequalities associated with transport are complex and acute. For instance, Milheiro (2021) has traced the role of transport infrastructure projects under Portuguese colonial occupation in Mozambique and Angola, with forced labour and resource extraction rationalized through discourses of modernization and development. Transport geography’s sustained concern with tracing inequalities has also produced powerful accounts of the ways in which hardship and privilege are co-produced in the domain of transport and mobility, whether in twentieth-century Luanda or twenty-first-century Toronto (Kern, 2005). The ongoing co-production of advantage and disadvantage as part of societal relations shaped by gender, race, class, age and disability, is not always rendered sufficiently visible in transport research. Empirical accounts of inequalities, such as comparisons of the travel behaviours of men and women, prescient as they are, often come up against the kinds of theoretical limitations that are better addressed in other parts of the discipline. A similar observation can be made in relation to transport geography’s treatment of space and spatial relations. On the one hand, there are the subdiscipline’s undeniable strengths in tracing the spaces of transport disadvantage, whether in refining measurements of service accessibility, making visible consumption- and surveillance-centred spaces in airports, or opposing community severance resulting from infrastructure construction. On the other hand, much of transport geography remains circumspect when it comes to relational, processual, post-structuralist, political, affective, lived and imagined notions of space and time. Even more worryingly, the power to define the most pressing transport injustices, and the ways of studying them, Debbie Hopkins and Anna Plyushteva

remains concentrated within very few geographical locations and academic institutions. As the number of exceptions grows (and with it, a more diverse set of spatial concepts and geographies of knowledge), so too will the power of transport geography to discuss and enact just mobilities. For instance, transport geography may be able to inform socially and spatially differentiated perspectives on notions such as transport affordability, or better map the interconnected mobilities of human and non-human living beings. As the body of evidence on the injustices of transport has grown, scholars have inevitably faced the challenging task of defining what a just transportation system might look like. With the climate crisis faced by our planet coming into ever-starker view, it is clear that a world where unrestricted mobility is the norm is neither possible, nor desirable. Fairness at different spatio-temporal scales – local, global, intergenerational – remains a challenge of imagination as well as implementation. While inevitably far from producing definitive answers, contemporary transport geography, with its growing epistemological and methodological pluralism, plays a key role in imagining just transport futures. Once the ‘underdog’ of transport geography (Rodrigues, 2006), there is growing interest in freight and logistics, spurred on by, for instance, rising volumes of freight, the emergence of ‘discard’ studies, and the instability of global supply chains. While inhabitants of some countries had experienced decades of seemingly easy and relatively cheap trade, a steep rise in shipping and pallet costs, too few ships to move goods, and worker crises across freight (including port workers and truck drivers) have contributed to supply chain breakdown at global, national and local scales. This is a transport issue, but also a geopolitical and economic challenge; it unites transport geographers with scholars from other subdisciplines, it connects seemingly isolated (groups of) workers and communities and speaks to nationalist politics, trade wars and political alliances. For example, Cowen (2010) uncovers a tension between territorial borders and ‘free-flowing’ trade occurring at logistical sites. New work in/on logistics brings into view the connections between scholarship on borders and abolition, war and military, security and surveillance. Critical engagement with freight,

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logistics and supply chains can include optimizing flows, identifying blockages and modelling efficiencies, as well as the everyday realities and hyper-local spaces of capitalist production. Ports have remained important sites of investigation for geographers because of their critical position as a hinge for global trade and space of intermodal exchange. Dry ports emerged in response to the (geophysical) limitations and rapid growth of seaports globally and have ignited renewed interest in their spatial evolution as a land/sea interface. The positioning, management and operation of these sites connects transport with business and management studies. As with urban consolidation centres, questions remain on viable business models, and public–private partnerships, to enable the long-term economic sustainability of these operations. At the same time, the growth in urban logistics (i.e., food and parcel deliveries) has drawn attention to labour relations/regimes and differentiated workers’ experiences in the gig economy, with time-sensitive deliveries reconfiguring the spatial flows of goods in cities. While logistics platforms have been posited as ways to improve distribution within cities under logics of efficiency, ride-hailing and food delivery companies, now operate in ‘extra-regulatory spaces of their own making’ (Leszczynski, 2020, p. 194), vastly different from the high regulation in other parts of the (freight) transport system. The four themes we outline are highly connected; smart cities innovation and urban logistics go hand in hand, and injustices are replete in mobile working lives. Similarly, extreme weather events and other consequences of climate breakdown are likely to make transport privilege and disadvantage ever-starker, while (hopefully) also encouraging, environmentally and socially responsible innovation. Crucially, thinking in terms of cross-cutting themes points to the links between the geographies of transport and political, cultural, feminist, more-than-human geographies. While in-depth understandings of individual transport modes and their users in particular locales remain as relevant as ever, contemporary transport geography has greater ambitions. The need to develop novel methods, and to use them in thoughtful new ways, has become a much-debated concern

in transport geography. We hope that the work of scholars who traverse the qualitative/quantitative divide, push the boundaries of geospatial techniques (Kwan and Ding, 2008), and devise new methods of engaging with diverse publics will inspire and amplify imaginative transport geographies. Working at the edges of themes and disciplines, and across methodological and geographical boundaries, is becoming increasingly important if researchers are to tackle the challenges posed by transport. The future of transport is as exciting as it is important, and geographers have key roles to play in providing spatially sensitive analyses of contemporary mobile lives. Debbie Hopkins and Anna Plyushteva

References and selected further reading Adom-Asamoah, G., Amoako, C. and Adarkwa, K.K. (2020). Gender disparities in rural accessibility and mobility in Ghana. Case Studies on Transport Policy, 8 (1), 49–58. Bows-Larkin, A. (2015). All adrift: aviation, shipping and climate change policy. Climate Policy, 15 (6), 681–702. Cavoli, C. (2021). Accelerating sustainable mobility and land-use transitions in rapidly growing cities: identifying common patterns and enabling factors. Journal of Transport Geography, 94, Article 103093. Cowen, D. (2010). A geography of logistics: market authority and the security of supply chains. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 100 (3), 600–620. Davidson, A.C. (2020). Radical mobilities. Progress in Human Geography, 45 (1), 25–48. DeLyser, D. and Greenstein, P. (2017). The devotions of restoration: materiality, enthusiasm, and making three ‘Indian motocycles’ like new. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107 (6), 1461–78. Hopkins, D. and Schwanen, T. (2021). Talking about automated vehicles: what do levels of automation do? Technology in Society, 64, Article 101488. Kern, L. (2005). In place and at home in the city: connecting privilege, safety and belonging for women in Toronto. Gender, Place & Culture, 12 (3), 357–77. Kwan, M-P. and Ding, G. (2008). Geo-narrative: extending geographic information systems for narrative analysis in qualitative and mixed

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392  Concise encyclopedia of human geography method research. The Professional Geographer, 60 (4), 443–65. Leszczynski, A. (2020). Glitchy vignettes of platform urbanism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38 (2), 189–208. Milheiro, A.V. (2021). Colonial landscapes in former Portuguese southern Africa: a brief historiographical analysis based on the colonial transport networks. African Geographical Review, 40 (3), 214–30. Muñoz, D. (2020). An uncomfortable turnstile: bodily exclusion and boarding practices in a public transport system. Emotion, Space & Society, 34, Article 100652. Njoya, E.T. and Nikitas, A. (2020). The role of air transport in employment creation and inclusive growth in the Global South: the case of South Africa. Journal of Transport Geography, 85, Article 102738. Noxolo, P. (2017). Introduction: decolonising geographical knowledge in a colonised and re-colonising postcolonial world. Area, 49 (3), 317–19. Ottelin, J., Heinonen, J. and Junnila, S. (2014). Greenhouse gas emissions from flying can offset the gain from reduced driving in dense urban areas. Journal of Transport Geography, 41, 1–9. Pratt, G. and Hanson, S. (1991). On the links between home and work: family-household

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strategies in a buoyant labour market. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 15 (1), 55–74. Pucci, P. and Vecchio, G. (2019). Trespassing for mobilities: operational directions for addressing mobile lives. Journal of Transport Geography, 8, Article 102536. Rodrigues, J.-P. (2006). Transport geography should follow the freight. Journal of Transport Geography, 14 (5), 386–8. Tolcha, T.D., Bråthen, S. and Holmgren, J. (2020). Air transport demand and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa: direction of causality. Journal of Transport Geography, 86, Article 102771. Wood, A. (2015). The politics of policy circulation: unpacking the relationship between South African and South American cities in the adoption of bus rapid transit. Antipode, 47 (4), 1062–79. Yu, H. and Peng, Z.-R (2019). Exploring the spatial variation of ridesourcing demand and its relationship to built environment and socioeconomic factors with the geographically weighted Poisson regression. Journal of Transport Geography, 75, 147–63. Zhao, P. and Yu, Z. (2020). Investigating mobility in rural areas of China: features, equity and factors. Transport Policy, 94, 66–77.

76. Uneven development Within human geography, uneven development refers to a body of theory closely associated with Marxist geography, and the work of Neil Smith and David Harvey in particular, which tries to explain the fact that ‘societal development does not take place everywhere at the same speed or in the same direction’ (Smith, 1982, p. 142). Instead of conceptualizing this as inevitable, natural, or simply self-evident, the theory suggests it is specifically capitalist imperatives that shape those patterns of unevenness specific to capitalist society; moreover, this unevenness is not merely a by-product of the system, but essential to its working. Uneven development is thus a fundamental part of a wider critique of the geographical workings of capitalism. is not merely a by-product of the system, but essential to its working. Uneven development is thus a fundamental part of a wider critique of the geographical workings of capitalism. First published in 1984, Smith’s (2010) Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space remains one of the most influential attempts at merging geographical and Marxist analyses to the benefit of both. The book explores a series of contradictory relations, where the tension between and within opposing tendencies creates an overall movement that is not reducible to either. This enables a conception of difference within a framework of similarity (or vice versa), where varying trajectories of ‘development’ and ‘underdevelopment’, affluence and poverty, privilege and exploitation, are understood as always related in unstable ways. The principal contradiction that animates Smith’s theory is that between equalization and differentiation. On the one hand, capitalism attempts to overcome all barriers (whether ‘natural’, cultural, technological, etc.) to expand the remit of profitability, and this can appear as a forever-unrolling yet never-complete convergence (for example, in the global ubiquity of certain products, the generalization of the wage-relation and the sanctity of private property). This seems to conform to the idea of a ‘shrinking world’, or a tendency towards equalization. At the same time, however, profitability relies everywhere on differentiation (for example, in the distinctions between boss and worker,

urban manufacturing and rural agriculture, where products are made and where they are bought by consumers). The first tendency contains within it its opposite, and the two are never reconciled. The expansion of capitalist relations simultaneously expands the differences on which those relations depend. Smith’s innovation was to extrapolate from these foundations the basis of a theory that would help to explain the production of space under capitalism as therefore fundamentally uneven. In this sense, ‘uneven development is the concrete manifestation of the production of space under capitalism’ (Smith, 2010, p. 106). A second contradiction is borrowed from David Harvey’s (2006b) The Limits to Capital – namely, that between fixity and mobility. Capital must be fixed in place to produce surplus value but must also move to remain profitable. To use an example, the small village of Coatbridge in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, experienced a population increase from 2000 to 22 000 in the four decades after 1831; four decades in which it was dramatically transformed into an industrial town (Checkland and Checkland, 1989, p. 94). By the late nineteenth century, the landscape would have been barely recognizable to a traveller from 50 years prior, where ‘the flames of its furnaces cast on the midnight sky a glow as if of some vast conflagration’ (Groome, 1885, p. 273). In this instance, ‘fixed capital’ was embedded in a vast array of railway lines, collieries, brickworks, furnaces, ironworks and housing for the rapidly growing labour force; in short, the landscape necessary to produce immense profit in that context. But that extent of fixity becomes a problem when profitability declines or is outpaced by newer development elsewhere. The ‘anarchy of competition proves to be the Achilles’ heel of capital. What was once a dynamic built environment for production, at the cutting edge of expansion, now demonstrates its inertia; sporadic sometimes brutal devaluation takes place’ (Smith, 2010, p. 178). To remain profitable, capital moves, and so landscapes that were once at the forefront of profitability suffer acutely from the evacuation of investment (Coatbridge, by 2012, had several districts in the 15 per cent most deprived wards in Scotland). The cruelty of the dynamic of uneven development is the double-edged sword of labour exploitation in one era (profitability), unemployment in the

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next (devaluation), with differentiation being common to both. ‘[T]he resultant landscapes scream out for the resolution of social inequality’ (ibid., p. 243). Smith (2010) deploys the idea of a ‘see-saw’ of uneven development to illustrate the way that capital moves from place to place to overcome barriers to profitability. This dynamic can be observed at multiple scales: internationally, in the shift of manufacturing following deindustrialization in some countries and industrialization in others; nationally, in the clustering of investment and wealth in some regions and unemployment and poverty in others; and at the urban scale, in the renewed investment in some neighbourhoods and the continued disinvestment in others. The appeal of the ‘see-saw’ metaphor is both its connection to inequality – akin to Marx’s (1990, p. 777) assertion that capital ‘grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many’ – and its dynamism. What swings up can also swing down: the movement of capital is never permanent, in part because ‘disinvestment and underdevelopment create the opportunity for their opposite’ (Smith, 2011, p. 263) through, for example, cheaper land, cheaper (and politically weaker) labour, more acquiescent regulation in areas more desperate for investment, and so on. As Gilmore (2007, p. 65) notes, ‘surplus land lies in the nexus of these contradictory tendencies’ at the low-ebb of disinvestment, but ‘surplus land is not empty land’ (p. 69), for it brings with it a ‘surplus population’, where the status of surplus is, in both regards, a measure of unprofitability that renders that which it labels ripe for exploitation once again. Crucially, whilst capital may be thought of as ‘footloose’ in this regard, chasing lowest costs and highest profits wherever they may be found, this movement is always curtailed and shaped by already existing geographical inequalities. Uneven development shows that it is a fallacy to believe that everywhere can become rich or ‘developed’, though a fallacy that performs an important mythical justification for capitalism. The ‘see-saw’ never swings freely, because (to build on the metaphor) the land on which it lies is not flat, nor are its players equally weighted. The theory is not deterministic in this sense. It bequeaths us an understanding of the geography of capitalism as dynamically unstable, and within Hamish Kallin

this instability are a myriad of relations that are contested. For Smith, this was clearest at the urban scale, where it dovetails with his work on gentrification (Smith, 1982). Conceptualized as a ‘back to the city movement by capital, not people’ (Smith, 1979), gentrification was, in Smith’s eyes, fundamentally about a shift in where profit could be made that exemplified the ‘see-saw’ of uneven development. Inner-city neighbourhoods that had suffered waves of disinvestment were ripe for reinvestment precisely because they were devalued: land was cheap, and soon it would not be. This is the shifting fate of urban land that Smith (1979) alludes to with his ‘rent gap’ model, where disinvestment and reinvestment are related not merely because one follows the other, but because the former makes the latter profitable. Gentrification is thus not only a process that creates uneven geographies (architecturally, financially, socially), but also relies on uneven geographies (you cannot speculate on land in a flat world, nor profit from ownership in an equal city). The theory of uneven development therefore helps to explain gentrification within a wider dynamic: capitalism has – and, perhaps less opaquely, capitalists have – always exploited the unevenness of the world. Gentrification is just one manifestation of uneven development, even if it is the scale at which this ‘see-saw’ is easiest to empirically observe (Smith, 2010). In recent years, the theme of uneven development in relation to gentrification research has received renewed attention due to the increased emphasis on decentring the experience of cities in the Global North. In their work on global gentrifications (in plural to denote the plurality of the concept), Lees, Shin and López-Morales (2015, 2016) make it clear that gentrification as it occurs across the world is a differentiated process – it does not happen the same way everywhere – that differentiates – it exacerbates inequality by building a landscape in its image. The connection between the gentrification debates and uneven development helps to explain the switch of capital into real estate and into previously disinvested parts of the city (a switch that, as Lees et al. attest, is evident across the world). Just as crucially, it allows Smith’s (2002) assertion that gentrification has become a ‘generalized’ strategy of capital accumulation to be critically adopted without

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assuming that this implies that all of space will gentrify, or that all instances of gentrification will be similar. Rereading Smith’s (1982, 2010) work on uneven development attests to the fact that, theoretically speaking, gentrification cannot become ‘total’ or occur universally in the same way, because it is hardwired into a set of processes where unevenness is the watchword. David Harvey has addressed similar themes to Smith in ways that are compatible, albeit not synonymous. Curiously, Harvey (2006a) uses the phrase ‘uneven geographical development’ to denote what is, for all intents and purposes, ‘uneven development’. This functions as an umbrella term that holds together many of Harvey’s headline concepts. ‘Creative destruction’ (the erasure of no-longer-profitable assets to allow room for renewed growth) can be seen as the point at which the see-saw swings most violently, whilst both ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (the commodification of previously decommodified realms of life) and the ‘spatial fix’ (capital’s attempt to solve crises by shifting investment to new areas) can be seen as crucial points that animate the wider dynamic of movement that typifies uneven development. In this complex net of ideas (which I have summarized here with brutal simplicity), we can trace a line of argumentation that endures from the original publication of The Limits to Capital (Harvey, 2006b) in 1982 onwards, through which the intellectual project of David Harvey (and Marxist geography more broadly) has been to inject space into a Marxist theory of capital as much as vice versa: to argue, in other words, that we cannot properly understand (or critique) capitalism unless we understand its spatiality. In this sense, it is possible to look at the work of uneven development as one of fleshing out Lefebvre’s (1976) contention that capitalism survives by producing space: to which we can add that capitalism survives by producing an uneven space, within which there is always room for the reproduction of new spaces. Uneven development was also central to the work of Doreen Massey (1984, 1988) around the same time that Smith’s book first appeared, though they never worked to combine their insights. Massey (1988, p. 250) starts from a similar standpoint, asserting that ‘uneven development must be conceptualised in terms of the basic building blocks of

(in this case, capitalist) society’ but, unlike Smith, her work is more empirical – based in a study of regional shifts in a deindustrializing Britain – and less concerned with a general theory of capitalism (which means, superficially speaking, it can appear as ‘dated’ to the contemporary reader). Massey emphasizes that the class relation is also always a spatial relation, one that changes as forms of production change. The hierarchy of control within relations of employment is therefore spatial, with very real political implications for collective bargaining power (it tends to be easier to leverage power on your employer if they are nearby and, crucially, if you know who and where they are). The notion of a spatial hierarchy of control is, as Massey shows, social as well as economic, gendered as well as classed, to the degree that managerial authority is still overwhelmingly masculine authority (Massey, 1994). Crucially, these power relationships are themselves ‘permanent’ functions of capitalism – as Maria Mies (2014, p. 76) puts it, ‘in a contradictory and exploitative relationship, the privileges of the exploiters can never become the privileges of all’ – though they can be mitigated to a certain degree by state regulation, industrial policy, workers’ rights, zoning laws, and so on (the specificities of which are fought over, and do not simply arise). In many ways, the spatial hallmark of neoliberalism has been an abandonment of these powers, exacerbating the resultant patterns of unevenness whilst highlighting how contested these rhythms of de- and reinvestment can be. Unsurprisingly, uneven development is also a recurrent motif in critical development geography. Here there are other Marxian roots to trace, through the avowedly radical geography that blossomed in the 1960s, where a fierce eye was cast on imperialism and ‘underdevelopment’ in the so-called Third World. As Lawson (2007) shows, this legacy was inherited, fused with feminist and post-colonial approaches in the decades that followed and tempered by post-structuralist critique. It survives in work that conceptualizes ‘big-D’ Development – the drive towards economic growth, a project of ‘catching up’ with the affluent world – as existing in relation to the ‘little-d’ development of capitalism itself ‘as geographically uneven but spatially interconnected processes of creation and destruction’ (Hart, 2009, p. 119). For Hamish Kallin

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Mawdsley and Taggart (2022), the D/d dialectic has entered a new stage in the years since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, becoming ever more tightly intertwined. The emergence of the ‘de-risking state’ means that Development policy is increasingly fixated on creating investable assets above all else, a trend most visible in the Global South (though in many ways mirroring neoliberal statecraft more broadly). In between global gentrifications and critical development scholarship, there is a clear emphasis on decolonizing the ideas themselves, and in this sense the importance of uneven development is conceptually very clear: it could become a vital tool for a de-essentialized, decentred political economy. A fully realized theory of uneven development is unlikely ever to be complete. David Harvey’s (2006a) attempt at sketching its outlines confirms this, for the factors influencing why some places develop differently are always going to be contextually evolving. This multiplicity is clearer still when bearing in mind the similar-but-different ways in which Doreen Massey and critical development scholars have used the phrase. Neil Smith’s formulation acts as an influential bedrock because, above all else, it destabilizes essentialist notions of spatial difference. Rather than assume that the fate and characteristics of a given area (and, of course, the people who live there) can be explained within that area, uneven development frames the production of specific places within the broader production of space under capitalism. This evokes, in its most visceral form, histories of colonial exploitation, where the relation between development and underdevelopment was baked into imperial policy, exploiting and producing racist divisions (Rodney, 2018). As Smith and others have shown, these kinds of spatial inequalities were not an abhorrent error of historical capitalism, but integral to its survival as a system. And they remain so. Hamish Kallin

Hamish Kallin

References and selected further reading Checkland, O. and S. Checkland (1989), Industry and Ethos: Scotland 1832–1914, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gilmore, R.W. (2007), Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Groome, F.H. (ed.) (1885), Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland: A Survey of Scottish Topography, Statistical, Biographical, and Historical, Edinburgh: Thomas C. Jack. Hart, G. (2009), ‘D/developments after the meltdown’, Antipode, 41 (S1), 117–41. Harvey, D. (2006a), Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Development, London: Verso. Harvey, D. (2006b), The Limits to Capital, London: Verso. Lawson, V.A. (2007), Making Development Geography, New York: Routledge. Lees, L., H.B. Shin and E. López-Morales (eds) (2015), Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement, Bristol: Policy Press. Lees, L., H.B. Shin and E. López-Morales (2016), Planetary Gentrification, Cambridge: Polity Press. Lefebvre, H. (1976), The Survival of Capitalism, London: Allison & Busby. Marx, K. (1990), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, London: Penguin Books. Massey, D. (1984), Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production, London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Massey, D. (1988), ‘Uneven development: social change and spatial divisions of labour’, in D. Massey and J. Allen (eds), Uneven Re-Development: Cities and Regions in Transition, London: Hodder & Stoughton, pp. 250–76. Massey, D. (1994), Space, Place and Gender, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mawdsley, E. and J. Taggart (2022), ‘Rethinking d/ Development’, Progress in Human Geography, 46 (1), 3–20. Mies, M. (2014), Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, London: Zed Books. Rodney, W. (2018), How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, New York: Verso. Smith, N. (1979), ‘Toward a theory of gentrification: a back to the city movement by capital,

Uneven development  397 not people’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 45 (4), 538–48. Smith, N. (1982), ‘Gentrification and uneven development’, Economic Geography, 58 (2), 139–55. Smith, N. (2002), ‘New urbanism, new globalism: gentrification as global urban strategy’,

Antipode, 34 (3), 427–50. Smith, N. (2010), Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, London: Verso. Smith, N. (2011), ‘Uneven development redux’, New Political Economy, 16 (2), 261–5.

Hamish Kallin

77. Urban geographies The politician and philosopher Cicero used the term plebs urbana to refer to a subset of Ancient Rome’s population. These people were Roman citizens without political status, but not slaves or foreigners. Their defining feature was that they resided in imperial Rome, urbana being a geographical designation. Their rough equivalents in the modern city are middle-class urban professionals. Since the Romans started differentiating inhabitants in this way, we have used the word ‘urban’ to identify an association with ‘the city’. The word’s usage declined with the fall of Rome, only again becoming part of the vernacular in the early 1800s. At this time, some European societies witnessed the rapid growth of large industrial cities, places like London and Paris. With this change came the necessity to designate the innumerable things within these societies that were related to, and defined by, ‘the city’. So, what kinds of things are related to the city? The answer to this question has changed over time, with different concepts being used to explain the relationship and the changing geographies of cities, making a definitive statement hard to formulate. The term ‘urban’ does not therefore refer to a steady set of things that are related to cities. Rather, it is better understood as an ill-defined descriptor of a changing set of objects and processes that have their genesis within cities. My objective here is to trace forward this project and show how current scholarship on ‘the urban’ struggles with a similar, but much more geographically complex, problem to that which faced the status-conscious Romans. Although reading contemporary urban geography might suggest the need for a wholesale transformation about how we think about the urban, much of our work is still enmeshed with figuring out just what processes are related to a city (e.g., New York City) or cities in general. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many writers drew a sharp contrast between life within the metropolis and that in the rural surrounds. Jean-Jacques Rousseau would famously associate large European cities with a degrading of human life. Thomas Jefferson’s preferred vision for his embryonic American republic was agrarian, based on an ideal of small-holder farmers and country

villages. This anti-urban thesis found many homes and would take a variety of forms. But despite protestations, by the late nineteenth century, urban life had become well established, attracting the interest of pioneering late nineteenth-century German social theorists and, a little later, a group of sociologists working in Chicago. Like many other European nations around the turn of the twentieth century, Germany was experiencing wholesale social changes as it became an industrial urbanizing nation. In 1887, Ferdinand Tonnies would theorize this as a transformation in human existence, Germany moving from somewhere defined by Gemeinschaft (community) to Gesellschaft (society). Cities, Tonnies argued, were related to the rise of new human relations, one defined by the absence of previously critical social interdependences: ‘human Gesellschaft (society) is conceived as mere coexistence of people independent of each other’ (Tonnies, [1887] 1955, p. 88). Tonnies went on to claim that the city is a home of ‘artificial’ forms of human life. He associated this artifice with the rise of Germany’s capitalist economy, where money mediated human relations and laws and contracts formed the basis of social regulation. Georg Simmel, fellow German sociologist, would echo many of Tonnies’ sentiments, arguing that metropolitan cities had brought into being a new human consciousness. Simmel’s ([1903] 2013) central thesis remains commonsensical today. He argued that living in a big city forced its inhabitants to adopt an urban mentality, what he called a blasé attitude. City dwellers, Simmel insisted, were faced with so much mental stimulation that they shut down parts of their sensory experience. This involved not just a dulling of inputs, but also a qualitative shift. Simmel’s city dweller was a rational and calculating character who stood in contrast to the preceding rural populace: ‘Thereby the essential intellectualistic character of the mental life of the metropolis becomes intelligible as over against that of the small town which rests more on feelings and emotional relationships’ (Simmel, [1903] 2013, p. 26). This intellectual character is familiar to anyone who has ever walked past a homeless person in a large city. We all feel empathy for that person, and perhaps a strong desire to assist, but our objective-driven lives and transactional social interactions compel us to

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ward off the emotional. We keep on walking and become examples of Simmel’s blasé attitude. Across the Atlantic, a group of groundbreaking Chicago-based sociologists and theorists would further develop these insights. Louis Wirth’s 1938 seminal essay, ‘Urbanism as a way of life’, starts with the following statement: Just as the beginning of Western civilization is marked by the permanent settlement of formerly nomadic peoples in the Mediterranean basin, so the beginning of what is distinctively modern in our civilization is best signalized by the growth of great cities. Nowhere has mankind been farther removed from organic nature than under the conditions of life characteristic of great cities. (Wirth, [1938] 2013, p. 32)

Wirth argued that urban life was not restricted to cities. It had breached the city’s boundaries, making the urban–rural distinction more of a heuristic than empirical fact. This sociological definition of the urban shifted emphasis away from defining ideas like agglomeration and density. Instead, Wirth argued, we had to look to ‘that cumulative accentuation of the characteristics distinctive of the mode of life which is associated with the growth of cities’ (ibid., p. 38). These characteristics could not be boiled down to the features of industrialization or capitalism. Urbanization had its own identity, characterized by superficiality, anonymity and transitory relations. Wirth also described urban life as segmented and utilitarian, with everyone going about their daily tasks largely regardless of what others around them are doing. Despite living cheek by jowl, the urbanite is thus fully engaged in the competitions of the city – for space, jobs, wealth. The city’s proximities and heterogeneity are converted into segregation and individuation. Wirth finishes his essay by reflecting on the city’s social life. He writes about the city dweller’s need to join voluntary organizations in order to combat the lack of power individuals can have. Collective organization is therefore associated with the pressures individuals face in the city; new ‘urban’ sociological phenomena resulting from the novel geographical environment. This interpretation opens up the prospect of urban societies being ecological in character. In other

words, if cities have produced a particular type of individual who begins to coordinate their activities and behaviors in systematic ways, we might find that the city functions in a coordinated manner. It was Wirth’s Chicago school colleague, Ernest Burgess, who would crystalize this idea. Burgess’s concentric zone model (1925) turned a set of empirical observations about 1920s’ Chicago into a theoretical abstraction. Burgess explained the city as an urban system, driven by the particularities of its human ecology. Each part of the city was geographically related to others. The various functioning parts of the city – administration, industrial production, cheap and expensive housing – were theorized as being held together by urban ecological forces. This was a profoundly influential idea and extended the meaning of ‘the urban’. While sociologists like Simmel identified the city with a particular type of person and/or consciousness, Burgess introduced the idea of the city being shaped by its own distinctive ecological forces. The idea would influence subsequent urban scholarship, including Homer Hoyt’s sectorial models and Harris and Ullman’s multi-nuclei model. Despite the prominence of Burgess’s work, it received a great deal of scrutiny and criticism. At the time of its publication, some argued that the model was not an ‘urban’ model in any meaningful sense. Rather, it was only an abstraction based on a particular American city (i.e., Chicago) at a certain point of economic development (i.e., industrialization). Later criticisms would be aimed squarely at the apolitical nature of Burgess’s theory. Marxist theorists argued that we must look at the city’s geographies through the lens of social relations, not ecology. For Marxists, theorizing the city as an ecological entity willfully ignored its role in a system of class-based exploitation. During geography’s radical turn in the late 1970s, geographer David Harvey would attempt to theorize the urban using insights from Marx’s critique of capitalism. Harvey wrote: ‘I hang my interpretation of the urban process on the twin themes of accumulation and class struggle’ (1978, p. 101; original emphasis). Harvey went on to to explain how cities are shaped by the crises of accumulation that inevitably afflict capitalism. The urban, for Harvey, was a geographical manifestation Mark Davidson

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of capitalism’s ongoing accumulation and related attempts to resolve the associated contradictions. For example, Harvey identified city (re)development with a need to put capitalist surplus to work. In other words, as a long-term investment requiring significant capital expenditures, the city was theorized as a fantastic vehicle for quenching capitalism’s insatiable thirst for growth. Fellow Marxist Henri Lefebvre ([1970] 2003) would share this perspective, but he also argued that urbanization itself had become a mode of production. Cities, Lefebvre explained, are manifestations of an urbanized economic system: ‘An urban society is a society that results from a process of complete urbanization… Here, I use the term “urban society” to refer to the society that results from industrialization, which is a process of domination that absorbs agricultural production’ (ibid., pp. 1–2; original emphasis). This is a profound shift in how the urban has been traditionally understood. For Lefebvre was arguing that urbanization had made the whole planet an urban place, even outside of cities. He explained that although not everyone lived in cities, all now had an urban way of life. A life defined by industrial production, alienation, market exchange and class struggle. The idea of ‘the urban’ had therefore shifted from something related to the geographically definable city and been recast as a set of processes and problems that originated in cities (i.e., nineteenth-century industrial cities) but which had now become a globally dominant social system. This conclusion led Lefebvre to rethink a distinction that had been critical to the idea of ‘the urban’: the urban–rural divide. Lefebvre argued this had become a redundant distinction. Rural life, even when lived in apparently rural spaces, had become dominated by urban processes. Green and bucolic landscapes had been folded into the industrial process and drawn into a distinctly urban class struggle: ‘From this moment on, the city would no longer appear as an urban island in a rural ocean, it would no longer seem a paradox, a monster, a hell or heaven that contrasted sharply with village or country life’ (ibid., p. 13). Recently, much has been made of Lefebvre’s re-reading of ‘the urban’. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid have sought to develop Lefebvre’s interpretation via the concept of ‘planetary urbanization’. Mark Davidson

A central goal of their project has been to ‘cast doubt upon established understandings of the urban as a bounded, nodal and relatively self-enclosed socio-spatial condition’ (Brenner, 2014, p. 15). If Lefebvre was looking to untie the connection of ‘the urban’ to ‘the city’, Brenner and Schmid (2015) attempt a complete severing. Planetary urbanization is described as a condition afflicting every inch of the planet. A world of what they call ‘generalized urbanization’ (p. 155) erases the association between ‘the urban’ and any discrete geographical entity. There is no ‘there’ for the urban to be associated with. What we are left with is a varying global fabric of urbanization with its constitutive processes forming an uneven geography of omnipotence. For Brenner and Schmid (2015), there are no longer zones outside of urbanized capitalism; everywhere has become hooked into the machinations of capital accumulation. Any distinction between the town and country is therefore redundant, since both landscapes are deeply integrated into the urbanized capitalism Lefebvre foresaw. By extension, this means that all social relations are urban, making the farm worker just another urban proletarian. This unmooring of the urban from the city has not gone unchallenged. Some have pushed back against the idea that urban processes are now somehow unconnected to the defined geographical spaces we matter-of-factly call cities. Walker (2015) has argued that we can theorize the urban as both a process (like ‘planetary urbanization’) and an object (like Boston, Massachusetts). Walker’s key argument is that we can identify the urban with both a geographical object (i.e., cities with political boundaries) and a set of associated processes whose influences extend beyond, and are not limited by, this object. For example, Davidson and Iveson (2015) argue that the term ‘London’ refers to a material place (i.e., object with identifiable boundaries) that contains and emanates a variety of socio-spatial processes (i.e., urbanization), although the latter, which is often expressed as the growing influence of ‘London’ in other places, should not be conflated with any loss in geographical distinctions. More and more of life on earth may well be bound up with urban processes but that does not mean there are no non-urban spaces left. Others have pointed out that as definable objects, cities continue to be distinctive

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geographical phenomena. Scott and Storper (2015) attempt to reground urban theory in two core processes: ‘the dynamics of agglomeration/polarization, and the unfolding of an associated nexus of locations, land uses and human interactions’ (p. 1). Here cities are understood as material agglomerations – of people and buildings – that organize themselves in accordance with changing economic conditions. For Scott and Storper, this means there are still distinctive qualities of the urban environment requiring particular types of theoretical and empirical scrutiny. The idea that we can disassociate ‘the urban’ from ‘the city’ is firmly rejected. We should, Scott and Storper argue, instead be in search of explanations about how productive activities (i.e., the economy) and human life ‘unfold into dense, internally variegated webs of interacting land uses, locations and allied institutional/political arrangements’ (p. 10). This defense of ‘the urban’ as relating cities therefore leads Scott and Storper (2015) to argue for generalizing forms of urban theory that attempt to explain the city’s common geographies. Post-colonial geographer Jennifer Robinson (2016) has pushed back against the universalizing tendencies within all types of urban scholarship, rejecting both planetary urbanization (Brenner and Schmid, 2015) and the search for core urban processes suggested by Scott and Storper (2015). Robinson’s proposed alternative is to theorize cities as singular manifestations of a varying urban process, the key idea being that we should be seeing multiple urbans relating to multiple types of cities. In this post-colonial framework, urban theory becomes a more modest intellectual exercise. It cannot, Robinson (2016) suggests, be wrapped up in an unachievable effort to explain common elements of all cities. Rather, the urban – and thus urban theory – is always particular to the city where it resides. This post-colonial approach has been notable for its importing of new concepts into urban geography. McFarlane (2018) proposes the idea of ‘fragments’ to understand the particularities and complexities of ‘the urban’. Since there can only be multiple urbans, existing and emanating from multiple cities, McFarlane argues we must adopt ‘a modest and experimental style of knowing and acting in the world’ (p. 1010). If there is something

identifiable as ‘urban’ in a world of different cities, McFarlane argues we can only know about a small part of it. The task of the urban theorist is to provide partial insights into the innumerable ways that cities relate. Jazeel (2019) takes this one step further by rejecting even modest attempts to understand ‘the urban’ across multiple instances. He argues that this theoretical approach is associated with an ‘intellectual culture of subsumption that reduces examples and cases to exchangeable instances’ (p. 7). Instead of subsuming the uniqueness of cities – that is, linking particularistic understandings to some general notion of ‘the urban’ – we must think in pure singularities. Common nouns are therefore irreversibly replaced by proper nouns. Singular theories for singular places. These developments in urban thinking amongst geographers amount to a resurgence of interest in urban theory, and a rethinking of how ‘the urban’ can be understood as relating to cities. Returning to the example of ancient Rome can give a sense of where this debate is currently. In 1917, classicist Ellis Schnabel wrote about how the establishment of Rome served to transform social and political relations in the Roman Empire: ‘the significant change in Rome was the one which transformed, by degrees, the old rural Republic into a metropolis of wealth that changed the de jure political equality into a de facto social inferiority, that made the old plebs rustica a plebs urbana’ (p. 162). As imperial power shifted into Rome itself, so social class became ever-more urban in character, the city making Roman society definitely urban. We can draw a line of connection from Schnabel’s observations to current urban theory debates. As cities have extended their number, size and reach, their powers of ‘world-making’ (Amin and Thrift, 2017) have greatly increased. All this makes the contemporary problem of understanding ‘the urban’ more complicated. The making of the Roman Empire into an urban society was limited by the scale and scope of Rome’s influence. But today global connectivity and various types of interdependences render cities a much more powerful and geographically pervasive force. If you were sat atop Hadrian’s Wall on the northern edge of the Roman Empire in 122 CE, the world-making powers of Rome would have seemed extremely weak or likely Mark Davidson

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non-existent. Today, if your smartphone has a good signal, you will find yourself suspended in a vast network of intersecting ‘urban’ processes emanating from a huge range of cities. Your choice of playlist might be shaped by group-thought in Palo Alto, California, and your views on political issues nudged by the intellectual climate in North London or Brooklyn, for example. It has become the task of the urban geographer to try to understand how these geographical forces – many of which could only ever be generated in and by ‘the city’ – come together to shape our individual and collective existence. New theoretical advances will be required to meet the challenge of understanding a very old problem. Mark Davidson

References and selected further reading Amin, A. and Thrift, N. (2017). Seeing Like a City. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Brenner, N. (2014). Urban theory without an outside. In N. Brenner (ed.), Implosions/ Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (pp. 14–35). Berlin: JOVIS. Brenner, N. and Schmid, C. (2015). Towards a new epistemology of the urban? City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action, 19 (2–3), 151–82. Burgess, E.W. (1925). The growth of the city: an introduction to a research project. In R.E. Park, E.W. Burgess and R.D. McKenzie (eds), The City (pp. 47–62). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Davidson, M. and Iveson, K. (2015). Beyond city limits: a conceptual and political defense of

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‘the city’ as an anchoring concept for critical urban theory. City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action, 19 (5), 646–64. Harvey, D. (1978). The urban process under capitalism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2 (1–3), 101–31. Jazeel, T. (2019). Singularity: a manifesto for incomparable geographies. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 40 (1), 5–21. Lefebvre, H. ([1970] 2003). The Urban Revolution. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. McFarlane, C. (2018). Fragment urbanism: politics at the margins of the city. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36 (6), 1007–25. Robinson, J. (2016). Thinking cities through elsewhere: comparative tactics for a more global urban studies. Progress in Human Geography, 40 (1), 3–29. Schnabel, E. (1917). The plebs urbana in Rome: a phase of social conditions in the later years of the Republic. The Classical Weekly, 10 (21), 161–6. Scott, A. and Storper, M. (2015). The nature of cities: the scope and limits of urban theory. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39 (1), 1–15. Simmel, G. ([1903] 2013). The metropolis and mental life. In J. Lin and C. Mele (eds) (2013), The Urban Sociology Reader (pp. 23–31). London: Routledge. Tonnies, F. ([1887] 1955). Community and Society (Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft). Translated by Charles Loomis. London: Routledge. Walker, R. (2015). Building a better theory of the urban: a response to ‘Towards a new epistemology of the urban?’. City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action, 19 (2–3), 183–91. Wirth, L. ([1938] 2013). Urbanism as a way of life. In J. Lin and C. Mele (eds) (2013), The Urban Sociology Reader (pp. 32–41). London: Routledge.

78. Young people Introduction This entry focuses on young people. The terminology used to describe younger members of the population varies between geographical location, age categories and sometimes even cultural conventions and norms. However, the term generally refers to those under the age of 25 years. Most often, the term young people refers to a broad spectrum of ages that includes children (under the age of 18 years) and youth (aged 15–24 years) as defined in UN legislation, but also encompasses younger people referred to as infants, young children, adolescents and teenagers. The fluidity of terminology is reflective of the diversity of social and cultural expectations and attempts to categorize younger people across different contexts, continents and cultures. The inclusion of children and youth, herein young people, in geographical research as significant contributors for understanding social-spatial processes in everyday life, locally and globally, was cemented through the first editorial in the first issue of the journal Children’s Geographies in 2003 (Editors, 2003). Prior to this, the early inclusion of young people in geographical research initially emerged from the position of environmental psychology, exploring the mapping abilities of children from a developmental perspective. These early studies, mostly carried out by North American geographers such as James Blaut, Reginald Golledge and Mark Blades, combined a biological perspective of child development rooted in Piagetian psychology, with a social and environmental perspective to influence education and understand how children’s spatial cognition develops. However, by the late 1980s and 1990s, growing interest in rectifying the imbalance of perspectives to include all people’s voices and experiences in geography, regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and age, resulted in feminist and post-structuralist researchers advocating for the inclusion of young people as human ‘beings’ in their own right. Drawing on new theoretical advances within the sociology of childhood, positioning young people as social actors and societal contributors, despite structural constraints imposed,

and an increasing body of work exploring children’s engagements with space, place and environment, resulted in a critical mass that repositioned young people as important social actors in their own right, rather than subsumed within families as human ‘becomings’. A series of important texts contributed to cementing young people’s geographies through a social approach (Aitken, 2001; Holloway and Valentine, 2000; Skelton and Valentine, 1998). This shift in perspective resulted in less attention placed on biological approaches to childhood and youth, and concentrating rather on considering young people themselves and understanding their lifeworlds. It is important to recognize that young people’s contributions to geography have gone beyond understanding the micro-geographies of their lives to consider their connections with institutions – for example, through education and childcare and their relationships with others including families and communities. Such connections influence social life in multiple directions, with, for example, young people impacting and reshaping the lives of others, such as parents, siblings, peers and teachers (Holloway, 2014). Young people’s geographies have also been shaped by scale examining the impacts of local and global processes (Katz, 2004) for understanding the diversity of young people’s experiences. Indeed, young people constitute the majority population on the African continent and contribute to diverse understandings of social life and processes that are shaped by different local and global structures, inequalities and cultural contexts. The paradigm shift that resulted in young people’s social geographies taking a place in geography was supported by methodological developments, which sought to provide greater equity in research relationships between adult researchers and young people. The adoption of participatory approaches from other disciplines aligned to geography, such as development studies, where the inequality of power in research relationships was paramount, resulted in critical methodological debates over the value of child-friendly methods, participation, co-production of research and the best ways to make research relevant and properly carried out. Ethical considerations featured heavily in research with young people, similarly highlighting the inequalities between adults and young

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people, with children’s geographers driving forward the need for ethical review. The methodological leaps that have been made within geography following the ‘qualitative’ turn have arguably often come from research with young people. The shift to remote or digital research during the COVID-19 pandemic was also preceded by efforts to engage with young people across the digital domain. The remainder of this entry is separated into three areas where young people have made significant contributions to geography, and the wider social science disciplines. The first section outlines the contribution to understanding the spatialities of young people’s lives, their engagement with diverse spaces and the relational aspects of young people’s spatial lives, how they make and remake places and create identities through their interactions. The next section explores the temporal dimensions of young people’s lives. The process of growing up brings temporalities to the forefront of geographical understandings of social life. Young people do not stay young for long and the challenges and changing dynamics of life are highly differentiated by age as a temporal process. Third, the entry turns to explore the structural constraints under which young people’s lives are lived, access to rights and their participation in global debates as agents of change, before drawing to a brief conclusion and positioning new directions.

Young people’s spatialities Young people’s spatialities featured heavily in the literature that explored the micro-geographies of young people and their engagements with diverse spaces of home, school, streets, leisure space and all varieties of private, public and in-between spaces. This was partly due to the intersection of geographical concepts into the principles of the sociology of childhood, carving out a place for geography in helping to understand young people’s lives and contributions. Explorations of how young people used space and the meanings and emotions various places had for them, transitioned to explorations of the intersections between place and identities, with geographers examining the influences of gender, age, ethnicity, (dis)ability, birth order and other markers of difference in shaping the Lorraine van Blerk

ways in which young people’s geographies were enacted and created. Understanding the impact of inequalities on spatially located activities such as education and livelihoods also emerged, with a focus on the global diversity of young people’s lives from the mundane realities to the exceptional childhoods that exist at the margins (see Ansell, 2017; Twum-Danso Imoh, 2016). The location of young people in-place and out-of-place, in many instances, brings into focus the relational nature of young people’s lives, which are not lived in isolation but as connected to others, whether in families, communities, institutions or public spaces. These relational connections radically alter how young people experience the places in which they live their lives. This may be emotional connections with families and peers that foster the creation of place-related identities (see Konstantoni, 2012), or violence experienced on the streets for homeless young people through interactions with law enforcement, criminal gangs and older street users. The placemaking that young people participate in may be spatially located but is also socially, and culturally, enacted. Understanding young people’s spatialities has, of course, transformed as more research has been carried out, including a significant body of material focusing on the less static placing of young people’s lives. Young people are engaging in everyday mobilities between and through a variety of spaces, as well migrating across borders with and without families in planned migration and forced displacement contexts. Everyday mobilities include the daily practices of movement between school and home, work and leisure, and not only focus on the geographical (spatial) movements but also the relationality of such movement through engagements with transport, participation in exercise (cycling, running, playing), as well as the emotional reactions to moving through different spaces such as fear, excitement and familiarity. Beyond these daily movements, particularly for older young people, the burgeoning growth in student mobilities and migration has created new insights into the impacts of education (including higher education) globally on young people’s identities and aspirations, with migration offering potential for some while others remain ‘stuck’ with the prospect of failure, as discussed in relation to South Asia by Johanna Waters (2018). For

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others, growing protracted refugee crises, the impacts of climate change on fragile and marginal environments, are forcing displacement and disruption to education and livelihoods for young people. The virtual environment has also featured in explorations of young people’s spatialities, and more so during the lockdowns and virtual learning environments of the COVID-19 pandemic. Bessell (2022) highlights the negative impacts of lockdowns in Australia on children’s immobility that resulted in lack of exercise and deteriorating mental health through the creation of policies of isolation and remaining at home. Such strategies, implemented globally, also created a switch to online learning, resulting in vast inequalities, with schools closed periodically in some contexts to full closures for several months in others, where impoverished young people have no or limited access to the Internet, computers or mobile phones, thereby heightening inequalities in education access at local, national and global scales. Yet the digital environment holds promise for many young people, with Waite (2021) elucidating the importance of digital media in placemaking, examining how young migrants, dispersed in locations outside the city, use digital media to connect with physical aspects of cities and relational connections they miss in urban environments. Therefore, the exploration of young people’s engagement in virtual and digital environments has become more pertinent for understanding their geographies than ever before.

Young people’s temporalities Time and temporality are critical concepts in young people’s geographies and lived experiences. Although early studies focused on their spatialities at particular moments in time, as young people’s geographies received more attention in the 2000s and beyond, not only did the exploration of their spatialities become more diverse, but the temporalities of young people’s lives also went beyond snapshots of daily life. Holt (2017) has explored the geographies of very young children, their materialities and connectedness to others (mothers, fathers and others) indicating that the focus on young people’s agency has resulted in a narrow view of

young people, excluding babies and infants. She charts an agenda that extends the temporalities of young people’s lives from a much younger starting point, indicating that infancy is central to the emergence of agency. At the other end of the temporal spectrum of young people’s lives is work on transitions to adulthood. Geographers, working at the intersection between geography and other disciplines, particularly drawing on youth studies, development studies and sociology, are crucial to understanding the process of growing up. This adds a temporal perspective to understanding young people’s spatialities as they begin to embrace the challenges of adulthood in navigating their growing-up journeys. Work by geographers (Hopkins, 2006; Valentine, 2003) details the complex intersecting indicators of growing up as transitions to adulthood where young people leave education, find employment, engage in relationships, cohabitation and sometimes marriage, bear children and create families under a plethora of circumstances. Of course, the linear school-to-work transition, often positioned as the panacea for success among non-governmental organizations (NGO) and donor communities working in the Global South, has been challenged. Similarly, the notion that leaving home, marriage and/or childbearing are specific markers of adult status has also been contested, with research uncovering the temporal and spatial dynamics of young people’s lives to be cyclical, sometimes resulting in young people remaining static or moving in different directions to previously planned – for example, students returning to their parental home after completing their degrees or travelling to other locations as part of a carefree period prior to finding employment. Jeffery (2010), and also Ungruhe and Esson (2017), highlight the role of theoretical concepts such as ‘vital conjunctures’ and ‘waithood’ as examples of the disruption to growing-up experiences. Vital conjunctures are critical moments that may change one young person’s planned pathway, such as unintended pregnancy, failure of exams or death in the family, creating potential disruption to their pathways to adulthood and influencing their experiences. Waithood, on the other hand, indicates a period of placing adulthood on hold. Recent literature explores Lorraine van Blerk

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experiences of waithood principally across the Global South, where poverty and inequality result in school leavers being unable to access formal employment and therefore entering into a period of waiting, pausing this aspect of their pathway to adulthood. This further impacts on other aspects of transition as a lack of employment and economic means may delay the establishment of independent living and cohabiting relationships. Additionally, van Blerk et al. (2022) highlight that the migration experience of becoming a refugee and growing up in a situation of protracted crisis not only disrupts transitions to adulthood spatially and temporally, but also ruptures their experiences due to social and cultural dynamics, legal restrictions and economic challenges – creating a fundamental shift in transition pathways. Young refugees may reorientate their plans completely, seeking sources of livelihood survival. Therefore, the complex and diverse experiences that young people have globally are not only positioned within social, political, economic and cultural contexts but are also situated within local and global inequalities over space and time.

Realizing young people’s rights and participation The complexities of young people’s lives, experienced and highlighted through a geographical lens, does more than bring their voices and perspectives into geographical debates. It creates a channel for realizing their rights in a more nuanced way, beyond ideas of a global ideal, and at the same time seeking justice for all young people’s access to basic human rights. By examining the geographies of young people’s lives, the cultural specificities and diversity of experiences must be situated within an understanding of how young people’s lives are influenced by structural conditions in their localities, countries and globally. Globalization, health pandemics, economic restructuring and recession are positioned within a context of neoliberal modernization, resulting in pervasive inequalities alongside the promotion of societal uniformity across institutional contexts including education. Geography is therefore critical for enabling all young people to access rights beyond a Eurocentric Lorraine van Blerk

perspective, and rather from a position of understanding their individual realities. Participation is no less geographically positioned. From a context-specific perspective, young people’s participation has been championed by geographers advocating for their perspectives to be considered, from designing local environments and children-centred spaces such as play parks and other recreation facilities, to their involvement in governance decision making at local and national scales through youth parliaments and decentralized governments. Yet, where such participation models are in place, structures need to be adapted to fully include young people’s views. Macheka and Masuku (2019) reviewed such processes in Zimbabwe to identify that, despite excellent inclusive policy for young people in local government decision making at district levels, the process of decision making is relational and not all actors wanted to divert from current patriarchal structures. Therefore, participation is both policy and practice oriented, with a call for changing attitudes to ensure all voices are represented and respected. The recent response to climate change is perhaps a pertinent example of how young people can individually and collectively assert their views, and participate in important events, when adults fail to act. The climate strikes of 2019, following the call from Greta Thunberg for young people to take a stand on climate change, was global in reach and overwhelming in scale within local communities as schools witnessed a collective will to create a global social movement. The strikes received significant media attention and young people’s voices continue to be strongly heard in climate discussions. Nissen, Wong and Carlton (2021) indicate that, in this case, young people have the potential to shift political and institutional discourse as well as change public attitudes through their participation. Finally, in thinking of new directions and ways forward for young people’s geographies the aptly titled After Childhood (Kraftl, 2020) reminds us to think beyond young people in the present to also consider the materialities, relationalities and environments in which young people’s lives are experienced but with a future-oriented perspective to respond to the difficult challenges that young people, the world over, are confronted with. Lorraine van Blerk

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References and selected further reading Aitken, S. (2001), The Geography of Young People, London: Routledge. Ansell, N. (2017), Children, Youth and Development (2nd edition), London: Routledge. Bessell, S. (2022), ‘The impacts of COVID-19 on children in Australia: deepening poverty and inequality’, Children’s Geographies, 20 (4), 448–58. Editors (2003), ‘Inaugural editorial: coming of age for children’s geographies’, Children’s Geographies, 1 (1), 3–5. Holloway, S.L. (2014), ‘Changing children’s geographies’, Children’s Geographies, 12 (4), 377–92. Holloway, S.L. and Valentine, G. (2000), Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning, London: Routledge. Holt, L. (2017), ‘Food, feeding and the material everyday geographies of infants: possibilities and potentials’, Social & Cultural Geography, 18 (4), 487–504. Hopkins, P.E. (2006), ‘Youth transitions and going to university: the perceptions of students attending a geography summer school access programme’, Area, 38, 240–47. Jeffrey, C. (2010), ‘Geographies of children and youth I’, Progress in Human Geography, 34 (4), 496–505. Katz, C. (2004), Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Konstantoni, K. (2012), ‘Children’s peer relationships and social identities: exploring cases of young children’s agency and complex interdependencies from the Minority World’, Children’s Geographies, 10 (3), 337–46.

Kraftl, P. (2020), After Childhood: Re-thinking Environment, Materiality and Media in Children’s Lives, London: Routledge. Macheka, T. and Masuku, S. (2019), ‘Youth participation structures in Zimbabwe: a lens into the experiences of rural youth within WADCOs and VIDCOs’, CSSR Working Paper No. 440, Centre for Social Science Research. Nissen, S., Wong, J.H.K. and Carlton, S. (2021), ‘Children and young people’s climate crisis activism – a perspective on long-term effects’, Children’s Geographies, 19 (3), 317–23. Skelton, T. and Valentine, G. (1998), Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures, London: Routledge. Twum-Danso Imoh, A. (2016), ‘From the singular to the plural: exploring diversities in contemporary childhoods in sub-Saharan Africa’, Childhood, 23 (3), 455–68. Ungruhe, C. and Esson, J. (2017), ‘A social negotiation of hope: male West African youth, “waithood” and the pursuit of social becoming through football’, Boyhood Studies, 10, 22–43. Valentine, G. (2003), ‘Boundary crossings: transitions from childhood to adulthood’, Children’s Geographies, 1, 37–52. van Blerk, L., Shand, W. and Prazeres, L. et al. (2022), ‘Youth transitions in protracted crises: conceptualising the “rupture” of refugees’ pathways to adulthood in Uganda and Jordan’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 47 (2), 315–30. Waite, C. (2021), ‘Making place beyond the city through the lens of digital media: culturally diverse young people negotiating social change in a rural city’, Digital Geography and Society, 2, Article 100021. Waters, J. (2018), ‘In anticipation: educational (im) mobilities, structural disadvantage, and young people’s futures’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 39 (6), 673–87.

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Index #BLM 150 #MeToo hashtag  150 #MeToo zeitgeist  164 #PinjraTod hashtag  150 Abbott, D.  104 ableism 201 Abrams, T.  104 absolute poverty  297 absolute space  333, 378 Abu-Lughod, J.  70 academic coroners  323 critical geography  82 discipline 217 feminism 152 geography 81 knowledge 120 institutions 390 academicisation 2 academy  81, 82 accountability 255 Achebe, C.  293 ACME  4, 80 active bodies  105 activism forms of  3 history of  3 housing 3 scope of  3 social and protest movements and  2 understandings of  4 activist  323, 324 activist ethnography  148 activist geography  1 Actor Network Theory (ANT)  7 39, 178, 221, 272, 276 agency in  7 analytical focus of  10 analytical toolkit  8 assemblage thinking  9, 10, 304 description of  7 development of  7 diverse interpretations and usage  7 Euclidean space and challenges  9 for human geographers  10 in human geography  10 methodological approach  9, 10 power  303, 304 process of translation  8 relational connections emphasized in  10 relational ontology  7 topological emphasis of  9

actually existing neoliberalism (AENL)  268 Adams, P.C.  190 administrative rationalism  225 adult education  120 adulthood 405 advocacy 141 AENL see actually existing neoliberalism (AENL) aestheticize space  28 affect  39, 40, 85, 86, 125 and emotion  125 collective 13 definition of  12, 13 Deleuzian version of  13 deliberation and contestation about  12 importance of  12 affective life  14, 15 afflict capitalism  399 affordable housing  110 Afro-pessimism 318 age  403, 404 agencement 37 agency  17, 18, 19, 20, 213 agentic act  214 Age of Migration  236 Age of Reconnaissance  65 agglomeration/polarization 401 agnosticism 328 agrarian capitalism  219 agrarian citizenship  158 agri-capitalism  158, 159 agricultural labor markets  138 agricultural technologies investments in  157 agriculture  156, 157 a human geography  388 AI see artificial intelligence (AI) Airbnb 146 airports 390 Alff, H.  208 algorithms 100 Al-Hindi, F.  197 Allen, J.  302, 303, 336 Amazon 157 Amazon forest land  261 amenable to crime  74 American Agricultural Adjustment Act  157 American environmentalism  136 Amin, A.  283, 335 Amin, S.  150 Amoore, L.  55, 208, 282

408

Index  409 analysis  167, 168, 169, 172, 173 Anand, N.  208 Anderson, B.  256, 346 Andresen, M.A.  75 Andrews, G.J.  181 Anglo-American human geography  217 Anglo-American scholarship  188 Anglo-centrism 102 Angloness 374 Anglophone 324, 326, 380 anglophone radical geography  324 anglophone universities  326 animal geographies  8 evolution of  17 first wave of  17 research in  20 scope and character of  19 study of  17 third wave in  18 animals and relations with humans  19 geographical research on  18 sacrifice of  19 treatment of  20 animal subjectivity 20 anonymity 141 ANT see actor network theory; see actor network theory (ANT) antagonism 308 antagonistic relationship 58 Anthropocene  91, 138, 178, 186, 271, 318, 372 Anthropocene Working Group (AWG)  22 concept of  22, 23, 24 description of  22 geographical research agenda  23 geographies of geoengineering  24 hypothesis  24, 25 implications of  25 nature  260, 261, 262, 263 notions of  217 place and region  23 planetary boundaries and global tipping points 23 problems of  26 research 25 strata 22 scale 23 socio-environmental reform and transformation 24 specific causes of  25 unfolding research into  24 anthropology 380 anti-austerity movements  3 anti-black racism  81 anti-colonial movements  256 anti-colonial social justice  201 anti-essentialist Marxism  80 Anti-Eviction Mapping Project  111, 142 anti-geopolitics 177

anti-politics machine  89 anti-racism  317, 318, 320 anti-urban thesis  398 anxiety affects and senses of  221 apocalyptic bemusement park  344 Apple mobility data  43 application programming interfaces (APIs)  45 architectural practitioners  106 archive  186, 187, 188 documents 188 forms of  187 methods 224 research  186, 187 area effects  299, 300 Armiero, M.  138 art interconnections 27, 28 interventions 28 contemporary 28 artefacts  27, 84, 109, 209 artificial intelligence (AI)  32, 44, 101, 167, 374 definition of  32 for human mobility and human dynamics  33 for place studies  33 for public health, disaster response, population studies, and other areas  34 integration of AI  32 techniques 32 artistic agency 28 artistic media 27 artistic methods  140 artistic political agency  28 artistic practice  27 artistic production 28 artistic research  27 artists  27, 28 creative interventions  28 art-making 27 art–science collaborations  29 arts-based methodologies  87 Ascensão, E.  292 Ash, J.  86, 100 assemblage 55 and ANT  304 thinking 304 assemblage convertors  40 assemblages 55 analysis of  40 description of  37 dynamic 37 emergent capacities of  37 of enunciation  56 process of becoming in  40 theory  37, 38 transformative potentials of  38 with emergent properties  37 assemblage theory  55 assemblage thinking  178, 304 asset accumulation 59

410  Concise encyclopedia of human geography asset economy  59, 60 assetization 61 asset ownership  58 creditworthiness for  60 positioning of  61 asylum politics 236 asylum seeker  237 Atkinson, P.  147 atmosphere  13, 22 atmospheres of conflict  13 atmospheric river weather systems  136 atomism 328 Aufseeser, D.  122 authenticity 96 marketing of  251 practices of  251 autoethnography 146 automated systems  42 autonomous geographies  2 autonomy 58 Aven, T.  348, 349 aviation 389 AWG see Anthropocene Working Group Ayoob, M.  177 back-propagation 32 Balkans 258 Balkin, A.  29 banishment 111 Banksy’s Dismaland  344 Barnett, C.  267 Barron, A.  346 Bartolini, N.  340 Baschieri, A.  121 basis for geography  217 Basso, K.H.  193 Bates, E.  106 Beale code  354 Bear, C.  18 Beaumont, J.  339 Bebbington, A.  89 Beck, U.  258 becoming 48 behavioral geography  192 belonging  251, 252 Benjamin, W.  294 Berkeley school of cultural geography, the  84, 218, 219, 275 Berlant, L.  13 Bessell, S.  405 ‘best-practice’ policy  247 Bhabha, H.K.  196, 294, 381, 385 big data  100, 142, 187, 259 access to  45 attributes of  42 characterizing 42 emergence of  42 generalizing findings from  44

geographic and temporal granularity  42 key feature of  43 key sources of  42 opportunities of  42 sources 42 use of  43 ‘big-D’ Development  395 big geo data  32 bike-share scheme  248 binarized categories  384 binary operations  99 biocapitalism 262 biodiversity 137 biodiversity loss  117 biological differences  161 biomedical model of health  180 biometrics 282 biopolitical borderwork  55 biopolitics 107 biosocial 373 biosphere 22 Bissell, D.  374 Bjørnshagen, V.  104 black boxes  8 black/brown vulnerabilities  372 black feminisms  150, 153 black geographers  81, 152 Black Lives Matter  375 Black Man, the  292 Blades, M.  403 Blaeser, K.  205 blank canvases  49 Blaser, M.  263 Blaut, J.  403 Bledsoe, A.  319 Blomley, N.  81, 223, 226 blue spaces  181 Blum, V.L.  309 Blunt, A.  294 bodies and plants  50 discrete and bounded entities  50 grappling with  49 quantified data on  50 understanding 48 Bonds, A.  65 bordering complexity of  55 contexts of  53 definition of  53 heterogeneous notion of  55 heterogeneous spaces  54 perspectives on  55 politics 375 practices 56 processes 53 social and cultural practices  53 with territory processes  54

Index  411 borders  235, 236, 237 mobility 54 post-modern geopolitical perspectives on  55 resources for intercultural dialogue  54 securitization discourses  53 topological intersections  54 violence of  236 borderscapes 53 approaches 54 boundaries 53 boundlessness 378 Bowman 281 brain 32 Braverman, I.  223 Bremner, L.  54 Brenner, N.  266, 267, 400 Brexit 343 Bridge, G.  276 Britain’s territorial integrity  175 British diplomats  178 British imperialism  133 brokerage 237 Brown, E.  76 Brown, W.  373 Browne, K.  369 Buchanan, I.  39 Bulkeley, H.  358 Bunge, W.  325, 343, 378 Bunge, William  1 Burciaga, E.  226 bureaucracy 255 languages of  258 Burgess, E.  399 Burgess’s concentric zone model  399 Burns, A.  127 business models  391 bus infrastructure  248 Butler, J.  162, 283, 368 Buttimer, A.  190, 191, 379 Cabral, A.  293 calculative investments  60 Calkins, H.W.  167 Callon, M.  7, 8 Calzada, I.  359 capabilities approach, poverty  297 capability deprivation  297 capital accumulation of  230, 231 agential properties of  213 freedom of  232 inherent dynamic of  230 limits to  395 power of  230 capital accumulation  157 “generalized” strategy of  394 capital gains  61

capitalism  60, 96, 136, 150, 151, 158, 163, 205, 229, 230, 232, 261, 262, 266, 277, 394, 395, 399 basis of  232 central dynamic of  232 development of  256 differences in  230 disasters 231 expansion of  256 general theory of  395 geographical manifestation of  400 geographical workings of  393 geography of  213 grows out of  229 imbalances of  158 Indigenous alternatives to  205 logic of  70 Marxian assumption of  116 neoliberal development of  61 quasi-permanent crisis, regulation of  267 space under  396 two-classes model of  58 capitalist imperatives  393 capitalist natures  260 capitalist pluralism  231 capitalist production  229, 230, 231 spaces of  391 capitalist social formations  61 capitalist society  230 capitalist system  229, 231 capital–labour relations  61, 230 Capitalocene 138 carbon energy systems  133 carbon offset schemes  92 Carby, H.  318 carceral system  319 care  213, 262, 326 Carpenter, R.C.  225 cartography 379 CAS see critical access studies (CAS) Cassidy, K.  53 caste/class composition  151 casteism 151 Castells, M.  313 Castree, N.  2, 231 categorization 94 causal mechanism  329, 330, 331 Cavanagh, V.  375 CAVs see connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) Cederlöf, G.  132, 133 census and statistical collections  287 definition 287 population geographers  287 Césaire, A.  293 Chakrabarty, D.  294 change complex workings of  383 literature on  386

412  Concise encyclopedia of human geography charge of affect  12 chattel slavery  317 Chicago school of sociology  145, 190 children  403, 405, 406 geographers 404 mapping abilities of  403 China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)  208, 210 Christophers, B.  117 cinema 86 cisnormativity 205 cities  398, 399, 400, 401 citizenship 96 City, C.  226 civilian involvement in military conflict  242 ‘civilizational’ colonies  64, 65 civilizational entities  66 ‘civilizational’ vs ‘settler’ colonies  65 civil rights movement  115 Clark, G.L.  114 Clark, N.  25 Clark’s Graduate School of Geography  324 Clark University  324 class and gender  58 description of  58 gender and  162 necessitates 61 range of phenomena  58 structures of  163 classical geopolitical logics  109 classical geopolitics  175 classism 201 class landscapes  219 class relations  230 Clayton, D.  63 Clifford, J.  145, 147 climate  136, 138, 139 climate activism  359 climate adaptation  359 climate breakdown  388, 391 climate change  117, 156, 182, 247, 372 geopolitical challenges of  178 climate governance  359 climate strikes of 2019  406 Cloke, P.  339, 340, 354 Closs-Stephens, A.  13, 284 coal geographies of  131 materialities of  132 Cockrayne, D.  13 cognitive assimilation  204 cohabitation 405 co-intensive sensing  252 Coleman, A.  74 collaborative art  28 collaborative learning  122

collective affects 13 efficacy 76 emotion 126 eroticism 49 identity 256 organization 399 productive activity  58 solidarity 256 subjectivity 37 Collins, P.H.  197 colonial administration  257 colonial discourse  197 spatiality and tropicality of  64 colonial geographies gendering of  64 colonialism  63, 136, 137, 142, 150, 152, 202, 293, 314, 318, 320 see also post-colonial and migration  235 and racism  66 brutality and demeaning nature of  63 geographies of  63 historical-cultural diversity of  63 oppressive shackles of  63 processes of  204 study of  64 coloniality  201, 203, 204, 235 modern states of  201 of migration-related knowledge  235 processes of  204 question of  235 Colonial Laws Validity Act of 1865  64 colonial powers  197, 202 colonial spaces  63 colonial states  257 colonial subjugation  209 colonial violence  203 egregious acts of  203 colonization  61, 157, 201 colonizing geographies  63 colony 64, 65 colour code  169 Comaroff, J.  294 commensurability 69 commerce practices and technologies of  219 commercial data  55 commodification  122, 131 commodities 158 production and transportation of  114 commoning mobility  247 commons co-owned 314 description 314 historical 314 rights and shared responsibilities  314 communism 315 community activism  3

Index  413 community unionism  213 comparative approaches  69, 70 broader systemic processes  70 description of  69 research 69 research traditional modes of  70 traditional logic of  69 comparative approaches  69 limits of  71 methodological and empirical issues of  71 comparative strategies primary forms of  69 comparative urbanism  355 comparison categories of  71 experimental and novel approaches to  71 form of  69 compartmentalization 383 complex network connections 10 computation 99 computational devices  99 computational technologies  99 concentration, spaces of  210 concrete ethical issues  140 conjoined power matrix  295 connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs)  389 connectionism in cognitive science  32 consent, anonymity  140 consequentialism 140 consumer credit expansion of  60 Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC)  45 contact zones  293 containment 378 contemporaneous plurality  385 contemporary capitalism 158 cultural geography  84, 87 debates 142 developments 114 ecological crisis  85 ecological emergency  117 geographers  86, 136 geopolitics 176 human geography  13 legal geographers  225 military forces  242 refugee crisis  258 scholarship 242 transport geography  388 context-specific perspective  406 contextual qualities  69 continental philosophy  344 contradictions of capitalism  229, 230 convergence spaces  2 convolutional neural networks (CNN)  32

Coombes, B.  202 COP26, Glasgow  360 co-production 208 possibility of  141 corporate platforms  99 corporeal geographies  50 corporeality  48, 49, 51 corporeal (skin) boundaries  50 Cosgrove, D.  217, 218, 219 cosmopolitanism 341 cosmopolitan regionalism  335 Coulthard, G.  205 counter-hegemonic energy  132 counterspaces 383 Couto, M.  293 covert research  147 COVID 104, 271, 353, 364 Cowen, D.  390 Cowen, M.  89 Cox, K.R.  358, 359 creative city  28, 29 creative geographies  27 creative methodologies  87 creativity fix  29 credit acceptability  60 Crenshaw, K.  151, 152, 196 crime and delinquency  74 definition of  74 ecological manifestations of  74 ecology of  75 humanistic interpretation of  74 perceptions of  75 rates, mapping of  74, 76 criminal behavior  74 criminalization 75 policies of  76 crisis of precarity  326 critical description of  79 critical access studies (CAS)  105 critical consciousness  293 critical contemporary approach  240 critical ethnography  145, 148 critical feel-trips  143 critical food studies  156 critical geographers  2, 79, 138 critical geography  2, 79, 81, 82 future of  82 subject positions in  82 Critical Geography Forum  80 critical geopolitical thinking 177 critical geopolitics  177, 265 approach 176 researchers 176 scholarship 177 critical health geography  1, 2, 3, 27, 267, 181 critical political economy approach  116

414  Concise encyclopedia of human geography critical political geography  1 critical population geographies  288, 289 critical psychoanalytical studies  293 critical race theory  141, 198 critical realism (CR) description 328 generative causality  329 naturalism 329 ontology  328, 331 positivism  328, 330 practical adequacy  330 rational abstraction  329 statistical sampling  330 critical scrutiny  140 critical theory 79 Croatia-Slovenia border  55 Cronon, W.  136 cross-cutting themes  391 cross-disciplinary collaboration  87 Crowe, B.  105 Crutzen, P.J.  22, 138 cryosphere 22 cultural animal geography  17 cultural contemporaneity  385 cultural context of white supremacy  146 cultural/culture 87 centrality of  84 description of  84 domain 84 ecology  137, 217 geography  84, 218, 252, 345 ‘Berkeley school’ of  84 contemporary 84 definition of  84 development of  85 dominant approach within  85 historical 185 landscape in  85 methodological and conceptual repertoire  87 place-writing in  14 researchers to  85 style of  84 subdiscipline of  84 governance processes  28 identity 251 knowledge 59 landscape  17, 84, 217 language 250 life complexities of  148 dimensions of  87 Marxism 13 presentation 29 relationships 250 sensitivity 140 spaces 186 theory 162 turn  84, 145, 147 in economic geography  156 in geography  176

cultures of consumption  156, 159 Curiel, O.  318 Curley, A.  203 Curtis, S.  182 Cusicanqui, R.  152 cybergenetic organisms  7 cyber security  99 cyberspace 100 cyber war  101 Cybriwsky, R.  74 cycle lanes 248 Daggett, C.N.  133 Daigle, M.  203, 204 Daniels, S.  218 Darwin’s theories of evolution  175 data analysis  45 data-driven thinking  43 Davidson, M.  400 Davis, A.  318 daydreaming 128 de-agrarianization 92 de Alwis, M.  151 death of geography  271 De Boeck, F.  295 debt 61 decarbonization 389 De Carli, B.  53 decision making  90 unit and scale of  164 decolonial approaches 3 feminisms 151 decoloniality 151 decolonialization  150, 151, 152, 153 decolonial literature  319 decolonial thinking  277 decolonization  153, 305, 312, 314, 316 adoption of  153 discussions of  204 engaging with  204 projects 153 decolonized ethnographies  146 deconstruction 292 De Craene, V.  51 deep learning  32, 35 methods 34 models  33, 34 deep neural networks (DNN)  32 defence 242 de-fetishize food  158 Deffontaines, P.  338 deforestation 92 de Genova, N.  319 deindustrialization 394 de la Cadena, M.  263 Delaney, D.  226

Index  415 Deleuze, G.  9, 12, 37, 38, 39, 40, 85, 86, 262, 303, 304 Deleuzian version of affect  13 delinquency 74 della Dora, V.  340 De Luca Zuria, A.  152 dematerialization 221 Demeritt, D.  350 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)  258 demographic accounting equation, population 286 Demographic and Health Survey, the  288 Dempsey, J.  81 deontological ethics  141 dependency 65 deregulation, financial market  266 Derrida, J.  309 de Saussure, F.  343, 344 descriptive particularism  70 descriptive (statistical or non-locational) element 168 desegregation  364, 365 deterritorialization  53, 96, 303 of capital  157 of power and capital  158 Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI)  1, 324, 325 development and place  90 definition of  89 description of  89 discourses of  390 enabling 90 forms of  89 imaginings of  388 Northern forms of  92 of underdevelopment  90 pathway for  91 people’s critiques of  89 practices and cultures of  91 projects 90 social, cultural, political and environmental change 89 source of  91 theory 90 traditional terminology of  89 trajectories of  393 developmentality 91 development-induced displacement (DID)  109 Dewsbury, J.-D.  85 DGEI see Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute; see Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute (DGEI) dialectical thinking  39 dialectics 39 dialogics 293

diaspora 94 central aspects of  94 characteristic of  94 communities 94 definition of  94 dimensions of  95 Eritrean 94 inclusions and exclusions for  94 relationship to home and homeland  94 ‘space challenging’ nature of  97 territorial identity for  95 diasporic cultures  127 diasporic identities  97 Dickinson, H.J.  167 Dickinson, R.  217 DID see development-induced displacement (DID) differentiated displacement  112 differentiates 394 differentiation  393, 394 digital archives 186 data 288 definition of  99 devices 128 digitalization 118 ecosystem 44 environment 405 ethnography  146, 270 forms of labour  99 geographies  99, 120 infrastructure  209, 210 infrastructures 99 media 99 in placemaking  405 methods 187 platforms  44, 45 processes 99 technologies 51 commercial and governmental application of 101 history of  100 traces  44, 45, 46 data 43 turn 99 dimensionality 378 Dimensions of Political Ecology (DOPE)  278 disability environmental construction of  105 geographies of  106 interdisciplinary and intersectional nature of 105 disabled people  104 lived experiences of  104 lives of  105 disabling culture  104 disablism faces of  107 socio-cultural relations of  105 spatial manifestations of  107 systemic nature of  107

416  Concise encyclopedia of human geography disablist culture  104 disciplinary boundaries  388 discipline history of  3 discourse immanent 305 patriarchal 302 representations 344 within society  302 discourses of rurality  356 discrimination in job hiring processes  104 discriminatory practices  61 discursive idealism  345 disease  180, 181 disease ecology  180, 181 disempower labour action  213 disinvestment waves of  394 displaceability 109 displacement and possession  111 conceptual genealogy of  110 emotional toll of  111 forced 109 formation of resistance against  111 forms of  109, 110 housing 110 investigations of  111 literature 109 pressures 111 risks 111 rural 109 studies 112 theories 111 urban 109 within human geography  109, 110 disposability of certain bodies  151 dispossession 109 neoliberal modalities of  61 places of  63 distributed representations  32 distributive causality  39 Dittmer, J.  178, 344 diurnal science  328 divergences 70 diversity 87 Doan, P.L.  370 Dodge, M.  100 Dodgshon, R.A.  386 domestication 18 domicide 111 dominant minority  82 Domosh, M.  150 Donovan, K.P.  209 DOPE see Dimensions of Political Ecology (DOPE) ‘double’ commodity  159

doubled becoming  40 Dowler, L.  177 Drew, C.  105 Driver, F.  64, 185 dry ports  391 dualism 48 Du Bois, W.E.B.  196, 318 Duggan, L.  368 Duncan, J.S.  338 Dwyer, C.L.  339 dynamic assemblages  37 dynamic unfolding  106 Earth’s ecosystem  22, 23, 25, 230 Earth writing  343 Easterling, K.  210 Eaves, L.E.  153, 197, 369 eco-cosmopolitanism 271 ecología política 276 ecological campaigners  231 ecological degradation  89, 92 ecological destruction 232 ecologically unequal exchange  133 ecological systems 91 écologie politique 276 economic capital 59 change 89 development  209, 251, 389 geographical inquiry  117 geography  118, 161, 251 development of  114 existing learnings in  117 perspectives 252 study of  114 globalization  265, 268 economic geographical queries in  115 landscapes  213, 219 liberalization policies  265 precarity 60 relationships 250 rights 96 uncertainties 257 ecoscarcity 275 ecosystem services  92 Eden, S.  18 Edensor, T.  386 education datafication of  122 geographers of  120 geographies of  120 inequalities 123 inequitable access and quality of  123 in Global South  123 researchers 123 research, geographies of  120 role of  122 educational spaces  121

Index  417 Edwards, C.  105 Edwards, P.N.  209 EJOLT see Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade (EJOLT) Elden, S.  282 elections 255 electoral geography  3, 59 electric vehicle (EV) development  389 Eliade, M.  338, 340 Ellis, E.  24 emancipatory energy politics  133 emancipatory politics  79 embeddedness 28 embodied geographies  49, 50, 51 embodied methodologies  49, 51 embodied process  51 embodiment  49, 107, 191 normalizing discourses of  105 Emel, J.  17 Emery, J.  13 emotion 86 emotional geographies  120, 125, 128 importance of  86 emotion(ality) 125 emotional labour  127 emotional politics  125 emotional relationships  398 emotion/emotional cultures 126 importance of  125 politics of  126 principal ‘site’ of  125 processes 125 research focus and field sites  127 work/labour 126 emotionlessness  125, 126 emotions  12, 250, 252 centrality of  143 importance of  12 relationality of  13 empires  63, 64, 65, 66 empiricist reasoning  43 emplacement 105 employment relations  58 encounter 372 endemic environmental crises  157 energy concept of  131 conceptualization of  133 consumption 132 definition of  131 democracy 132 geography 133 influential encounters with  131 infrastructure 131 infrastructures 131 justice literature  132 poverty and climate change  131

remunicipalization of  132 resources 131 socio-ecological production of  131 spatial approach to  132 subdiscipline of  131 system change  132 thermodynamic conceptualization of  133 within political ecology  133 engagement 143 Engels, F.  110 ENTiTLE, Initial Training Marie Curie Network 278 Entrikin, J.N.  190, 191 entropy 132 environment definition of  136 description of  136 environmental decision making  203 environmental determinism  114, 217, 257 environmental geography  23, 136 environmental governance 225 environmental humanities  29 environmentalism 3 environmental justice  141 movements 138 Environmental Justice Atlas, the  278 Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade (EJOLT), The  278 environmentally oriented innovations  117 environmental management frameworks  225 environmental/planetary crises  158, 159 environmental pressures  109 environmental psychology  403 environmental relations  136, 137 epistemological universalisms  70 equality 339 equalization 393 Eritrean diaspora  94 Escudero, K.  226 essentialism 161 Esson, J.  405 ‘ethical’ consumption  158 ethical food system  158 ethical reformulation  141 ethics definition of  140 of data mapping  142 of research  140, 142 ethnic discrimination  110 ethnic identities  251 ethnicity  96, 162, 255, 381 analytical gazes on  235 distinctive configurations of  257 ethnic language  250 ethnographer 147 ethnographic practice  147 ethnographic walking  146

418  Concise encyclopedia of human geography ethnography  145, 344 branches of  146 critical 145 geographers doing  147 image of  147 in human geography  146 principal element of  146 purpose of  145 eugenics 104 Eurocentric beliefs  257 Eurocentricism 318 Eurocentrism 309 hegemonic priorities of  152 Europe  255, 256, 257, 258 European-based imperialism  66 European colonialism  256 language 258 legacies 257 European expansion and slavery  61 European Union statistical agency, the  298 Eurostat 298 Eurozone 268 evangelicalism 339 Evans, D.  74 Evans, J.  181 EV development see electric vehicle (EV) development eventual transition  208 everyday  383, 385, 386, 387 practices 374 everyday life  243 social-spatial processes in  403 everyday resistance  3 evidence-based policy perspective  248 evidence bias  182 experience 250 exploitation 230 forms of  229 expulsions 111 exterminism 263 extractive capitalism  157, 201 Fabian, J.  293 Facebook 102 Falkingham, J.  121 Fanon, F.  292, 293 Faraday, M.  186 Faria, C.  224, 320 farming 19 feeling 13 Feld, S.  193 Fellows, M.L.  82 femininities 161 feminism  3, 12, 145, 150, 154, 180, 205, 380 and power  305 liberal 161 subject positions in  82 feminist 48

feminist critique  177 feminist ethnography  146 feminist geographers  153, 154, 162 feminist geography  1, 48, 49, 150, 302 broadening of  150 history of  161 feminist geopolitics 177 feminist political ecology (FPE)  277 feminists description of  150 generations of  151 geography 150 of colour  150 scholars  163, 177 theories 141 scholarship 150 theorizing 151 urban geographers  163 Ferguson, J.  89 Fernandez, S.  76 Ferretti, F.  1, 188 field research in economic geography  114 fieldwork 224 finance  208, 209, 210 finance capital  208, 210 financial geography  117 financial instruments  210 financialization  117, 210 financial technology (fintech)  118 financing mechanisms 210 Finlay, M.I.  65 Finnegan, D.A.  186 Finney, C.  136 fiscal policy  265, 268 Fischer, M.M.  32 fixed capital  232, 393 fixity 393 flood risk 170 Flores, A.  226 Florida, R.  28 Flyvbjerg, B.  210 food analyses of  156 animal production for  159 consumption 158 definition of  156 geographical investigation of  156 geographical research into  159 geographies 159 networks 158 political and cultural economies of  159 political economy  159 production  156, 158 provision under agri-capitalism  157 food provision  156, 157, 158 force of existing  12 forced displacement  109 forced labour  390 Fordist mode of production  266 foreign aid  89

Index  419 formal geopolitics  176 Fosado Centeno, E.  152 Foster, J.B.  261 Foucauldian approaches  91 Foucault, M.  120, 302, 344, 381 foundational theorists  9 FPE see feminist political ecology (FPE) Frank Lloyd Wright (FLW)  106 Fraser, N.  233 Frediani, A.  53 free market  91 Fregonese, S.  13 freight  388, 390, 391 Freire, P.  293 Freud, S.  307, 309, 310 Fried, M.  111 Gamsu, S.  122 GAN see generative adversarial networks (GAN) Gao, S.  33 Garland-Thomson, R.  104 gay spatialities  367 GCNN see graph convolutional neural network (GCNN) gender  61, 96 and class  162 and sex  161 and sexuality  163 and social relations  161 bias 164 history of  161 identifications and disidentifications  163 identities and roles  161 inequalities 161 in geographical research  162 intersectional issues of  225 relations 163 roles and relations  163 roles, concept of  161 structures of  163 theorization of  162, 163 with race  162 gender differences  277 gendered criminalization  76 gendered space  161, 163 gendered subjects 164 gendering of emotionality  126 gender relations  233, 388 generalization 45 generative adversarial networks (GAN)  32 generative causality  329 genetic analysis  19 genres 251 gentrification  364, 394 research 394 gentrification studies  386 gentrification theory  387 GeoAI see geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) geographers  48, 50, 81, 99, 100, 204, 389

dismal failure of  22 investigation for  391 invitation for  235 ontology and epistemology of  115 relationality and interconnection by  100 geographers of crime  75 geographical analysis  387 geographical boundaries  391 geographical communities  94 geographical inquiry substantive fields of  104 geographical knowledge  50, 143 commonplace expressions of  176 incorporeality of  49 geographical locations  390 geographical scholarship  17, 106, 122, 142, 164, 165 digital in  99 geographical thinking  185 geographic discourse  29 geographic information systems (GIS)  99, 167 and society  173 application and understanding of  167 applications 167 definition of  167 for mapping  167 geospatial data  171 in human geography  173 on academic literature database  168 publications by subject area  169 visualization utility of  167 geographic knowledge formation  153 geographic scholarship 27 geographies  12, 126 of disability  121 of education research  120 geographies in healthcare work  182 geographies of crime  76 definition of  74 positivist social scientific iterations of  74 seminal books on  74 geographies of labour  213 geographies of marginalization  76 geographies of the illicit  74 Geographie Universelle   1 geography  63, 104, 202, 398, 399, 400 and international politics  175 conjunction with  79 cultural and humanistic approaches in  181 disciplinary attempts of  205 disciplinary histories of  379 discipline of  79, 161, 185, 188, 190, 250, 372 feminist movement on  163 fundamental elements of  167 hegemonic approach in  81 history and philosophy of  188 intersection of  168 of past environments  185 of world politics  176 subdisciplines of  100 types of  48

420  Concise encyclopedia of human geography geohistorical materialism  266 geo-humanities  29, 331 geolegalities 225 geolocation software  99 geology 22 geometrical perspective  219 geometric space  9 geomorphological agent  217 geomorphology 240 geo-piracy 109 geo-poetics  29, 205 geopolitical agency  175 geopolitical analysis 178 geopolitical conflicts  175 geopolitical discourse  176 geopolitical imaginations  176 geopolitical relations  175 geopolitical relationships  178 geopolitical scholars  178 geopolitical thinkers  175 geopolitics  281, 309 approaches to  175 description of  175 reduction of  177 study of  178 vital role of  235 geoprocessing 172 geosocial relations  375 geospatial analytics 167 geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI)  32 geospatial datasets  34 German historical geography  185 Gibson-Graham, J.K.  116, 231, 343 Giddens, A.  380 Gieseking, J.J.  367 Gill, N.  282 Gilmore, R.W.  75, 317, 394 Gilroy, P.  293, 318 GIS see Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Gkartzios, M.  355 Glasgow Climate Pact, the  360 Glass, R.  111 global capitalism  112 histories and legacies of  61 political economy of  131 global capitalist economies  90 global change 12 global comparativism  71 global economies  251 global environmental change  23, 24 global equity 118 Global Financial Crisis  91, 396 global financial networks  242 global financial system  117 global governmentality  91 globalisation 271 globalization  14, 122, 406 and sense of place  270 processes of  235

Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) 69 globalization/glocalization economic  265, 268 markets 267 neoliberal 268 globalization processes  69, 164 global labour markets  235 Global North  90, 92, 110, 208 political attention in  122 global political economy  242 global public sphere  258 global remote sensing applications  168 global social movement  406 Global South  89, 118, 372 connectivity in  210 donor communities working  405 institutions of  372 perspectives and interest of  114 US and European geopolitics in  177 Global South, the  353, 354 global supply chains  50, 390 global trade in arms  242 global transportation  132 global warming  271 Gökariksel, B.  341 Golledge, R.  403 good change  89 Google mobility data  43 Gordon Riots of 1780  185 Gottmann, J.  281 Gough, K.  122 governance technological development and processes of 101 transformation of  107 governing 236 government  255, 256, 258 hierarchies of  257 structures of  255 Gramsci 293 graph convolutional neural network (GCNN)  33 grassroots 90 Great Acceleration inventory, the  260 Great Depression  157 Great Recession, 2008–09  297 green economy, the  277 Greenham Common occupation  2 greenhouse gas emissions  389 green infrastructure  209, 210 Gregory, D.  64, 66, 294 Grier, E.  110 Grier, G.  110 grounded theologies  340 group relations 250 groupuscules 40 Guattari, F.  9, 37, 38, 39, 40, 262, 303, 304 Gudgin, G.  281

Index  421 Hackworth, J.  339 Hägerstrand, T.  378 Haggett, P.  378 Halfacree, K.  354 Hall, E.  106 Hall, S.  152, 317 Hamraie, A.  105, 107 Hankins, K.B.  196 Hannah, M.  282 Haraway, D.  262, 381 Harries, K.  74 Harris, E.  13 Harrison, J.L.  226, 359 Harrison, P.  191 Hartman, C.  110 Hartman, S.  188, 318 Harvey, D.  1, 137, 185, 266, 267, 281, 326, 339, 343, 379, 380, 393, 395, 396, 399 hate crime  105, 106 hatescapes 106 Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the  273 Haushofer 281 Hawkins, H.  27 Hayek, F.  267 headcount measure, poverty  298 Head, L.  373 health and place  180 and well-being  180, 181 biomedical and social models of  180 risk to  181 social determinants of  180 health behaviours 181 healthcare 182 health geographers  181, 183 health geography  180, 182, 203 research in  180 Heffernan, H.  188 Hegel and Kant  190 hegemonic processes 141 Heidegger, M.  111, 379 Heise, U.K.  271 Henderson, G.  219 Herbert, D.  74 Herbert, S.  145, 146, 226 Herod, A.  213 Herzfeld, M.  326 heterogeneous engineers  7 heterogeneous networks  7 heterolocalism, migrant and refugee communities 288 heteronormativity  61, 205, 367, 368, 369 heteropatriarchy 201 heterosexuality 367 heterosexual relations normalization of  163 Heyman, J.  226 HGIS see historical geographical information systems (HGIS)

hierarchy scales 358 territories 358 higher education (HE)  120, 122, 142 institutions 122 Higher Education Research Group  120 higher scales influence  9 Hillis, K.  313 historical development  388 historical geographers  185, 187 intellectual pursuits of  185 opportunity for  188 historical-geographical information systems (HGIS) 187 historical-geographical research  186 historical geography  185, 186, 187 diversification of  188 internationalization 188 of environment  186 of knowledge and science  186 philosophical approach in  185 style and substance of  185 sub-discipline of  185 traditions of  185 historical materialists  58 historical work and approaches  188 and thinking in human geography  185 development of  185 historiography 294 Hodder, J.  188 Holloway, J.  340 Holocene  22, 23, 24, 25 Holt, L.  405 home  109, 110, 111 transnational entanglements of  94 home-based learning  181 homeownership 59 Homestead Acts  157 homogenization 92 homonationalism 368 homonormativity 368 Hopkins, P.  197, 339, 340 Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie WEGO-ITN network, the  278 Hornborg, A.  24 Horner, R.  91 hotspot analysis  172 ‘hot spots’ policing  74 household energy  132 housing accumulation of  60 accumulative potential of  60 housing activism  3 housing displacement  110 Howard, N.  153 Howe, C.  209 Howitt, R.  202

422  Concise encyclopedia of human geography Huang, X.  34 Huber, M.  131, 132 Hulme, M.  24, 26 human 372 human action 145 human and physical geography 23 human–animal relationships  18 human ‘becomings’  403 human behaviour  44 algorithms on  45 complex, contradictory nature of  147 human beings ‘withness’ of  379 human ecology 399 human encounters  373 human–environment relations  91 human environments  23 human epoch  22 human exceptionalism  19, 372 human geographers  64, 80, 99, 109, 131, 140, 187, 190, 197, 202, 222, 231, 233 human geography  3, 14, 17, 32, 33, 34, 42, 43, 69, 72, 79, 84, 85, 94, 111, 146, 148, 154, 185, 204, 380, 384, 393 and poverty  297, 300 boundary object in  79 central concerns of  255 challenge for  43 comparative researcher in  72 cornerstone of  69 criticism in  220 ‘cultural turn’ in  145 curriculum 143 empirical research in  146 ethnography in  146 examination of  34 methodological component in  145 progressive approaches in  79 quantitative studies  299 realm 193 reflexive space for  258 research in  383 scholars 109 segregation  362, 363, 364, 365 subdiscipline of  223 subjects in  186 theories 44 valuable and popular method within  148 humanism  180, 191, 192, 379, 380 humanistic geography  190, 192, 379 approach 190 centers 190 endeavors 193 framework 190 phenomenology-based idea of  190 principles 193 utilizing 190 vital importance in  192

humanistic perspectives  218 humanitarianism 64 humanity emancipation of  229 normative view of  256 humanity of emotional experience  125 human life artificial forms of  398 reproduction of  229 human mobility  33 human-non-human relation  309 human perceptions  379 human population growth  159 human realms  156 human sociality 243 human social reproduction  159 human socio-cultural system  17 Huntington, E.  156 Husserl, E.  379 Hu, T.H.  209 Huxley, T.H.  186 Hu, Y.  33 hybrid collectifs  7 hybridity 381 Donna Haraway on  7 hydro-social landscapes  224 hydrosphere 22 hypothesis of the mobility transition, the  286 hypothetico-deductivism (H-D)  330 ICS see International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) ICTs see Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) identity  250, 251 description of  196 sound and  198 identity categories  61 identity politics  80, 283 IFAD see International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) imagined community  256 imagined landscapes  219 imbrication 100 immanent development  89 immobility 237 immutable mobiles  8 imperial  63, 64 imperial historiography  64 imperialism  63, 64, 66, 142, 256 brutality and demeaning nature of  63 imperial sovereignty’  63 imperial system  114 Inaugural International Conference of Critical Geographers (ICCG)  80

Index  423 income as measure of poverty  298 high-income countries  298 household 298 insufficient labour market  299 low-income households  298 spent on food  298 subsistence 297 Index of Dissimilarity, the  299 Index of Rurality for England and Wales  354 Indian colonial historiography  294 Indian feminists and feminist geographers  151 indigeneity  64, 204 Indigeneity  201, 202, 203, 205 ontologies of  203 socio-spatial processes and practices of  204 Indigenous communities 202 definition of  201 geographers 204 identity, definition of  201 place names  202 self-determination 202 Indigenous communities in Niger Delta  80 Indigenous feminist theories  205 Indigenous geographies  81 Indigenous movements  3 indigenous political ecologies  295 Indigenous thinkers  153 individual  190, 191, 192, 193 actors 9 citizen rights  255 conduct 303 identities 97 migrant 237 self-realization 229 subjectivity 37 industrial agriculture  157, 261 industrial capitalism  133 industrialization 399 processes of  256 Industrial Revolution  63 industrial urbanizing nation  398 inequalities 236 empirical accounts of  390 inequality  58, 61, 315 contemporary phenomenon of  115 dynamic of  58 generation of  152 inextricable from society  373 informal education  120 informal learning spaces  122 information and communications technologies (ICTs) 100 infra-physics 334 infrastructural development models  248 infrastructural labour  213, 214, 215 geographies of  215

infrastructure  131, 246 and processes  208 definition of  208, 209 degenerative nature of  209 description of  208 emerging  209, 210 enchants 209 energy 131 exclusion from  210 forms of  245 framework 208 networks  131, 132 of logistics and finance  209 resources and  131 studies 208 Ingold, T.  221 innovation 389 inquiry 14 insecurity 76 Institute of British Geographers (IBG)  80 institutional ethnography  120, 146 institutional frameworks  141 instrumentation 251 integration 235 integration/assimilation 235 intellectual culture of subsumption  401 intentional development  89 interessement 8 intergenerational inequality 59 interlocal competition  265 intermediary 8 internal colonialism  375 internal combustion cars  389 internal/settler colonialism  372 international borders  237 International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) 22 international community  178 international financial institutions  91 International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) 355 International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) 22 International Handbook of Political Ecology, (Bryant) 276 internationalization 122 international migrant  236 international migration  121 geographical analysis of  164 international students  123 Internet of Things  102 interpersonal attraction 37 intersectional  161, 162, 164 intersectional feminist analysis  151 intersectional identities  373 intersectionality  124, 373 investment 393 invisible economies of care  214

424  Concise encyclopedia of human geography Inwood, J.  65 Iralu, E.  153 Iraqi diaspora  96 irregular migrant  237 Isaac, E.  338 Iveson, K.  400 Jackson, J.B.  193 Jazeel, T.  401 Jefferson, B.J.  75 Jefferson, T.  398 Jessop, B.  266, 358 Jim Crow  362 Johnson, J.T.  202, 203 Johnston, L.  49 Johnston, R.J.  281 Jones, E.  188 Jordan 107 Jukes, J.  370 justice  388, 390 ‘kaleidoscopic’ borderscape epistemology  54 Kant, I.  379 Kapoor, I.  309 Katz, C.  324 Kearns, R.A.  180 Kedar, A.  223 Kern, L.  325, 386 Keynesian welfarism  59, 266 King, A.  294 Kingsbury, P.  307, 308 Kitchin, R.  42, 100 Klein, M.  310 Klug, H.  225 Kniffen, F.  217 Knopp, L.  367 knowledge  185, 186, 187 forms of  51 networks 186 objects of  372 knowledge collection  147 knowledge discovery  32 knowledge practice  148 knowledge production  48, 118, 204 social relations of  81 knowledge transfer  248 Koopman, S.  177 Kothari, U.  54 Krishnan, S.  367 Kristeva, J.  310 Kropotkin, P.  1, 323 Kubrin, C.E.  76 Kudva, N.  89 Kuokkanen, R.  205 Kurki, M.  283 Kurtz, H.  359 Kusno, A.  294

labour activism 3 description of  213 disembodied category of  214 geography  2, 213, 214 215 analysis of  213 discipline of  214 emergence of  213 pluralistic discipline of  213 research on  214 in human geography  215 internal division of  229 market 104, 236 income 299 marketization of  214 mobilization 213 mobilization of  164 of care  213, 214 of maintenance  215 of waste-picking  215 policies 266 political potential of  214 power  229, 233 relations 209 research on  213 specific articulations of  214 supply 242 treatment of  213 typologies of  214 Lacan, J.  307, 310 LAFPE see Latin American FPE (LAFPE) Laing, R.D.  310 laissez-faire  265, 267 Lambert, A.  63 land dispossession  109 land occupation  109 landscape 85 conceptualizations of  222 description of  217 formation of  217 inter-textual construction of  219 living inhabitants of  221 material form of  217 materiality of  178 Mitchell’s analysis of  220 observable elements of  217 paintings  190, 218 places 378 processual aspects of  221 rural communities and  92 Sauer’s studies of  218 study of  186, 217 symbolic and critical approaches to  220 symbolic conception of  218 symbolic conceptualization of  219 language 255 La Révolution Urbaine 281

Index  425 large technical systems (LTS)  208 Larkin, B.  209 late liberalism  81 latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)  33 Latin American feminist political ecology (LAFPE) 152 Latin American Group of Feminist Studies, Formation and Action  152 Latour, B.  7, 9, 10, 262, 303, 304, 381 law enforcement 404 Law, J.  7, 9, 10 law-like explanation  71 Lawson, V.A.  395 learning  120, 121, 122, 123 Lees, L.  147, 148, 295, 326, 394 Lefebvre, H.  1, 209, 281, 313, 343, 353, 379, 383, 384, 385, 386, 395, 400 left assemblages  40 legal geographic scholarship  225 legal geography  223 description of  223 legal-spatial consciousness  226 LeGates, R.T.  110 Legg, S.  188 legitimate comparisons 70 Leibniz 334 Lenton, T.  24 Lerche, J.  214 Les Maîtres Fous   294 Lester, A.  63 Leszczynski, A.  100 Lévi-Strauss, C.  156, 380 Ley, D.  74, 219, 340 LGBT culture 368 geographies 367 rights 368 liberal democracy modern forms of  256 liberal feminism  161 liberal state power  303 Liboiron, M.  137 Li, M.  34 liminality 109 limited knowability  383 Limits to Capital, The   276 line 171, 172 linguistic colonial control  293 listening  250, 252 literary inscriptions  8 literary landscapes  219 Liu, K.  34 lived diasporic identity  198 lived experience  17, 18, 19, 20, 125, 145 livelihood opportunities  92 live music venues  251 Liverman, D.  24 living beings 388

Livingstone, D.N.  64 Ljubljana School of psychoanalysis, the  310 Lloyd, S.E.  226 localness, notions of  251 location-based element  167 logistics  208, 388, 390 London Olympics, 2012  284 Longhurst, R.  49 long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network  32, 34 López-Morales, E.  295, 394 Lorimer, J.  137, 262 love 177 Lowman, J.  75 LTS see large technical systems (LTS) Luandino Vieira, J.  293 Lugones, M.  151 Luque-Ayala, A.  131 lyrics 251 Macheka, T.  406 machine learning  44, 45, 100 methods 34 machine learning methods  34 machine spaces  325 Mackinder 281 Magritte, R.  343 Maguire, D.J.  167 Mahfouz, N.  293 mainstream schools  121 major theory  324 Malabou, C.  336 Malaysian diaspora  96 Maliene, V.  167 Malm, A.  24, 132, 261 Malpas, J.  193 Mango, K.  293 Mann, M.  282 Mansfield, B.  164 mapping  167, 168 Mapping Desire  367 Marcuse, P.  111 Marcus, G.E.  147 marginality 381 marginalization 104 Mark, D.M.  167 market 91, 158 market-based mechanisms  92 market-oriented development theories  90 marriage 177 Martí-Henneberg, J.  283 Martin, D.G.  226 Marxism  185, 233, 275, 302, 324 basic principles of  229 criticism of  1 fundamental basis of  229 post-structuralist versions of  231 Marxist geography  1, 79, 393

426  Concise encyclopedia of human geography Marxist infused theorization  220 Marxist schools of dialectical thinking  38 Marxist theory of capital  395 Marxist utopianism  14 Marx, K.  110, 229, 394 Marx’s critique of capitalism  399 masculinist approaches  177 masculinist bias 164 masculinities 161 studies 163 Massey, D.  58, 71, 213, 271, 282, 294, 303, 335, 372, 380, 383, 384, 385, 395 Massumi, B.  12 Masuku, S.  406 material assets  59 material cultural complex  217 material discourses 163 materialists 79 materialities  120, 406 materiality  131, 132, 378 complexity of  49 materialization 208 material social practices  385 Matias, L.F.  75 Mawani, R.  76 Mawdsley, E.  396 Maxwell, N.  105 Mayer, J.D.  180 May, J.  386 Mbembe, A. J.  63, 292, 373 McCarthy, J.  32, 276 McClintock, A.  292 McCormack, D.  86 McEwan, C.  294 McFarlane, C.  39, 401 McKay, H.D.  74 McKenzie, G.  33 McKian, S.  340 McKittrick, K.  153, 272, 319 McLean, H.  325 Meade, M.  180 meat 159 media 176 languages of  258 mediators 9 medical geography  180 megaprojects 210 Megoran, N.  53 Memmi, A.  292, 293 Menon, N.  151 mental health  180 geography 181 mental well-being  181 metabolic rift  261 method 330 methodological diversity  180 methodology 72 methods  87, 140, 142 qualitative 331

micropolitical encounters  374 Mies, M.  395 migrants pathways of  235 stories 235 migrant workers in India  214 migration  54, 55, 56, 94, 96, 132 academic knowledge production on  235 colonialism and  235 conception of  164 critical migration studies  288 drivers of  235 explanatory factors of  235 facilitation of  237 from Uganda  94 geographers 164 geographical imaginaries of  236 geographic analyses of  164 internal  286, 287 knowledge production on  236 maps 236 mobilities  54, 246 net 287 patterns 235 planned 404 processes  110, 237 scholars and population  94 scholarship 286 securitization of  246 spatial interaction models  286 studies  235, 236, 246 transnational  94, 96 transnational student  288 migrations 257 Milheiro, A.V.  390 militant ethnography  148 militarization  241, 243 military category of  240 demographics 241 functions, outsourcing of  242 functions, taxonomies of  241 gendered and racialized dynamics of  241 nature of participation  241 operations of  242 participation and war-making  243 participation, spatialities of  241 personnel 240 phenomena 240 power  240, 241 military activities 240 military geographical engagements  240 Millennium Development Goals  91, 122 Minca, C.  146 mind/body dualism  48 Miraftab, F.  89 Misgav, C.  49 Mitchell, D.  220, 223, 313 Mitchell, T.  262 mixed methods in geography  288

Index  427 mobile audio technology  251 mobile networks  54 mobile phones  99 mobile solidarity 237 mobilities  53, 54, 55, 363, 365 mobility  245, 393 accomplishment of  389 commoning 247 concept of  245 differentiation of  237 domain of  390 future directions in  248 infrastructures of  245 in vivid ways  388 justice 246 of ideas  247 politics of  236 practices of  236, 245 racial politics of  246 relational 245 research 248 spatialities of  388 specific practices associated with  245 unevenness of  245 unrestricted 390 mobility justice  246, 248 mobilization 8 Möbius strip  308 modelling  171, 173 modernity 294 fractured processes of  66 imaginings of  388 modernization 390 modernization theory Rostow’s 90 simplicity and promise of  90 modern medicine  203 modes of inquiry  12, 14, 15 Mollett, S.  320 Monad 334 Mongolian mounted archer  38 monoculture cropping systems  157 Montessori schools  121 Moore, J.  25, 138, 261 more-than-human  17, 18 geography approach  272 ‘morphology 217 mortgage crisis  268 mortgaged house purchases  59 Moscovici, S.  354 Mouffe, C.  315 Mountz, A.  54, 226, 326 Mufti, A.R.  71 multiculturalism 121 multicultures 373 multilateral organizations 258 multiple sclerosis  104 multi-sensory methods  140 Murdoch, J.  7, 8, 9, 355

music 198 and place  250 experience of  250 festivals 251 genres 250 human geographers exploring  250 Indigenous perspective  250 local and global forms of  250 making and listening  250 non-verbal engagement with  252 performance 251 production 251 ubiquitous presence of  251 musical experiences  252 musical styles  251 music–place relations  252 NAFTA 53 Naipaul, V.S.  293 nascent interactions  215 Nast, H.J.  191 nation contemporary resurgence of  259 emergence of  255 reference to  255 national identity  255 national imaginary production of  256 nationalist atmospheres  13 Nationality and Borders Bill  54 national sovereignty 255 National statistical offices  287 nation-states 258 concept of  255 formation, histories of  256 native ecosystems  157 naturalism 329 natural landscapes  84, 217 nature 85 actualizable potential resources  261 and society  262 anthropogenic 260 capitalism  261, 262 capitalist 260 contemporary crisis  261 crisis 260 double internality  261 environmental crisis  260 geography, role of  262 Great Acceleration inventory, the  260 interrogating 260 metabolic rift  261 planetary boundaries framework  260 planetary crisis  262 political ecology  261 post-structuralism 262 recuperative  260, 262 social science  260 nature/society relations  8 Ndungu Kungu, J.  76

428  Concise encyclopedia of human geography neighborhood group’s vision of  196 Nemser, D.  210, 317 neocolonial heritage  92 neoliberalism  14, 59, 61, 91, 122, 339, 340 as rascal concept  267 capitalism  61, 375 championing of  92 city 266 definition 265 flexibility of  268 globalization 53 ideological status of  267 rationality 269 resilience 268 neoliberalization academy 82 of policies  182 of universities  81 process 61 institutions 81 neo-paganism 340 neo-vitalism 37 net migration  287 network 358, 359 analysis  7, 173 associations  8, 10 circumstances 8 configuration and capacities  8 configurations 8 construction of  9 stability 8 vs territories scenario  336 neural networks  32 development 32 neurocapitalism 262 neurodiversity 106 new cultural geographers  219 ‘New Deal’ economic policies  157 new economic geography (NEG)  115 new geographies of health  180 new materialism  178 new mobilities paradigm  245 new urban geography  147 Niger Delta Indigenous communities in  80 Nikitas, A.  389 Nissen, S.  406 Njiru Gichobi, T.  76 Njoya, E.T.  389 Nogueira de Melo, S.  75 nominalism 328 non-communicable diseases (NCDs)  180 dominance of  181 non-Eurocentric analysis  292 non-human agency  19 non-human animals  17, 19 entanglements of  17

non-military workers  242 non-place 307 non-renewable resource extraction  389 non-representational theories  12 non-representational theory  40, 250 North America scholars 185 subsequent occupation and colonization of  157 North, P.  360 North–South research collaborations  92 novel comparative approaches  71 nudging 284 Nyerere, J.  177 objective environmental expertise  225 occupy movement  2 O’Connor, J.  278 official nationalisms  256 Ogborn, M  186 Ogoni activists  80 oil description of  131 extraction 131 Oldfield, F.  24 Olson, E.  339, 340 Olympic Stadium, the  284 ontological occupation  157 ontological scales  358 ontology description 328 sacralized 338 open data  167, 168, 173 opportunity hoarding  60 oppression 48 optimism 13 organic evolution  217 organic theory of the state  175 organized labour 213 Orientalism  64, 293 Oswin, N  370 Oteng-Ababio, M.  75 othering  54, 146 otherness 251 Ó Tuathail, G.  176 Our Planet (Netflix series)  23 Oven, K.J.  182 overextended metaphors  54 ownership edges of  60 unequal 58 ownership threshold  60 PAH see Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) paid work  214 Pain, R.  75, 340 Palka, E.J.  217 pandemic health geographers  183

Index  429 paranormal 308 Paris Agreement, the  360 Park, C.  338 Park, D.  104, 107 Parkes, D.N.  383 Park, R.E.  294 parochial origins of theory  70 Parr, H.  182 partial objects  38 participant observation  145, 146, 147 participant sensing  252 participatory collaborative research process  326 geography 324 Pasteur’s “discovery” of bacteria  7 patriarchy  61, 152 Patterson, G.E.  75 Peake, L.  326 peak oil  131 pedosphere 22 Peet, D.  2, 324 Pelletier, Philippe  1 Pellow, D.  319 Pentecostalism 339 performance  250, 251 music 251 non-verbal components of  252 opportunities for  252 styles of  251 traditional 251 performativity 252 Perreault, T.  276 personal affective memories  127 PESO see Political Ecology Society (PESO) Philo, C.  18, 181 philosophical turn  193 philosophy 344 phonography 252 photographs 27 physical access 105 physical fieldwork  187 physical geographers  201 physical geography  25, 69, 185 branches of  22 physical–human geography divide  190 physical realms  156 physical space  27, 252 physiological disorders 104 Piagetian psychology  403 Pile, S.  125, 191, 309, 340 place  94, 95, 96, 97, 192, 201, 202, 203, 251 see also sense of place and people  270 and space  190 Anthropocene 271 as analytical tool  270 attachment 270 audiences imagine and attribute meanings to 251 description  270, 271

development and  90 genius loci 270 geographies 273 globalisation  270, 271 health and  180 human connection to  191 inhabitation of  374 in space  190 meaning and creation  192 non-direct experiences  270 placelessness 270 rhythms of  386 sense of  191 social relations and understandings  271 temporary constellation of  385 time–space compression  271 place-centered ontologies  111 place emotions  33 placeless foodscapes  158 placemaking 27 place matters  27 places and bodies  51 experiences of  50 geographies of  240 policy implementation travel to  247 relationality of  71 sensory experiences of  51 place-specific happenings  181 planetary boundaries  23, 24 environmental relations  138 tipping points  23 planetary gentrification  295, 387 planetary urbanization  70, 353, 400, 401 planned migration  404 Plantationocene 138 plasticity 336 Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) 111 platforms 102 playability 33 play spaces  325 Plissart, F.  295 Pocock, D.C.  190 Podmore, J.A.  367 Pohl, L.  307 point 172 point data  171 police activity distribution of  75 geographical basis of  75 policy influence process of  182 policy knowledge  247 policy landscape 182 policy mobilities  247, 248 approach 248

430  Concise encyclopedia of human geography policy tourists  247 policy tours  247 political action 2, 3, 4 political and ethical subjects  17 political artworks  28 political dispositions  258 political ecology  133, 137, 261 and political economy  275 Anglo-American 276 Anglophone 275 contested institutionalization  275 DOPE 278 EJOLT 278 ENTiTLE 278 formation of  137 FPE 277 gender differences  277 geography 275 indigenous 295 intellectual roots  275 PESO 278 POLLEN 278 research 277 scholarship 277 UPE 276 Political Ecology Network (POLLEN)  278 Political Ecology Society (PESO)  278 Political Ecology Working Group, University of Kentucky 278 political-economic discourse  115 political economy  163, 275, 365 elements of  158 essential resources   156 feminist 277 knowledge production  277 political-economy 354 rural geography   354 political geography  1, 37, 53, 175, 281 central concern of  53 political goal  1 political identity quality of  96 political inaction necropolitical character of  236 political landscapes  219 political leadership  255 political movements  3 political pluralism  324 political power  105 concrete systems of  28 politics  312, 313, 314 and geography  281 body and brain  283 decolonial 295 emotions and affect  283 gender 283 geography 284 geopolitics 281

political geography  281 politics of connectivity  283 politics of propinquity  283 relationality  282, 283 scalar  358, 359 spatial implications  283 state territories  283 state territory  282 urban 281 politics of affect  283 politics of connectivity  283 politics of emotion  126 politics of propinquity  283 politics of refusal  273 politics of the body  283 POLLEN see Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) polygons 171 layers of  172 polyvocality 373 popular culture  176 representation in  240 popular geopolitics  176 population  42, 43, 44, 45, 46 big data  288 births and deaths  287 census data  287 definition 286 demographic accounting equation  286 description 286 digital data  288 Facebook data  288 fertility  286, 289 geography 286 internal migration  286, 287 longitudinal survey data  288 migration scholarship  286 mortality   286, 289 positivism 288 qualitative approaches  288 quantitative data  287, 288 registers 287 younger members of  403 population data census   287 digital data  288 large scale surveys  288 registers 287 population management  55 positionality  140, 145, 147 awareness of  143 positivism 328 positivist reasoning  43 post-colonial and Third World countries  293 description 292 literature 293 post-colonial feminisms  151 post-colonial geography  61

Index  431 post-colonialism  1, 145, 150, 151, 275, 276, 277 post-colonial nations  258 post-colonial nation-states  257 postcolonial projects  49 post-colonial racism  375 post-colonial state formations  255, 257, 258 post-colonial theories  141 post-colonial theory  293 post-Fordist capitalism  132 post-human 50 post-humanism  262, 276 post-military transitions  241 post-modernism 180 post-positivist approaches  25 post-productivism 355 post-structuralism  161, 180, 262, 275, 277, 334, 343, 344 post-structuralist geographers  381 post-structuralist perspectives  163 post-structuralist researchers  403 post-war optimism  115 Povenelli, E.  137 poverty 373 absolute 297 approaches, level of resources  297 area effects  299 capabilities approach  297 causes 299 consensual approaches  297 definition 297 description 297 distribution of  74 expert approaches  297 generation of  152 headcount measure  298 human geographical studies  297 incidence of  298 income, as measure  298 mapping 298 objective approaches  297 persistent measures  298 quantitative human geography studies  299 relative 297 risk of  298 segregation indices  299 shame 297 spatial distribution  298, 299 subjective approaches  297 unit of account  298 US poverty thresholds  298 power  100, 240, 241, 243, 380 advantage and  58 and oppression  48 and racism  317 and space  56, 305 and territories  303 ANT  303, 304 centred view of power  302

decoloniality and coloniality  319 disciplinary 317 discourse and  49 double life  302 expressions of  250 feminist geography  302 forms and modes of  14 forms of  99 function of  58 generative 303 geography 305 horizontal/vertical power relations  302 inequality of  403 legacy of Foucault, the  302 liberal state  303 modalities 303 modes of  12 popular imaginaries  302 power geometry  303 relations of  219 science 305 socio-cultural review of  164 spatialities of  164, 380 spatial workings of  303 structure of  163 topology 304 transnational social movements  302 power geometry  303 power matrix  295 power relations  131, 147, 223, 275, 281 centrality of  152 renegotiating of  147 practical adequacy  330 practical geopolitics  176 practice  379, 380 of measurement  378 Pratt, A.  355 Pratt, G.  81 Pratt, M.L.  293 precarity  13, 213 predictions 173 primary schools  120 private sector  91 private spaces  373 privatization 91 privatization, public sector  266 privatized Keynesianism  60 problematization 8 processual ontology  54 pro-democracy protests  315 production embeddedness 156 materialities of  158 productive work  214 productivism 157 professionalisation’ 2 profitability 393 progressive geographers  79

432  Concise encyclopedia of human geography progressive social theories  79 property 61 property markets  59 property ownership  223 psychoanalysis 128 cultural geographers  309 definition 307 Eurocentrism, accusation of  309 feminist geographers  309 human geography  309 inner and outer space  308 paranormal 308 psychoanalytic geography  308, 309, 310 space and spatiality  307 subdisciplines 309 topological thinking  308 unconscious  307, 308 universalizability 309 world 307 world writing  308 psychology, scholars in  379 psychotherapy 128 Pualani Louis, R.  202 Puar, J.K.  368 public health rise of  182 public museums/exhibitions  187 public service missions  266 public services  60 public space  104 boundary 312 commons 314 consumption-scapes 314 decolonized 312 global justice movements  312 global pandemic  312 human geography  316 humans 312 hybridity, zone of  314 Indigenous cultures  314 inequality 315 natural environment  314 physical 313 reappropriation by marginalized groups  251 religious institutions  315 repression 315 Singapore 312 socially networked virtual publics  313 space of flows  313 theorizing 312 Venezuela 312 violence 315 virtual space  313 void decks  315 public spaces  154, 373 public transport  246 Puerto Ricans 95 Pulido, L.  138 pure exteriority  38 Python 167

quantitative revolution  115 queer community 367 economies 367 geographies  163, 201 and transgender 154 projects 49 spaces 367 theory  367, 369, 370 theory  1, 13, 14, 48 urban spaces 163 Quijano, A.  150, 318 race  61, 161, 381 Afro-pessimism 318 and ethnicity  110 conceptual movements  317 definition 317 Eurocentric 198 historicization of  246 infrastructures of  317 intersectional issues of  225 racialization 317 racism 317 regime of truth  317 social construction of  150 structures of  163 race geographers  48 racial capitalism 372 categories  197, 210 discrimination 110 hierarchies of empire  133 inequities 183 racialized inequalities  29 racial subjugation  209 racism  61, 373 and environment  318 and power  317 colonialism and  66 for Marxists  233 forms of  81 institutional 320 political geographies  317 space, production of  317 racist/racializing border enforcement  56 radical academic coroners  323 Antipode 324 crisis of precarity  326 DGEI 325 geographers 323 geographies 323 machine spaces  325 origins 323 participatory and collaborative approaches  326 play spaces  325 radical geography  2, 80 radical indeterminacy  8 railway network  283 Ramírez 56

Index  433 ransomware 101 rasters  169, 170 rational abstraction  329 rational academic research  48 Ratzel, F.  175 Raynor, R.  13 Razack, S.  82 RCMP see Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Reagan, R.  265 real/near-real time availability  43 Reclus, E.  1, 323, 372 “recombinant” labour geography  215 recuperative nature  260, 262 recurrent neural networks (RNN)  32 Reddy, G.O.  167 redistributive politics  151 reflective ethnography  147 reflective practice  147 reflexive scrutiny  140 reflexivity  140, 147, 148 type of  147 regional development strategies  252 regional diversification  116 regional economic geography  117 regional instability  257 regional landscapes  186 regional music scenes  252 registers, population  287 Reid, G.  202 relation 136 relational  398, 399, 400, 401 relational comparison  71 relational dimension  140 relational economic geography  117 relational grammar of politics  335 relationalities 406 relationality  250, 312, 313 between people  107 relational politics  282, 283 relational space & regions absolute space  333, 334 absolute vs relative debate  333 connectivity 334 non-territorial trap  336 objects 334 spacetime philosophies  334 relational thinking  54, 358 relations 136 contextual webs of  142 relationships 99 relative poverty  297 relative space  378 relativity theory  334 religion  96, 255 alternative femininities  339 geographers 338 politics and poetics  339 Religionwissenschaft 338 religious geography  338 religious institutions  315

relocation  109, 111 Relph, E.C.  111, 270, 379 remote sensing  34 renewable energy  132 renter activism  148 “rent gap” model  394 rentier class  59 rentiership  58, 59 Ren, Y.  34 representation  86, 201 in popular culture  240 representation/al performative 343 representationalism 86 representations disabled from  105 repression 315 repressive border regimes  54 reproductive labour  214 rescaling 266 research collaborative and participatory approaches to  141 performative afterlives of  140 researcher safety and privacy  147 research frameworks  190 resettlement 241 residential burglary  75 residential regeneration  266 residuum 61 resilience  348, 349 resistance forms of  10 public 314 resource extraction  390 resources and located decision-making  302 and power  302 centralized 303 energy 131 existence of  302 mobilization of  302 redistribution of  233 resource security  178 responsible critical geographies  82 resurgent nationalism  318 reterritorialization  53, 96 rhythmanalysis  252, 386 Rich, A.  381 Rigg, J.  90 risk academic study areas  348 and resilience  348, 349 assessment 348 communication 349 governments and policymakers  350 human geography  350 perception 349 precautionary principle  350 regulatory regimes  350 vulnerability 349

434  Concise encyclopedia of human geography risk assessment  348, 349, 350 risk communication  349 risk governance  350 Risk Society, the  350 RNN see recurrent neural networks (RNN) road transport  389 Robertson, R.  265 Robinson, C.  318 Robinson, J.  70, 71, 92, 294, 355, 401 Rocheleau, D.  277 Roelofsen, M.  146 Roman Catholic Church, the  339 Rosenberg, R.  370 Ross, A.  75 Rostow, W.  90 Rothenberg, T.  367 Rouch, J.  294 Rousseau, J.J.-  398 Routledge, P.  177 Roy, A.  319 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)  136 Royal Geographical Society (RGS)  80, 120, 141 Ruhleder, K.  208 rule 255 rural 354 rural displacement  109 rural environment  210 rural idyll  354 rural spaces  92, 400 Rural Urban Classification, the  354 sacred archipelagos 340 ontologies 340 Said, E.  63, 293, 318 Samaddar, R.  235 Samers, M.  226 Santa Cruz-based Center for Political Ecology, the 278 Santos, B.S.  293 Santos, M.  379 SAPs see structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) Sasson-Levy, O.  241 Sauer, C.O.  17, 84, 156, 217, 275 Saunders, R.  340 scalar identities  197 scalar politics  358, 359 scale  307, 309, 310, 319 climate governance  359 engagement 359 ontological 358 relational thinking  358 spatial 358 scallop fishing  7 Schaffter, M.  53 Schengen borders  53 Scherr, A.W.  226

Schmid, C.  400 scholar-activism 2 scholarship 186 thread of  225 scholarship on urban  398 school hallways and playgrounds  121 Schumpeterian workfare regime  266 Schweik, S.  105 science  260, 261 science and technologies studies (STS)  7 scientific cropping techniques  157 scientific knowledge 7 scientific racism  257 Scope 104 Scott, A.  401 Scott, J.C.  3 Seahorse operations  54 Seamon, D.  191, 379 secondary schools  120 Secor, A.  339, 341 Secor, A.J.  309 secular space  338, 339, 340 securitized borders  237 security 101 Sedgwick, E.  12 Seeley 65 Segato, R.  151 segregated mobility index, the  363 segregation 235 agents of  362 capitalist structures  362 cause 362 definition 362 ideology 362 impacts of  363 indices 363 marginalized groups  364 measuring 363 privileged groups  364 self-segregation 362 segregation indices  299 self-determination  201, 202, 205 self-expressive cosmopolitanism  341 self-governance spaces of production through  213 self-policing 303 Sembène, O.  293 Semple, E.  156 Sen, A.K.  297 SEND see special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) Senghor, L.  293 sense of belonging  27, 96, 256 sense of historicism  384 sense of national unity  258

Index  435 sense of place  27 and sense of planet  271 attachment and belonging  272 black 272 climate change  271 COVID-19 pandemic  271 environmental studies  270 geographers’ research  270 global 271 globalisation 271 humanist geography  270 insideness 270 more-than-human geography approach  272 strength of  272 urban design studies  270 senses of belonging  100 sensuous materialities  221 separate comparative sites  71 settler colonialism  109, 157 settler colonies  65 sex heterosexuality 367 spatiality 367 sexism 201 sexual difference  381 sexualities gay spatialities  367 geographies 367 heterosexuality 367 homonormativity 368 LGBT+ rights  368 monogamy 368 spatiality 367 sexuality  61, 151 sexual reproduction  104 Shaba/Lubumbashi Swahili language  293 Shah, A.  214 shaping force  217 shared collective identities  252 shared spatial values  196 Sharma, S.  386 Sharp, J.  177 Shaw, C.R.  74 shelter organizations  237 Shenton, W.  89 Sheppard, E.  326 Shin, H.B.  295, 394 shipping 389 Sieber, R.E.  202 signifying system  87 Silver, J.  131 similarity 393 Simmel, G.  294, 398 Simmonds, N.  204 Simone, A.  295 Simpson, A.  273 simultaneity 385 situated actions  107

skilled migrant  237 small-to-medium size businesses  114 ‘smart’ cities  99 smart cities innovation  391 smart city  101 smellscapes 27 Smith, A.  65 Smith, C.J.  75 Smith, N.  137, 276, 358, 379, 393, 394, 396 Smith, S.J.  177, 190, 191, 372, 374 Snow, J.  180 social Antipodean framings of  374 conceptualizations of  372 polyvocal understandings of  373 social action  250 social actors  148, 403 social ascent 60 social change  2 social construction  75, 225 social constructionism  161, 334 social data 42 social difference  13 force and persistence of  13 forms of  13 spatialities of  121 social differences  161 social disadvantage  58, 59, 60 social dispositions  258 social geography  79, 372 social goal  1 social groups  250 social hierarchy  58, 213 social identities  373 social inequality  118, 183, 373 social injustice  323 socialism  229, 231 sociality  246, 373 social justice  141, 372 arguments of  180 social life  49 complexities of  148 social media  102, 270, 278, 288 social media data  128 social media platform  128 social mobility  59, 60 social model of health  180 social movement  2 social movements  3, 175 social networks  252 social oppression  229 social oppressions  230, 233 social polarization  180 social policy  297 social processes  250 social psychology  12 social reality  308 social relations  81, 82 of marginalization  82

436  Concise encyclopedia of human geography social relationships  250 social representation  354 social reproduction  156, 213, 215, 229 social sciences 190 social science theories 70 social science theory  186 social security benefits  60 social security transfers  299 social situations 251 social space  219 social-spatial formations  12, 14 social-spatial relations  12 social stratification  58 social theory  162, 350 social worlds  245 societal contributors  403 societal power relations  163 societal processes  388 societal relations  390 society description of  229 disabling nature of  104 Society for Risk Analysis (SRA)  348 society–nature relationships  186 socio-ecological change broader processes of  133 socio-ecological relations  131 socio-economic inequalities  132 socio-material networks  247 socio-political processes  247 socio-spatial differences  55 socio-spatial displacement  28 socio-spatial relations  48, 146 socio-spatial segregation  364 sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK)  7 soft skills  58 software applications  99 Sohn, C.  55 Soja, E.W.  1, 379, 380, 383, 384, 385 solidarity 95 song lyrics  251 Sopher, D.  338 sound diaries  252 soundscapes 27 Southern urbanism  92, 208 South–South development relationships  91 sovereignty formal protection of  258 of state government  255 soya 157 Soyinka, W.  293 space  190, 191, 192, 193, 380, 381, 383, 384, 386 see also relational space & regions absolute  333, 334 and spatialities  379 anglophone conceptions of  382 approaches to  381 collective emotional experiences in  125

commodification of  86 conceptualizing 384 configuration of  105 definition 333 dependence 359 description of  378 emotionalities of  127 Euclidean imaginary of  305 geometric and arithmetic understandings of  382 imagining 384 notions of  27 of intervention  385 of theorization  72 positional quality  333 post-colonial theories of  381 power 305 power relations  305 reclaiming of  384 relational entities  305 relational, performative and topological conceptions of  382 relative  333, 334 representations of  383 secular  338, 339, 340 time and  385 under capitalism  393 cadets 378 space identity  251 spaces  53, 229, 383 and spatialities  240 constitutive of  245 experiences of  50 in airports  390 of capitalist production  391 of cultural presentation  29 of knowledge production and circulation  247 of military operations  241 of production and consumption  158 societies and  245 spaces of contention  2 spacetimes 374 Spanish anti-eviction movement  111 Sparke, M.  256 spatial  167, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173 spatial boundlessness  271 spatial demography  289 spatial distribution, poverty  298, 299 spatial ecology of stripped cars  74 spatial engagement 196 spatial estrangement  109 spatial hierarchy of control  395 spatial injustice  323 spatialities  120, 121, 123 of young people  404 spatiality  100, 380, 381, 382 of power relations  380 post-colonial theories of  381 spatialization  127, 196

Index  437 spatialized economic impacts  251 spatial justice  1, 267 spatial ordering 63 spatial perspective  223 spatial polarization  180 spatial processes  250 spatial relation  132 spatial science  378, 382 spatial separatism  378 spatial turn  383 special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) 121 spina bifida 104 spiritual geographies  340 Spivak, G.C.  82, 151, 293 spotting patterns  172 Springer, Simon  1 SQS see Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy Squires, G. D.  76 SRA see Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) Sriram, C.L.  75 Srivastava, S.  82 SSK see sociology of scientific knowledge Stanes, E.  49 Star, S.L.  208 state 281 boundaries 283 definition of  255 electoral units  281 expansionism 281 formation 256 politics 282 rescaling of  358, 359 sovereignty  255, 319 spatial definition and boundaries of  255 territories 282 violence 319 state capitalism  315 state-centric political geography  1 state colonial power postcolonial critique of  243 state–diaspora relations  96 state intervention coherence and effectiveness of  230 state of emergency  386 state power 255 statistical sampling  330 Steiner schools  121 Steward, J.  275 Stiegler, B.  86 Stockholm Resilience Centre, the  260 Stoermer, E.  22 Storper, M.  401 structural adjustment programs (SAPs)  91, 293 structuralism 185 structural Marxism  219 structures of feeling’  13

STS see Science and Technologies Studies student geographies 122 international 123 study 245 subaltern 294 subaltern geopolitics  177 Subaltern Studies Group, the  293 Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) 22 subdiscipline  12, 185, 186, 188, 204 subject and individual  307 and world  307 intimate feelings  308 social order  308 unconscious, the  309 subjectivities 132 suburban ethnographies  146 Sundberg, J.  204 Sundstrom, R.R.  196 supply chains  136, 242 support vector machine (SVM) model  33 suprastructure 209 surplus value  230 sustainability science  26 Sustainable Development Goals  91, 122, 283 sustainable urban mobility  389 suzerainity 257 SVM model see support vector machine (SVM) model Swyngedouw, E.  265, 276 symbolic landscapes  219 system builders  208 systemic marginalization  66 Taggart, J.  396 talk-based methods  87 taskscapes 221 Taylor, P.J.  281, 358 technical artefacts  8 technological change  388, 389 technologies 246 technology 86 TEMPEST database  187 temporality  100, 383, 385, 386 awareness of  243 temporary autonomous zones  2 terrains of resistance  2 territorial fixing of order  54 territoriality of  96 territorialization  303, 318, 336 territory  54, 56, 94, 95, 97 and power  303 territory (bounded spaces)  281, 282, 283, 284 text-based methods  87 textual constructions of reality  145 textual discourse  252

438  Concise encyclopedia of human geography Thatcher, M.  265 Theodore, N.  267 theo-ethics 340 theology  338, 339 theorization 44 theory 245 theory of migration, the  286 therapeutic landscapes concept of  181 universal healing notion of  181 thermodynamic conceptualizations of energy  133 thermodynamics discipline of  132 laws of  132 The Treachery of Images  343 thingness 99 Third World feminists  162 Thomas, N.  294 Thomas-Slayter, B.  277 Thompson, A.  81 Thrift, N.  84, 85, 191, 192, 221, 345, 380, 381, 383, 386 Tibetans 95 TikTok 102 time and temporality  405 to geographic theory  383 TimeSpace 386 quality of  386 time–space compression  271 tipping points  23, 24 Tixier, J.  348 Todd, J.D.  370 Todd, Z.  136 Tonnies sentiments  398 topography 334 topology  202, 336 and power  304 human-non-human relation  309 psychoanalysis 308 psycho-social spatializations  309 spatial relations  304 topophilia 338 definition 270 Toynbee, A.  39 traditional military geography  240 traditional statistical methods  44 trans and gender variant geographies  49 transgender  367, 369, 370 transition  131, 132, 133 translation 8 difficulties of  378 process  8, 9 trans-local affiliation  27 transnational corporations  114 transnational

labour 92 liberalism 265 migration  94, 96 discussions on  236 migration spaces  164 social networks  236 student migration  288 transnationalism  94, 236 transport description of  388 disadvantage 390 domain of  390 future of  391 geographers 389 geographies of  391 infrastructures  246, 247 injustices of  390 issues 390 mobilities 245 modes and practices of  246 multi-modal forms of  246 social and material infrastructures of  248 spatialities of  388 systems of  388 transportation 245 infrastructures 246 transport geography  388, 389, 390, 391 power of  390 transport justice  388, 390 transport technologies  390 travel habitual form of  245 types of  388 trends 173 Trewartha, G.T.  286 tribal solidarity  37 Trovalla, E.  209 Trovalla, U.  209 Tuan, Y.-F.  111, 190, 191, 192, 193, 338, 379 Tuck, E.  153 Tucker, A.  369 Turner, B.L.  24 typology 94 Uber 101 UBT see Urban Big Time (UBT) ugly laws  105 Ugreninov, E.  104 Ugueto-Ponce, M  312 UK ‘Brexit’ referendum campaign 2016  55 Ulloa, A.  152 uncertainty 168 unconscious, the definition 308 materialized and embodied spaces of  308 outside 308 psychoanalytic thinking  308 scale 309 social life  308 subject’s social order  308

Index  439 underdevelopment 393 uneasiness in culture, the  309 unemployment  29, 60, 373 unequal ownership  58 uneven development  394, 395 theory of  396 uneven geographical 395 unformed elements  37 unfree labour 61 Ungruhe, C.  405 UNHCR 109 un-homing 111 uniformity 378 uniform planar surfaces  378 unionism 3 United Nations food security  157 United Nations peacekeeping missions  176 United States Department of Agriculture, the  354 United States poverty thresholds, the  298 universalism  318, 328 universalizability 309 universal man  372 unofficial legal system, Brazil  293 unpaid 214 unrestricted mobility  390 unsafe operating space’  23 “unsound and unnecessary” concept  217 UPE see urban political ecology (UPE) urban concepts 398 description of  398 geography 398 processes 400 theory 401 thinking 401 urban air pollution  232 urban animal geographies 17 Urban Big Time (UBT)  383 urban context 164 urban cultural fabric  28 urban development  118 urban discourse  29 urban displacements  109 literature 112 urban electricity grids  131 urban environment  74, 131, 210 urban geography  161 research in  163 urban governance  223 Urbanik, J.  17 urban infrastructure 104 urbanism 208 urbanization  70, 132, 399, 400, 401 impacts on animals’ behaviours  17 large-scale processes of  137 processes of  256 process of  137 study of  70

urban landscapes  18 urban logistics  391 urban manufacturing  393 urban modernity  294 urban places 251 urban planning  163 urban political ecology (UPE)  276 urban population  92, 187 urban redevelopment  248 urban restructuring  266 urban–rural distinction  399 Urban Small Time (UST)  383 urban spaces  92 UST see Urban Small Time (UST) Valentine, G.  197, 251, 339, 367 van Blerk, L.  406 vandalism 74 variation-finding 70 Varsanyi, M.  226 vehicle automation  389 Véron, O.  4 victimization 237 Vincett, G.  340 violence  201, 315 and instability  257 excessive use of  255 from maquilas  152 of neoliberal policies  152 on Indigenous communities  204 Virocene 372 virtual border 55 environment 405 andscapes 219 rivate network  44 public spaces  313 shutdown 372 virtuous investment  60 visual discourse  252 visual ethnography  146 visualization 168 vital conjunctures  405 vitalism 37 Vocabulaire de ville de Elizabeth 293 void decks  315 volunteered systems  42 von Thünen, Johann  156 vulnerabilities 373 vulnerability  348, 349 Wadiwel, D.J.  18 wage labourers  58 wage stagnation 61 waithood 406 Waitt, G.  49 Walker, R.  400 ‘walled-off disciplines’  373 Wangari, E.  277

440  Concise encyclopedia of human geography Wardman, J.K.  350 war on terror  282 Warren, G.  1, 325 Washington consensus, the  265 Wasteocene 138 Waters, J.  404 Watts, M.J.  275 way of life  87 weapons systems use of  242 Weber, M.  232 WeChat 102 welfare and area effects  300 improving 299 spatially differentiated welfare losses  297 welfare policies  266 Western civilization  399 Western colonialism  292 Western North America heatwave  136 Wetherell, M.  127 Whatmore, S.  7, 336 Wheatley, P.  338 Whetung, M.  203 white dominions  65 white geographies  142 White, G.F.  348 whiteness 374 of geography  373 White, R.J.  4 white supremacy  65, 81 social relations of  82 Wiegman, R.  81 Wilbert, C.  18 Wilde, M.  148 Wilford, J.  339, 340 Wilkins, D.  341 Williams, N.  87 Williamson, O.  265 Williams, R.  13, 128 Winnicott, D.W.  310 Wirth, L.  294, 399 Withers, C.W.J.  186 Wolch, J.  17, 181 Wolf, E.  275 women approach, geography of  161 defining 163 lived experiences  161 migration experiences  164 representation of  164

Woods, C.  319, 323 workers’ disempowerment in production  232 workers’ struggle  229, 230, 231, 233 work place  48, 214 world antagonism 308 definition 307 psychoanalytic geographer  308 writing  307, 308 World Bank’s poverty line, The  298 world-making  142, 401 world music  251 world systems theory  90 wretched savages  64 Wright, E.O.  58 Wylie, J.  221 Wynter, S.  318, 320 xenophobic attitudes  106 Xing, X.  34 Yang, K.W  153 Yiftachel, O.  112 young people adults and  404 access to basic human rights  406 contributions to geography  403 description of  403 diversity of  403 global diversity of  404 in geographical research  403 micro-geographies of  404 relational aspects of  404 relational nature of  404 social geographies  403 spatialities 404 temporal and spatial dynamics of  405 youth  403, 405, 406 Zalasiewicz, J.  22 Zaragocin, S.  152 zeitgeist 267 Zelinsky, W.  338 Zhao, L.  34 Zhu, D.  33 Ziai, A.  89 zones of impunity  75 Zuni people  153