Geographical Journal最新文献

The unprecedented climate change has catastrophic repercussions for high mountain communities and these issues need a multi-disciplinary understanding for adaptation and mitigation strategies. The limited cultivable agricultural land and pastures along with an abridged cultivation season and water scarcity, all have severely impacted local communities in the cold desert of Ladakh. The indigenous people relying on glacier and snow-melt have developed unique water management and agro-pastoralism practices and are searching for additional alternatives owing to continuous climate and lifestyle changes. People are increasingly relocating to higher valleys in search of adequate cultivable land. In this endeavour, people are found to be practicing agro-pastoral activities adjacent to the thermokarst lakes (Oasis) present on the rock glaciers. The present study is a one-of-a-kind overview of such innovative and adaptive farming strategies to encourage research towards the water storage in such features, and how long it will remain sustainable.

The individual and social therapeutic benefits of spending time making have received both popular and academic endorsement. These testimonials often promote the sentiment that the benefits of making are experienced in the doing rather than what is made. In particular, making is recognised for providing alternative temporal experiences to the incessant pace of global capitalism. In this paper I unpick this bias towards the processes over the products of making in an autoethnographic study of memorial remaking. This practice involved making items for family members from my father's clothing in 2020/21 following his death at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Inspired by William Morris's writing on the hopes of work, I reflect on the assumed value of process over product and reassess this binary with reference to time. In Morris's original formulation time is expressed through the hope of rest, which I suggest can be reworked into rhythm. Through re-engaging with the hopes of making in my own practice of memorial remaking, I reflect how changing the temporal dimension from rest to rhythm is more in tune with a relational approach to creativity rather than confining making to responsibilities that are bounded by time and space. Memorial remaking provides a way of fabricating how memories, intimacies, emotions and responsibilities are interwoven into the experiences of grief, through making items that resonate with individuals in time and space. Thus, this paper also unpicks how experiences of grief consolidate normative codes of moving on and individual endeavour to craft one's journey through this process.

The Jamaican specialty coffee industry operates in an ecologically sensitive landscape that is institutionally, politically and socio-economically complex. Birthed under colonial rule, the industry has undergone a confluence of events that have shaped its contemporary organisation and exacerbated deeply rooted institutional and structural conditions. Through the lens of environmental justice, the paper sheds light on the plural claims to justice under changing climatic conditions and reveals the politics of adaptation within the context of market capitalism. Using stakeholder interviews, the paper captures the articulations and manifestations of injustice by exploring the local perceptions of procedural justice and justice as recognition. Through an examination of power and politics, the paper begins by contextualising the pre-existing conditions that shape the disabling environment in which smallholders operate. This includes the neoliberal restructuring of the industry, smallholders' access to low farm gate prices, expensive farm inputs, low-value chain participation, and limited support services. As these conditions are exacerbated by climate change impacts, the paper then discusses the disparity in justice claims between farmers and industry stakeholders surrounding the deployment of suitable climate change adaptation response. This is an area of contestation, as even though smallholders face multiple stressors, industry leaders have continued to operate the island's major coffee-producing spaces as areas where profits can be mined and privileges reinforced. Effectively, the smallholder livelihoods embedded within Jamaica's coffee-producing landscapes have been subjected to asymmetrical structures of power which legitimise whose voices are heard and which adaptation pathway takes precedence, thus generating injustices, nurturing vulnerabilities and stifling agency.

This study explores the relationship between Winter storm Grayson and human responses in the US by considering a multitude of periods, regions, socio-demographic variables and spatial autocorrelation for the number of tweets. This study suggests that the proportion of tweets is highly concentrated in the north-east region, which is the most damaged region in the winter storm week. Second, there is significant spatial autocorrelation for the number of tweets related to the winter storm. The lag coefficient values of the spatial lag model and the spatial error model are 0.362 and 0.437 at a 0.01 significance level, respectively. Third, younger people and people who have less than a high school degree show a positive coefficient value, whereas males, people with a high school degree, and those who have high income show a negative coefficient value for the number of tweets. This study shows that spatial regression models would be better models to understand human responses to natural disasters than the ordinary least squares model.

Fieldwork – “going there” – is the presumed norm and baseline of geographical research. In this commentary, I propose a framework for challenging the normative framing of fieldwork in geography and other fields (including those beyond academia): an ethic of not going there. I argue that fieldwork, rather than a neutral rite of passage, is deeply entwined with some of the most entrenched issues in contemporary geography and research more broadly. Building on a range of prior critiques and using the lens of “access”, I propose some ways for critiquing the presumptions inherent in geographical imaginaries of “fieldwork”. This ethical framework argues that doing geographical fieldwork should have to be justified to the same extent as not doing fieldwork is expected to be justified. I envision an ethic of not (always) going there as an alternative way of thinking about research (and researchers) within and beyond geography.

Urban gardens have emerged at the cracks and edges of the densely built environment of Metro Manila, taking on a variety of forms that cultivate a sense of habitability amid harsh urban conditions. The empirical diversity in the spaces, practices and trajectories of urban gardens in the city, however, often exceeds their usual framings either as state-sponsored projects from above that seek to transform individual dispositions, or as grassroots initiatives from below that result from conscious collective resistance or encroachment. Framing gardens as a locus to understand city-making amid massive urbanisation, this paper aims to provide a different account of urban gardens by focusing on how they emerge from a certain edginess, characterised by a coming together of various actions, aspirations and relations, and by a mode of practice marked by a distinctive temporality and peripheral logic. Using particular accounts of gardening from across Metro Manila, the paper demonstrates the edginess of urban gardens in terms of four articulations: as interstitial, provisional, transversal and experimental. Making a garden work and maintaining its place in the city entail consolidating relationships between various urban elements that carve spaces of manoeuvre, produce diverse eventualities, and map onto the indeterminate politics of the maybe.

The Anthropocene provides a useful way to think through all manner of human–environment processes and challenges. This is especially pronounced in relation to food and farming, which are heavily implicated in changes to the Earth's biophysical and chemical processes. Yet, despite burgeoning interest in the Anthropocene as a concept, it is comparatively absent from recent developments in food geography. This is surprising given the profound impacts of food and agriculture on biogeochemical flows and geographical strata, and given future predictions regarding ‘Anthropogenic climate change.’ The objective of this Theme Issue therefore, and the five papers that comprise it, is to redress this by directly connecting and drawing together social science scholarship that examines food geographies ‘in,’ ‘of’ and ‘for’ the Anthropocene. The Theme Issue papers engage with different aspects of the Anthropocene as spatial phenomena and here we integrate relevant arguments from each, alongside wider agri-food geographical scholarship, to explain what we mean by food geographies ‘in,’ ‘of’ and ‘for’ the Anthropocene. In doing so, we respond to Tsing and colleagues' (2019, Current Anthropology 60, S186–97) call for a spatial as well as temporal treatment of the Anthropocene. These spatial expressions are also key to the proliferation of terms that have accompanied developments in Anthropocene scholarship. We conclude by offering up some brief reflections on a future research agenda. An important first step is to conceptualise food geographies ‘in,’ ‘of’ and ‘for’ the Anthropocene, including accounts that ground and potentially unsettle food and the Anthropocene as Capitalocene (Moore, 2016, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism) and food and the Anthropocene as more-than-human (Haraway, 2016, Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucen). A second step is to address key contemporary Anthropogenic agri-food relations, especially those that are already in flux or transition. A final priority for future research is to deepen and extend the ethics of care and moral food geographies of the Anthropocene imperative.

The objective of this Theme Issue, and the five papers that comprise it, is to connect and draw together social science scholarship that examines food geographies ‘in,’ ‘of’ and ‘for’ the Anthropocene.

Plastic is a persistent problem in westernised cities. Yet it is also a key mediator, affording and assisting the everyday. In small apartments, it supports daily life by assisting with waste management, storage, and provisioning of affordable ornaments and furniture. Plastic, in this context, is a mundane and utilitarian substrate to apartment life, as well as being a problematic potential pollutant. Recognising the diverse contributions to research on high-density living, this paper draws on vertical urbanism and relational ideas of home. It explores the socio-material entanglements of plastic in apartments through household interviews across Melbourne, London, Barcelona, and Perth. The research reveals ways in which plastic mediates the material inequalities of high-rise living, typified by entanglements of space constraint, transience, and waste management. The contribution is twofold. Theoretically, our work suggests a direction for socio-materialities research in reframing ideas of home as a static, physical site, to one that is more contingent materially and spatially. As various households adapt and make do, their refuges in the sky are being reconfigured physically and symbolically by and through plastic. Relational approaches can help to reveal the mundane but critical entanglements of plastic and everyday life in apartments. Second, empirically, we show that mundane infrastructures matter; they shape the spaces and places of plastic and apartment inequalities. Thus, policy interventions that target household behaviours can only have a marginal impact on plastic consumption where uneven infrastructures remain. Moreover, they may direct attention away from where change might be more promising, such as wider social rules and meanings around plastic, and the materialities of building design/management for waste infrastructures both inside and outside the apartment.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, suspended and laid off garment workers struggled on severely reduced incomes to meet the cost of food for themselves and their families. It is in this context of ‘double crisis’ that our commentary focuses on the diminished eating and reduced bodily fates of garment workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that thinking with Berlant encourages and supports scholars to contemplate and articulate how the ‘production of value for others’ can reduce the ‘fates of the body’ of those living and labouring at the sharp end of the capitalist system.

A key scientific publication demonstrates that the bio-physical composition of the broiler chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) represents a signal of the Anthropocene. This finding contributes to a wider body of evidence that locates the beginning of the Anthropocene in the mid-20th century, and is part of a broader intellectual project that seeks to establish and demarcate the Anthropocene as a new geological era. This paper takes a different tack. Treating Gallus gallus as an objective corollary for the Anthropocene, it positions the broiler chicken and the Anthropocene as an ontologically emergent nexus comprised of social–spatial relations, materialities, and practices. The paper then adopts critical nexus thinking to trace out the key relations and materialities, and their points of convergence, and underpinning extractivist ontologies that assemble into the chicken's body. Relations of particular concern include the processes that embody surplus value into the corporality of the chicken; the rationalisation and transformation of territories and landscapes into productive units of space, and the tightly coupled, interconnected flows of relations, materials, and coordinating technologies that comprise the ‘supply chain’. It argues that by using critical nexus thinking to identify and articulate these relations that assemble into Gallus gallus, it renders the Anthropocene legible. Such legibility in turn fosters geographical awareness and responsibility that might lead to the changes necessary to address the large-scale spatial inequalities from which the era stems and redress the consequences that the era might otherwise engender.