Pub Date : 2025-06-28DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103386
Nicholas Patrick Sweeney
Devolution is argued to enhance decision-making through allowing for representative place-based policy making by engaged local citizens. Meanwhile, voter participation in local elections in England is approximately one-third of the electorate, divided along demographic lines, raising questions over the democratic legitimacy of local policymaking. Leveraging a restricted dataset from The Elections Centre, my study provides the first detailed investigation into this relationship. Focusing on the six English devolved areas granted expanded powers in 2017, I employ a difference-in-differences approach on a panel of single-tier authorities spanning 2004–2022. I find that despite the transfer of greater local powers, devolution does not lead to any overall increase in democratic engagement, although these effects vary by devolved area. Also, there is no relationship between existing voting behaviour and the effect of devolution, suggesting cycles of political exclusion persist. My findings evidence a ‘geography of disengagement’, and the inefficacy of increased devolved powers in influencing these patterns, contesting the importance of representative policymaking under England's devolution framework, and place-based policies more generally, beyond a political rhetorical device.
{"title":"Devolution and democratic engagement in England","authors":"Nicholas Patrick Sweeney","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103386","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103386","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Devolution is argued to enhance decision-making through allowing for representative place-based policy making by engaged local citizens. Meanwhile, voter participation in local elections in England is approximately one-third of the electorate, divided along demographic lines, raising questions over the democratic legitimacy of local policymaking. Leveraging a restricted dataset from The Elections Centre, my study provides the first detailed investigation into this relationship. Focusing on the six English devolved areas granted expanded powers in 2017, I employ a difference-in-differences approach on a panel of single-tier authorities spanning 2004–2022. I find that despite the transfer of greater local powers, devolution does not lead to any overall increase in democratic engagement, although these effects vary by devolved area. Also, there is no relationship between existing voting behaviour and the effect of devolution, suggesting cycles of political exclusion persist. My findings evidence a ‘geography of disengagement’, and the inefficacy of increased devolved powers in influencing these patterns, contesting the importance of representative policymaking under England's devolution framework, and place-based policies more generally, beyond a political rhetorical device.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103386"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144523496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-06-27DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103380
Valeria Guarneros-Meza
Against the backdrop of fiscal austerity and bordering discourses in the UK, precarious work has become increasingly important to understand local governance and provision of community services. This paper contends that precarity can be overcome through caring practices found in the social reproduction that communities develop in their everyday experience of place-making, but care is made invisible by the state's own contribution to informal governance arrangements. The paper aims to contribute to the study of precarity in England, by bringing into dialogue debates on work precarity, informality and popular economies. Through this framework the relationality between state and non-state actors can be studied through decentring the role of the state in the provision of community services. This framework recognises the hidden and ambiguous interfaces that co-exist, or are nested within each other, when local communities encounter marginality in social, organisational, political and economic ways. Through qualitative research carried out in Barnsley Metropolitan Borough in South Yorkshire, the paper unpacks how the visibility of material and social precarity are compounded with the invisibility of voluntary work in the initiatives organised by the local council and different community organisations when caring for others and place. Through the relations among individuals and community groups that stem from practices which render work invisible, networks of solidarity are formed, but they are not enough to develop more inclusive conditions for change.
{"title":"Precarious work and local governance through the lens of informality and caring for place","authors":"Valeria Guarneros-Meza","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103380","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103380","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Against the backdrop of fiscal austerity and bordering discourses in the UK, precarious work has become increasingly important to understand local governance and provision of community services. This paper contends that precarity can be overcome through caring practices found in the social reproduction that communities develop in their everyday experience of place-making, but care is made invisible by the state's own contribution to informal governance arrangements. The paper aims to contribute to the study of precarity in England, by bringing into dialogue debates on work precarity, informality and popular economies. Through this framework the relationality between state and non-state actors can be studied through decentring the role of the state in the provision of community services. This framework recognises the hidden and ambiguous interfaces that co-exist, or are nested within each other, when local communities encounter marginality in social, organisational, political and economic ways. Through qualitative research carried out in Barnsley Metropolitan Borough in South Yorkshire, the paper unpacks how the visibility of material and social precarity are compounded with the invisibility of voluntary work in the initiatives organised by the local council and different community organisations when caring for others and place. Through the relations among individuals and community groups that stem from practices which render work invisible, networks of solidarity are formed, but they are not enough to develop more inclusive conditions for change.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103380"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144490439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-06-26DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103384
Yiqun Yang , Kevin Lo
Climate experiments—innovative measures taken to mitigate or adapt to climate change—have become a global driver of low-carbon transitions. However, the social justice aspects of climate experiments have not been adequately explored. This study theorizes just climate experimentation from three perspectives of justice. From a distributive justice perspective, climate experiments should fairly distribute costs and benefits, ensuring that communities receive direct advantages while mitigating negative impacts. Procedural justice requires informed consent and equal decision-making for communities. Recognition justice involves understanding and respecting the perspectives of affected local populations. We mobilized these ideas to empirically analyze the interactions between experimenters and local communities in two low-carbon pilots in China. We found that: (1) while experimenters benefited financially and politically from climate experimentation, local residents faced material and non-material burdens; (2) procedural justice issues include a lack of informed consent and meaningful community involvement; and (3) experimenters selectively acknowledged community perspectives, leading to some changes but also dismissing certain views.
{"title":"Just climate experimentation: Distributive, procedural, and recognition justice in two low-carbon pilots in China","authors":"Yiqun Yang , Kevin Lo","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103384","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103384","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Climate experiments—innovative measures taken to mitigate or adapt to climate change—have become a global driver of low-carbon transitions. However, the social justice aspects of climate experiments have not been adequately explored. This study theorizes just climate experimentation from three perspectives of justice. From a distributive justice perspective, climate experiments should fairly distribute costs and benefits, ensuring that communities receive direct advantages while mitigating negative impacts. Procedural justice requires informed consent and equal decision-making for communities. Recognition justice involves understanding and respecting the perspectives of affected local populations. We mobilized these ideas to empirically analyze the interactions between experimenters and local communities in two low-carbon pilots in China. We found that: (1) while experimenters benefited financially and politically from climate experimentation, local residents faced material and non-material burdens; (2) procedural justice issues include a lack of informed consent and meaningful community involvement; and (3) experimenters selectively acknowledged community perspectives, leading to some changes but also dismissing certain views.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103384"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144480997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-06-25DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103361
Hanieh Molana
The Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) left enduring imprints on Iranian history, identity, landscape, and memory. The geographic remains and memories of the War can be easily observed in city landscapes, grave sites, museums, schoolbooks, city murals, films, and street names. But this paper seeks to geolocate the invisible traces of the War in a way that make an appearance today and how they are reproduced by the state. In this article, I argue for a reinterpretation of the Iran-Iraq War, its affective absence, and its geohaunting of a society's collective temporality. Through an ethnographic analysis of Tehran's National Museum of the Islamic Revolution and Holy Defence, the paper illuminates how these hauntings permeate public consciousness, and shape collective temporality. I present the concept of geohauntology to highlight the central geographical aspect of invisibilities, hauntings, memories, and ghosts in geographical research and in the study of memory and remembrance more broadly. I conclude by analyzing the ways in which the Iranian state strategically curates and controls these spectral presences, while mobilizing the ghosts of the Iran-Iraq War as instruments of governance, national memory, and ideological reinforcement.
{"title":"Haunted Temporalities: Ghosts and the geohauntologies of the Iran-Iraq war and the production of the nation-state through martyrdom","authors":"Hanieh Molana","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103361","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103361","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) left enduring imprints on Iranian history, identity, landscape, and memory. The geographic remains and memories of the War can be easily observed in city landscapes, grave sites, museums, schoolbooks, city murals, films, and street names. But this paper seeks to geolocate the invisible traces of the War in a way that make an appearance today and how they are reproduced by the state. In this article, I argue for a reinterpretation of the Iran-Iraq War, its affective absence, and its geohaunting of a society's collective temporality. Through an ethnographic analysis of Tehran's National Museum of the Islamic Revolution and Holy Defence, the paper illuminates how these hauntings permeate public consciousness, and shape collective temporality. I present the concept of geohauntology to highlight the central geographical aspect of invisibilities, hauntings, memories, and ghosts in geographical research and in the study of memory and remembrance more broadly. I conclude by analyzing the ways in which the Iranian state strategically curates and controls these spectral presences, while mobilizing the ghosts of the Iran-Iraq War as instruments of governance, national memory, and ideological reinforcement.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103361"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144471396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-06-20DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103378
Michelle Irengbam , Christopher Sneddon
In recent years, frontier thinking has mushroomed across a range of environmental social sciences seeking to understand the ongoing exploitation of regions identified as politically, economically, and culturally marginal. Scholars emphasize that frontiers are the products of both geographical imaginations and material forces of extraction and exploitation with often dire consequences for the regions' inhabitants. Despite decades of academic work on frontiers, few studies have focused specifically on the intersecting processes and actors that have made hydropower development critical to understanding frontiers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This paper introduces the hydrofrontier to emphasize that the advent of hydropower development introduces novel spatial and temporal dynamics to frontier regions, which are constantly assembling ideas, peoples, ecologies, and political-economic processes across diverse and fragmented spaces. Nowhere are these sites and assemblages more evident than in the hydrofrontier of Northeast India, a region at the juncture of South and Southeast Asia long targeted by state planners as critical to national energy goals. While sharing many characteristics of other frontier regions, Northeast India's hydrofrontier assembles discourses and practices centered on economic development and renewable energy aligned with complex processes of securitization in novel ways. The notion of the hydrofrontier offers distinct and broadly applicable insights into our understandings of conflicts over hydropower and environmental conflicts more broadly, which can be applied to many of the world's frontier regions. While primarily theoretical, the paper draws from recent fieldwork by the first author and her reflections as a person from the region.
{"title":"The making of a hydrofrontier: geopolitics, securitization and ‘green’ energy imaginaries in India's eastern borderlands","authors":"Michelle Irengbam , Christopher Sneddon","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103378","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103378","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In recent years, frontier thinking has mushroomed across a range of environmental social sciences seeking to understand the ongoing exploitation of regions identified as politically, economically, and culturally marginal. Scholars emphasize that frontiers are the products of both geographical imaginations and material forces of extraction and exploitation with often dire consequences for the regions' inhabitants. Despite decades of academic work on frontiers, few studies have focused specifically on the intersecting processes and actors that have made hydropower development critical to understanding frontiers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This paper introduces the <em>hydrofrontier</em> to emphasize that the advent of hydropower development introduces novel spatial and temporal dynamics to frontier regions, which are constantly assembling ideas, peoples, ecologies, and political-economic processes across diverse and fragmented spaces. Nowhere are these sites and assemblages more evident than in the hydrofrontier of Northeast India, a region at the juncture of South and Southeast Asia long targeted by state planners as critical to national energy goals. While sharing many characteristics of other frontier regions, Northeast India's hydrofrontier assembles discourses and practices centered on economic development and renewable energy aligned with complex processes of securitization in novel ways. The notion of the hydrofrontier offers distinct and broadly applicable insights into our understandings of conflicts over hydropower and environmental conflicts more broadly, which can be applied to many of the world's frontier regions. While primarily theoretical, the paper draws from recent fieldwork by the first author and her reflections as a person from the region.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103378"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144322760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-06-19DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103379
Andreas Kallert, Simon Dudek
This paper examines the effects of austerity policies on financially weak rural municipalities in Germany, focusing on debt support programmes that make financial aid conditional on municipal efforts to increase revenues and cut expenditures. These programmes effectively enforce austerity at the municipal level. Drawing on Streeck's concept of the consolidation state and austerity urbanism literature, we develop the concept of the rural consolidation state to analyse the specific challenges rural municipalities face under austerity. To this end, we identify five characteristics that shape the possibilities and limitations of fiscal consolidation for rural municipalities. Based on a case study of Bavaria's debt support programme, Stabilisierungshilfen (stabilisation aid), we find that austerity operates differently in rural settings than in cities, often leading to distinct forms of discontent and embitterment in the countryside.
{"title":"The rural consolidation state. A critical examination of municipal consolidation strategies in Bavaria (Germany)","authors":"Andreas Kallert, Simon Dudek","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103379","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103379","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines the effects of austerity policies on financially weak rural municipalities in Germany, focusing on debt support programmes that make financial aid conditional on municipal efforts to increase revenues and cut expenditures. These programmes effectively enforce austerity at the municipal level. Drawing on Streeck's concept of the consolidation state and austerity urbanism literature, we develop the concept of the rural consolidation state to analyse the specific challenges rural municipalities face under austerity. To this end, we identify five characteristics that shape the possibilities and limitations of fiscal consolidation for rural municipalities. Based on a case study of Bavaria's debt support programme, <em>Stabilisierungshilfen</em> (stabilisation aid), we find that austerity operates differently in rural settings than in cities, often leading to distinct forms of discontent and embitterment in the countryside.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103379"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144313752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-06-17DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103347
Amanda Tattersall , Katie Moore , Juliet Bennett , Christine Evans , Louise C. Johnson , Naomi Joy Godden , Dibya Shree Chhetry , Elise Ganley , Sally Fisher , Jaclyn McCosker , Jade Wright , Liz Bonner , Helen Long , Noreen Nicholson
Economic responses to climate change, such as just transitions and the Green New Deal (GND), have helped shift climate policy debate to focus on the economic dimensions of climate change. Yet these approaches have also been limited; they have not always delivered, they have left some groups behind and at times have polarised affected constituencies. This article argues that a key reason for this is that these agendas have primarily involved imposing solutions on communities without activating people's participation in the perpetual cocreation of new social, political and economic solutions. Here, community and academic researchers reflect on the first five years of the Real Deal for Australia project and its effort to realise a community-led climate transition politics through its application of the ‘relational method’. This paper locates the Real Deal within the traditions of just transitions and the GND, and details the theories, methods and practices that it has built upon and involved, including in two place-based projects. It reflects on the intentions of the project and the learning that has occurred in the process, in particular from seeking to privilege the voices of Indigenous Peoples, form diverse community coalitions made up of strong interpersonal relationships between existing trade union, environmental, neighbourhood and faith-based groups, produce robust place-based agendas and buid effective actions for alternative futures.
{"title":"Creating a new climate transition politics? Reflections on a Real Deal for Australia","authors":"Amanda Tattersall , Katie Moore , Juliet Bennett , Christine Evans , Louise C. Johnson , Naomi Joy Godden , Dibya Shree Chhetry , Elise Ganley , Sally Fisher , Jaclyn McCosker , Jade Wright , Liz Bonner , Helen Long , Noreen Nicholson","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103347","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103347","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Economic responses to climate change, such as just transitions and the Green New Deal (GND), have helped shift climate policy debate to focus on the economic dimensions of climate change. Yet these approaches have also been limited; they have not always delivered, they have left some groups behind and at times have polarised affected constituencies. This article argues that a key reason for this is that these agendas have primarily involved imposing solutions on communities without activating people's participation in the perpetual cocreation of new social, political and economic solutions. Here, community and academic researchers reflect on the first five years of the <em>Real Deal for Australia</em> project and its effort to realise a community-led climate transition politics through its application of the ‘relational method’. This paper locates the Real Deal within the traditions of just transitions and the GND, and details the theories, methods and practices that it has built upon and involved, including in two place-based projects. It reflects on the intentions of the project and the learning that has occurred in the process, in particular from seeking to privilege the voices of Indigenous Peoples, form diverse community coalitions made up of strong interpersonal relationships between existing trade union, environmental, neighbourhood and faith-based groups, produce robust place-based agendas and buid effective actions for alternative futures.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103347"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144306305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-06-17DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103368
Frank I. Müller
This paper explores the interplay between rain, landslides, and local governance, highlighting their roles in shaping the precariousness of homes of lower-income residents in Medellín. Building on literature that positions “natural” disasters as human-made or exacerbated phenomena, and on semi-structured interviews as well as media analysis, the paper examines how rain and its associated risks serve as socio-spatial markers in the narratives of the residents, journalists and planners. A key finding is that geomorphological instability, coupled with extreme weather events, disproportionately affects residents with lower social status in the community. This situation is exacerbated by the ongoing urbanization activities of criminal actors in the area. I seek to explore which of these threats is perceived as more significant and how, according to the interviewees, these challenges are interrelated. The paper argues that the physical terrain fundamentally influences socio-political struggles, shaping the legitimacy of authority while simultaneously embodying a tension between the expected safety of home and the destabilizing realities of displacement. It introduces the concept of “dwelling in limbo,” where home-making reflects a dynamic balance between adaptability to immediate conditions and a future-oriented endurance against ongoing threats. Through this lens, the research elucidates how governance assemblages contribute to sustained socio-material insecurity, offering insights into the lived experiences of communities affected by environmental and socio-political challenges.
{"title":"Durable instabilities of home: Rain, terrain, and governance assemblages in Medellín, Colombia","authors":"Frank I. Müller","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103368","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103368","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper explores the interplay between rain, landslides, and local governance, highlighting their roles in shaping the precariousness of homes of lower-income residents in Medellín. Building on literature that positions “natural” disasters as human-made or exacerbated phenomena, and on semi-structured interviews as well as media analysis, the paper examines how rain and its associated risks serve as socio-spatial markers in the narratives of the residents, journalists and planners. A key finding is that geomorphological instability, coupled with extreme weather events, disproportionately affects residents with lower social status in the community. This situation is exacerbated by the ongoing urbanization activities of criminal actors in the area. I seek to explore which of these threats is perceived as more significant and how, according to the interviewees, these challenges are interrelated. The paper argues that the physical terrain fundamentally influences socio-political struggles, shaping the legitimacy of authority while simultaneously embodying a tension between the expected safety of home and the destabilizing realities of displacement. It introduces the concept of “dwelling in limbo,” where home-making reflects a dynamic balance between adaptability to immediate conditions and a future-oriented endurance against ongoing threats. Through this lens, the research elucidates how governance assemblages contribute to sustained socio-material insecurity, offering insights into the lived experiences of communities affected by environmental and socio-political challenges.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103368"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144297283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-06-15DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103367
Rebecca Patterson-Markowitz
Politicized healing is a phenomenon emerging within contemporary movements for social justice intended to address the impact of intergenerational traumas, ongoing oppression, and state violence that impact marginalized communities. A turn to healing opens space for care and attention to embodiment as part of a politics of transformation. However, it risks subsuming projects about collective justice(s) into individualist, healthist paradigms, obscuring the role and responsibility of the state. In this paper I draw on interviews with thought leaders engaged in struggles for political and social transformation who insist that healers have a place in political strategy and action. My research demonstrates that while these change-makers have differing approaches to embodied healing and politics, the individual body is never just that. A focus on collective and intergenerational trauma allows for harms to be understood as relational, embodied, and political. Their interventions target new terrains, from the therapeutic encounter to the workings of the Medical Industrial Complex, as sites for political action, and imagine futures that make space for the tensions of individual and collective autonomy.
{"title":"On the therapist's couch and in the streets: Politicized approaches to healing trauma and embodying liberation in the US and Canada","authors":"Rebecca Patterson-Markowitz","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103367","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103367","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Politicized healing is a phenomenon emerging within contemporary movements for social justice intended to address the impact of intergenerational traumas, ongoing oppression, and state violence that impact marginalized communities. A turn to healing opens space for care and attention to embodiment as part of a politics of transformation. However, it risks subsuming projects about collective justice(s) into individualist, healthist paradigms, obscuring the role and responsibility of the state. In this paper I draw on interviews with thought leaders engaged in struggles for political and social transformation who insist that healers have a place in political strategy and action. My research demonstrates that while these change-makers have differing approaches to embodied healing and politics, the individual body is never just that. A focus on collective and intergenerational trauma allows for harms to be understood as relational, embodied, and political. Their interventions target new terrains, from the therapeutic encounter to the workings of the Medical Industrial Complex, as sites for political action, and imagine futures that make space for the tensions of individual and collective autonomy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103367"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144288808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-06-04DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103358
Debasish Hazarika, Ngamjahao Kipgen
This article is an attempt to understand the fraught territorial contestations in the post-colonial borderlands within Northeast India. Focusing especially on the foothill borderlands located between Assam and the surrounding hill states, this article engages with the northeastern foothills as sites and products of territorial politics and thereby brings out the role played by territoriality in shaping contemporary politics in Northeast India. This work attempts to situate foothills as a historical and contemporary vantage point through which territorial politics in Northeast India could be explored. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article captures everyday territorial entanglements with the subnational border in the foothills between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh and unpacks how infrastructures of development and conservation become the sites where borderland dwellers articulate and contest their territorial anxieties. Engaging with the emergent politics of ethnic diplomacy in these foothills, this paper brings out and analyses its emergence as an agentive response of the borderland dwellers deployed for navigating this volatile landscape of territoriality in the region.
{"title":"Can the borderland speak? Entangled territoriality in the foothills of Northeast India","authors":"Debasish Hazarika, Ngamjahao Kipgen","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103358","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103358","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article is an attempt to understand the fraught territorial contestations in the post-colonial borderlands within Northeast India. Focusing especially on the foothill borderlands located between Assam and the surrounding hill states, this article engages with the northeastern foothills as sites and products of territorial politics and thereby brings out the role played by territoriality in shaping contemporary politics in Northeast India. This work attempts to situate foothills as a historical and contemporary vantage point through which territorial politics in Northeast India could be explored. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article captures everyday territorial entanglements with the subnational border in the foothills between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh and unpacks how infrastructures of development and conservation become the sites where borderland dwellers articulate and contest their territorial anxieties. Engaging with the emergent politics of ethnic diplomacy in these foothills, this paper brings out and analyses its emergence as an agentive response of the borderland dwellers deployed for navigating this volatile landscape of territoriality in the region.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103358"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144204707","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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