Geography Compass最新文献

Environmental historical geography is a diverse, dynamic and active subfield with close connections to environmental history. Here, I examine developments in three overarching and overlapping themes within the subfield: environmental reconstruction, environmental knowledges and discourses, and environmental impacts and interventions. For each area, I highlight recent approaches to, and applications of, environmental historical geography. I also draw attention to several promising areas of research where environmental historical geography can build on its existing strengths and continue reinvigorating understanding of environment-society relations. These include contextualising environmental knowledge and data production amidst advances in big data and AI; illuminating the multi-directional interactions between environmental change, knowledges, and materialities; revealing the entangled physical and intellectual legacies of imperial and colonial projects; and enhancing comparative research.

The field of feminist urban geography has shed light on the workings of power and its spatial manifestation at multiple scales. Weaving across this scholarship, I show that it is motivated by concerns about systemic hierarchies, emphasizes looking from the margins, and highlights alternative, emancipatory possibilities. First, these works show how patriarchal logics underpin institutional spaces and shape social norms that govern urban life in violent ways. Second, feminist scholarship has shown how the everyday lives of those at the margins can challenge and subvert a dominant making of boundaries between the public and private, or local and global. Third, they articulate how strategies to attain urban belonging, structured around commoning, care, and a call for freedom, can offer alternatives for just futures. Through a grounded understanding of everyday practices, this scholarship shows the significance of temporality in world-making and complicates the notion of the urban as a site of aspiration. Moving forward, the field can be more attentive to how global urban margins hold promise in decentering power-knowledge networks and showcase the place of the urban within center-periphery relations. With this tool kit, feminist urban geography can provide provisional, conjectural possibilities to conceptualize more meaningful worlds.

Which biosensing technologies are geographers using in their research, and what exactly do they measure? What are the theoretical origins of geographic interests in biosensing? This article provides an overview of the variety of biosensors applied in biosensing research, tracks the theoretical debates and roots of geographic engagement with biosensing, and discusses the potentials, limitations and ethical implications of applying biosensors. We critically reflect on the varied terminologies that have been used to describe a rapidly evolving array of biosensing technologies and methodologies and suggest a common understanding for key terms such as “biosensing” (technologies or methodologies), “biosensors,” “wearable biosensors” and “biosignals.” We offer an overview of the broader theoretical debates that have inspired geographers turn to biosensing, including behavioral geography, more-than-representational theory, critical neurogeography, the mobilities and biosociality paradigms, and visual geographies. These have called for methodologies that can capture affects neglected in representational research, follow people, things and technologies as they are mobile in space and time, investigate the links between brain, cognition and biopolitics or attend to visualities in everyday life. Although geographers have so far engaged with a limited number of the ever-growing variety of available (bio-)sensors, the development and application of biosensing methodologies is vibrant, highly diverse and very promising for diverse geographical research questions and fields. Going forward, we particularly encourage experimentation with eye-trackers, which come closest to measuring instantaneous responses to environmental stimuli and offer interesting opportunities for the analysis of social and material environments through the visual data they create. Finally, we conclude with a call for a stronger emphasis on data ethics, procedural ethics and ethics of care in biosensing, which have so far received too little attention in these often interdisciplinary and complex biosensing research endeavors.

Drawing on established scholarship in the historical geography of science, the history of technology and science and technology studies, this paper argues for the significance of an historical geography of engineering. Large-scale and transformative infrastructure projects have been a common focus in historical geography, however comparatively little attention has been paid to the engineers responsible for designing and implementing them. This paper reviews recent work which has foregrounded engineers and their work across diverse times and places. It conceptualises engineering in three ways: as a form of knowledge about the world that is connected to, but distinct from, science; as a set of practices undertaken in specific locations; and as an identity that, since the profession's origin in the 18th century, has enabled individuals to claim expertise in relation to environmental management and therefore exert power over land, territory and people. The article reviews geographical inquiry that foregrounds these perspectives on engineering and suggests future directions for research in the field.

The use of data and statistics along with computational systems heralded the beginning of a quantitative revolution in Geography. Use of simulation models (Cellular Automata and Agent-Based Models) followed in the late 1990s, with ontology and epistemology of complexity theory and modelling being defined a little less than two decades ago. We are, however, entering a new era where sensors regularly collect and update large amounts of spatio-temporal data. We define this ‘Big Data’ as geolocated data collected in sufficiently high volume (exceeding storage capacities of the largest personal hard drives currently available), that is updated at least daily, from a variety of sources in different formats, often without recourse to verification of its accuracy. We then identify the exponential growth in the use of complexity simulation models in the past two decades via an extensive literature review (broken down by application area), but also notice a recent slowdown. Further, a gap in the utilisation of Big Data by modellers to calibrate and validate their models is noted, which we attribute to data availability issues. We contend that Big Data can significantly boost simulation modelling, if certain constraints and issues are managed properly.

Green Skills are considered a prerequisite for sustainability transitions. However, existing literature shows heterogenous meanings of Green Skills, which are based on normative assumptions about what is understood as ‘green’ and ‘skill’. Despite the high expectations of Green Skills as a driving force for increasing sustainability of companies and regions, there is a research gap about implementation of Green Skills in vocational education and further training, and their impact on sustainability transitions. This paper is based on a literature review and reveals a fertile field for investigation, creating clarity by systematically analysing the fragmented literature and suggesting a research agenda for economic geography and labour geography.