Geography Compass最新文献

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.

Sense of place has become relevant in Latin America in recent decades. Although many scholars have looked at people-place relationships there, language barriers have limited the international exposure of these studies. By assembling a collection of works mainly published in Spanish and Portuguese, we trace the fields of research where the concept has taken root and reflect upon the regional characteristics of sense of place. Overall, this review provides empirical insights into the human experience of place in a culturally diverse region marked by historical injustices, inequalities, and instability. These structures have created specific, often ambivalent senses of place, organized around resistance and adaptation. A more nuanced understanding of sense of place, which emphasizes the richness and complexities of people-place connections, will help avoid oversimplification and idealization in future theories. To frame our analysis, we investigate sense of place from the perspective of humanistic geography. Overlapping with other non-representational inquiries, the humanistic lens focuses on human-environment relationships—encompassing experiences, behaviors, ideas, and feelings—to deepen our understanding of the intricate and multifaceted human condition and the essential role of place in human life. Our review shows that sense of place has proven helpful in shedding light on critical Latin American socio-spatial phenomena such as mobilities, territorialities, and fear. Regionally, researchers center on marginalized and oppressed senses of place framed by longstanding structural inequalities stemming from a colonial legacy, capitalism, and neoliberalism. We highlight “geographies of terror,” “diabolic places,” and “necroplaces” as powerful categories that address the grim reality in the region.

Racial capitalism has received much attention within the social sciences over the past few decades, including fields such as urban geography and infrastructural studies. This state of the field identifies key contributions, highlights the latest developments, draws attention to limitations, and points to future directions. Given the concept's multiple iterations and lineages beyond Cedric Robinson's framework, there is a risk racial capitalism might become an empty signifier if more work is not done by scholars to define their points of departure, clarify the concept's theoretical reach, and expand empirical contributions beyond the U.S. heartland. To advance the racial capitalism body of work, current scholarship suggests theoretical conversations with postcolonial theory, decolonial thought, Indigenous studies, and feminist approaches. There is also a need to engage not only with other variants of racial capitalism, but also with earlier scholarship that investigates the interplay between race/racialization and space.

Extractivist practices threaten water security and with it, people's health and livelihoods. Numerous communities around the world are engaged in the strenuous work of resistance against mining. Through our previous research, we matured a sense that women are a major force behind organizing for water security, particularly because they often refer to an embodied sense of urgency to act against ongoing extractivism to preserve their waters and territories. Yet, a systematic assessment of the state of knowledge at the intersection of extractivism, water, resistance and gender is still missing. Thus, the goal of this article is to provide an overview, through a systematic scoping review, of the existing anglophone scientific literature focusing on water insecurity due to extractivism and its consequent community resistance, with a particular focus on gender. We identify 30 articles with only six explicitly referring to gender. All studies have in common the understanding that water insecurity is a manmade problem, particularly due to extractivism. Resistance is a great revelator of politics, and this systematic scoping review shows that dynamics of depletion and sacrifice zones—both in environmental and human terms—cannot be understood without considering gender and intersectional relations. Yet, an explicit focus on gender as an analytical lens of water and extractivism is still lacking in the literature. Importantly, this systematic scoping review shows similarities across case studies emphasizing the need to interrogate the transnationality of these phenomena.