Geography Compass最新文献

We put into conversation two conceptual approaches for understanding the dissident nature of urban space: the commons and the counterpublics. This novel conceptual conversation asks the following questions - what is the interplay between them? Do they complement, build on, contradict, or ignore each other? What is urban about their particular interplays? These hypothetical matters are framed by a consideration of the fate of populations deemed surplus in urban space. Our conceptual conversation enables a new and productive way of understanding dissident urban spaces.

The term peri-urbanization has been widely used to describe a range of different processes that transform rural areas to a mix of rural and urban spaces. Although there is a burgeoning literature on peri-urbanization, the conceptual debate about peri-urbanization's distinction from urbanization is rarely considered. It sometimes seems like whatever occurs at the urban periphery across the global south is labeled peri-urbanization. This universalizing use of the term risks obscuring the existing diversities of rural-to-urban transformations. At the same time, it is empirically clear that the urban periphery of the global south hosts the most dynamic processes of urbanization in the contemporary world. It is also conceptually accepted that to better understand these diverse processes of urbanization, scholars must decenter global urban theory and build new vocabularies and theories from the south. Thus, there is doubt as to whether and to what extent a single concept like peri-urbanization can capture the great diversity of rural-to-urban transformations across the global south. This critical review of the southern geographies of peri-urbanization first identifies three interrelated conceptual vectors (territorial, functional, and transitional) for understanding the peri-urban concept, and outlines recent developments in the field. Then, peri-urbanization is reframed as an umbrella concept, which embraces multiple theoretical concepts and avoids the universalization inherent in much current usage. Finally, the paper reviews recent theoretical inquiries and new vocabularies of urbanization processes at the urban periphery, offering scope to theorize the heterogeneity of the geographies of peri-urbanization in the global south.

Over the last 3 decades, while ethnography has arguably become a popular and legitimate method to study geopolitics among geographers, anthropologists have increasingly turned towards geopolitics as a popular subject to investigate former and emergent empires as everyday phenomena. Yet, their efforts remain rather disjointed. Written by an anthropologist, this review essay aims to put these rather disjointed efforts into a programmatic conversation and think about how one might (re)calibrate geopolitics as an ethnographic object and agenda. To that end, the essay first takes stock of the existing ethnographic knowledge of geopolitics through a review of selected works by geographers and anthropologists. Then, to help students and scholars of geopolitics from within these cognate disciplines move this engagement forward, the essay concludes by proposing the ‘cultures of geopolitical expertise’ as a productive avenue to recalibrate geopolitics as an ethnographic object and agenda.

Within an ongoing debate about the relationships between the body and technological experiences within virtual reality (VR), there has hitherto been limited consideration of the spatial. Geographers, meanwhile, have only just begun to engage with VR and its spatialities but have paid less attention to its embodiment. The technology allows users to go beyond merely imagining themselves in a different world, creating a real sense of presence in the digital realm. Immersion and presence in VR are, however, a mix of space, embodiment and the digital. As such, any discussion of VR requires critical consideration of both embodiment and space. This paper therefore explores some of the linkages between bodies, spaces and VR to demonstrate how engagement with VR can enrich geographical scholarship.

In river deltas, human interference with regional and global socio-ecological systems has led to a plethora of gradual and more abrupt environmental changes that result in inundation, coastal and river bank erosion, land loss and, ultimately, displaced people. Often apolitically framed as protective, state-led transfer of people to new housing grounds, resettlement has become a common response to such displacements. In its process, existing arrangements of land tenure and occupancy and, at times more covertly, related arrangements of capital, labor and the social fabric become dislocated and reassembled. In line with emerging critical geographies of resettlement, this paper conceptualizes resettlement in river deltas against the background of environmental change as a highly political process with far-reaching environmental, economic, social and cultural implications. For this article is based on an in-depth review of both resettlement and political ecology literature, we first elucidate the concept of resettlement before providing a structured overview of categories and recent trends in resettlement literature. We then focus on river deltas that due to multi-scale environmental change are about to become hotspots of future resettlement. Building on identified gaps in resettlement literature, the article concludes with opening up three analytical strands of political ecology as entry points to resettlement studies, understood as critical geographic research into localized manifestations of environmental change in river deltas. Overall, our paper aims to initialize conceptual debate, grounded in a thorough review of recent case study literature on resettlement that is informed by political ecology. The review challenges positivist reductions of resettlement processes as technocratic-managerial tasks that so far have dominated scientific literature in this field and opens up new perspectives for critical research on resettlements in river deltas for human geographers.

Many scholars have examined the museum as a site of politics. This paper reviews recent research on museums and puts forward “soft combat” as a device for understanding how museums operate as geopolitical entities today. Soft combat includes (a) enrolling the visitor in affective atmospheres, (b) engaging with violence and trauma, and (c) embodied persuasion. We examine a military museum in the U.S.A to substantiate soft combat as a kind of biopolitics.

Mainstream society expects women to look and behave in particular ways. Women are expected to adhere to conventional Western beauty standards of grooming, fashionable clothing, and hygiene. They are also traditionally associated with the home, homemaking and being indoors. The bodies of homeless women transgress in both ways: through lacking the resources to engage in the body work which would allow them to adhere to the beauty standards; and through lacking a home and predominantly being outdoors. This in turn, results in particular stigmatization for homeless women, who have unique experiences of homelessness. A lack of gendered literature has left many of these experiences underdiscussed, and even those approaches which do focus on gender, rarely account for other social differences such as race, age, and sexuality. This paper extends existing debates by arguing that framing homelessness through beauty standards and embodiment enables a new and more nuanced understanding of homelessness, which is not only gendered, but also allows for the acknowledgement of other intersectional difference, such as race, age, sexuality, and disability. It concludes that future research into homelessness should not only account for gender but should take an intersectional approach to consider the ways that homelessness is not one universal experience.

This paper suggests that the dominance of one debate on climate related conflict – establishing whether climate change leads to conflict, or not - is the product of Imperial knowledge produced in the Global North Orientalising the Global South. This debate is also one in which the subdiscipline of political geography has been inadvertently complicit by accepting positivist approaches, that erase the subject and their subjectivities from this discussion, and frame them as science. The argument in this paper problematises the fundamental understanding of ‘climate conflict’, as defined and universalised by Western science in the Western academy. Instead, it argues that the subaltern's lived experience and interpretation of hazards and their relationship with conflicts needs to be located and centred in this conversation – not just as that of a hapless victim but as knowledge producers able to set the agendas and re-orient the focus of this field. Research examining conflicts around floods and evictions begins to map a new future for how that might be possible.

Climate change can only be tackled with public support for sustainable policies. Thus, public attitudes towards climate change matter. More than 3 decades of climate change opinion (CCO) research—conducted by geographers, environmental psychologists, behavioural scientists, sociologists etc.—have provided us with a wealth of information about which predictors shape public CCOs. This review synthesises these findings and highlights the different geographies (the self, the nation, the region, the digital) that emerge within this research. Given the increased importance of social media, virtual geographies of climate change scepticism are increasingly being identified. Our paper argues that new research agendas must be developed to address the meshwork of virtual space and small scale geographies (regions, towns, districts) in which CCOs are formed.

In recent years, critical border studies have developed sophisticated concepts and methodologies for exploring the multifaceted spatialities, sociologies and temporalities of contemporary borders. In this article, we consider how the “aesthetic turn” that has gained prominence in the scholarship can further inform thinking in border studies. Specifically, we focus on the role of the visual in the construction as well as subversion of borders, suggesting possible avenues for future critical aesthetics-engaged research on COVID-19 era border reconfigurations. To do so, we first briefly outline the theoretical evolution of border studies, paying attention to recent conceptualisations of borders as dynamic processes of social and spatial differentiation. We then build on the borderscapes concept to unpack research on border aesthetics, with particular attention to the heterogeneous roles played by visual objects such as maps, photographs and videos in shaping both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic processes of bordering. Finally, we bring these contributions into discussion with recent insights on the COVID-19 pandemic, sketching several ways to advance aesthetic concepts and methodologies in academic research on borderscapes that are emerging with, and will likely outlast, the pandemic. We suggest that border studies and affiliated sub-fields can gain useful insights from attending more explicitly and robustly to dynamic visual geographies of power, contestation and subversion.