Geography Compass最新文献

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.

Starting from the observation that the notion of “multiple geographies” has gained considerable traction in geographical research in the past years while its theoretical foundations have often remained abstract, in this paper we contribute toward elaboration of multiple geographies as a research perspective, recognizing its potential as a valuable framework for analyzing divergent spatial relations. Initially, we provide an overview of the diverse applications of multiple geographies through a review of relevant literature, focusing on papers within the realms of political geographies that mention the term in their title or abstract. Subsequently, we categorize these papers thematically, identifying three main theoretical strains: post-colonial geographies, uneven geographical development, and feminist geographies. We then propose a theoretical scaffold for navigating the complexities of multiple geographies by engaging with broader discussions on plurality and multiplicity in relation to the aforementioned strains. Finally, we synthesize the insights garnered from this analysis, exploring the potential of a multiple geographies research perspective to contribute to a nuanced understanding of the diverse ways in which space is produced and experienced. Our contribution aims to enrich ongoing debates within human geography on how space can be redefined in more relational, decolonial, socially just, feminist, and diverse ways, opening pathways for pluralistic geographical imaginations.

This paper draws together elements of the academic literature on policy mobilities on the one hand, and on the ‘digital turn’ on the other. It argues that COVID-19 accelerated the digitalization of everyday life asking we think through how those already existing informational infrastructures supporting the mobility of policies are continuing to evolve, as are the methods available for researching them. This has potential consequences for how cities practice policy comparison exchange, and learning and how these processes are studied. This paper sets out a three-pronged schema to take seriously the intersection of policy mobilities and the digital. They are policy mobilities through the digital, policy mobilities produced by the digital and policy mobilities of the digital. It concludes by outlining fruitful areas for a future research agenda.

Whilst China's aid and development model has been traditionally understood as divergent from the dominant post-1945 liberal development model, scholars are also increasingly exploring convergence between features of the two development models. Recently, scholars from a range of disciplines including development studies, development geography and international (business, environment and legal) studies have explored a process whereby China's Belt and Road Initiative and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals converge (‘BRI-SDG integration’). This paper brings these multidisciplinary strands of scholarship together and places them in dialogue with social sciences convergence theory to understand how BRI-SDG integration aligns with or challenges previous conceptualisations of Chinese-dominant development convergence. The paper first demonstrates that BRI-SDG integration proposes a novel and deliberate convergence process - which the paper names ‘complementary convergence’. However, BRI-SDG integration also underscores the need for more multidirectional frameworks that reject Eurocentricity for evaluating the contemporary Chinese-dominant relationship, and an enhanced focus on how China is influencing dominant development institutions. Finally, BRI-SDG integration reiterates the methodological difficulties of delineating between ‘development models’ in an increasingly interrelated global governance of development.

The 21st century in Latin America began with a widespread shift to the left politically, a phenomenon called the ‘pink tide’. Following a period of right-wing re-ascendancy, left wing governments are again gaining traction across the continent. This article analyses the end of the last pink tide via a dialogue between the post-extractivism and degrowth literature by examining Bolivia, Ecuador, and Brazil. This is done through a look at the impacts of both economic growth as a normative policy aim and extractivism as the engine to produce this growth on political developments in these countries. In the tradition of Gramsci this is interpreted as a hegemonic force, recast here as growth-through-extraction, that serves to perpetuate the interests of wealthy classes despite political changes. This article concludes with a brief analysis of how academic debates and political processes have moved on since Escobar 2015 and what this might mean for the new left-wing governments of Latin America.

Building upon a review of geographic research agendas and concepts related to the uneven geographies of COVID-19, this first of three articles debates the benefits of geographic analyses to the syndemic approach and, vice versa, of a syndemics perspective to geographic analyses. The syndemics perspective was proposed by critical medical anthropologists. It seeks to deepen the understanding of the structural dimensions and processes that lead to the convergence and cascading of multiple epidemics in specific population groups. Geographers have also highlighted the intersections of multiple health or other crises during COVID-19, when the pandemic and global health emergency coincided with and escalated existing structural inequalities produced by the climate crisis, environmental degradation, political conflicts and war, socio-economic disparities and poverty, social divisions, racism, hatred and violence, mental health problems and stress. Geographers have mobilized concepts such as scale, territory, borders and intersectionality to unravel the uneven unfolding and consequences of the global health emergency for diverse population groups. We therefore argue that geography has a lot to contribute to the understanding of the spatial and contextual dimensions of COVID-19 as a pandemic as well as a syndemic – but it has so far not actively employed the latter concept's analytical lens. Mobilizing the syndemics approach can contribute to more comprehensive accounts of the structural dimensions and processes that continue and cascade in pandemics.