Geography Compass最新文献

In a historically colonial field, what are the possibilities of a geography informed by Indigenous and Anti-Colonial ethics and onto-epistemologies? This article suggests engaging in a critical study of data from an Indigenous geographic standpoint, with a focus on imperialism and colonialism in settler nation-states. I begin by emphasizing the pervasive and long-standing imposition of geographical data collection in Indigenous life, naming the binds of engaging with the production of data for and with colonial institutions. I then review prominent spatial analytics within critical Indigenous studies, Indigenous geography, and aligned Anti-Colonial geography, including Indigenous place-based knowledge and onto-epistemologies, (racialized) colonial dispossession, sovereignty and recognition, environmental colonialism, and mapping and cartography. Last, I suggest that studies of colonial data dynamics and Indigenous data production strengthen Indigenous and Anti-Colonial geographies by emphasizing the co-constitution of good relations and good data. Future research avenues include the need to push beyond the geo-historical bounds of the category settler colonial, and to build co-rejections of racial empire with other fields of study including Black, Queer, and Feminist geographies.

Though Geography began as a tool of empire and war, now some of us are using this master's tool to dismantle the master's house. But we are tweaking the tool in various ways to make it more liberatory. People's geography aims to take Geography to the streets, and the streets to the ivory tower. It works to popularize radical geography, and radicalize popular geography. Community geographies focus on collaborations between academics and public scholars to co-produce knowledge that serves social change. This term has grown in use recently in the US, where there is a new community geographies specialty group. The term public geography has perhaps been more often used in the UK, where the focus on “impact” by the REF has given it more weight. That sort of push from funding agencies is a growing trend internationally, though the terms used vary. Participatory research aims to foster civic engagement and look alongside research subjects, rather than looking at them. It is a strong influence on both community and public geographies, though the overlap is not exact. Other terms used are engaged research and reciprocal research. This work takes longer and is often undervalued as simply service, rather than research. Too often it has been done despite, rather than with support from, academic policies. That is beginning to change. Some terms and traditions have more resonance in some contexts than in others, but whatever the label used, it is important that we organize to honor and nurture this work.

The growing scholarship on settler colonialism largely understudies aesthetics. Settler colonial logics work not only through the elimination, dispossession, and criminalization of Indigenous populations but also through the erasure of Indigenous narratives and aesthetics. Aesthetics communicate a particular system of knowledge and power that can either refute or perpetuate settler colonial projects. I use the term “settler aesthetics” to foreground an understanding of aesthetics as dynamic socio-spatial practices through which state and non-state actors assert power, construct particular visions of a city, and shape conditions of belonging. Settler aesthetics demonstrate how the logic of elimination and the work of settler memory reproduces and is reproduced through various visual modalities. I argue that as geographers, we must examine both contemporary settler colonial projects that continue codifying cities as purely settler spaces without Indigenous presence and resistance, and spaces that insist on Black, Latinx, and Indigenous presence and livingness. This paper therefore explores how scholarship on decolonizing and anti-colonial art practice and theory can inform emerging scholarship on settler colonial urbanism that centers perspectives and practices of Black and Indigenous presence and resistance.

Global challenges call for timely social–ecological transformation. There is a substantial amount of literature on social–ecological transformation, increasingly replacing and going beyond ‘sustainability’. However, the concept itself is used very inconsistently. This paper aims at identifying and systematizing the strains of argumentation that encompass the social–ecological transformation. Adding German-speaking literature to the Anglophone debate, we systematize as we follow the concept's genesis to its varieties of use within context-based (spatial, temporal, and societal) disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary debates. Building on the various strands of contemporary use, this paper aims at contouring the epistemologies of the concept. Lastly, we illustrate the roles of geographical research approaches and the assigned methodology. We argue that the strands tend to drift apart and cannot be seen nor used as a singular uniform approach. We identify the key dimensions of how scholars use social–ecological transformation, unearthing underlying epistemologies. To conclude, we delineate key elements that geographical research on social–ecological transformation must address, laying the foundation for further scholarly debate.

This paper engages theoretical principles from critical human geography, media and communication studies, and development literature to present a research trajectory that unpacks the influence of digital platforms in representing and mediating distant suffering. Critiques of aid and development communication have long focused on concerns around the representation of the Global South as an ‘Othered’ space; powerful and deeply problematic geographical imaginaries become embedded within contemporary dominant discourses of aid and development. As significant sources of aid and development imaginaries, how civil society has mediated distant suffering has been subject to much critique. However, the rapid transition towards engagement with digital platforms necessitates an extension of critical considerations about representation and mediation. For example: what impact do digital platforms, their knowledge politics and representational capabilities have on imaginaries of distant suffering? Digital platforms (such as websites and other social media platforms) are situated within and constituted by (and through) a ‘digital knowledge politics’. These platforms and their mediations still exist within broader social practices and processes, and therefore remain entrenched within the power relations between Global North and Global South. This poses significant questions regarding the role digital platforms (and their representational capabilities) play in producing and mediating representations of distant strangers and their places. Moreover, further gaps within existing research emerge regarding how digital platforms can inform how (and indeed if) the public respond to such discourses. Through identifying key interdisciplinary intersections between critical human geographies and media and communication studies, this paper considers research trajectories that extend critical examinations of the role that digital platforms play in producing and representing aid and development imaginaries.

This paper positions possibilities for human geographies of the sea. The growing volume of work under this banner has been largely qualitative in its approach, reflecting, in turn, the questions posed by oceanic scholars. These questions necessitate corresponding methods. Whilst this is not necessarily a problem, and the current corpus of work has offered many significant contributions, in making sense of the human dimensions of maritime worlds, other questions—and methods—may generate knowledge that is useful within this remit of work. This paper considers the place of quantitative approaches in posing lines of enquiry about shipping, one of the prominent areas of concern under the banner of ‘human geographies of the seas’. There is longstanding work in transport geographies concerned with shipping, logistics, freight movement and global connections, which embraces quantitative methods which could be bridged to ask fresh questions about oceanic spatial phenomena past and present. This paper reviews the state of the art of human geographies of the sea and transport geographies and navigates how the former field may be stimulated by some of the interests of the latter and a broader range of questions about society-sea-space relations. The paper focuses on Automatic Identification Systems (or AIS) as a potentially useful tool for connecting debates, and deepening spatial understandings of the seas and shipping beyond current scholarship. To advance the argument the example of shipping layups is used to illustrate or rather, position, the point.

Motivated by a critical concern for state-sanctioned coercion, control, and containment across “free society,” geographers have extended Foucault's concept of “the carceral” to more and increasingly diffuse spaces and processes. In this paper, however, we aim to re-center the prison in the carceral geographies literature, reasserting it as the sine qua non of the subfield. In doing so, we organize geographers' analysis of prisons into nine conceptual categories based on this journal's areas of geographical exploration: cultural, development, economic, environment, geographic information systems & quantitative, historical, political, social, and urban. In addition to providing a review of existing prison research in geography, we illustrate the diversity of disciplinary approaches to that most “complete and austere” of institutions.

Causality is at the core of much contemporary discussion in social sciences, philosophy, and computer science—from the establishment of basic definitions of causality to developing methods for causal inference, this discussion is increasingly finding voice within geographical literature. However, geographers have long discussed (and differed) about the role “causality” plays in our work. We present a history of contemporary definitions of causality arising from philosophy and examine how these intellectual currents interact with past and present geographical thinking about causal relations. In particular, we focus on how new thinking about counterfactual causality can help re-route inquiry around a well-known impasse: law-based causality in geography. In other words, while different perspectives around “laws” of geography exist, we argue that it is more productive to put aside these differences and find common ground in counterfactual causal thinking. To demonstrate, we outline new kinds of scholarship enabled by counterfactual causality and contemporary challenges that counterfactual causality faces in spatial analysis. Throughout, we refer interested readers to contemporary work on spatial causal inference and methods useful for scholars interested in analysing causal relationships in geographical systems.

This paper aims at calling geographers' attention to the works of Italian historical demographer Massimo Livi Bacci, who authored fundamental texts on the indigenous genocide in the Americas, on the history of world population, on global migrations and on population's environmental ‘sustainability’. In denouncing colonial crimes, critically questioning commonplaces of Malthusian origin and challenging sovereignist prejudices against migrations, Livi Bacci stresses the need for scholars to fully address the complex relations between space and population in both analyses of empirical cases and elaborations of broader theoretical models. He explicitly raises geopolitical matters on the potential political consequences of demographic and migratory dynamics. Yet, Livi Bacci's huge scholarly production is highly influential among historians and demographers, but seems to have been overlooked by most geographers hitherto. For these reasons, I argue that scholars committed to critical, radical and decolonial geographies of population (past and present) should (re)discover Livi Bacci's contributions. Re-reading Livi Bacci's works through geographical lenses and connecting them with current geographical scholarship, I show how ‘geo-demography’ can help geographers to address demographic matters at different scales, by providing insights for a new critical geo-history of population. This interdisciplinary engagement with the relations between geopolitical matters on sustainability and the ongoing changing in global population has the potential to plurally nourish critical geographical agendas, including on global migrations and colonial legacies.

This paper reviews contemporary geography literature pertaining to the development and experience of underwater spaces. Examining the underwater world as a space of practices, experiences, and visions that are both phenomenologically and geopolitically rich, the review covers research studies from human geography and cognate fields concentrating on the tourism and travel literature. After a brief overview of the many activities taking place underwater worldwide—from the evolution of the mythical Atlantis to the development of modern-day Atlantis such as underwater hotels—the paper focuses studies in three areas: the consumption of cultural and natural heritage, Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus diving and divers' experiences, and the possibility of human inhabitation of underwater realms in habitats such as underwater hotels and submarine research sites. It is argued that by becoming more familiar with underwater spaces, geographers who concentrate on tourism and marine environments can gain new perspectives that are likely to challenge the terrestrial imagination.