Geography Compass最新文献

Originating in the early 20th century, international education migration has undergone significant growth to become a sprawling industry responsible for managing substantial student mobility. This process encompasses more than just the students themselves, incorporating a diverse array of actors, regulations, and technologies. Within this multifaceted system, commercial brokers play a vital role by actively facilitating the intricate and interconnected interactions involved in international education migration. This review takes a critical look at the evolving role of commercial brokers in international student mobilities, with a particular focus on the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. Brokers are presented as key intermediaries, bridging the gap between state mechanisms and migrating students, and contributing significantly to economic development through education migration. The review explores the layered relationships between brokers and students, taking into account not only economic aspects but also the social, cultural, and interpersonal factors that shape these interactions. Additionally, it considers the impact of digital transformation on commercial brokers, revealing how digital platforms have necessitated a reevaluation of their roles in an increasingly globalized educational landscape. In underscoring the growing importance of commercial brokers in the post-pandemic education-migration landscape, the review concludes that brokerage is best conceived as a complex, technologically-mediated social practice that bridges state policies, migrants' aspirations, and the overarching digital landscape.

Tranquil places that induce a sense of calm and peacefulness are important for those seeking respite from their stressful everyday lives. Although tranquillity is a word commonly used in everyday English, we show that its definition is complex, most often encompassing sight and hearing, with strong cultural and historical influences. To shed light on the concept of tranquillity and related research in geography and other disciplines, we (i) trace how tranquillity has been conceptualised and characterised (ii) outline how the potential for tranquillity has been modelled in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and (iii) highlight methods capable of extracting individual experiences of tranquillity from interviews, public participation GIS and text analysis. We conclude by charting a research agenda for tranquillity that makes a case for theory development across disciplines including human geography, GIS, and environmental psychology, with interdisciplinary methodologies that should be implemented and developed to better reflect the importance of the combination of physical environment and lived human experience in shaping experienced tranquillity. Based on its importance for people's well-being, we argue for the recognition of tranquillity as a cultural ecosystem service in its own right. Finally, we call for a more holistic inclusion of tranquillity in policy-making and planning, where a focus on tranquillity and associated positive landscape and soundscape elements could help extend the focus beyond simply protection from noise, towards creating liveable and healthy environments for the future.

Engaging with recent applications of the concept of slow violence to the ongoing political developments in the West Bank, this review article argues that the relational approach offered by feminist geopolitics facilitates the conception of slow violence and warfare as part of a single complex of violence. The article traces feminist geopolitics' contribution to research on geographies of slow violence on the one hand, and to the analyses produced within the fields of critical geopolitics and critical war studies on the other, exposing that scholarly work exploiting the relational approach generated within and across these areas of research enables a broader understanding of political violence's tangled operations. Based on the analysis of the recent scholarly engagement with slow violence in the West Bank, the article proposes that thinking of slowness as a form of warfare captures the complex entanglement of different modalities of violence as they materialize in specific spatio-temporal circumstances. Moreover, such an approach contributes to the further reinvigoration of feminist geopolitics with insights generated within (settler) colonial studies.

We engage with debates on shifting geographies of sovereignty in the digital age by providing a conceptual framework for “situated sovereignty”. Our contribution draws on a review of the scholarly literature and current sovereignty practices. We aim to move beyond state-centred and territorial understandings of sovereignty. A common discussion is the necessity of reconfiguring notions of sovereignty. However, hardly any studies have discussed the sociospatial configurations of practising sovereignty in the digital present. We conceptualise practices of sovereignty along intersecting strands of scholarly literature that have scarcely been related, drawing from political geography, science and technology studies, and critical digitalisation studies. Reviewing the literature, we identify three fields framing current practices of sovereignty—(i) state and territory, (ii) civic engagement, and (iii) digitalisation—based on which we develop a conceptual framework of situated sovereignty. Our framework addresses the situated role of sovereignty practices from a spatial point of view. We propose pragmatism, legitimacy, and governance as three analytical themes for better understanding current and future shifting geographies of sovereignty and enhancing sovereignty studies.

Armed forces in urban areas are a very visible source of socio-spatial and urban change. Even in contemporary cities ‘at peace’, this presence and ensuing changes can be wide-ranging, evident across infrastructure, organisations, narratives of place, events, and everyday activities. Although over the past 2 decades critical military studies and urban geopolitics have explored some of these themes, an urban studies perspective on such military geographies in peacetime has elicited far less attention. The aim of this article is to open up opportunities for deeper conceptualisation and research on urban military geographies. This article establishes a dialogue between critical military studies and urban geopolitics, to review the different dimensions of the influence of a military presence in urban space, and to provide a synthesis of these two bodies of literature. Using Lefebvre's dialectical theory of spatial production, this review shows how cities can be privileged spaces for the reproduction of militarism and preparation for war. Moreover, it examines how the presence of military forces in peacetime can influence the material and immaterial production of urban space.

Shining a light on the various non-formal education spaces that have garnered attention in geographies of education over the past two decades, this review takes stock of how historical spaces of education and learning have become a key focus of this body of work. In so doing, the review signals prominent and emergent themes around which scholarship in this subdiscipline has cohered: most notably, geographies of citizenship and morality in informal education spaces, and the radical pedagogic practices of alternative education spaces. As well as looking back, the review also signals two areas that scholars in the field should consider engaging with more closely: Black education and decolonial education. Analysing literature in history and sociology on the Black education movement in Britain, the paper calls for geographies of education to engage more closely with work published in cognate disciplines and not to overlook the relational nature of decolonial education in global north contexts.

As calls grow for relational approaches to nature and wellbeing research that consider reciprocity in human-environment interactions, the concept of affordances is gaining importance as a useful way of thinking about nature experiences. Affordances provide a framework to enable individualised conceptions of nature by focusing on what is functionally meaningful to people. However, affordance thinking is currently limited in its ability to help us understand how peoples' background, culture and circumstances shape interactions with nature - a critical issue with respect to inclusivity and the under-representation of some sections of society. Bourdieu's theory of practice is a well-established set of ‘thinking tools’ which potentially help addresses these influences. It examines how our social environment may pattern our practices, attitudes, and perceptions. In this paper, we review the various applications of affordances before providing an overview of how Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, capital and field can complement, and be integrated with, affordance thinking for novel applications to greenspace research. Bridging these areas of thinking will facilitate development of a more intersectional and complete understanding of nature experiences, including the quality and inclusivity of green and natural spaces.

Research on the intermediate space or interface where rural and urban boundaries become blurred has been gaining momentum within geography and other intersecting fields. In contrast to the dominant focus on the growth of urbanism at the rural-urban interface, a growing number of studies have emerged to intervene the debate from the rural side. This paper contributes to this burgeoning scholarship by reviewing recent work on geographical articulations of rurality in the face of urbanizing forces and processes operating in intermediate spaces. I firstly explore how extant representations of rurality at the rural-urban interface are inherent with an “idyllic” vision, a “modernist” one or a combination of both, and how the interactions among multiple rural visions produce tensions and conflicts at the interface. Then, I outline the recent conceptualizations of rurality under the relational and materialist turns, which move beyond the discursive construction of the countryside and offer new theoretical insights and analytical concepts for appreciating multiple, heterogeneous, open and inclusive articulations of rural voices at the interface. Finally, I map out directions for future research to attend to the insufficiently-addressed temporal dimensions of the rural-urban interface, thereby moving current discussions of relational rurality forward.

Bioregionalism was popularised in the 1970s back to the land movement. It is distinguished from other forms of environmentalism through the spatial imaginary of a bioregion as the scale for environmental action and regenerative living. Bioregional thought has been widely critiqued by geographers for its potentially deterministic understanding of the relationship between place and culture. This paper argues that bioregionalism is less of a homogenous movement and more of a discursive forum that houses a spectrum of perspectives. We identify three key tendencies within bioregional thought, an ontological tendency, a critical tendency and a processual tendency. Each tendency is rooted in different spatial imaginaries, and generates different axiologies and strategies of change. We argue that contemporary processual tendencies in bioregional thought are productive for geographers considering questions of (1) materiality, agency and place, (2) politics, ethics and place, and (3) acting in place for urgent and ethical change.