Geography Compass最新文献

With climate change and pandemics, the last few years has ushered in a planetary age. Moreover, the concept of the ‘globalisation’—a totalising and capitalist-centric concept that homogenises the entire planet into a territory to conquer—has become incapable of adequately accounting for the planetary events taking place. To date, geographical literature has used the term ‘planetary’ in important, but disparate ways; and in so doing, underplaying the emancipatory potential the concept has in resisting the totalising concept of the ‘globalisation’. This paper looks to the wider humanities and social science to offer four propositions—materiality, human as praxis, antinational and safeguarding—the planetary can be more coherently conceptualised geographically.

This paper provides a critical overview of research in geography that has explored the economic lives of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) individuals. I begin by considering how the consumption and production of mainstream commercial gaybourhoods is the primary approach through which geographies of sexuality, and queer geographies have engaged with economy. I then examine the ways in which digital spaces have blurred the boundaries of consumption and production, arguing that digital spaces are indicative of the much broader range of economic actions in which LGBTQ+ people take part. Finally, I turn to Gibson-Graham's ‘diverse economies’, suggesting that this concept can attend to the existence of numerous multi-scalar and overlapping queer economies. Developing a queer economies research agenda is crucial to turn attention beyond consumption and production in a narrow range of gaybourhoods, and to better portray the lives of those frequently excluded from mainstream commercial LGBTQ+ economies.

Largescale “big” water infrastructure is once again at the forefront of the global developmentalist agenda and is receiving attendant scholarly attention. Given this parallel growth, now is time to take stock of current scholarly contributions and explore opportunities for future research. In this paper, I review recent developments and insights gained from research on big water infrastructure, and water infrastructure studies, generally, to highlight six key threads of current scholarship. These include the production of big water infrastructure as: (1) a temporal process embedded in colonialism and ecological modernization; (2) infused with infrastructural knowledges, practices and subjectivities; (3) a spatial-geopolitical process; (4) subject to infrastructural and environmental material characteristics and capacities; (5) producing uneven development and enabling accumulation by dispossession; and (6) a contested process of differentiated socio-material resistance. In reviewing this literature, I argue that these six research strands form key analytic considerations that could be employed by others studying the nexus between water development, political ecological change, and infrastructure. Before concluding, in the final section of the paper I present additional and ongoing future research directions including big water infrastructure as it intersects with socially differentiated human intimacy and embodiment, indigenous and racialized forms of dispossession, and financialization.

While historical geographers contributed to colonial projects as surveyors, explorers and map-makers, since the 1990s they have contributed to the critical analysis of the imaginary and material geographies of empire. However, as the only example of Asian-led colonialism, the study of Japanese colonialism has not received anywhere near the same degree of scholarly attention as western colonialism, especially in the English-speaking literature. This study summarizes the historical geographies on both Japanese colonialism and colonial cities in Japanese Empire, arguing the vulnerable status of Japanese colonial cities in postcolonial urbanism, and concludes with a discussion of the particularities of Japanese colonialism. It argues that there is plenty of space for geographical research in the Japanese colonial context. Japan's colonial cities have special characteristics and should receive more attention in post-colonial urbanism as it in line with the urban scholar's call for ordinary cities in global south. It is hoped that this review can be a complete summary of relevant research and will provide useful references for future geographers to comparatively research Japanese colonialism.

As consumer cultures become increasingly digital and the digital/data has become more commodified, geographers have turned their attention to researching the ways in which consumption spaces, socialities and subjectivities are (re)produced by the digitalisation of everyday life. This article investigates the relationships between the digital and geographies of consumption based on a close reading of recent studies on the promises, possibilities, challenges, and flaws of the intersections of the digital and consumption in geography. It connects the digitalisation of consumption with the tradition of mapping and doing geographies of consumption that is concerned with the social life of thing, and opens a conversation on how subjectivities, spatialities, and socialities of consumption are reproduced by the changes in digital spaces and practices in the mundane. This article also points to the potential of a ‘follow the digital’ approach for establishing a dynamic and multi-sited understanding of geographies of consumption in the digital context.

This intervention develops arguments in our book Capitalism and the Sea on the complex temporalities attached to capitalism's intense and peculiar relationship to the global ocean. Technological innovations like the steamship or containerisation plainly transformed the pace and intensity of maritime commerce, and aspects of the global economy. We take this further to argue that the very origins and periodisation of capitalism are connected to the global ocean; as will be our futures, given the unpredictable implications of the oceans acting as the biosphere's ‘heat sink’. We consider several stylised expressions of time at sea: deep-time, logistical-time, life-time, and revolutionary time suggesting that the ocean world as a geographical space articulates these in distinctive and contradictory ways.

This paper reviews literature and identifies trends in the study of slum redevelopment and rehabilitation policies in India since the country's Independence. In doing so, it brings into conversation literature from various disciplines centered around slum redevelopment and rehabilitation policies of Indian cities. The paper begins by laying out the history of slum redevelopment and rehabilitation policies in India and then contextualizing the policies by examining how they came about and how they correspond to specific moments of the Indian political-economy, especially the “liberalization” of the market in the 1990s. In the second section, the paper highlights trends in contemporary research on slum redevelopment and rehabilitation policies with a focus on studies on dispossession. The final section identifies a critical omission of the socio-spatial realities of caste in contemporary studies of slum redevelopment and provides suggestions for future research.

This critical review lays down the fundamentals for rethinking just energy transition. It reviews the theoretical perspectives of energy justice, socio-technical transitions (STTs), and political ecology and presents a plausible and useful way to approach a just low-carbon transition using Political Ecology as a broad framework. This Political Ecology framework for Sustainable Energy Transition (PESET) addresses power issues associated with low-carbon transition, while also identifying the role of inclusivity and justice in low-carbon transition. As energy transition studies have primarily focused on the Global North and the extraction and production of large technologies, this framework provides a more radical means to achieve just transition objectives with particular relevance for application in the Global South—a region largely overlooked in transitions scholarship and where mundane/simple technologies (e.g. Solar Home Systems and clean cookstoves) typify transitions processes to date. The PESET framework presents a novel contribution, linking the concepts of energy justice, STTs, and political ecology to provide a more comprehensive means of framing and analysing just energy transitions. It thus provides a novel overarching framework linking energy studies, sustainability transitions, development studies and innovation studies especially in an era where the globe is moving toward a clean and affordable energy for all (Sustainable Development Goal 7).

Geographers and urban studies scholars tend to rely on policy mobilities approaches to explain processes of policy spread, whereas political scientists and public policy scholars usually draw on either policy diffusion or policy transfer. I challenge this widespread scholarly practice of selecting approaches based on the association with a certain discipline. Instead, first and foremost, the specific research aim(s) and question(s) should shape the choice of theoretical lens. Analytical or policy outcome-oriented studies should rely on policy diffusion and policy transfer, while a policy mobilities approach is best suited for more (policy) critical analysis. The approaches can also complement each other to a certain degree. Analytical and policy outcome-oriented approaches need a stronger critical perspective while policy mobilities scholars need to underpin their critique with constructive suggestions on how to improve established practices.

In this paper, we survey the expanding body of literature on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Chinese and Anglophone geography, and locate the main lines of development. The emerging scholarship approaches the BRI as a spatial discourse and examines the production of geographical reasoning in statecraft. It also links up with studies of the BRI as both a material project and an everyday experience. We argue that it is in this combined understanding of BRI's multiple registers, as discourse, project, and experience, that a trilectical approach for future geographical engagement can be identified as the BRI edges to its second decade.