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Rewilding as a term and as a practice has divided public opinion. While rewilding studies mainly focus on the effectiveness of practices that lead to ecosystem recovery, the last decade has seen a rise in the investigation of stakeholder and local community responses to rewilding. This Special Section builds on this by examining rewilding through a gendered perspective that draws on feminist approaches. By doing so, the four full-length articles and two commentaries highlight the need to reflect on researchers’ positionality, to diversify research methods, and to take seriously people's emotions.

This commentary reframes gender and rewilding through a relational understanding of wildness. Moving beyond a binary lens of ‘the wild’, it examines how gendered relations shape rewilding's material, emotional, and epistemic dimensions. Centring relational wildness exposes how rewilding challenges masculine imaginaries of control and ownership while opening space for more equitable multispecies relations.

Over the past two decades, historical geographers have increasingly questioned who produces historical knowledge, whose voices are heard or excluded, and how participatory approaches might reshape geographical scholarship. In response, participatory methods have emerged as powerful tools for unsettling dominant historical narratives and expanding the practice of doing historical geography with communities, rather than about them. This Special Section brings together a diverse range of articles that provide examples of doing and theorising participatory historical geography. Each article is drawn from discussions or paper presentations that took place at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Annual Conference in 2023 during a double session entitled ‘Participatory Historical Geographies’. Together, the papers showcase a range of methodologies, case studies, and critical reflections from academic researchers and history and heritage practitioners. In bringing these different perspectives together, this special section seeks to distinguish participatory historical geography as a valuable subdiscipline and presents a range of perspectives from both academics and history/heritage practitioners which can be drawn upon to support and inspire researchers seeking productive methods for collaborating with contemporary communities to undertake historical research.

The worst impacts of climate change will be felt by the most vulnerable in our society, including children and young people who will be both witness to and victim of its increasingly serious consequences. Structural power imbalances limit children and young people's agency to effect meaningful change. Presented with a unique opportunity to showcase collaborative work between academic researchers and the National Youth Theatre on the international, high-profile stage offered by COP26, we wanted to elevate the voices of young people and explore what mattered to them about climate change. Drawing on participant journals, audience feedback, and researcher reflections, what follows is an account of our experience of the participatory development and final performance of this work, ‘On The Edge’ (OTE), a 90-min show featuring a short play and a climate cabaret of poetry, original music, and magic. Using participant and researcher journals, the performance itself, and audience feedback, we respond to the National Youth Theatre's own provocation to the COP26 audience: was it worth it? In exploring OTE's depiction of the conflicting hierarchies of young people's care, the paper argues that theatre can act as a powerful vehicle both for articulating intersectional youth perspectives and for emotionally and cognitively engaging the public. Situating narratives of climate and flood within young people's lived experience and memories of flooding, told in their own words, gave the audience a strong sense of connection with OTE's message and motivated their intention to become better advocates and stronger campaigners for climate action. Being present and performing on the world stage of COP26 allowed the young creatives of the National Youth Theatre to be part of a historically significant event. Many of them reflected on their experience as a source of personal and professional pride, with hopeful intent of taking action for a better climate future.

This editorial introduces a Special Section on gentle geographies in which the authors were invited to problematise ideas of gentleness in their research and practice. We understand gentleness to mean the act of limiting or moderating capacities to affect others, or ourselves, in ways that could otherwise cause harm. Gentleness is not necessarily a risk-averse practice that stands or sits in the way of other forms of resistance, and we should distinguish the gentleness we advocate for from a white classist form of etiquette as ‘niceness’, or a smiling acquiesce to injustice. Rather, acting gently modifies action so that it is experienced as recognising, and adequately responding to, the intersubjective and more-than-human capacities to affect, and be affected by, others. We write for gentleness as part of a multi-tonal politics of activism and academic labour, and locate this as part of a ‘virtue turn’ in and beyond human geography. We draw out themes in the papers around acts and activisms, and gentle methodologies which draw our attention to the absencing of human and more-than-human others.

This article explores how collaborations between geographers and performance artists can offer new ways for present-day communities to engage with the histories and legacies of postwar urban planning. Focusing on the development of site-responsive performances in Newport (Wales) codesigned by geographer Aled Singleton, Tin Shed Theatre Co and artist TEMMAH, the paper examines how artistic interventions can mediate contested planning documents, oral histories and lived experiences. Drawing on archival research, oral testimony and embodied performance, the project reimagined Newport's post-World War II renewal through performances staged in the streets, layered with both real and imagined voices from the past and subsequently turned into online and digital formats. These interventions challenged official narratives of urban renewal and foregrounded alternative memories and experiences. The article reflects critically on the methodological, ethical and political dimensions of this work, arguing that participatory historical geography, when entangled with artistic practice, can transform how urban pasts are remembered, represented and contested, and opens up new possibilities for place-based, public engagement with the planning histories that continue to shape urban life.

On 27 January 2025, I submitted my doctoral thesis titled ‘The architecture of whiteness: How institutional whiteness shapes academic careers in the UK’, and shared this milestone on X (formally Twitter). However, given the far-right political landscape of the platform, the post became a representative for the very thing I was hoping to challenge—the normalcy of whiteness. In this paper, I define the architecture of whiteness as the metaphorical notion that whiteness is a structure feature of the UK university space—both physically and metaphorically—and focuses institutional investigations on ‘race’ and racism on spatial features that have been built into the walls of the academy. I argue that now more than ever, whiteness must be articulated as more than a phenotype, more than an imagination, more than a system, but as an architecture, particularly in the context of university organisations built by bricks of whiteness.

As we contend with climate change, understanding its impacts on our everyday lives and work becomes increasingly crucial. In this paper, we applied research diaries as an innovative qualitative method to better understand how we, a team of climate change researchers in Melbourne (Australia), experience, sense, and make sense of and adapt to climate change. Our approach documents how we sense climate change in the individual and collective spaces of our work as researchers, addressing a significant gap in climate change adaptation studies, which have largely overlooked hybrid work environments. The paper offers two main conclusions. First, the research diaries provide insight into the personal, embodied, and affective character of how we sense climate change in hybrid work environments. Second, while research diaries have limitations, they show promise as part of a suite of collective autoethnographic approaches for deepening our understanding of the personal, and often invisible, work experiences of climate change adaptation.

Extreme heat is both a chronic and acute threat to the health and well-being of urban populations. The aim of this paper is to share experiences from using a range of quantitative and qualitative methods to conduct research on extreme indoor heat, plus highlight the benefits of taking this more holistic approach. Research conducted in urban Ghana measured temperatures in homes and workplaces, evaluated existing coping strategies of residents, and identified affordable retrofitting measures to reduce indoor temperatures. Eight data-gathering techniques were applied within our multi-dimensional research framework: thermistors, wearable sensors, qualitative interviews, thermal comfort surveys, diaries, participatory photography, dynamic thermal modelling, and testing of retrofits using full-scale experimental buildings. Our experiences of using each method are appraised individually and collectively. We contend that culturally and locally nuanced adaptations to extreme indoor heat can only be discerned by a community-led, mixed-methods approach. It is hoped that other multi-faceted studies of extreme heat can benefit from our experiences and reflections.