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Drawing on my accompanied returning-home fieldwork in China with a dear friend, Yun, this paper critically reflects on the ideas of friendship in fieldwork and its enabling and enhancing role in managing safety concerns and negotiating data collection. The contribution is two-fold. First, it advances current fieldwork scholarship in Humanities and Social Sciences that predominantly focuses on the researcher–informant friendship formed in the field by engaging with the companionship of pre-existing friends. This diversifies our understandings of fieldwork friendship in individually, socially and culturally unsettling ways. Second, this study furthers ongoing conversations calling for greater visibility and support of different forms of accompanied fieldwork by focusing on the accompaniment of pre-existing friends. Three potential directions are outlined to normalise the model of accompanied fieldwork in efforts to promote equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in geography fieldwork.

This paper engages with digital urban futures prospectively, departing from most existing geographical work that has tended to explore the future retrospectively. I do so by first discussing a methodology that is sensitive to the meanings and significations of the future as well as future-making as an active process, or as ‘practised’. I argue that such an orientation is necessary to challenge the established view of the future as an endpoint or as a priori in social and cultural geography and, correspondingly, invite a more processual and emergent understanding of the future as multiple, never complete and always becoming. Using the example of Singapore's Smart Nation initiative, I then show how this methodological approach can be employed to study the way urban dwellers encounter, engage and evaluate possible futures in their everyday spaces and lives. Focusing on futures prospectively is significant insofar as it directs attention to their relationality and open-endedness, which, in turn, provides the latitude to consider and construct different forms of futures. Beyond the methodological contribution, this paper offers an epistemological intervention that not only unpicks how knowledge about the future is currently produced in the literature but also multiplies our ways of studying futurity and future-making.

Within feminist geography, there is a growing consensus on the need for research to contribute to social change and transformation beyond the academy, and increased emphasis on the co-production of impact. In this paper I critically reflect and report on how I co-produced impact with a participatory audio-visual research project, conducted in collaboration with women in Bogotá and Medellín and researchers and filmmakers based in the UK and Colombia. I focus particularly on co-producing ‘impact-in-process’, which builds participants' capacities, creates spaces of reciprocal learning and increases participants' confidence and sense of ownership both during and beyond the research process. Yet, while co-producing impact-in-process benefits research participants and has the potential to contribute to social change and transformation, this form of impact is rarely recognised as such.

This paper centres geological matter in questions of marginality, inequality, and structural racism in the US. I follow the entanglements of geological matter with bodies, emotion-laden imaginaries of place, and histories of slavery and colonialism, to illustrate how contemporary Black lives are intimately connected to processes of mineral extraction. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman's concept of ‘afterlives’, I situate heightened levels of ambient toxicity from geological refinement and industrial waste as extractive afterlives, connecting commonly felt precarity around extractive worlds to broader questions of race, inequality, and connections to place. Citing academic and artistic accounts of life in Southern Louisiana, a historically Black region with a large petrochemical industry, I demonstrate the relevance of geological entanglements to experiences of structural racism in the US.

This paper brings an urban communication lens to bear on the geographies of platformisation in cities. It does so by drawing on three select instances of platformised materialities in Toronto and Vancouver that represent familiar contours of urban platformisation: mobility (bike and car sharing), last-mile logistics (on-demand delivery), and labour (gig work). These examples are worked through Aiello and Tosoni's heuristic of cities as constituting the mediums, content, and contexts of urban communication, respectively. As mediums, platformised materialities in the form of street signs designate exclusive uses of public space by mobility platforms, communicating the spatial conditions of platform urbanism. As the contents of communication, stickers and signs advertising on-demand meal delivery available at a restaurant venue express the platform-driven transformation of the social relations that make the delivered meal take place. And as context, broader trends of the platformisation of labour render communication by other, non-platform-based materialities – such as posters calling on urban gig workers to unionise – meaningful. An urban communication perspective contributes to geographical scholarship on platform urbanism by nuancing our understandings of how platforms and platform technology capital secure and sustain themselves in cities through their material communicative capacities.

This paper is concerned with the situated production of opinions in human geography research. Drawing on an online focus group project in which university students were asked to discuss smartphone use in urban greenspace, I'm interested in how our methods can make opinions as much as collect those that are already assumed to exist. Why were these students inclined to speak of having and sharing opinions? How important should opinions be to us if they are not actively influencing the everyday lives of those who we hope to understand in our studies? And what does this all say about staging effective group discussion in the discipline?

Minimalist fashion has become a key element of the wider minimalist movement that promotes reducing one's wardrobe space to a bare minimum of essential items (or a ‘capsule wardrobe’) with few, quality items that coordinate. Minimalist-inspired ‘fashion challenges’, in which participants are challenged to only wear a certain number of garments over a certain time period, have also gained increasing momentum, particularly in the USA and the UK. This study considers ‘Project 333’ (in which participants must only wear 33 items of clothes over a three-month period), and the ‘Six Items Challenge’ (which requires participants to only wear six garments over 6 weeks), to explore their potential to encourage sustainable fashion (non-)consumption. This is achieved via an analysis of 20 blog posts of individuals reflecting on their own participation in the two challenges and an auto-ethnography of my own participation in the Six Items Challenge. The research reveals that while just over half of participants mentioned sustainability as a motivation or outcome of their participation in a fashion challenge, the challenges' focus on garment reduction, re-use, repair, and not shopping while partaking in them, renders them sustainability driven in practice. Almost all challenges also mentioned personal benefits of conducting a fashion challenge (such as money and time saved plus greater fashion creativity), which could be seen as a helpful way in which to encourage their uptake. However, the paper also considers the idealisation of ‘perfect’ minimalist wardrobe spaces and subsequent fashioned identities and issues regarding who has the pecuniary means to embrace the quality over quantity narrative of the challenges. The paper therefore concludes that fashion challenges do have the potential to encourage more sustainable fashion practices, but they simultaneously raise tensions regarding idealised minimalist fashioned identities.

Located on the redeveloping waterfront of Canada's largest city, the Toronto Music Garden is a unique public garden inspired by the first of J. S. Bach's Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. Designed through a collaboration with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy, the garden attempts not to represent Bach or his music but to inscribe its essence on the landscape. Several lines of inquiry are pursued in this paper. First, it provides an overview of the geographies of gardens and the ways in which elements of garden design and music composition have influenced each other. Second, it reveals the creative process involved in translating the elements of one art form (music) to another (landscape design). Especially important to this process is Messervy's use of what she terms ‘archetypal’ landforms. Third, the Music Garden is analysed as an integral part of the lived landscape of Toronto's post-industrial waterfront. Finally, the paper contends that the power and significance of the Toronto Music Garden lies in the interstices between the emotional geographies that informed the design and the resulting affective atmosphere experienced by a diversity of visitors. The methodology for this project includes open-ended interviews, fieldwork, and archival research. This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on the roles that the arts can play in the production and utilisation of distinctive public spaces.

This paper focuses on the use of emancipatory research principles in archival research and contends with the suitability of academic conventions that characterise ethical practice when the research goal is to elevate the voices of marginalised historical groups. Drawing on a case study of Le Court Cheshire Home, England (1948–1975) to address a critical gap in the literature, I highlight some ethical dilemmas I encountered when working at the nexus of historical geography and geographies of disability. This paper demonstrates what an emancipatory research approach means for an archival study of disability, using examples to illustrate how ethical decisions impacted all stages of the research design and the write-up of findings. I argue that ethics should not be envisaged solely as an approval process completed at the project's outset. Rather, the explorative nature of archival research necessitates that ethics should be an iterative undertaking, with archival sources having the potential to shape both the content and conduct of the research.

Graphic elicitation, an arts-based method that focuses on participant-led drawing activities, is often conducted with the researcher in situ and discussed in an interview setting, either during or after drawing. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns have meant that using graphic elicitation in its current form required a re-evaluation. Reflecting on a research project that undertook graphic elicitation remotely, this paper considers the emotional affordance and disruption management of the method in caregiver research. While informal caregiving may be an emotionally fraught topic for the participants, we demonstrate how graphic elicitation explores emotions and experiences with sensitivity and care. Furthermore, we show that graphic elicitation enabled us to acknowledge the pandemic but maintain focus on caregiving itself. The caregivers were responsive to the method and found it rewarding and insightful, albeit with some initial hesitancy and ingrained perceptions of arts-based outputs. Through our discussions, we show the potential for remote graphic elicitation in geography as a method to explore potentially sensitive, emotionally charged topics like caregiving.