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This ethnographic study examines Tibetan pastoralists' perceptions of the COVID-19 pandemic in Pema Rito, Golok Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, China, during the initial outbreak in 2020. Framed through the lens of multispecies placemaking, an approach that highlights the dynamic, co-creative processes by which humans and non-human beings (animals, plants, microorganisms, and viruses) collectively shape place, the study challenges traditional anthropocentric theories of space. Drawing on remote and in-person interviews, the research reveals that pastoralists understood the pandemic not merely as a public health crisis but as an ecological and moral reconfiguration of place. For Pema Rito communities, COVID-19 represented an anthropause that compelled them to renegotiate their relationships with the pastoral landscape, viruses, wildlife, and livestock. They interpreted the pandemic as karmic retribution for human exploitation of nature, reinforcing their commitment to wildlife conservation while advocating for physical distancing from wild species. Amid the crisis, pastoralists positioned their traditional lifeways as an optimal response to zoonotic and ecological disruptions. By analysing the pandemic through multispecies placemaking, this study demonstrates how crises reconfigure human–nonhuman entanglements, offering critical insights into resilience, ecological ethics, and post-pandemic placemaking.

Drawing on the critical toponymic approaches that theorised place naming as an instrument for contested spatial politics of interaction between power, people, and places, and the emerging volumetric geopolitics scholarship which considers the political processes in three dimensions, rather than flat two-dimensional space, this short commentary analyses the volumetric (geo)political motivations and potential consequences for the symbolic landscapes of the recent notable (re)naming events worldwide. The paper concludes that, in the current volatile geopolitical processes, the powerful actors (state leaders, politicians, or oligarchs) use toponyms as one of the most easily accessible, relatively inexpensive, and comprehensible tools for the general public to transmit ideas of nationalistic domination through volumetric territorialisation and transformation of symbolic landscapes.

Feminist geographers have highlighted the significance of attending to the embodied, affective, and emotionally charged relationships that exist between researchers and participants during qualitative research. And yet, taking research back to participants for post-fieldwork feedback remains an often invisiblised aspect of qualitative inquiry. This is unfortunate, as scholarly attentiveness to these encounters may yield valuable insights. Such insights may be of particular relevance to feminist scholars who seek to foster research spaces of mutual respect and accountability and those researching in ways that prioritise bodily knowledges. In what follows, I explore a post-fieldwork encounter with a participant that occurred after offering participants in my PhD research the opportunity to provide feedback on draft interpretive chapters. I discuss how the research's methodological emphasis on bodily movement may have influenced the participant's response to interpretive chapters. I also reflect on my embodied, emotional and effective responses to the participant's feedback. In questioning my attempts as a feminist researcher to negotiate power ethically with the participant, I seek to contribute to growing discussions around doing feminist research and being a feminist researcher in methodological contexts that let the body lead.

This paper problematises the application of UK-based research ethics policy for overseas fieldwork. It draws on our own fieldwork experiences as researchers holding double affiliations. On the one hand, we are affiliated with two UK universities, on the other, our overseas fieldwork sites are in our home country, Jordan. Insider researchers face multiple frictions as they navigate between ethics requirements by their institutions and their participants' culture. We argue that in the researchers' pursuit to uphold institutional policies of their universities while respecting the socio-cultural sensibilities of their participants at overseas fieldwork sites, they engage in mediative acts. Thus, we put forth the concept of ethical mediation to describe these acts of mediation that researchers engage in. We discuss the concept through two topics that cause friction and prompt mediation: researchers’ positionality and informed consent. This paper examines our field experiences in conducting 80 semi-structured interviews, including a structured 53-page ethics diary. The data examination follows two approaches: a prospective approach that focuses on ethics processes from the onset of fieldwork preparation, and a retrospective approach that assesses ethical aspects after the conclusion of the research project. We conclude by reflecting on the role of ethics training. We also suggest measures for improving institutional ethics processes to support researchers as they engage in ethical mediation during overseas fieldwork.

Research within the geographies of education and related fields has advanced our understanding of how family, school and policy shape young people's educational aspirations, emphasising that these processes often reflect middle-class norms. This paper furthers this debate by examining how young people's aspirations are shaped at Chance4You; a private, non-profit supplementary education programme for low-income immigrant youth that aims to address the social inequalities reproduced at the transition to selective public secondary schools in Zurich, Switzerland. Despite the growing importance of supplementary education, its role in shaping young people's aspirations is underexplored. Using Appadurai's concept of the capacity to aspire and a Bourdieusian sensitivity for social class, the paper analyses data from a six-month ethnography with three ninth-year students (aged 14–15) and their coaches at Chance4You. The analysis revealed that students viewed the programme as enhancing their capacity to aspire, while coaches framed Chance4You's practices in a way that implied parents faced challenges in appropriately managing their children's aspirations. This paper posits that using aspiration as a lens has helped to identify the tension between Chance4You's efforts to counter inequalities created by systemic privilege at this transition and the programme's inherent dependencies on the hegemony shaped by the middle-class norms embedded in the transitions' admissions process.

In this paper, we analyse the key forms of borderwork that have emerged in UK social security over the last few decades. We argue that these forms play a role in everyday bordering in the UK, i.e. the embedding of immigration checks into more and more routine encounters, administered not by trained, paid border officials, but by other residents, in order to secure a range of public services for a majoritised population deemed deserving by the state. Legislation plays a role within the formation of public sector bordering practices and processes, but does not pre-determine the exact forms and, therefore, people's experiences of and with these. We argue that far from being a ‘flat’ or ‘uniform’ space, the bureaucratic field in which borderwork is being undertaken is lively and differentiated. We believe that it is important that we as geographers attend to and analyse these variations. To develop these arguments, we explore the uneven topographies of bordering and borderwork in UK social security by focusing on two key forms: conditions and tests. Specifically, we seek to answer the question, what do these forms do, that is, what role do they play in the aggregation of bordering within this specific site? We argue that conditions mean that borderwork both exceeds and persists, whereas tests function to ensure that borderwork proliferates and obfuscates.

What does ‘good farming’ look like in a context of climatic, technological, socio-economic, regulatory, and geopolitical upheaval? In this commentary, we highlight the opportunities presented by arts-led research to complement the existing STEM-centric data by offering more inclusive, holistic, dialogical, and experiential understandings of contemporary agriculture. Creative methods offer diverse opportunities to engage with farmer voices, and ensure that policy-making successfully connects with its intended stakeholders, in contrast to the experiences of the Welsh Sustainable Farming Scheme. Through three brief examples of participatory arts, storytelling, and futuring, we highlight the importance of voicing silences, building trust, and enabling more culturally sustainable policies within contentious, complex and, emotive arenas such as environmental sustainability.

In this short commentary for the Gender and Rewilding Special Section, I look through an ecofeminist lens to focus on two themes in the special issue—reproductive labour and epistemic injustice—that should promote radically different conversations about the politics of rewilding but are seldom found in the academic literature in this growing transdisciplinary field.

This paper draws on ethnographic narratives to critically examine the plantationscape as an ongoing site of ‘backwardness’, highlighting the everyday livelihood struggles of indentured Oraon labourers and their continued institutional exclusion. This study was conducted in the tea plantation belt of the Dooars area of India. The arguments in the paper centre the voices and experiences of the Oraon people, offering a grounded perspective on how subaltern group(s) navigate recurring liabilities amid constrained agency and uneven, often contradictory, encounters with the state's shifting narratives of (in)equality. The research, conducted via intensive fieldwork and comprehensive interviews, elucidates how structural inequalities, exemplified by intergenerational poverty, territorial isolation, institutional neglect, and gendered disadvantage, persistently shape the socio-economic spectrums of communities reliant on plantations. These conditions exemplify backward geographies, highlighting spaces marginalised by historical dispossession, infrastructural neglect, and deliberate exclusion from prevailing developmental narratives. Engaging debates in labour geography, territorial equity, and indigenous marginalisation, the plantationscape is not ascertained as a ‘historical anomaly’ but as a contemporary site where colonial labour legacies intersect with postcolonial developmental exclusions and decision-making asymmetry. I argue that, far from being a historical anomaly, the plantation remains a locus of ‘structural disempowerment’, perpetuating marginalisation and reinforcing mono-livelihood dependency. This study urges researchers and policymakers to understand backward geography as evolving formations of exclusion, where marginalisation is spatially embedded and continues to shape the lives of those at the ‘edges of development’ across the Global South.

Geographers have shown that power structures shape the doing of geography and the knowledge that we produce. These power structures are maintained, in part, by discourses that themselves are supported by the representative work of images. This paper explores how geography is visualised as an institutional academic discipline, using a discourse and content analysis of 196 images from 15 geography department websites and Instagram accounts. In these images, geography is depicted as an active discipline, with empirical and particularly rural field-based research at its heart. Qualitative methods and urban research are rarely depicted. Geographers themselves are shown as friendly and welcoming, revealing the evolution from a paternalistic academic of old to an (apparently) engaging academia of the neoliberal university. While welcome in some ways, the depiction of education in particular will be misleading for many, showing a more discursive and collaborative practice than many students experience. This appearance of engagement is further undone by the lack of diversity of people shown as geographers. The geography of institutional websites is dominated by racial majorities. There are few if any markers of difference that suggest the presence of oppressed or minority groups in geography, although outside East Asia there is a healthy gender split. The images from Instagram offer, in some instances, more diversity in terms of showing geographic practice, and the paper suggests that despite concerns about social media, it may still be a place where geographers can construct more varied representations of our discipline.