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The COVID-19 pandemic somewhat unexpectedly promoted resurgent interest in the attractions of rural places, not least associated with nature, in many countries for especially urban people. The paper argues that this link was very fecund for many within the broad UK ‘folk music’ community specifically. After introducing COVID-19's pro-rural turn, the paper gives a brief overview of now substantial music geography scholarship, paying particular attention to what has been studied in respect of folk music, not least its examination of the latter's problematic links to English identities. It argues that folk music's resurgent rural links call for attention. It then introduces how the rural-folk music COVID-19 experience worked at three non-exclusive levels. First, there was rural influence on the music being produced. Second, some musicians were also personally impacted strongly by rural experiences, evident not solely through their music. Third, some musicians developed original rural initiatives that saw audience members also gaining direct rural inspiration, not just via the strong growth in internet-facilitated connections but through direct in-place encounters with the musicians in the rural. Each reading is illustrated by two brief case studies, with the rural-folk combination becoming increasingly alive and more-than-representational. It is suggested in conclusion that there remains a strong ‘life’ to these rural-folk music connections in less predominant COVID-19 times.

This paper explores the resizing, reshaping and connectivity of islands by examining ongoing relations between land and sea in the context of the Channel Island of Guernsey. Ideas of materiality, temporality and vertical depth are employed to explore how contemporary tides and past sea-level change impact island–island connections, and island–mainland connections between Guernsey and France. By focusing on the littoral zone as a space of encounter between land and sea, the paper explores some of the processes that challenge the notion of an island having fixed edges, emphasising the island's shape and size as always in flux. The paper then explores how tides alternatively reveal and hide material structures such as rocks and causeways, making the underwater scape temporally visible and differently accessible as an extension of land. It enables connections to be made and remade. This is demonstrated through the example of Guernsey and the tidal island of Lihou. The paper subsequently considers these ideas in the context of Quaternary sea-level change. The land known as Guernsey alternated between literal island surrounded by water, and a steep-sided plateau on the Normanno-Breton plain, coinciding with interglacials and glacials. This connection is referred to as geologic. I argue that by acknowledging Guernsey's former visible connection with France, lack of contemporary visibility in the underwater scape does not render this a disconnection. Rather, the geologic, as further evidenced in the contemporary natural and built environment of Guernsey, continues through an underwater scape. It reappears in other Channal Islands and France, demonstrating ongoing connections at a land–sea–geologic interface. The paper argues for geology as a form of vertical depth. It calls for greater consideration of the geologic in the human geographical study of islands.

With the recent, constantly growing interest in the critical geography of the oceans and critical toponymy, there is still plenty of space for theoretical, methodological and practical interconnections between these emerging subfields. Despite some sporadic examples of critical analysis of the names of the islands and seas, the ocean floor and the open ocean remain unexplored spaces in critical toponymic investigations. This paper aims to fill this gap by introducing the concept of the toponymic frontier, focusing on the spatial-political dimension of the names of the natural submarine features (bathyonyms). Drawing on critical toponymy and critical geography of the oceans' theoretical literature and using the empirical database of more than 5000 bathyonyms and the secondary resources represented by the international media, official reports and governmental websites, this paper develops a base for a conceptual framework for analysing the marine place names as (geo)politically and political-economically motivated symbolic elements of the oceanic voluminous realm. Finally, the paper paves the way for future debates related to the politics of place naming in the contested spaces of the hydrosphere and the generation of reinvigorated productive insights in critical toponymic studies.

Achieving successful multi-stakeholder collaboration for sustainable outcomes is complex. This paper provides key principles for future co-design projects aimed at fostering an inclusive approach to research. These have been developed based on a novel methodology that co-designed the essential components of a long-term, collaborative agreement for a nature recovery scheme in England. Using an assortment of iterative, deliberative participatory methods, this research engaged a wide variety of stakeholders to produce a template agreement for an agri-environmental policy. We demonstrate that a flexible, highly reflective approach resulted in positive engagement with previously marginalised stakeholders. The approach also successfully navigated the unequal power dynamics seen both within and between groups. Finally, multiple feedback loops allowed participants to continually build on previous interactions as they developed and reviewed the agreement. By drawing out the complexities of the co-design process, this paper explains how co-design efforts can produce potentially transformative outputs. We hope that the principles introduced here offer a useful starting point for those planning to undertake multi-stakeholder co-design.

While an increasing number of studies concerning youth and informality have examined the complex relationship between youth, informal work and transitions to adulthood, this literature has paid little attention to how the death of a family member presents distinctive challenges to young vendors' life and livelihood progression. Addressing this, the paper draws on a case study of a small-scale informal worker in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, who was participating in in-depth ethnographic research when their father died suddenly. Through this, it investigates how parental death intersects with the challenges a young vendor experienced working informally while simultaneously attempting to achieve transitions to anticipated adulthood. Life-mapping interviews and participatory timeline diagrams were employed, gaining rich insights into a young vendor's experiences of parental death, revealing how these were shaped by an interplay between the past, present and future. More specifically, the research, which brings together literature concerning youth, informality and family relations, explores how parental death can (re)configure a young person's household roles, responsibilities and relations in response to sudden precarity in the present, reshaping priorities and plans towards achieving goals over different timeframes. Given persistent levels of informality and uncertainty across employment in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond, this article provides a timely contribution by highlighting the need for more studies to investigate how parental death creates and exacerbates the challenges youth vendors experience, constraining their abilities to grow and sustain their lives and livelihoods within the informal sector.

This paper reports on our ongoing experiences of using co-productive zine-making as a creative and participatory method in a research project on public libraries as social infrastructures. Engaging different audiences, including library management and staff, patrons and urban government authorities, the project aims to simultaneously study and stimulate a sense of community in public libraries. While many libraries already deploy zine-making programmes as a low-cost visitor activity, we use it as both a data collection and community-building tool. Co-productive zine-making offers opportunities for reflection and mutual understanding to foster education, exchange and encounter between different stakeholders. It challenges the traditional power dynamics of knowledge production in academia and beyond. Zine-making can act as a creative tool that pushes researchers to be more (self-)reflexive. Yet, despite these benefits, zine-making does not come without challenges, and therefore requires a specific researchers' skillset. This paper provides insight into both practical and ethical issues we encountered before, during and after the organisation of the first out of five zine-making workshops in our project, held with community librarians in Rotterdam.

Hong Kong, in contrast to its previous image as a glamourous global city, has recently been associated with negative keywords such as oppression, fear, violence and even human rights emergency, following the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Movement and later the implementation of National Security Law (NSL) in 2020. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong Special Area Administration presented a post-NSL policy direction as promising a ‘Beautiful New Hong Kong’. This paper is aimed at understanding how Hongkongers have continuously lived with/against the imposed (re)writing of Hong Kong. We examined how Hongkongers have been taking initiatives to raise awareness about the ‘slow emergencies’ in Hong Kong and to counter it in various forms of ‘evacuation’, whether they are on the move or staying put in place, in order to pursue future-making. We carried out a multi-sited study on the two kinds of Hongkongers between January 2020 and August 2023. We talked to those who already left Hong Kong for Taiwan, the UK, Canada, and so forth, and with those who were debating about relocation and at the same time preparing for departure if necessary. We strategically read ‘evacuation’ in two senses: First, evacuation responds to emergencies and therefore by adopting ‘evacuation’ is itself a disagreement with the Beautiful New Hong Kong policy as curated by the state. Second, evacuation responds to geography of future and politics of simultaneity. We conceptualised ‘normalisation of evacuation’ to understand the future-making behind the move in Hong Kong. The particular kind of evacuation discussed took shape in two forms, relocation elsewhere and reorganisation in situ, both of which, in our analysis, are demonstrating Hongkongers' agency in pursuing geographies of future beyond the state-led agenda.

The issue of rangeland governance and tenure in pastoral China has sparked significant controversy and discussion. Several models have been suggested, encompassing private, state and common property systems. However, what does the practical implementation of rangeland governance entail? A review of the history of rangeland governance and policy in Amdo, Tibet tells how land governance is constructed by pastoralists adapting existing norms, formulating rules in various contexts, and negotiating with various groups such as the monastery, religious organisations, and governmental authorities. The governance of rangeland in Amdo, Tibet is characterised by constant negotiations and contestations, including resistance from below, and is shaped by various processes in the real-world context. Through the notion of assemblage, which involves bringing together an array of agents and objectives to intervene in social processes to produce desired outcomes and avert undesired ones, this paper adds to the existing body of research on land governance by examining how institutions are formed in the case of a hydroelectric dam on the land of the pastoralists. Consequently, the question arises: What does this mean for policy and practice for the rangelands of China? If hybrid rangeland governance is to be considered the prevailing practice, then what implications would this have for the framing of policies and their implementation?

This paper makes a novel intervention in political geography by offering methodological reflections on contemporary radio and podcast listenership. It begins from the starting point that radio and podcasts are important and popular sites of geographical knowledge production with the power to shape how audiences understand, imagine and engage in the world. The paper heeds calls in critical and popular geopolitics to move away from the site of representation towards audience reception and presents the ‘playlist-diary’ method as an innovative way of exploring listener responses to BBC radio journalism on migration. This method is then used as a springboard to think more broadly about everyday encounters with radio and podcasts. It argues that situating audience engagements within specific spatialities and temporalities, and considering the digital technologies and platforms though which audio is discovered, consumed and circulated, is critical to developing a nuanced understanding of radio and podcast geopolitics. This discussion reflects growing interest in materialities, networks and assemblages of popular geopolitics and points to a blurring of visual and aural media. Overall, the paper makes the case for amplifying methodologies of listening in political geography and aims to be a catalyst to future scholarship on radio and podcasts.

Mega-events like the Olympics and the football World Cups remain popular around the globe, regardless of their record of damaging host cities and societies. In parallel, research on mega-events continues to grow across a range of disciplines, including geography. Much of this literature remains fixed at global levels of analysis. In this light, mega-events suffer from a double problem: their planning and articulation too often cause harm to cities and societies and, simultaneously, research on mega-events focuses too much on the macro. This paper endeavours to address both problems by proposing to make sense of mega-events by thinking through the minor. This concern valorises micro scales and marginalised people, those who most often lose during mega-event hosting. The paper argues that geographers are uniquely positioned to conduct nuanced mega-event research across a globally diverse range of political-economic contexts, and calls for more geographers to contribute to this project in a move towards a critical geography of mega-events.