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Attention has emerged as an important issue in the social sciences and humanities in recent years. Much influential work characterises our era as one in which our attention is increasingly placed under stress, seeking to unpack the consequences of such a state of affairs for our capacities to think. This paper turns to the work of Henri Bergson to offer a distinctly geographic perspective on such debates by emphasising the intimate links between attention and the material environments of everyday life. Thinking through Bergson, the paper suggests that some environments enrol a greater degree of our attention in routine actions, leaving us more in thrall to the repetitive sensory and cognitive solicitations of each present moment, while others are more amenable to a displacement of attention away from such demands, prising open time and space for creative thought and action. As a way of exploring the latter, the paper explores the potential of music—specifically, the drone music of Tony Conrad—to create environments of displaced attentiveness. Through the use of single tones sustained over long durations, often at high volumes, Conrad's performances aimed to create a space in which an audience's everyday habits of attention were suspended. Approaching Conrad's music through Bergson suggests that what emerges in the displacement of attention through drone music is a feeling for the powers of time that the teeming activity of each present moment requires we habitually ignore.

This study examines the interplay between demographic shifts in occupational patterns and corresponding changes in land use practices in the Kamrup district of Assam, India during 2010 and 2024. Through extensive field surveys and data analysis across villages in the district, the research identifies significant declines in traditional occupations such as farming and fishing, alongside notable growth in non-traditional sectors including service, business and labour. These shifts reflect broader socio-economic transformations driven by environmental factors like recurrent floods, economic pressures, educational advancements and governmental policies like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Consequently, there has been a reduction in agricultural land and an increase in fallow lands and vegetation cover, impacting soil health and biodiversity. The findings underscore the district's adaptation to economic and environmental challenges, reshaping local landscapes and livelihood strategies. Policy recommendations emphasise sustainable agricultural practices, resilience against natural disasters, and inclusive socio-economic development to support ongoing transitions and foster community resilience in rural Assam.

This paper provides an overview of the research techniques that can be used for explorations in legal geography, highlighting the multiple instruments available in the legal geographer's methodological toolkit. These diverse methods stem from a twofold shift away from the ‘ordinary’ research techniques of human geography. This shift has entailed first, the adaptation of traditional qualitative methods, such as ethnography or interviews, to research on subjects like judges, politicians, and other elite members; and second, the appropriation of methods prevailing in the field of law, such as doctrinal analysis. Against this background, the paper shows which research methods can be used to investigate the different subdomains of the law-space tangle (i.e., law-in-books, law-as-a-system-of-practices, and experiencing-the-law). Among these methods, special attention is paid to doctrinal analysis, which is usually distant from the typical training of geographers: its characteristics and the caution required in its use are emphasised, as are the tools that can make it more systematic and the specific contribution that a geographical approach can make to it. The paper also discusses the possibility of using quantitative techniques, which are currently approached with a certain scepticism, to carry out legal geographical analyses.

In this commentary I build on my earlier contribution to Area and engage with a series of responses as part of an emerging debate on the future of academic books. Although the deficiencies in UKRI's approach culminated in the suspension of an open access mandate for books to be submitted to the 2029 REF (Research Excellence Framework), the pressure to extend a science-based publishing model to the social sciences and humanities remains intense. I argue that the imposition of an open access policy for books will restrict academic freedom, threaten independent publishers, exacerbate existing inequalities in access to research funding, disrupt career development for early-career researchers, and facilitate the economic exploitation of intellectual labour for the development of AI systems.

In this article, I explore the topic of dairy transitions in Aotearoa New Zealand through an ecofeminist lens. This perspective challenges existing power dynamics and calls for greater consideration of ethical and political dimensions for food system transitions. I draw from reflections from doctoral fieldwork conducted in the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand in 2022, which included visits to 13 dairy farms, a milk processing facility, and a precision fermentation laboratory. Guided by ecofeminist ethics and critiques of feminised protein production, the paper advocates for more ethical engagement with the complex relations within dairy food systems and explores the cultural and the material realities of shifting away from animal-based dairy towards abstracted protein production. These reflections highlight the importance of critical place-based inquiry, researcher reflexivity, and situated knowledges in shaping understandings of just and sustainable agri-food transitions more broadly.

In the context of poverty and deprivation alleviation by national and local government, we use census data to explore 50 year trajectories of area deprivation to provide insight into how the spatial context of a community influences these trajectories. Using the temporal and spatial framework of spatial Markov models, we provide evidence for England and Wales on whether changing levels of deprivation over time are conditioned by areas having different types of neighbour. We find that, independent of the nature of their neighbours, there is high persistence of Most Deprived communities remaining deprived. Moreover, after conditioning by the type of neighbour, there is little likelihood of a Most Deprived neighbourhood improving when its neighbours are also the Most Deprived. However, Most Deprived neighbourhoods with Less Deprived neighbours have a greater likelihood of improvement. Communities that are the Least Deprived and have neighbours that are mostly Least Deprived, most likely remain Least Deprived. In terms of policy implications, targeting Most Deprived areas that have mostly Least Deprived neighbours can be considered ‘quick wins’. It will also be resource efficient to target spatial clusters of Most Deprived communities rather than a similar number of isolated Most Deprived communities. This raises ethical questions around investing in some Most Deprived areas, but not in other, potentially more deprived, communities.

In this perspective paper, we explore the role virtual field trips (VFTs) may play in creating a more resilient, sustainable and equitable field education for Geography students in higher education as we move away from the pandemic but into a financially precarious higher education environment. While in-person field trips are a fundamental part of Geography (and allied subjects) education, there is growing recognition of the equality, diversity, and inclusivity (EDI) barriers presented by fieldwork, the environmental and financial costs of trips, and the vulnerability of field education to disruptions. During the pandemic, there was a shift to online remote learning, which saw innovation and growth in the development of VFTs. Written from a staff perspective, this paper aims to review the opportunities and challenges VFTs present in education and consider future directions for this pedagogical practice. We argue VFTs should not replace in-person trips, but they can enhance field education and may help to address EDI and sustainability challenges. We identify that the resourcing and development of VFTs is a particular challenge and suggest that developing communities of practice and cross-institutional global collaboration could be one effective way to avoid duplication of time and effort as well as sharing valuable knowledge and expertise. Cross-institutional sharing of VFTs would also support the development, implementation and evaluation of VFTs as a teaching tool and would support continued innovation in this teaching practice.

The idea of right-sizing, or the process of adjusting the size of a city to maximise the efficient use of resources, has traditionally been used in strategic management and the resizing of shrinking cities to promote efficient urban development. Concurrently, in contemporary discourse, the sizing of smart cities has emerged as a critical topic, as size impacts the implementation of smart initiatives. Smaller cities offer the advantage of serving as cost- effective testing grounds for innovative solutions; however, they also need to be sizeable enough to attract private investments and build a robust smart city ecosystem. In this paper we demonstrate how in the context of smart city planning and governance in Southeast Asia, different actors are adopting new spatial strategies to address the sizing question. The idea of right-sizing requires rethinking in the context of the smart city because it captures how effectively cities are scaled to balance technological innovations with socio-economic and administrative demands. Through three case studies from Southeast Asia, we analyse three distinct smart city right-sizing strategies: dispersal, zoning, and merging. By examining these, the paper highlights the complexities and nuances in determining the right size of a smart city across discrete contexts.

For the past two decades, China's multi-ethnic Southeast Asian borderland has been experiencing transitions, characterised by the confluence of capital, people, items and technologies. This borderland has effectively been repositioned, with opportunities for investment and employment, regional integration and transnational linkages featuring multiple spatial interactions. Based on eight months of fieldwork in three ethnic villages in China's Southeast Asian borderland, this article examines how geo-economic repositioning featuring multiple spatial interactions affects agrarian livelihoods. This study argues that local households have used spatial interactions in differentiated ways to transform the use of land and to improve livelihoods, while uneven development among ethnic minorities remains a concern. Land use has been changed to include the dominant commercialisation and marketisation of high-value-added crops. Livelihoods have been diversified, and many local villagers have become entrepreneurs, landowners and agricultural investors. Different ethnic groups have adopted different strategies in response to market-oriented products and processes. The Han Chinese from both inside and outside the area now dominate the commercialised processes of cash crop expansion and diversification. This article contributes to the existing literature on changing agrarian livelihoods in multi-ethnic borderlands in the context of opening-up and economic globalisation, especially in East and Southeast Asia.

This paper explores the collaborative methodology of conducting working participant observation in a team setting to study the experiences of hotel housekeepers in Sweden. It aims to refine and extend the method of working participant observation by highlighting the benefits of a team approach to intensive ethnographic fieldwork. Drawing on critiques of ‘traditional’ geographical methods that rely heavily on interviews, the researchers immersed themselves in the physical labour of housekeeping alongside housekeepers, engaging their own bodies as research instruments. The research team navigated the complexities of embodied labour, reflecting on how their own identities (gender, age, nationality) influenced interactions and observations. The study emphasises the importance of collective reflection and dialogue between researchers, who debriefed each other daily, transforming individual experiences into shared analytical insights. Taking this approach challenges methodological conservatism by integrating feminist and intersectional perspectives and demonstrates how working participant observation can provide deeper understandings of workplace hierarchies, bodily labour, and power dynamics. By focusing on the bodily presence of both researchers and workers, the study highlights the unique insights gained through participatory, team-based ethnographic research in service work.