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This article traces the past, present and future of health geography through the career journeys of three notable academics, Sarah Curtis (SC), Julia Jones (JJ) and Graham Moon (GM). All three of these scholars have had entanglements with the Geographies of Health and Wellbeing Research Group (GHWRG) of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) (RGS-IBG) throughout their careers, enabling them to shape health geography into the contemporary sub-discipline that we know today. GHWRG has, for the last 50 years, offered a lively and supportive network for all those interested in the geographies of health and health care, medical geography and all other areas of scholarship related to health and wellbeing that engage with geographical concerns.

This article explores the ways in which physical scientists, especially in the geosciences, are responding to calls to decolonise university curricula in current conjunctural conditions. It asserts that it is crucial not to strip decolonisation of its radical political potential and reduce it to an instrumental Equity, Diversion and Inclusion (EDI) initiative. Geoscientists in higher education who wish to decolonise their curricula must also pay attention to epistemological pluralism, politics, and colonial violence and free themselves from Eurocentric legacies of positivism, universality and objectivity. They must also make the turn to social theory, in ways that address the politics of geologic matter and the modes of violence that geoscientific practice and knowledge reproduce. Engaging with curricular decolonisation has potential not only to arrest the decline being experienced by the geosciences, but to make the forced neoliberal mergers between geography and geology less painful and more intellectually productive.

Through an analysis of the available literature on women street vendors in the Global South, and then specifically in India, this paper identifies several knowledge gaps and future directions for research. The paper makes three broad claims: (1) street vending spaces are fundamentally gendered spaces; (2) the intersectional identities and caste-based locations of women street vendors shape their spatial experiences, material realities and access to power; and (3) gender and caste are co-constituted categories that produce a spatiality unique to the Indian subcontinent. While the geographical approach towards street vending recognises the importance of space and considers vendors as spatial practitioners, vendors are often assumed to belong to a homogenous (male) category with differentials such as gender, race, age, ethnicity and caste invisibilised. This research gap is of even more critical importance in India where caste intersects with gender to produce space. Examining the literature on gender and street vending reveals three broad analytical themes—socio-spatial disparities, politics of space, and strategies of control. What seems to be missing is a critical, qualitative focus on the experiences of women street vendors, the gendering of vending spaces, the recognition of caste as a dynamic factor, and a spatial analysis grounded in the Southern urban context. Ultimately, this paper makes the case for a situated and postcolonial feminist geography approach to street vending in India, and calls for an intersectional research agenda that is attentive to the co-constitution of caste and gender in the production of urban space.

As rural places and people are increasingly intertwined between cities, markets and mobility, broader perspectives are needed to examine the multiple changes occurring between rural and urban spaces, and between families and generations. This article discusses how a generational perspective can study ‘more-than-rural’ change in a contemporaneous manner. Drawing on field examples from a village on Flores Island, Indonesia, I show how intergenerational views, gathered through household surveys and in-depth interviews, gave further depth to younger generations' changing relationships to land. Why, despite greater numbers of young people leaving the village for greater work and study opportunities elsewhere, were many parents sure their children would return one day? Using intergenerational and life-course views to answer this question revealed how many villagers encountered livelihood limitations elsewhere. Furthermore, I show how generational data give fuller explanations to household dynamics, such as how age and gender play a role in the pursuit of migration between family members, and how rural land and households are managed over time and space. I conclude by discussing the strengths and challenges of building a generational perspective to study ‘more-than-rural’ livelihood change.

Since the 1970s, a defining feature of advanced economies has been industrial plant closures, stemming from the broader process of economic restructuring. Plant closures have been extensively covered by the media due to their adverse effects on localities. However, no media analysis of closures has been conducted in the plant closure literature. In addition to providing a wealth of information, such an analysis can provide insight into media narratives of closures. Media profoundly affects economies by disseminating narratives that influence society, institutions, and politics. To bridge the plant closure and media literature, this paper conducts a media analysis of closures in Ontario, Canada, from 2000 to 2019. Like other advanced economies, the province has experienced many plant closures over the past several decades. The paper found that the overarching narrative presented by the media was that ‘no one is responsible’ for plant closures and therefore ‘no one can or should act’. Also, it was found that differences in media narratives of closures were primarily due to the political slant of news outlets, not city size or scale of news outlets or whether news outlets were independently owned or part of a media conglomerate. Lastly, the paper found that the dissemination of media coverage on plant closures throughout the province was primarily based on the number of job losses, resulting in media coverage of smaller closures remaining localised, while media coverage of larger closures spreading throughout the province.

African doctoral students studying abroad and returning to their home countries for fieldwork face multiple and complex challenges. This paper reflexively addresses the question of positionality from the experiences of conducting research on urban governance and the spatial politics of street traders in Harare, Zimbabwe. The paper discusses dilemmas associated with navigating insider and outsider identities, showcasing how these categories continually shift while conducting research on street traders within a distinct socio-cultural and political context. Moreover, the author's background as a former street trader, now pursuing a PhD at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, adds a layer of complexity to the situation, offering valuable insights into how these ‘multiple’ positionalities can either facilitate or hinder data collection. The paper underscores the nuanced experiences of the researcher in the field, shedding light on the potential challenges, pitfalls and opportunities inherent in grappling with one's positionality. By foregrounding these complexities, the paper contributes to our understanding of the positionalities of researchers in the social sciences and adds to the growing body of literature on methodologies for conducting urban studies, particularly with vulnerable populations.

Richard Skelton's 2009 recording, Landings, is recognised as being intimately connected with landscape and the experience of place. This paper explores the use of therapeutic practice within the creation of the recording of Landings. Building on the work of cultural geographers who have emphasised the cultural and symbolic significance of landscape, as well as incorporating the work of geographers who have studied sound and music, the paper develops a non-representational analysis, emphasising the interplay of human experiences and therapeutic practice. The paper explores how Skelton's music transcends a simple representation of the moorland landscape. It shows how the music, created through Skelton's therapeutic practice, channels the essence of the landscape. Skelton acknowledges the healing nature of this creative process. It offers catharsis and solace while, at the same time, connecting to living systems and exhibiting an ecological principle. By exploring the music created by Skelton's therapeutic practice and its profound alignment with nature, Landings offers valuable insights for geographers and beyond.

This paper addresses how walking-with an infant makes mothering worlds legible. Employing the active verb ‘worlding’, it illustrates how walking-with contributes to the emergent, embodied and relational nature of mothering as a story in motion and how we make sense of becoming a mother. The walking in this study takes place in and through (sub)urban landscapes, and how we negotiate our maternal bodies through these spaces, at a very particular moment in time (COVID-19 lockdowns), is imbricated in our worldings. Walking-with is used to not only explain the interembodiment of mother and child but also the wider milieu of ‘withs’ to demonstrate the corporeal and relational experience of walking. Walking-with a baby, particularly with a postpartum body, is hard work, messy and unpredictable, yet that is not to say the analysis leads to a negative perspective. When walking-with a baby is understood as ‘worlding-with’ we can develop a more affirmative understanding of mothering. By using creative analytical practice a walking-with story was developed drawing on data collected from walking mothers and autoethnography of my own walking-with experiences. The story makes it possible to develop a legibility that captures the contradictory experiences of mothering in motion. Creative analytical practice highlights that storying, walking and mothering is never a complete.

In this introduction to the collection of papers ‘Qualitative Longitudinal Methodologies for Crisis Times’, we argue that two main characteristics or ‘qualities’ of qualitative longitudinal methodologies (QLMs) can be identified for researching crisis. The first is that QLMs can function to repudiate crisis exceptionalism. The papers denounce the discrete and time-limited, instead impressing the ongoingness of crisis from the past, the present, and into the future. The second overarching point made in the introduction is that QLMs protect against ‘helicopter’ research, a heightened risk when studying crisis times. Together the papers offer a close and complex introspection on the use and outcome of QLMs in spaces and times of crisis from the perspective of researchers undertaking the research, and in multiple instances, research participants enrolled in them.

When young people engage with climate change education, they are often left feeling disempowered and daunted. But past research has shown that there are ways to design and deliver climate change education that can be empowering and enabling. The delivery of climate change education was further challenged in 2020 by the shift to online learning driven by the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. However, the challenges of the pandemic context also offered an opportunity to engage new audiences and establish new collaborations in climate change education. In this paper, we explore how the shift to online research, collaboration and education can also be harnessed to develop interdisciplinary coastal adaptation training for young people interested in better understanding the complexities of our coastal environments. The resulting ‘More than Maps’ framework draws on qualitative and quantitative data collected over a two-year programme focused on the design and delivery of an international climate change research capacity building workshop series, across the United Kingdom, Ghana, Jamaica and Australia. Carried out by an interdisciplinary team of early career researchers and established academics, 15 workshops were developed on coastal adaptation research methods, targeting a range of ‘young’ audiences who are and will continue to be impacted by climate change. Building on reflections from the workshops' design and delivery, we developed a scalable framework to aid researchers in sharing open-access, replicable methods for studying climate change mitigation and adaptation. This work demonstrates that our workshop participants had increased confidence, sought to apply learned methods to other contexts, and wanted to share this knowledge with others. We conclude that the COVID-19 online workspace facilitated rather than hindered the international collaboration and delivery of these coastal adaptation research methods workshops, and we provide best practice tips to researchers delivering climate change education.