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The examination of gender in fieldwork highlights a need to provide attention to possible problematic instances that may arise between women interviewers and men participants. Qualitative research identifies that women interviewing men find themselves continually navigating power imbalances while attempting to negotiate safe environments for themselves. Gender in fieldwork predominately focuses on differences between interviewer and interviewees, with little understanding of similarities that contribute to shaping the research environment and research outcomes. This article draws on PhD research and my experience as a cisgender woman PhD student conducting interviews with cisgender men to demonstrate the multiple meaningful ways interviews are constructed and negotiated, including how both interviewer and interviewees draw on sameness in the field. I argue that gendered behaviours are not always obvious and problematic, but rather can be subtle, fluid and work to support shared understandings of the research topic.

The production of radio, a medium with the power to shape listeners' geographical imaginations, has received little attention in geography, particularly in comparison to visual media such as photography, television and film. This paper redresses this imbalance by examining the production of From Our Own Correspondent (FOOC), one of BBC Radio 4's longest-running programmes which has broadcast dispatches from journalists around the world since 1955. It explores the representational power of FOOC to script the world for listeners by constructing geographical imaginaries of distant people and places; interrogates who ‘Our’ correspondents are and the structures which underpin whose voices are heard; and reveals the concealed practices, spatialities and temporalities which shape the programme's production and geopolitical scripts it broadcasts. In doing so, the paper makes a significant and timely contribution to popular geopolitics, a subfield of political geography which has traditionally focused on deconstructing geopolitical discourses and imaginaries in ‘texts’, at the expense of investigating where, how and why media are ‘made’. It draws on original interviews conducted with FOOC's presenter, two producers and four correspondents, and reflects on what the programme's production reveals about how FOOC understands, conceptualises and portrays the world. By exploring FOOC, the paper offers important insights into the hidden geographies of production which govern BBC radio journalism as a sonic medium of popular geopolitics.

This paper examines The diary from the border: Ventimiglia, an auto-ethnographic comic based on intensive fieldwork in the Italian border city of Ventimiglia from September to December 2018. The primary objective of my empirical research was to explore the socio-spatial effects of France's reintroduction of border controls in the area since 2015, mainly targeting irregular mobilities within the European Union (EU). This study presents the auto-ethnographic comic by delving into two crucial aspects. Firstly, it illuminates the rationale behind utilising an auto-ethnographic comic as a research output, shedding light on the creative process involved in its conception. Secondly, it explores its composite narrative plot, encompassing three key elements: ‘me’ (the researcher's personal experiences extending beyond the fieldwork), ‘me in Ventimiglia’ (the researcher's encounters during the fieldwork), and ‘Ventimiglia itself’ (the French-Italian border regime). By fostering a trans-disciplinary dialogue encompassing migration issues, comics and life course theory, this paper enriches the geographical debate in three significant ways. It recognises the profound impact of the researcher's life events in shaping both research experiences and outcomes within and beyond the fieldwork. Additionally, it underscores the importance of auto-ethnographic comics in challenging dominant narratives and visually portraying the multifaceted experiences of migration. Lastly, it contributes to the ongoing discussion on visual methods within geography and advocates for using comics as a compelling tool to disseminate research findings, fostering empathy and a comprehensive understanding of migration experiences.

My research is situated within the literature looking at the processes of deinstitutionalisation of the mental health system through the lived geographies placed in between the walls of the asylum. It addresses mental health geographers' call for a situated knowledge about mental health and, by using the Italian psychiatric experience of the 1960s and 1970s as an example, stresses the importance of looking at care in both spatial and relational terms. Through a geographical understanding of the Italian psychiatric reform, that goes from Franco Basaglia's renowned work to the underrepresented experience of Turin, in northwest Italy, I will examine how space is intertwined with processes of mental health care. Additionally, I assess the role played by the interaction between spatial and relational elements in potentially enabling patients' self-determination, empowerment and inclusion. The case of Turin—the story of which will be told through the analysis of archival material from a grassroots association called Associazione per la Lotta contro le Malattie Mentali—will serve to expand the common narrative around the Italian lesson and to give resonance to the instrumental role played at the time by both patients and civil society. By looking at the key events that led to the gradual dismantlement of the traditional psychiatric institutions in the metropolitan area of Turin, this paper contributes to the spatial turn in mental health studies, calling upon researchers to look at past achievements as something we still need to learn from and safeguard.

The Geographies of Health and Wellbeing Research Group of the Royal Geographical Association-Institute of British Geographers is perhaps the major professional organisation for health and medical geographers working in the UK. This paper reviews the organisational history and operation of the group, and its forerunners, and its role in shaping the development of the geographies of health and wellbeing, since its inaugural symposium in 1972, marking its 50th Anniversary.

Urban community gardens, once seen as a counter to neoliberal subjectivity, are now perceived as inadvertently reinforcing neoliberal dominance, challenging the progressive goals of urban gardening. This study investigates how the state shapes urban community gardens in alignment with neoliberal principles, potentially diluting their intended advantages. By analysing policies and interviewing state actors supporting urban gardening initiatives and activists, I argue that the state actively cultivates neoliberal subjectivities in these contexts. Unfortunately, state policies and projects often fail to address the root causes of food and nutrition insecurity in urban areas. This neoliberalisation of urban community gardening diminishes their potential to act as tools for advancing food justice in historically disadvantaged communities in Cape Town. Nevertheless, there is hope in the agency of gardeners who are not passive participants in this process. I conclude that relying on the state to implement projects for a more equitable food system may not be a dependable strategy. Instead, urban gardeners must carefully select their allies to effectively pursue their goals.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the persistent problem of gender, class and racial inequality that has been neglected or poorly addressed globally. The effect of the lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions on the home cannot be undermined. Additionally, investigations on the relationship between Roma migrant women, household practices and the COVID-19 pandemic still warrant more exploration in the social scientific literature. This research investigates these topics through the lens of Romanian Roma migrant women in Spain during the pandemic. Using geographies of home and gender perspectives based on focus group interviews with Roma women in eastern Spain, we claim that these women encountered multiple problems during the pandemic, built through replication of practices, objects and rhetoric of home. The findings suggest that home has not lost its utility, as the experiences of Roma migrant women during the COVID-19 crisis give fresh aspects for reconsidering the living conditions for women and their families under restricted pandemic circumstances. We conclude that Roma women reproduce and co-produce the home as a living space in times of pandemic crisis.

Our concern in this paper is the environmental ‘footprinting’ of food and its role as a source of technopolitical power in global food governance. Our case is the highly industrialised farmed salmon sector which currently generates metrics and carefully curated visualisations to promote this fish as a more sustainable and ‘climate friendly’ protein relative to animal protein produced on land. We show how these metrics and visualisations depend on an industrial production and measurement infrastructure. Significantly, this infrastructure and the metrics that it generates is being promoted as a ‘climate smart’ solution to small-scale and extensive aquaculture in the Global South. Salmon aquaculture industry proposals for the transfer of technology from salmon farming to global aquaculture are explicitly articulated in global food governance and other institutional spaces. While there may be frictions in the transfer of salmon aquaculture's infrastructure of measurement to aquaculture in the Global South, our analysis suggests that environmental footprinting of food—and its associated measurement infrastructure—may be an emerging source of technopolitical power in increasingly corporatised global food governance systems.

This commentary reflects on research jointly conducted by the Development Geographies Research Group (DevGRG) and the Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group (GFGRG) of the RGS-IBG, which aimed to understand the challenges faced by academics with care responsibilities. We set out the effects of research funding policies and practices on researchers' ability to combine careers as academic geographers with care responsibilities, highlighting the specific effects in a field-based subject such as Geography. We gathered data about a range of research funders' policies and how these are implemented (in various ways) in UK Geography departments. We also surveyed all UK university Geography departments to understand experiences of parental and adoption leave, including support from employers, impacts on career progression, and recommendations for support. Our data show that there is a need for a more consistent and comprehensive approach to recognising the costs of academics' caring responsibilities, to support their career progression and to mitigate the impacts disproportionately experienced by women. Funders and higher education institutes (HEIs) need to work collaboratively to develop policies and practices to address the individualised way in which (predominantly female) academics currently experience navigating the provision of funding for parental leave, and for covering costs of care during fieldwork. Our research highlights the need for consistent and progressive policies in relation to care and parental leave across all funding bodies – that can subsequently be embedded into institutional frameworks – in order to provide equity and consistency for staff across the UK higher education (HE) sector. We also emphasise the need for these policies to be more visible and transparent, making the task of navigating them more manageable for staff at an often uncertain time in their working lives.