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The present research posits public art as a ubiquitously employed but equally underexplored subject of academic interest, addressing the sharply emerging notion of ‘smart urbanism’ in contemporary India. Drawing on a prolonged ethnographic engagement with the time-worn Galis in Varanasi city and seven in-depth interviews conducted with key informants in the city, this study explores the contemporary panacea of (re)producing urban space in accordance with the norms of smart urbanism, undertaken by one of the largest post-independence mega-scale urban infrastructural development programmes in India, namely the National Smart Cities Mission. This endeavour thus seeks to exemplify the potential of public art to endorse what is (and should be) apparent and conceivable in a heritage city with immense cultural importance, and dwells on the question of whether such interventions in situ can (re)produce social, cultural and economic capital in a smart city through a symbolic representation of urban space. Building principally on a qualitative mode of inquiry called ‘geographical ethnography’, the present study has elucidated the emerging relationships among people, space and institutional decision-making, and how such mechanisms are adding to the identity of Varanasi city along two opposite temporal spectrums of urban existence: heritage and smartness.

Top-down, extractive research approaches are increasingly challenged in social studies, particularly by communities in the Global South. However, methodological stagnation persists as systemic academic pressures and a wider lack of social change hinder researchers from engaging in long-term transformative studies. We discuss multi-step context-building focus group discussions (FGDs) within a ‘methodology as practice’ approach (Hui, 2023), emphasising collaboration, openness and integration of diverse approaches. Our discussion explores collaboration among researchers and participants and links elements of feminist, decolonial, and slow scholarship approaches. This paper draws on experiences applying a cross-comparative approach (INITI8), which combines community-based participant observation (CBPO) with FGDs in water security research in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Kenya. We critically discuss the tensions and resulting re-work related to (1) the power of the elite both in our North–South collaboration and in collaboration with participant group leaders in the study sites; (2) socio-spatial inclusion implications of our research design decisions in defining peri-urban areas and engaging with illiterate women in rural areas; and (3) multi-level reflexivity through the positionality of researchers, collaborative reflexivity in analysis and process, reflexivity of participants, and reflexivity on the overall study recognising its positioning within entrenched colonial epistemologies.

This article discusses the tension between economic and intellectual demands that play into the authoring of a ‘creative thesis’. At least since the ‘cultural turn’, human geographers have voiced support for creativity in research. Although ‘creative theses’ are often discussed in relation to artistry and innovation, the economic conditions in which such research is produced are less often in focus. At present, time and funding pressures are making the ‘creative thesis’ risky for supervisors and PhD researcher. This can lead to greater restrictions, even in cases where abandoning creativity is not an option if the thesis is to fulfil its intellectual and ethical aims. Rather than simply offering a critique, I am drawing attention to possibilities of supporting ‘creative theses’ within a challenging institutional environment.

What is unique about bringing rivers and borders into conversation with one another, and what are the implications for geographical research? This article and Special Section charts new directions in the study of rivers as borders. By emphasising a river-centric approach, we collectively challenge traditional terra-centric views prevalent in border research and show that rivers as borders are much more than just convenient tools for territorial demarcation and securing state sovereignty. The contributors engage rivers in conversation with border studies and conceptually navigate the liminal spaces in-between the inherent tensions of fixity and flow by drawing on perspectives from cultural, political and environmental geography. River-borders meander between land and water; violence and opportunity; artefact and landscape; dynamism and control. By bringing these multifaceted river-borders and bordering practices into dialogue, we advance geographical understandings of what happens at the meeting point when rivers become borders. We argue that geographical research on water-state-society relations must analyse the relations between rivers' material agency and the differently entangled lifeworlds of border dwellers and crossers, considering their historical, material, cultural and social ties to the river.

Industrial meat production fuels multiple socio-environmental crises and needs to be urgently addressed. Art practice research offers an original way of re-imagining the existing food system. Such research develops an open-ended, transformative approach for learning about and experimenting with possible food futures, creating a critical mass for change. Yet, creative geographers have also been calling for developing art practice research that imagines and engenders alternatives to the status quo. This paper contributes to the question of what creative practices can ‘do’ by discussing art practice-led research that challenges and re-thinks the industrial meat production geographies status quo. Here we consider the transformative potential of SOW – an AR public art intervention into the industrial meat complex. SOW is an animated digital sculpture appearing in AR in six locations linked to industrial pork production across England, filling them with distinct pig noises. We look closely at human encounters with SOW during two walking workshops conducted in June 2024 called ‘SOW in the City’: one as part of the London Festival of Architecture and the other as a ‘fieldtrip’ for the Royal Geographical Society Animal Geography Working Group's Multispecies Methods Workshop. Encountering SOW created spaces for reflecting on the current industrialised food system and contemplating alternatives to it: exploring new ways of seeing and thinking about the present and future human/non-human relations within it. SOW performed an act of revealing industrial meat production geographies in a playful yet informative fashion. Encountering her also planted seeds for connecting with both the non-human agents within the food system and beyond and the spaces that they inhabit. Finally, SOW also generated reflections on the futures within and beyond food production.

This paper critically examines the history of the Political Geography Research Group (PolGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) within the shifting landscape of political geography as a sub-discipline within British academic geography. While the sub-discipline has evolved almost beyond recognition in the past 50 years, from the rehabilitation of political geography and geopolitics in the 1960s through the political turn to the present, what has been the role of the flagship national study group in this journey? Reflecting on this question provides an opportunity to consider how the RGS-IBG research group has previously and can continue to contribute to and advance the (re)birth of British political geography while reflecting more broadly on the growing challenges to research groups—which rely upon volunteers undertaking ‘service roles’ for the benefit of the discipline—in the face of increasing workload pressures in the sector.

Island communities are particularly vulnerable to climate change and energy insecurity; renewable energy can counter both threats. This study takes a whole island approach to scoping wind and solar energy potential. The Isle of Man (IOM) was selected because of the limited development of renewables to date, plus high reliance on energy imports. Potential sites for renewables development were evaluated using social, environmental, technical, economic and political factors in a combined Geographic Information System (GIS)-multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). We find that 9% of the island is highly suitable for onshore wind development, and 2% for solar photovoltaic. These areas could potentially yield 107 MW from onshore wind and 150 MW from solar. Roof top and floating solar could add a further 30 MW, and offshore wind 497 MW. The total wind and solar renewables potential of onshore and offshore sites of 784 MW is much greater than the historical (85 MW) and projected (131 MW) demand by 2050. Hence, our first stage estimates suggest that combinations of renewables could significantly improve energy security and even support energy exports from the IOM. The demonstrated GIS-MCDA modelling offers a tool for scoping the resource potential of other energy-import dependent islands.

This paper is an autoethnographic account of situated ethics and risk during fieldwork. Specifically, it discusses experiences of gendered street harassment while conducting walking interviews with women in Manchester, UK. These are shared as a series of vignettes, each illustrating a different incident. It utilises Vera-Gray's (2016) conception of ‘men's stranger intrusions’ to understand what happened because each encounter irrevocably changed the trajectory of the research conversations it disrupted. Navigating through these incidents, this work reconsiders the ethics of empirical research in a UK city and what constitutes an acceptable risk. It discusses the impact of everyday sexism and street harassment on both the researcher and their work. Making these stories visible matters, because it centres the restrictions women may feel and strategies they develop to enable their continued participation in public life despite gendered threats. Thinking through possible implications for future research, it concludes with some practical recommendations to mitigate potential harms. Mitigations do not negate the need for wider structural changes to eliminate the threat of gender-based violence, nor do they signal resignation that we must minimise ourselves, or that perpetrators must not take responsibility for violence against women. These suggestions for practical actions researchers can take are based on lived experience and shared in a spirit of care, resistance, solidarity, and rage.

This paper reflects on adapting the Climathon method as a novel deliberative approach for place-based climate governance, with a focus on agri-food climate solutions. We consider the interrelated governance concepts of deliberative democracy and just transitions, with attention to liberal and agonistic perspectives. The paper draws on two Climathons organised in rural English communities in early 2022: one in Cumbria and one in Cornwall. It uses semi-structured interviews, evaluative data and researcher reflections to analyse alignment (or not) with components of deliberative discussion, principles of deliberative democracy, and factors that increase perceptions of procedural justice. We found it was possible to create conditions for conscientious and informed deliberation. However, some aspects of the Climathon methodology made deliberation challenging, particularly the ‘balanced’ component, as time pressure led to a focus on achieving consensus rather than exploring all arguments. Climathons can be a valuable deliberative tool, as part of a range of options including citizens' assemblies. We recommend co-designing events with local stakeholders, aligning with existing local initiatives, and mapping a clear pathway for solutions to feed into policy and practice.

While rarely employed 20 years ago, solicited diaries have gained popularity, albeit remaining somewhat on the periphery of human geography methods. Creativity has also expanded in both diary formats and research relationships. My diary method combined long-term ethnographic fieldwork with co-participation, producing rich detail and complex negotiations of intimacy, reciprocity, and power. This article examines these dynamics through my research relationships, focusing on how co-participation revealed the nitty-gritty elements of positionality, including personality and navigating intersectional identities. I call their lasting influence on fieldwork, data, and interpretation an ‘ethnographic fingerprint’. This discussion of positionality and reflexivity in diary methods is rare, as is my self-reflexive context of cross-racial fieldwork between a black researcher and white participants.