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This commentary reflects on an attempt to use ChatGPT to generate an image for a geography textbook. We explore why the image that was produced provoked surprise and intrigue and think through how our reactions revealed ingrained assumptions about educational spaces. Our discussion highlights the importance of intentionality in prompt design and offers a reminder of how seemingly neutral prompts can reproduce dominant narratives. We conclude by proposing that as generative AI becomes more prevalent in geography education, this take-up needs to critically engage with the ethical and societal implications of AI use so we can actively challenge ourselves as well as the technology.

The political ecology of dams offers an important perspective for analysing the interplay between ecosystem change and social power dynamics in the context of modern development visions. Currently, there is a resurgence of ‘dam fever’ in Kenya under President Ruto's green growth vision, which envisages the construction of 1,000 small and large dams across the country. This article shows that, while new dams are being planned, the first wave of dam development in Kenya in the last century is not a closed historical event, but continues to generate conflicts and claim-making around reservoirs, and continues as an active dynamic in the here and now. To date, the communities affected by the cascade of five large dams on Tana River, which is currently being proposed for expansion, have not been adequately compensated for the losses they suffered between the 1960s and 1980s. This lack of compensation has reinforced the displaced communities’ rights to the submerged lands and buffer zones around the dams, even though these rights remain unrecognised within contemporary Kenyan legal frameworks. This case illustrates how the failure to provide compensation during displacement not only leads to significant loss of land, livelihoods and household assets, but also to ongoing claim-making over land and water and the contestation of the hydrosocial territory of dam reservoirs. By exploring the temporalities of infrastructure and hydrosocial spaces, this paper shows how claim-making is rooted in these temporalities, and how these temporalities result in the ongoing burden of securing one's very existence around infrastructure.

This paper uses an ethnographic study of a bank in rural China to explore the localisation of financial calculative practices. Drawing on financial geography literatures, the analysis examines different aspects of institutional spatiality, with special attention to the everyday logic of place-based financial practices and to the broader territorial dynamics of state regulations. Ultimately, the paper argues that taking into account the spatiality of China's rural financial institutions—specifically in relation to the idea of ‘county place’—is fundamental to understanding the localisation of financial calculative practices in Chinese agrarian finance.

This paper examines how creative counter-maps can be a valuable participatory historical geography tool in their capacity to render visible multiple pasts, presents, and futures, and offer new possibilities for representation and belonging through visual and creative aesthetics. Emerging from the Ancient History, Contemporary Belonging project, the paper explores the co-creation of a participatory counter-map, Unprovenanced Map, displayed in Manchester Museum (2023–2025), which represents the entangled mobilities of ancient objects and contemporary migrants. Co-designed by a creative map-making artist in dialogue with Ancient History, Contemporary Belonging project researchers and youth researchers from Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Palestinian, and Kurdish backgrounds, the map integrates young people's personal ‘journey maps’ with archival research on ancient objects from their region of origin, drawn from collections in Manchester Museum. Reflecting the complexities and ambiguities of migration, the map represents places, borders, and movements as fractured, partial, and mutable, and embedded with the messiness of embodied and material migratory realities. In doing so, it confronts the (neo)colonial forces that shape maps and mobilities, engaging museum audiences with contextualised complexities of global movement through a migratory aesthetic. Simultaneously, this creative representation serves the practical-political purpose of safeguarding youth researchers from the risks of challenging fixed imaginaries of spatial–temporal borders within a heritage institution – and city – grappling with their own colonial legacies, while also imagining new futures and possibilities of representation.

Economic development is often defined as a cycle of sustained growth adding to ever-increasing living standards of the general population. However, in human and economic geography such an orthodox definition of development is increasingly considered problematic. Not only have cycles of lower growth, rising debt, inequality and environmental degradation challenged the foundations of post-war prosperity. Economic development in advanced nations must also be associated with the development of underdevelopment in peripheral countries. In this essay, I therefore contend that what is otherwise defined as ‘development’ has increasingly taken the form of ‘undevelopment’, i.e., a regressive cycle of falling productivity, financialisation, rising inequality, global imbalance and irreversible climate change. Although it is difficult to change the global course of undevelopment, I argue that de-development can develop into its logical successor. Indeed, by progressively transcending the capitalist world-system, I conclude that a more durable global economic system can emerge where global wealth redistribution and economic activity within the planet's finite boundaries are central.

This paper contributes an ‘ownership perspective’ to the spectrum of labour environmentalist enquiries, and positions environmental labour geographies within a wider political economy of transformation. The paper explores the concept of energy democracy as a trade union strategy that pursues the social and economic ownership and democratic governance of energy systems and resources. Empirically, the paper presents the case study of Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED), as an ‘actually existing’ initiative of labour environmentalism, contextualising its emergence and enduring relevance in terms of its approach to ownership vis-à-vis justice-oriented demands, and exploring its geographies through a strategy of spatially specific mobilising and regionally focused movement building. The paper investigates how the TUED network has developed a transnational, labour-inclusive framework of energy democracy as labour environmentalism, by promoting democratic control and the social, public and collective ownership of energy systems and resources as tangible solutions to address the climate emergency. The paper also establishes how the TUED network creates radical geographies of labour environmentalism, through the varied mobilisation of its participating unions in their specific local and regional contexts around actually existing opportunities for policy and political intervention. The paper concludes that the question of ownership is a fundamental one for environmental labour movements and their geographies, and one that shifts the emphasis of labour environmentalist thinking towards the democratisation of labour environmental ownership relations.

This paper is based on our experience of running a one-day participatory workshop at the Hull History Centre in the summer of 2023 titled ‘Watery Archives: Exploring Hull's flood histories’. The event was co-designed by academics and archivists in direct response to feedback from our community participants as part of the Risky Cities project at the University of Hull. During the day, we invited participants to explore original historical material about Hull's flood histories from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and then to produce creative and sometimes activist outputs that encouraged participants to critically engage with climate change today. The paper reflects on the value of community and participatory based approaches to open up access to archives and to unleash new learnings and discoveries. It considers some of the potential barriers to engagement in archives and shows how we addressed some of those challenges in our workshop design using methods of participatory learning and research. The paper shows how the 'Watery Archives' workshop built on the power of partnership between academic and heritage organisations to drive community-led, place-based research.

This paper explores the potential of participatory methods and practices to address the methodological difficulties surrounding the historical geographies of dance, and moving bodies, within archival research. Dance has long challenged traditional notions of the ‘archive’. While non-representational cultural geographers have privileged dance's ability to generate affect and embodied expression, historical geographers have predominantly struggled to engage with moving bodies through traditionally ‘disembodied’ archives. Ephemeral and embodied, dance escapes conventional historical documentation; this methodological challenge demands a more creative, participatory, and more-than-representational approach to historical geography and its privileging of the ‘archive’. Focusing on tap dance and its circum-Atlantic performance, this paper will explore how bodily encounters with and within the archive can lead to new research questions, through contemporary embodied participation in creative practices. By combining participatory approaches with more-than-representational historical geographies, it is possible to reconcile the history and politics of dancing bodies with corporeal and affective dimensions of the past. This dual approach demands working with creative communities as a researcher, in the past and the present, to draw out previously marginalised voices. This paper discusses three specific methods: oral histories and records of lived experiences; approaching the ‘body’ as an archive; and fostering public historical geographies, including walking tours, memorials, and festival participation. The paper finally considers how these participatory approaches work to build memory, community, and place-making through shared heritage.

What might methodological approaches drawing on Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) offer to sub-disciplines in geography which have traditionally been dominated by qualitative and often micro-scale research, such as historical or political geography? How might these approaches—often understood as opposing—be brought together to advance transnational research in particular? This article responds to these questions through a reflection on a recent project on the geopolitics of diplomatic training in the mid-twentieth century. Building on the established use of biography to focus transnational analyses within a complex abundance of sources, the project complemented such close-reading with computational methods of distant-reading, able to analyse large datasets to produce prosopographies and network visualisations that help identify diffuse and larger scale political and geographical relationships. The article concludes with a consideration of how such methods might be effectively integrated in the historical or political geographer's toolkit.

As a rapidly growing interdisciplinary literature has argued, rankings have become a key means of valuation in contemporary society. However, the majority of the work focuses on rankings in only a few areas, and even if spatial aspects play a role in the interdisciplinary literature, the number of explicitly geographical works on rankings is surprisingly low. Against this backdrop, in this paper I aim firstly to flesh out a pragmatism-inspired geographical perspective on rankings. Secondly, using the example of wine rankings, I will ask the question as to how the growing importance of rankings has changed valuation schemes. The wine industry is particularly well suited to this, as nominal classifications in the form of designations of origin have historically played a central role here. A pragmatist, geographical perspective on ordinal ordering processes illustrates that rankings evoke both economic and geographical realities; they do this not only through the ranking processes as such, but also through observation of and engagement with rankings by different actors. In the case of wine, local/regional specificity is an inherent part of the world of rankings—be it through the fact that ranking processes build on (embodied) geographically contextualised knowledge of wine judges, through the possibilities of using (or not using) (different) rankings for different markets by wine producers, or through the balance between the marketing of wine through rankings and the suitability of those very wines for the specific markets in which they are to be sold. This is perhaps the biggest difference compared with other fields in which the importance of rankings has increased considerably—in particular, higher education. It helps to explain why the historically significant valuation scheme of geographical origin has not lost any of its significance, despite the increase in the importance of rankings in the world of wine.