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This paper reflects on the research process and ethics of doing research with low-income households in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with five mothers experiencing food insecurity, I argue that it is imperative that researchers employ ‘care-full’, slow, flexible methodologies situated within everyday lives to ensure that research with vulnerable and precarious groups of people is not exploitative, especially during times of crisis. The emergency public health measures introduced to contain COVID-19 in March 2020 acted like a brake on my research activities, slowing things down, limiting the methods available to me, and ultimately, provoking a reimagining of my original research design. I make two contributions. First, building on feminist geographical scholarship on care and reflexivity, and calls for ‘slow’ research that prioritises the shifting needs of researchers and participants, I suggest adopting a relational approach to take account of participant subjectivities in order to minimise disruption in their everyday lives. Second, through discussing the ways in which I employed the mobile phone to continue gathering data with participant mothers during COVID-19, I build on nascent geographical and methodological conversations about the role of technologies in the design and implementation of care-full research. In highlighting the limitations of the mobile phone as a research device in this context, I extend current limited understandings of utilising mobile phones to gather data in the course of conducting research with marginalised people.

This paper aims to disrupt hegemonic ideas in transboundary water governance literature about rivers and borders being fixed and rigid. I argue that rivers are sites of uneven experiences not only in terms of access and use, but also in the way they are experienced as ‘borders’ by different communities, reflecting wider settler colonial dynamics and legacies. On the Yarmouk Tributary of the Jordan River, the river environments are borderised and territorialised in very unequal ways by nation-states and through bilateral river basin agreements. Through paying attention to how river-border environments have been transformed and how they function, this paper explores how the border is experienced and navigated in three border environments on the Yarmouk. This paper complicates the river-as-border scholarship by attending to how river borders are environments which are experienced differently by communities living in them through different forms of infrastructural and slow violence. Centring slow violence in this analysis offers a window into unexamined social worlds and experiences, showing how infrastructures on the border become environments and not just banal assemblages of pipes and pumps separate from people and land. It also presents an original contribution to examine transboundary river politics in the Jordan River Basin from the vantage points of the communities that continue to re-configure ways to forge and mend relations with the river and border environments.

This short paper introduces a special section exploring how human geographers use research notebooks. It outlines why a fuller exchange about how exactly we do ethnographic note-taking in human geography is worthwhile, and describes a series of conference sessions in which a group of human geographers took the relatively bold step of showing each other examples of what could be found inside their notebooks. It also provides an overview of how the papers in the special section might help us all to consider the variety of options available to us when we choose to work in this way.

How do we make sense of our place in the field as researchers and as sexual, spiritual beings? Ethnographic fieldwork is central to several disciplines, including geography. It involves the researcher encountering and gathering stories and meanings through interaction with people's lived experiences in settings that are often not the researcher's own. Although rarely strain-free, fieldwork is seen as a transformative experience, both from the personal and the academic point of view. This paper, situated at the intersection of geography, queer/ing practices, and ethnographic methodology, explores poetry as a form of self-care in the field. In recent years, poetry has emerged as a creative and productive mode of representation and (co-)interpretation of qualitative data. Based on my own spiritual experience(s) while conducting fieldwork in Spain, I consider prayer cards as a poetic form and a means through which issues of self-care and spiritual self-preservation are made visible, particularly when experienced within a social environment that is hostile to LGBTQ+ lived experiences of faith.

This article introduces a special section comprising papers examining the evolution, current state and potential futures of the subdiscipline of health geography. Geographers’ engagement with ‘health’ has transformed from a strict rooting in the ‘(bio)medical’, coinciding with, and contributing to, a paradigm shift emphasising a recognition of health as multifaceted and shaped by everyday experiential spatial practices, rhythms and identities. The development of this area of geographic scholarship, we argue, has been inextricably linked to the simultaneous growth of the Geographies of Health and Wellbeing Research Group (GHWRG) of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), founded in 1972. Celebrating this golden jubilee, the Research Group initiated a project reflecting on how geographical knowledge on health has been produced and the networks that have influenced thinking. This coincided with an additional anniversary, the twentieth iteration of the ‘Emerging and New Researchers in the Geographies of Health & Impairment’, a conference developed to support new conversations relating to geographical scholarship around ‘health’, playing an important role in the development of ideas, scholarship and community since its inception in 1994. In introducing this special section, we underscore the importance of geographic interrogations of health for addressing contemporary challenges and providing interdisciplinary contributions. The articles in the collection delve into conceptual, theoretical and methodological developments that have shaped health geography, featuring work showcasing the breadth and depth of research within the subdiscipline. Complementing these empirical pieces, the special section traces the history of the GHWRG and its contributions, alongside interviews and conversations with scholars who have played pivotal roles in shaping the evolution of the subdiscipline. Overall, we are keen to celebrate health geography scholarship, question how academic networks shape thinking about interrelationships between health and place, and reflect on potential future directions for geographical scholarship on health and wellbeing.

The COVID-19 pandemic somewhat unexpectedly promoted resurgent interest in the attractions of rural places, not least associated with nature, in many countries for especially urban people. The paper argues that this link was very fecund for many within the broad UK ‘folk music’ community specifically. After introducing COVID-19's pro-rural turn, the paper gives a brief overview of now substantial music geography scholarship, paying particular attention to what has been studied in respect of folk music, not least its examination of the latter's problematic links to English identities. It argues that folk music's resurgent rural links call for attention. It then introduces how the rural-folk music COVID-19 experience worked at three non-exclusive levels. First, there was rural influence on the music being produced. Second, some musicians were also personally impacted strongly by rural experiences, evident not solely through their music. Third, some musicians developed original rural initiatives that saw audience members also gaining direct rural inspiration, not just via the strong growth in internet-facilitated connections but through direct in-place encounters with the musicians in the rural. Each reading is illustrated by two brief case studies, with the rural-folk combination becoming increasingly alive and more-than-representational. It is suggested in conclusion that there remains a strong ‘life’ to these rural-folk music connections in less predominant COVID-19 times.

This paper explores the resizing, reshaping and connectivity of islands by examining ongoing relations between land and sea in the context of the Channel Island of Guernsey. Ideas of materiality, temporality and vertical depth are employed to explore how contemporary tides and past sea-level change impact island–island connections, and island–mainland connections between Guernsey and France. By focusing on the littoral zone as a space of encounter between land and sea, the paper explores some of the processes that challenge the notion of an island having fixed edges, emphasising the island's shape and size as always in flux. The paper then explores how tides alternatively reveal and hide material structures such as rocks and causeways, making the underwater scape temporally visible and differently accessible as an extension of land. It enables connections to be made and remade. This is demonstrated through the example of Guernsey and the tidal island of Lihou. The paper subsequently considers these ideas in the context of Quaternary sea-level change. The land known as Guernsey alternated between literal island surrounded by water, and a steep-sided plateau on the Normanno-Breton plain, coinciding with interglacials and glacials. This connection is referred to as geologic. I argue that by acknowledging Guernsey's former visible connection with France, lack of contemporary visibility in the underwater scape does not render this a disconnection. Rather, the geologic, as further evidenced in the contemporary natural and built environment of Guernsey, continues through an underwater scape. It reappears in other Channal Islands and France, demonstrating ongoing connections at a land–sea–geologic interface. The paper argues for geology as a form of vertical depth. It calls for greater consideration of the geologic in the human geographical study of islands.

With the recent, constantly growing interest in the critical geography of the oceans and critical toponymy, there is still plenty of space for theoretical, methodological and practical interconnections between these emerging subfields. Despite some sporadic examples of critical analysis of the names of the islands and seas, the ocean floor and the open ocean remain unexplored spaces in critical toponymic investigations. This paper aims to fill this gap by introducing the concept of the toponymic frontier, focusing on the spatial-political dimension of the names of the natural submarine features (bathyonyms). Drawing on critical toponymy and critical geography of the oceans' theoretical literature and using the empirical database of more than 5000 bathyonyms and the secondary resources represented by the international media, official reports and governmental websites, this paper develops a base for a conceptual framework for analysing the marine place names as (geo)politically and political-economically motivated symbolic elements of the oceanic voluminous realm. Finally, the paper paves the way for future debates related to the politics of place naming in the contested spaces of the hydrosphere and the generation of reinvigorated productive insights in critical toponymic studies.

Achieving successful multi-stakeholder collaboration for sustainable outcomes is complex. This paper provides key principles for future co-design projects aimed at fostering an inclusive approach to research. These have been developed based on a novel methodology that co-designed the essential components of a long-term, collaborative agreement for a nature recovery scheme in England. Using an assortment of iterative, deliberative participatory methods, this research engaged a wide variety of stakeholders to produce a template agreement for an agri-environmental policy. We demonstrate that a flexible, highly reflective approach resulted in positive engagement with previously marginalised stakeholders. The approach also successfully navigated the unequal power dynamics seen both within and between groups. Finally, multiple feedback loops allowed participants to continually build on previous interactions as they developed and reviewed the agreement. By drawing out the complexities of the co-design process, this paper explains how co-design efforts can produce potentially transformative outputs. We hope that the principles introduced here offer a useful starting point for those planning to undertake multi-stakeholder co-design.

The border river of the Evros/Meriç/Maritsa has been shaped during the century since its demarcation by the Lausanne peace treaty. Over this period, a dense overlap of environmental, geopolitical, legal and cultural actors has turned it into both a riverised border and a borderised river. The border regime appropriates the riverine characteristics of flow, erosion, mud, turbulence and fog as much as it is founded on military technology, international law, agricultural and conservation practices, resource logistics, border crossing and the denial thereof. Here, the river's movement of sand and alluvium has become an agent in the policing of the river border. Drawing on interviews with asylum seekers, locals, forensic pathologists, legal scholars and fish scientists, this paper weaves field research, primarily undertaken on the Greek side, with a historic and ecosystemic perspective of a century-old border that has become a hotspot for violent practices. These practices themselves harness the uncertain physical conditions that the riverscape affords. In this article we argue that the disjunctures of the river's dynamic geomorphology and the history of demarcation of the median line frame the contemporary politics of mobility of those illegalised by the border regime. In the ambiguous territorial pockets produced by the movement of the river away from the median line of 1926, islands of hyperlegality have been produced where state violence takes place with impunity.