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The issue of rangeland governance and tenure in pastoral China has sparked significant controversy and discussion. Several models have been suggested, encompassing private, state and common property systems. However, what does the practical implementation of rangeland governance entail? A review of the history of rangeland governance and policy in Amdo, Tibet tells how land governance is constructed by pastoralists adapting existing norms, formulating rules in various contexts, and negotiating with various groups such as the monastery, religious organisations, and governmental authorities. The governance of rangeland in Amdo, Tibet is characterised by constant negotiations and contestations, including resistance from below, and is shaped by various processes in the real-world context. Through the notion of assemblage, which involves bringing together an array of agents and objectives to intervene in social processes to produce desired outcomes and avert undesired ones, this paper adds to the existing body of research on land governance by examining how institutions are formed in the case of a hydroelectric dam on the land of the pastoralists. Consequently, the question arises: What does this mean for policy and practice for the rangelands of China? If hybrid rangeland governance is to be considered the prevailing practice, then what implications would this have for the framing of policies and their implementation?

This paper makes a novel intervention in political geography by offering methodological reflections on contemporary radio and podcast listenership. It begins from the starting point that radio and podcasts are important and popular sites of geographical knowledge production with the power to shape how audiences understand, imagine and engage in the world. The paper heeds calls in critical and popular geopolitics to move away from the site of representation towards audience reception and presents the ‘playlist-diary’ method as an innovative way of exploring listener responses to BBC radio journalism on migration. This method is then used as a springboard to think more broadly about everyday encounters with radio and podcasts. It argues that situating audience engagements within specific spatialities and temporalities, and considering the digital technologies and platforms though which audio is discovered, consumed and circulated, is critical to developing a nuanced understanding of radio and podcast geopolitics. This discussion reflects growing interest in materialities, networks and assemblages of popular geopolitics and points to a blurring of visual and aural media. Overall, the paper makes the case for amplifying methodologies of listening in political geography and aims to be a catalyst to future scholarship on radio and podcasts.

Mega-events like the Olympics and the football World Cups remain popular around the globe, regardless of their record of damaging host cities and societies. In parallel, research on mega-events continues to grow across a range of disciplines, including geography. Much of this literature remains fixed at global levels of analysis. In this light, mega-events suffer from a double problem: their planning and articulation too often cause harm to cities and societies and, simultaneously, research on mega-events focuses too much on the macro. This paper endeavours to address both problems by proposing to make sense of mega-events by thinking through the minor. This concern valorises micro scales and marginalised people, those who most often lose during mega-event hosting. The paper argues that geographers are uniquely positioned to conduct nuanced mega-event research across a globally diverse range of political-economic contexts, and calls for more geographers to contribute to this project in a move towards a critical geography of mega-events.

Over 55,000 km of the world’s interior political border is formed along river channels. Yet it is more than just water that is conveyed downstream and across these borders by river systems, with sediment, pollutants, nutrients also transported, impacting downstream ecosystem service provision and livelihoods. Fundamentally, water and sediment operate in two distinct cycles, the behaviours of which have major implications for their management. The water cycle is inherently circular, with water being replenished by climatic processes across the basin. The sediment system, however, is linear, where once sediment is hindered or removed from the system, it cannot be reintroduced without anthropogenic action. In this paper, the balance between discourses of water and sediment are redressed by viewing the dialogues around transboundary management practices from these two cycles. Using the Mekong River, Southeast Asia as a focus, it is concluded that despite a political discourse that may predominantly focus on water, the management of waterways that traverse or cross international political borders must recognise that flows of water and sediment are intrinsically linked. The flow of rivers across political borders presents both challenges (potentially hindering data generation and sharing) and opportunities for international cooperation on environmental issues. It is argued that the framework for international cooperation on water is a good place to start when trying to address sediment issues, but a recognition of the differing behaviours of water and sediment systems is necessary to ensure appropriate and sustainable management of the sediment resource.

Is it foolish to talk or write about hope in the face of widespread existential crises? Our answer is ‘no’. On the contrary, hope is more necessary the bleaker things become. In this article, we explore hope as a practice. Influenced by the abolition geography of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, we build on John Holloway's argument that such practices start from ourselves, where we are and our own capacities, and overflow that which contains us. We write as resident-activists within three community organisations in the place we live in. Extending existing geographical literature, we show how our resident-activism is distinct from, yet also entangled with, scholar-activism and the struggles, contradictions and potential solidarities found in the UK's marketised universities. This way of working can itself be seen as a practice of hope. The article further explores practices of hope that emerge within the three organisations. Though emplaced, these practices are not confined in space or time, drawing rather on history as a resource and connecting with broader national and international processes. The article concludes by using Holloway's concept of rage-joy to bring together practices of hope across the three organisations and among us as resident-activists and participants in industrial action over pay, casualisation, workloads, equalities and pensions in UK universities. The result is a capacity to see the human in each other, a necessary step in resisting resurgent fascist politics and addressing existential crises.

In recent years, short-video platforms represented by Douyin (TikTok) and Kuaishou (Kwai) have expanded to rural China. The rural, as an emerging ‘sunken market’ for digital platforms to generate revenue, has become an uncharted terrain for digital platforms to compete for, particularly in the context of the state's rural revitalisation strategy. Yao Shunwei, an independent photographer, uploaded a short video on Douyin in July 2022, recording a village basketball game in a Miao village (Taipan Village) in Guizhou to celebrate the Chixin Festival. The game quickly gained phenomenal popularity on digital platforms and was branded as ‘VBA’ (Village BA, appropriating the term NBA), contributing significantly to the revitalisation of the village. So far, work on rural places in their entanglement with digital platforms remains limited, lopsided on the rhetoric of a digital divide between the urban and the rural. Proposing the tentative concept of platform ruralism, this study probes into the emergent rural subjectivities and agencies vis-à-vis the negotiation, adaptation, innovation and autonomy of rural economies, livelihoods and socio-cultural practices as they are imbricated by digital technologies and platforms. As such, it looks at how digital platforms have rescaled rural basketball activities and turned them into a nationally influential brand to enhance the wellbeing, social cohesion and cultural identity of rural communities. The branding of ‘VBA’ demonstrates how the rural can take on an active and resilient role in the rise of digital platforms.

This commentary introduces civic geographies as a theme in Area, where papers can be collected, allowing a space for discussion at a time when the civic university agenda has become a priority for the sector. It calls for the discipline to share and debate ideas about civic geographies, showcase civic geographical research and teaching, and create a community of practice to develop approaches to engagement and social responsibility.

Across research on incarceration and insularity, recent trajectories have challenged conventional understandings of islands and prisons as isolated, autonomous units. Instead, they have directed attention toward their capacity to establish relations, circuits and routes. Beyond the focus on mobility and exchanges, this literature criticised the association between insularity, incarceration and confinement as the outcome of specific colonial epistemologies. This article builds on these literatures to investigate the case of Sardinia, a large Mediterranean island that plays a key role in the Italian carceral regime by providing a destination for thousands of Italian convicts. Despite being an Italian and European region, Sardinia's past and present exhibit distinct colonial qualities, which are visible in the structure of its carceral estate. The case study exemplifies how islands can hardly be interpreted as isolated units, given that their histories and geographies have implications that extend far beyond their coasts. In the case of Sardinia, the island combines modern penitentiaries with dynamics reminiscent of previous periods in the history of punishment, specifically penal colonies and convict transportation. This case study illustrates the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach that is willing to question the conceptual categories adopted, particularly those of island, prison and colony.

Studying the life and travels of the Victorian explorer Isabella Bird Bishop offers important insights into the history of disabled people within the discipline of geography. Bird Bishop is an important figure within geography's disciplinary history, as one of the first women admitted to the Royal Geographical Society in 1892. She also had a long-standing spinal condition that intermingled with psychological symptoms. In studying how her disability (and contemporary understandings of her body) shaped her travels, this paper shows how disability interacted with Bird Bishop's racial and gender identity in shaping where and how she travelled and how she wrote about her experiences. By drawing attention to the role that disability played in justifying her travels and the positive effect travel had on her health, this paper highlights her generally positive experiences of geographical travel as a disabled person.

This short commentary responds to Gandy's (2023) piece ‘Books under threat: Open access publishing and the neo-liberal academy’. It argues that the requirement for open access in UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) grants does not mark a major turning point in academic publishing, but rather is simply the latest trend in a series of changes which have seen academic inequalities redistributed under a metric culture.