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Research from political geographers has increasingly identified the diverse actors, practices, and performances of diplomacy, challenging narrow conceptions that had tended to associate them with the state alone. The following paper engages this plurality directly through, on the one hand, its focus on young people as diplomatic actors and, on the other, the diplomacy of a British Overseas Territory (OT)—the Falkland Islands—a polity characterised by its liminal subjectivity between colonial dependency and independent statehood. In 2022, to mark the 40th anniversary of the Falklands War, we partnered with the Falkland Islands Government Office (FIGO) in London, to design, deliver and evaluate a national schools' competition. The Falklands Forty Schools Competition (FFSC) culminated in an eight-day trip to the Islands for seven prize winners. The paper reflects on our role in co-organising the competition and the opportunities it afforded to observe young people probe and critically question the official narratives presented to them by government representatives. This offered us the opportunity to explore how geopolitical and diplomatic narratives can be projected, negotiated and challenged by young people in the context of a highly curated trip with narrative projection at its heart. We show how young people through their participation in the competition and, more specifically, a trip to the Falkland Islands, were able to identify slippages and inconsistencies in these ‘stable’ narratives related to governance of the Islands. The young people, far from being passive diplomatic ‘delegates’ unquestioningly imbibing the information presented to them were, instead, highly aware of narrative tipping-points, tensions and slippages in their engagements with government representatives and diplomats.

This article discusses using cue cards, also known as flashcards, and metaphorical cards to prompt and enhance conversations on the implications of domestic practices and energy demand. This cue card methodology has a long pedigree in qualitative sociological and cultural studies research. We discuss the challenges and benefits of cue card methodology in geographical research. To do this, we share our insights from applying cue cards within a mixed-method study conducted on domestic energy practices in relation to aging well at home. The study focused on individuals aged over 60, living in the Illawarra, New South Wales, Australia. We conclude that when mindful of potential constraints, cue card conversations can effectively assist participants reflect on domestic practices and energy demand.

This article traces the past, present and future of health geography through the career journeys of three notable academics, Sarah Curtis (SC), Julia Jones (JJ) and Graham Moon (GM). All three of these scholars have had entanglements with the Geographies of Health and Wellbeing Research Group (GHWRG) of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) (RGS-IBG) throughout their careers, enabling them to shape health geography into the contemporary sub-discipline that we know today. GHWRG has, for the last 50 years, offered a lively and supportive network for all those interested in the geographies of health and health care, medical geography and all other areas of scholarship related to health and wellbeing that engage with geographical concerns.

Rivers are hydrological and social entities, which complicates their use as borders but offers new conceptual possibilities for understanding border spaces. Rivers as borders challenge common understandings of seemingly static political borderlines. Moving away from simple cartographic abstractions, river borders are more than lines for territorial separation. Rivers have a material agency; they are constantly in motion and shift shape according to seasonal changes and hydromorphology. In this paper, I show how rivers through their specific characteristics, namely their materiality, movement and directionality, can challenge but also enable attempts to fix territories. Drawing on doctoral fieldwork between 2019 and 2022 along the Moselle River that crosses and builds the borders between France, Luxembourg and Germany, I argue for a dynamic and ample perspective on river borders that conceptualises them as simultaneously bounded and in motion. Using examples of contingent forms of riverine bordering this paper adds a riverine perspective to current understandings of border geographies. Seeing like a river border makes it possible to examine the relationships between territory, society and environment, and to consider material flows as fundamental to the constitution of rivers and borders.

This article explores the ways in which physical scientists, especially in the geosciences, are responding to calls to decolonise university curricula in current conjunctural conditions. It asserts that it is crucial not to strip decolonisation of its radical political potential and reduce it to an instrumental Equity, Diversion and Inclusion (EDI) initiative. Geoscientists in higher education who wish to decolonise their curricula must also pay attention to epistemological pluralism, politics, and colonial violence and free themselves from Eurocentric legacies of positivism, universality and objectivity. They must also make the turn to social theory, in ways that address the politics of geologic matter and the modes of violence that geoscientific practice and knowledge reproduce. Engaging with curricular decolonisation has potential not only to arrest the decline being experienced by the geosciences, but to make the forced neoliberal mergers between geography and geology less painful and more intellectually productive.

Through an analysis of the available literature on women street vendors in the Global South, and then specifically in India, this paper identifies several knowledge gaps and future directions for research. The paper makes three broad claims: (1) street vending spaces are fundamentally gendered spaces; (2) the intersectional identities and caste-based locations of women street vendors shape their spatial experiences, material realities and access to power; and (3) gender and caste are co-constituted categories that produce a spatiality unique to the Indian subcontinent. While the geographical approach towards street vending recognises the importance of space and considers vendors as spatial practitioners, vendors are often assumed to belong to a homogenous (male) category with differentials such as gender, race, age, ethnicity and caste invisibilised. This research gap is of even more critical importance in India where caste intersects with gender to produce space. Examining the literature on gender and street vending reveals three broad analytical themes—socio-spatial disparities, politics of space, and strategies of control. What seems to be missing is a critical, qualitative focus on the experiences of women street vendors, the gendering of vending spaces, the recognition of caste as a dynamic factor, and a spatial analysis grounded in the Southern urban context. Ultimately, this paper makes the case for a situated and postcolonial feminist geography approach to street vending in India, and calls for an intersectional research agenda that is attentive to the co-constitution of caste and gender in the production of urban space.

As rural places and people are increasingly intertwined between cities, markets and mobility, broader perspectives are needed to examine the multiple changes occurring between rural and urban spaces, and between families and generations. This article discusses how a generational perspective can study ‘more-than-rural’ change in a contemporaneous manner. Drawing on field examples from a village on Flores Island, Indonesia, I show how intergenerational views, gathered through household surveys and in-depth interviews, gave further depth to younger generations' changing relationships to land. Why, despite greater numbers of young people leaving the village for greater work and study opportunities elsewhere, were many parents sure their children would return one day? Using intergenerational and life-course views to answer this question revealed how many villagers encountered livelihood limitations elsewhere. Furthermore, I show how generational data give fuller explanations to household dynamics, such as how age and gender play a role in the pursuit of migration between family members, and how rural land and households are managed over time and space. I conclude by discussing the strengths and challenges of building a generational perspective to study ‘more-than-rural’ livelihood change.

Geographers have shown how borders rely on the enactment of state power and violence to reinforce territorial integrity and sovereign authority, or even perpetuate the destruction of nature. Moving away from an emphasis on violence, in this paper, I take an approach to borders and bordering that emphasises the opportunities of the border when it is also a river to understand borders as a resource and site of engagement with the state by a range of actors, including variants of care. To illustrate this, I draw on longstanding research along the Salween River, the 120 km stretch where the river forms the Thai–Myanmar (Burma) border, to reveal the ways in which borders as rivers can provide new insights into socio-natural bordering processes. In particular, I illustrate a range of ways local residents are caring for a river-border, and how even an ‘exploding’ or ‘hungry’ river-border can be a fragile space for care and for non-state actors to enact the border ‘differently’ in everyday life.

Since the 1970s, a defining feature of advanced economies has been industrial plant closures, stemming from the broader process of economic restructuring. Plant closures have been extensively covered by the media due to their adverse effects on localities. However, no media analysis of closures has been conducted in the plant closure literature. In addition to providing a wealth of information, such an analysis can provide insight into media narratives of closures. Media profoundly affects economies by disseminating narratives that influence society, institutions, and politics. To bridge the plant closure and media literature, this paper conducts a media analysis of closures in Ontario, Canada, from 2000 to 2019. Like other advanced economies, the province has experienced many plant closures over the past several decades. The paper found that the overarching narrative presented by the media was that ‘no one is responsible’ for plant closures and therefore ‘no one can or should act’. Also, it was found that differences in media narratives of closures were primarily due to the political slant of news outlets, not city size or scale of news outlets or whether news outlets were independently owned or part of a media conglomerate. Lastly, the paper found that the dissemination of media coverage on plant closures throughout the province was primarily based on the number of job losses, resulting in media coverage of smaller closures remaining localised, while media coverage of larger closures spreading throughout the province.

A common fieldwork recommendation is to keep a notebook and to write descriptions and reflections in it as soon as possible after each spell of participant observation. The idea is that we should record the details of the situations we encounter while they are still fresh in our memory. But sometimes, when faced with challenging situations, this may not be the best time to write. In this short article, I reflect on the timing of notetaking and how the more reflective purpose of fieldnotes may require more flexibility about how and when to take notes. Drawing on my PhD focused on pedestrian mobilities in Santiago, Chile, and with reference to two unsettling fieldwork experiences, I examine the merits of delayed and experimental notetaking in pursuit of both personal wellbeing and more insightful entries.