Area最新文献

Public authorities are increasingly deploying automated and algorithmic systems to support decision-making, often in the interests of efficiency and cost-saving. However, people in vulnerable situations often bear the brunt of errors that arise when these systems are at fault or used incorrectly. This paper presents a brief vignette and discussion illustrating how issues of data and algorithmic justice impact on co-produced geographical research, looking critically at the relationship between North–South collaboration and the UK government's use of algorithms to carry out public administration functions, specifically in the administration of visa applications by project partners from the Global South. The problem is outlined in the wider context of government automation, and questions for further investigation are raised concerning accountability and research ethics.

Access to elite actors is central to researching powerful institutions yet remains uneven and difficult to secure. This paper examines how geopolitical relations shape elite access and how researchers are read and interpreted in politically sensitive contexts. Drawing on fieldwork with hydropower policymakers and industry actors in Nepal, I show how regional geopolitical dynamics shaped my ability to engage powerful institutional actors. My positionality as an Indian female researcher affiliated with an elite Global North university was central to how access was negotiated, enabling and constraining engagement in shifting and contradictory ways. Three dynamics were particularly important: geopolitical suspicion linked to India–Nepal relations; institutional affiliation as a source of credibility and reassurance; and situated familiarity through shared ‘pahari’ identity that at times altered how my national identity was understood. These dynamics shaped whether I was seen as credible, harmless or potentially threatening, influencing access and the degree of openness possible in research encounters. The paper argues that in geopolitically sensitive contexts, elite access is not determined solely by formal gatekeeping or researcher positionality but emerges through participants' interpretations of the researcher, including their perceptions of political alignment, credibility and risk. In doing so, it reframes elite access as an affective process through which geopolitical relations are lived and felt in research encounters, shaping both engagement and the knowledge that becomes possible to produce.

Informed by scholarship on climate change and polar bears, this paper analyses alternatives to images of polar bears stranded on ice floes. The empirical frame of reference is recent prize-winning images and photo essays in popular media, drawn from a selection of news reports on targeted websites. The aim is not to produce a comprehensive data set of polar bear images, but to ask what messages about climate change impacts these images can help to convey. The first part shows that whilst Arctic polar bears remain associated with cuteness, endangerment and vulnerability to global warming, there are also reports of survival and local adaptation to climate change. I call this section ‘Echoes of Knut’, in memory of a zoo bear that survived via global resettlement. The second part is also about polar bears out of place but tells a different story about the impacts (for them and for humans) of a changing climate. Media coverage of increasingly close (and unwelcome) encounters between bears and humans in urban spaces shows how polar bears can represent strategies of spatial containment, as well as survival and local adaptation to change, in a time of climate crisis and emergency. Images of polar bears can thus do more than symbolise global warming. They can help to show how spatial relations are changing in consequence of climate change.

The ‘Game’ is a term used to refer to irregular journeys people must use to transit through different Balkan countries on their way to parts of Western Europe. The Game consists of a set of spatial practices specific to connecting different sites, border areas and actors along the way. Key to traversing this space are Google Maps used by people migrating and smugglers. These maps are especially made, marked and edited by users to connect different parts of the Game. While using the Google Maps base, they consist of their own archive, ways of crafting and economies of circulation. We theorise on this use of cartographic tools along the Balkan route, to inquire further into the functions of mapping in migration politics and to push concepts like counter-mapping further. While the role of cartography in migration management has been analysed, as have distinct counter-cartographic experiments to advocate for freedom of movement, the role of maps that facilitate the actual journeys of people migrating (or their facilitators) has rarely been considered. While opening this avenue of inquiry, we also pose the delicate ethical questions that must be attended before engaging these spatial practices in-depth.

This article examines Tirana's recent urban transformation through the lens of the state-architecture nexus, analysing how successive Albanian regimes have mobilised architecture as a political instrument of legitimation, identity construction and geopolitical positioning. Focusing on the Bulevardi i Ri as one of the contemporary sites of intervention, the study situates current development within the broader post-socialist transition and the neoliberal restructuring of Central and Eastern European cities. Drawing on post-socialist urban scholarship and a cultural political economy framework, the article argues that architecture in Tirana functions not merely as a material outcome of economic change but as a key medium through which the state produces and stabilises the economic imaginary of European modernity. Based on discursive analysis, desk research and interviews with experts and residents, the paper reveals how architecture, centralised planning and the displacement of informal settlements are intertwined in a hegemonic urban project that reinforces state power while generating socio-spatial tensions.

This article explores the role of sensitivity within geographical research, teaching and methodological practice. It emerged from a shared desire to reclaim sensitivity, deployed here not in a reactive sense (i.e., a propensity to be easily provoked or offended), but rather a responsive sense: to be alive to the lived experiences of others, the fragility of a changing planet and the myriad things which do and should bother us, and which often serve as the propulsive engine behind our work as geographers. To that end, we first trace an incomplete genealogy of sensitivity across moral, emotional, feminist, decolonial, affective and more-than-human geographies, demonstrating the concept's widespread utility and arguing that geographical inquiry is inherently about sensitivity; our research would flounder without this sense of perceptual openness at its heart. Next, we outline some of the many processes of desensitisation which characterise the neoliberal academy, situating these within the broader precarisation of everyday life. Finally, we offer autoethnographic reflections on how these incongruities between theory and practice have impacted our own lives and professional trajectories, before concluding with tentative thoughts on the possibilities contained in cultivating rather than muting our inherent, collective sensitivities. In doing so, we establish sensitivity as an interpersonal attribute which fosters empathy, collegiality and mutual care. Protecting our sensitivities allows us to embody our research, find love in our work and produce methodologically and theoretically rich accounts of our world and those who share it with us. Additionally, we advocate for the refusal to be desensitised to the failures and violences of the neoliberal academy, as well as the broader injustices embedded into the world in which we live and work. We argue, ultimately, that surrendering our sensitivity entirely leads to the impoverishment not only of our work in practice, but also of our humanity.

This paper draws from discussions arising during the 2024 RGS-IBG Annual Conference session Historical Geographies of the Caribbean and critically contemplates the presence—or not—of Caribbean historical geographies across the historic and contemporary enterprise of British Geography. Given the significance of the Caribbean archipelago across the globe, we begin by exploring the presence of Caribbean historical geographies across British and North American geography publications. We follow by considering the histories of the British discipline and its cultural, contingent and contextual historiographical relationship with the Caribbean in comparison with other humanities and social science disciplines, across the United Kingdom and the Caribbean. Reflections are also made regarding the discipline of British geography and its relationship with Caribbean Studies before concluding how (historical) Geography itself might serve as a conduit for more nuanced, grounded and practical ways forward in centring the intellectual and pedagogical sensibilities for Caribbean histories and geographies going forward.