ABSTRACT This paper discusses the links between hair and Jamaica's often unnamed ‘race’ politics as an expression of waywardness. Using a court ruling in which a 7‐year‐old, female student was mandated to cut her hair—at the time worn in locs hairstyle—it teases out the links between embodiment, coloniality and incidents of racism which show up in the state's (post)‐colonial imagination of itself as ‘new’ and sovereign.
ABSTRACT Climate change is leading to changing water availability and is likely to impact systems of supply and associated practices in the Global North. As a way of contending with these possibilities, this paper shows how migrant households from water‐scarce countries offer insights into specific practices, such as water reuse, minimising water waste and bucket‐bathing in the context of reduced water availability, alongside reflexivity on hydrosocial (water–society) relations. Using stories, a novel medium for geographical work, to relay insights from participants' experiences, this work draws on a set of 16 household interviews in England to offer three imaginaries of sustainable water futures. Imaginaries are how we envisage the world and potential future worlds and are a valuable tool in contemplating futures under changing socioecological conditions. Three imaginaries of care, collectivity and contextuality in water use are unpacked through the practices and hydrosocial relations described in household stories. These imaginaries connect the stories with the broader analysis uncovered in the dataset. We provide directions for water planning to contend with the potential for water scarcity through the implications of our findings. We pose questions around the visibility of water systems inside and outside the home, and whether social connectedness to water (or not) at the societal scale exists and how this might influence more or less sustainable use. We additionally probe into the potential for malleability in resource‐intensive water practices such as bathing. This work discusses how the influences of the life course, as well as family and personal histories, are vital to understanding water use. It further demonstrates that imaginaries can be expressed through the use of stories. Moreover, we demonstrate how migrant households' stories of adaptation to water scarcity are able to stimulate reflection on issues of water use, everyday practice and sustainable water futures.
ABSTRACT Tracing the historical roots of climate vulnerability in Sri Lanka's dry zone, this paper contributes new insights into how the legacies of colonialism continue to shape who is vulnerable to climate change and why. Drawing on Gidwani's (2008) conceptualisation of colonial capitalism's waste/value dialectic, the analysis illustrates how colonial classifications and developmental logics produced patterns of uneven geographical development across colonial and postcolonial periods. Challenging dominant narratives that naturalise climate crisis, the paper makes two main arguments. First, contemporary climate vulnerabilities in rural Sri Lanka are not natural outcomes of biophysical change but products of colonial capitalist and postcolonial development that systematically dispossessed peasant communities while reallocating and concentrating resources in sectors deemed more economically valuable to the state. Second, postcolonial development reproduced rather than dismantled colonial hierarchies, rearticulating logics of waste/value through new developmental frameworks that prioritise centralised, capital‐intensive agricultural systems over decentralised alternatives. Such arguments go beyond simply identifying colonialism and capitalism as key drivers of climate vulnerability and agrarian precarity, highlighting instead the specific rationales, logics and processes through which agrarian worlds have been, and continue to be, valued and devalued. This paper ultimately contends that understanding and addressing the drivers of climate vulnerability in postcolonial contexts like Sri Lanka requires first historicising climate crisis within the longue durée of colonial capitalism and uneven development—an approach that draws attention to how such crises emerge from entangled histories of colonialism, uneven development and environmental change.
ABSTRACT This essay illustrates how a golf course serves as a site for continuities of colonial spatial exploitation in Luanshya, Zambia. It draws on the narratives of alleged abuse of public office by a Zambian member of parliament as reported in media publications between 2012 and 2016 to locate exploitation as part of ongoing waves of dispossession that have been occurring from the founding of Luanshya city in the 1920s, which have persisted in varying formations. The paper demonstrates that capitalist extraction often happens at a large scale and also by individual political elites enabled by state neglect. I show that we can trace recent extractivism in the Global South by looking at fields of activity like sport in what are often small, neglected cities. This piece invites geographical scholarship practices to take a speculative approach in attending to wayward responses of refusal of the exploitative actions of political elites against the local public.
ABSTRACT This commentary advances the concept of denied agency to rethink how agency is understood in local and regional development research. Although agency has become a central concern in regional studies, the interpretive and emotional dimensions through which individuals understand, narrate and imagine regional change remain underexplored. Denied agency draws attention to actors whose perspectives and aspirations remain marginal or unheard, yet whose experiences may reveal alternative developmental possibilities absent from dominant policy and planning debates. By integrating individuality into structural and agentic perspectives, the commentary develops conceptual and methodological strategies to capture narratives, emotions and imaginative capacities that shape engagement with regional futures. Focusing on neglected voices, hidden discourses and fragile expressions of aspiration, the commentary calls for an interpretive turn in economic geography that recognises the diversity of lived experiences and the unrealised futures that denied agency can illuminate.
ABSTRACT The perennial question of who is properly part of the nation is again taking on a predominance in North America and Europe. This short intervention contends that to understand the operations of these contemporary geographies of nationalism, in which the hardening categories of national and foreigner serve as the basis to build or deny access to social rights, it is necessary to turn to the past. The past serves both to legitimate the nation but also as the means to demonstrate its fabrication. The commentary outlines how the past has been a focal point in geography, hinging around the issue of representation. It then points to alterations to representation with digital media and technology, thus opening questions over how contemporary geographies of the past interact with geographies of the nation.
ABSTRACT Pakistan has the world's largest contiguous irrigation infrastructure in the Indus Basin, which has resulted from more than two hundred years of investment in agrarian development in the arid Indus Plains by colonial and postcolonial states alike. Most of this infrastructural investment happened in the Punjab, where nine canal colonies were settled between 1886 and 1940, bringing more than 14 million lands under plough (Ali 1988, 9). Known as the breadbasket of colonial India prior to 1947 and now postcolonial Pakistan, Punjab hosts more than half the population of the country, which is predominantly rural and agrarian (Khan 2020). This irrigation infrastructure and the agrarian economy dependent on it are threatened by climate change and the resulting water crisis. In this essay, I will trace the history of this hydrosocial arrangement in Pakistan's Punjab province to reveal how this colonial and postcolonial irrigation infrastructural development set up the present moment of crisis instead of enduring development. Based on archival and ethnographic research in a canal colony village in the central Punjab, I explore the geographies of uneven agrarian development in the canal colonies and highlight how the climate crisis is internal to the strategies of development and political control over nature and the native communities. I also highlight the newer strategies of survival adopted by the local communities in the face of global environmental crisis.
Short Abstract This commentary examines how smart urbanism governs urban futures through practices of placemaking, using Mauritius as a postcolonial backdrop. Drawing on the concept of entangled temporalities, it argues that contemporary smart city developments reproduce colonial legacies by aligning re‐imagined pasts, curated presents and controlled futures within narratives of modernisation and sustainability. In doing so, the commentary reveals how seemingly inclusive and transformative urban futures remain shaped by selective forms of access, visibility and socio‐spatial exclusion.
ABSTRACT This commentary outlines the economic, political and moral geographies of prediction markets and maps how they are gamifying the future. These digital platforms are transforming the gambling industry and raising significant ethical questions.
ABSTRACT The global visibility, and political weight of the Olympic Games can inspire climate change action. Yet, at the same time, the Olympics are also significant carbon emitters, potentially undermining their credibility as sustainability leaders. To date, however, there is a lack of a systematic assessment of past carbon emissions and extrapolation of future targets considering international agreements. Our analysis shows Olympics‐related carbon emissions ranged from 1.59 to 4.5 million tonnes of CO 2 e in recent editions. Paris 2024 set emission‐reduction targets aligned with the 2015 Paris Agreement. Our analysis suggests that the IOC and future Olympic host cities should commit to verifiable emissions targets and change the delivery model of the event to meet the Paris Agreement.
This commentary examines South Korea's recent martial law crisis as an untimely or 'late' instance of authoritarian politics. To do so, we note the utility of Hart's (2020) 'global conjunctural frame' for situating this event within the broader, global context of right-wing reaction. We highlight how this approach can help examine not only the discursive connections among far-right movements but also the novel geopolitical visions and transformations that underlie them. We pay specific attention to how changing political attitudes towards both China and North Korea, and especially the rise of anti-China sentiment, have shaped the identity, strategies and networks articulated by South Korea's far-right.
The urban arrival of black-legged kittiwakes in the United Kingdom and Norway has made the embrace of socio-ecological complexity a necessary part of urban planning, involving pragmatic, ad hoc experimentation as much as it has structured forms of learning. Focused on the relationship between infrastructure, animal architectures and avian geographies, the paper draws on a collaboration between cultural geography and marine ecology that examines how black-legged kittiwakes are transforming urban life. The paper positions urban design as a set of more-than-human achievements to focus on one strand of the research: the development of artificial nesting structures in the form of so-called 'kittiwake hotels'. By tracking the movement of kittiwake hotel design and understandings of morphological adaptations between the United Kingdom and Norway, we demonstrate how ad hoc experiments have transformed understandings of urban-avian life, with wide-ranging implications for planning, policy and conservation. From small-scale interventions in the built fabric to large-scale infrastructural works, we demonstrate (1) how ad hoc experiments and forms of learning become critical to more-than-human cities and the place-making practices of avian inhabitants; and (2) how distinctive temporalities, fidelities and ways of sensing shape infrastructural projects that are necessarily more-than-human. The paper finishes with a reflection on the design of more-than-human cities, the role of academic research and its public life; and the significance of collaboration and diverse forms of learning in a context of novel socio-ecological change.
Tsunamis are rare but devastating disasters that primarily affect coastal regions. Structural mitigation measures, such as sea walls and offshore breakwaters, are effective but costly, especially for countries like Malaysia that are less prone to tsunamis. As a result, non-structural approaches are more practical. This research focuses on assessing building vulnerability using geospatial methods and multicriteria decision-making (MCDM), particularly the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and relative importance index (RII). Seven indicators with RII values exceeding 0.5 were accepted, while six were excluded. The AHP model utilised four key indicators and 17 sub-indicators to evaluate building vulnerability. The consistency ratio (CR) was calculated and validated using Monte Carlo analysis, yielding an acceptable value of 0.02. Results indicate that buildings made of wood, with one floor, located within 400 m of the shoreline and used as residences are highly vulnerable to tsunamis. This study provides valuable insights for governments, NGOs and communities to proactively prepare for tsunamis. It offers a strategic framework to enhance mitigation measures, supporting effective disaster preparedness and reducing future risks.
Could reproductive reluctance constitute a form of 'adaptation' to climate change? This commentary takes younger people's reportedly growing climate change-related anxieties about having children as a starting point for reflections on researching and making (non)reproductive futures in geography and beyond. First, it reflects on the value of a rejection of reproductive futurism, or the reduction of the future to the 'Child' (Edelman 2004), and the need for a new antinormative vocabulary in an era of unprecedented environmental destruction. Second, it articulates how the already vast rift between the generations has taken on geological form, and suggests looking to the deep history of the human (e.g., Clark and Whittle 2023) when thinking of how to live in the future. Third and final, it addresses the tensions between progress, reproduction and adaptation as highly contested narratives of future-making. It concludes by suggesting adaptation as an accountable yet affirmative approach to (non)reproductive futures.
Racist mechanisms in France deny racialised citizens recognition as French citizens, even more so when they live in marginalised social housing neighbourhoods. The question of who is considered French, which is framed in this paper as a question of citizenship, is informed by embodied everyday experiences of inequality. Even if the racialised inhabitants of marginalised neighbourhoods have formal political rights, they do not feel that they count as full-right citizens. They feel that what is expected from them is that they give up their cultural difference, remain silent, invisible and not disturb anyone. These expectations are incompatible with the definition of citizenship as the right to claim rights. This paper explores how research participants understand the causes and consequences of not being considered a full-right citizen. The focus of the paper is on persons with family ties to North Africa, who live in social housing neighbourhoods, who hold formal French citizenship, and yet encounter forms of othering that undermine their substantive experience of being considered a French citizen. Discussions with research participants took place in the context of the Universit & eacute; Populaire, which is a community-driven knowledge project that created space for discussions on discrimination, neighbourhood stigmatisation and later, the legacy of the colonial past. Combining the outcomes of extensive field research with insights from citizenship and postcolonial studies has led to two main findings. The first is that differential citizenship, where not all nationals have access to the same social, political and economic rights is not only a feature of France's colonial past but also of its present. The second is that being excluded from the category of (White) French has consequences for the degree to which one can claim rights and one is considered worth defending.
101 million people in the EU live with disabilities (EU 2022). Yet, disabled voices rarely are considered in endeavours of futuring. Even more, amid rising socio-political polarisation-fuelled by the knowledge crisis, populism and identity-based divides-ableist norms are being reinforced, further marginalising and erasing disabled perspectives from public futures (Kafer 2013). To counter this trend, we must urgently begin 'imagining otherwise' (Olufemi 2021) and co-envision desired futures through disabled perspectives. This commentary draws on Crip Theory, Critical Disability, and Black, Feminist and Queer Studies to advocate for co-productive approaches to futuring that centre the knowledge, creativity and lived experiences of disabled people (Shrodes 2023). We propose developing 'public geographies of futuring' by invoking and unfolding disabled dreams. We argue that imagining futures together can make them actionable. Although futuring alone may not achieve structural change, 'unfolding dreams' can amplify underrepresented voices, increase public visibility and help initiate local transformations.
Unreliable energy infrastructure is a defining yet understudied dimension of everyday precarity in informal settlements. This paper examines how infrastructural unreliability shapes lived experiences of energy insecurity in Qandu Qandu, a largely off-grid informal settlement in Cape Town, South Africa. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research, we analyse how residents navigate hybrid energy configurations comprising illegal grid connections, solar mini-grids and combustible fuels. We extend recent work on off-gridding by demonstrating that energy insecurity in informal urban contexts is structured not only by access, but by the intersecting qualities of reliability, affordability, safety and the emotional burdens produced by unstable infrastructures. Findings show that unreliability is pervasive, with weather-related disruptions, equipment failures and unpredictable informal markets generating layered insecurities that shape daily routines and heighten vulnerability. Residents respond through energy stacking, informal repair networks and mutual aid, exhibiting infrastructural agency while facing significant limits to adaptation. Unreliable energy services also produce acute mental and emotional strain, including anxiety, stress and health risks related to chronic illness management. We argue that these lived experiences reveal how off-gridding processes are embedded in structural inequalities and express forms of infrastructural citizenship. Addressing energy insecurity therefore requires community-centred, reliability-focused approaches to urban energy planning and governance.
Rural communities face increasing environmental challenges from plastic pollution, particularly in subsistence livestock farming areas where waste management infrastructure is inadequate or absent. Despite progress in waste pollution research and awareness, there remains a significant gap in understanding its perception on rural livestock agricultural systems. Existing literature on plastic pollution focuses on urban, marine or industrial contexts, with little attention given to subsistence livestock farming. Crucially, the interactions between livestock and plastic waste in informal grazing areas where open dumping and burning occur are poorly understood. This study investigated the perception of plastic pollution on livestock health and the sustainability of subsistence farming practices in resource-limited rural communities in South Africa, focusing on identifying socio-environmental drivers, challenges and local coping mechanisms. Data were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews using a purposive random sampling strategy from 40 randomly selected households actively engaged in subsistence livestock farming, with thematic analysis being used to code and categorise key findings. The analysis revealed that farmers are aware of the negative impacts of plastic pollution on livestock health; however, they are constrained by a lack of waste management services, land shortages, livestock theft, climate change and limited veterinary services. Farmers employ coping strategies, including traditional treatments and herd confinement. The study highlights how plastic pollution contributes to the degradation of communal resources, exemplifying the Tragedy of the Commons and aligning with Beck's Risk Society Theory, where invisible modern risks disproportionately affect under-resourced communities. The results underscore the urgent need for policy intervention, improved rural waste management infrastructure and community-based education to prevent further harm to livestock health, food systems and environmental sustainability. Findings suggest that local authorities must intervene to address plastic pollution in rural agricultural settings.
This paper focuses on the theoretical and methodological configuration of what we define as the 'Remote Habitability Method' (RHM). This place-sensitive epistemological and research-making approach aims at understanding what makes remote places inhabitable. While quantitative, economic growth-oriented approaches have long set research and policy agendas regarding marginalised areas, we argue that more fine-grained, fieldwork-based approaches are needed to understand the process of being left behind, as well as the patterns of actions, interactions and affections that shape the infrastructures of daily inhabitation in these remote areas. First, we situate the contribution of the RHM in the extensions of the geographical debates on the habitability and social infrastructure of cities in remote, left-behind places. Then, we exploit it to investigate the case study of the Italian institutional geography of marginal areas, that is, the 'aree interne' (inner areas), to showcase the potential of the RHM as an epistemological and methodological lens. To do so, we draw upon archival research, semi-structured interviews and empirical materials collected during the multisite fieldwork we conducted in the municipalities that comprise the Gran Sasso-Valle Subequana inner area.
This article examines the livelihood transformations and governance challenges of small-scale fishers (SSF) in Vietnam's Tam Giang-Cau Hai (TGCH) lagoon. Drawing on 47 semi-structured interviews and extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2022, it reveals how fishers navigate overlapping pressures: declining stocks, pollution, spatial competition and fragmented institutional reforms. Although adaptation strategies like livelihood diversification and outmigration are common, they frequently exacerbate structural inequalities related to age, gender and socio-economic status. We argue that state-promoted alternatives, such as aquaculture and ecotourism, show limited success and often risk 'pseudo-diversification' due to weak governance, uneven enforcement and spatial exclusion. Conceptually, this study advances an integrated framework combining wicked problems, livelihood adaptation, and spatial justice. It demonstrates that sustainability transitions in coastal fisheries are not merely technical challenges but contested political processes. By highlighting how institutional complexity and power asymmetries reproduce marginalisation, the study contributes to more grounded, justice-oriented approaches to coastal governance in Southeast Asia.
