For years, critical geopolitics was the field to which many political geographers spoke. Although it has offered important insights into the spatialisation of world politics, critical geopolitics has struggled to adapt to new times because of two problems which have plagued it from the start: an undertheorised notion of critique and tensions between narrow and broad conceptions of geopolitics. What remains, I argue, is an anti-dogmatic, geographically informed, ideationally interested ethos to political geography which seeks out audiences beyond the academy.
This commentary first considers how Chan and Ho’s call for an analysis of friendship and for the productive nature of ‘caring with’ would have enhanced my previous work with Zambian mining unionists. It reflects on times when, without a literature on friendship, I possibly over-attributed unionists’ amity and their ‘caring with’ to their tactical self-interest. After this, I use the experiences of these unionists to tease out the relationship between ‘friendship’ and ‘caring with’. I argue that across many cultures, and certainly among Zambian miners, there exists a difference between the pleasure of spending time with others, and a deeper set of obligations, entitlements and resource sharing, with the latter constituting a ‘deep friendship’.
In this commentary, I reflect on the contribution to the geographies of the seasons by Kaya Barry by outlining a few place-based and season-based first-person reflections on the colonial legacy of the Gregorian calendar and the Eurocentric idea of the four seasons. Writing from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada and in particular writing outdoors in public spaces, I reflect on colonial mobilities, tourist mobilities, colonial seasonal models, and I contrast these dynamics with Indigenous knowledge on months and seasons as place-based relational practices.
This commentary engages Thomas Cowan's ‘Geographies of Subsumption’ through research on formalizing municipal solid waste infrastructures in India. While corroborating many of the analytical gains of anti-stagist readings of capitalist subsumption, it argues that combinatorialist approaches also carry risks. Specifically, if, in the move away from telos, they abandon conceptions of capitalist tendency and thereby flatten capitalist temporality into an ontologized field of endlessly recombining differences. Serving as both companion and counterpoint to Cowan, the commentary advances a more dialectical and historical conception of subsumption as a differentiating, directional, and contradictory process of capitalist transformation.
The commentary welcomes Chan and Ho's critique of the directional focus of research on care and neglect of “mutuality.” It suggests future research possibilities drawing on two empirical studies that have sought to complicate the dyadic care/cared for relationship. The ideas of “dynamic fluidity in carer/cared for roles”; a “reciprocal web of care”; and “existential security” are discussed. The commentary also points to the work of Power on caring-with and suggests the possibility of using the concept of “care infrastructures” to set future research within a broader socio-economic context.
Cowan's heterodox approach to capitalist subsumption offers a framework for understanding how capital governs social relations beyond the labour process. This commentary extends that framework to argue that water utilities exemplify how capital formalizes social reproduction through billing regimes that tie access to the capacity to pay. Water shutoffs and debt mechanisms demonstrate hybrid subsumption operating in practice, while water scarcity emerges as politically produced, yet presented as natural, requiring price-based rationing that naturalizes inequality. A vignette of municipal cost-recovery demonstrates how these mechanisms converge to govern survival itself.
This commentary responds to the framing of a negative ontology of space that Özge Can Doğmuş develops in relation to the worldly receding of watery spaces. Building on the concept of finitude in this article, I offer reflections on how conceptualisations of the negative can engage more deeply with geographies of time. I extend Doğmuş' call for a more temporal geography of negativity that engages with the intensities of time that are felt and embodied. In proposing a more reflexive approach towards the nature of negative existence, I conclude by advocating for a deeper account of emotional geographies within theorisations of the negative.
This essay considers the political potential of informality as a force for challenging authoritarianism and creating more equal and democratic outcomes. Building on Bandauko's concept of ‘subaltern surveillance,’ this essay demonstrates how informal actors leverage their marginalized position and bottom-up efforts to confront state repression and claim the right to the city. Grassroots initiatives are inextricably linked to ‘autogestion’ – the radical self-management of socio-spatial production in pursuit of democracy and popular sovereignty. Because informality can constitute the praxis of autogestion, its global prevalence suggests an unrealized potential as a political project in research and practice. Drawing on emerging literature on political informality , I aim to re-energize scholarship within and beyond human and urban geography, reflecting the urgency of informality as a continuing force in global spatial transformation.
This commentary responds to Özge Can Doğmuş's account of vanishing lakes and the negative ontology of space. It argues that the article's powerful treatment of absence, withdrawal, and finitude can be extended by bringing negative ontology into conversation with ontolocational politics and elemental thinking. Ontolocational politics, my term, specifies how exposure to finitude is patterned across place, infrastructure, social position, and the life course. Elemental thinking, in turn, complicates the language of loss by situating lakes within wider circulations of water, air, earth, dust, salinity, and sediment. From this perspective, disappearance is not only world-loss but the uneven relocation of elemental conditions of life. The commentary therefore affirms Doğmuş's central provocation while arguing that absence must be understood as situated, redistributed, and materially consequential. That argument leads to the conclusion that an elemental ontolocational geography can sharpen debates about care, justice, evidence, and responsibility in a finite world.
Doğmuş's article on Vanishing Lakes offers a provocative and timely intervention in human geography and its related fields by looking at vanishing lakes and analysing their multiple conceptualisations of care, anxiety, loss, disappearance, and haunting. This commentary builds on Doğmuş's intervention, firstly, by engaging with the many layers of meanings entangled in the powerful and potential conceptualisation of vanishing lakes as ‘the undoing of worlds’ focusing on water's materialities. Secondly, by questioning its Heidegger's centrality and the use of Western thought to think with decolonial and feminist epistemologies. Finally, it claims for engaging with water materialities for the politics of unlearning.
This commentary discusses Ross Beveridge, Roger Keil and Maryam Lashkari's theoretical development of ‘crisis urbanism’ that they regard as a concept, method and process. By drawing from diverse literature, they present a comprehensive theorisation that calls for understanding the poly- and permacrisis that are linked with the urban way of life. In this commentary, I raise questions about taking the abstraction of ‘crisis urbanism’ to different urban contexts where global crises unfold in place-specific ways. I, furthermore, emphasize how the crisis talk is inseparable from other dominant discourses of hope, care and radicality that diversify political agencies in cities today.
This commentary responds to Dariusz Wójcik's and William Bratton's call for a rethink of the field of financial geography. It argues that ‘financialisation’ is not a theory, as they argue, but a process requiring theorisation, and raises some caveats in relation to their plea for a closer engagement with economists and more quantitative analysis. It contends that detailed case-oriented research, involving contextualised in-depth narrative analysis, is ultimately necessary for ‘explanatory adequacy’.
This commentary engages with formulation of climate geopoetics and the subsequent forum by placing these debates in dialogue with the activities of the Poetry Institute of China (PIC). While geopoetics has been framed as an experimental and critical practice that resists epistemic mastery and foregrounds affective, situated forms of knowing, the PIC offers a contrasting model in which poetry is mobilised within frameworks of environmental governance. Drawing on examples of national poetry campaigns, public programmes, and spatial initiatives, the commentary examines how geopoetic practice is reshaped when embedded in policy-driven contexts. It argues that geopoetics should be understood as a plural and context-dependent field, capable of operating both as a site of critique and as an instrument of communication and mobilisation. In doing so, it highlights the need to attend to the political and institutional conditions under which creative practices engage climate change.
The question of how financial geographers should be engaging with economics proper (if at all) is at the heart of Wójcik and Bratton's thought-provoking article. In this commentary, I argue for increased scholarly engagement with the archipelago of heterodox economic studies and for examining financial economics as an increasingly important ideological project that actively shapes modern-day financial policies and regulations. I further suggest that analyses of power should continue to lie at the heart of financial geographies.
This Author's Reply responds to six commentaries on ‘The ontology of absence: Vanishing lakes, care, and the limits of human geography’. Rather than defending absence as a fixed concept, it treats the forum as an invitation to reconsider how geographical thought should approach vanishing worlds. The reply argues that absence has never been synonymous with nothingness. Water may disappear as lake while persisting as sediment, toxicity, dust, memory, conflict, obligation, and altered relation. Engaging the commentaries’ concerns with water materialities, elemental exposure, hydrosocial struggle, terricide, ontological plurality, and temporal intensity, the reply reframes vanishing as a condition that discloses not only finitude, but also the limits of the conceptual languages through which finitude is named. It develops unlearning as a loosening of inherited conceptual authority rather than a pursuit of epistemic purity and proposes restraint as an ethical discipline for geographical theory. Care, in this account, is not restoration, management or possession, but a mode of attentiveness to worlds that exceed our descriptions. The reply concludes that vanishing worlds require forms of thought that care without possession and forms of care that refuse mastery.
