The article proposes a posthumanist, site-led mode of reasoning in which geological, ecological, climatic, and human forces participate in shaping artistic practice. It draws on Quarry Sonnets, a nine-day, practice-led field project at the Vale de Meios limestone quarry in Portugal's Serras de Aire e Candeeiros Natural Park in late November 2022, involving forty-five participants from six European art schools. Treating art practice as a way of knowing, the project convened open, revisable ways of working-walking, listening, iterative making, and collective reflection-so that the quarry's tempos, weather, fossils, and working traces could co-author inquiry. Methodologies were held lightly and adjusted in practice, with decisions led by what the site made possible on a given day rather than preset outcomes. Two orienting commitments-attunement and composting knowledge-held diverse practices and partial understandings in contact without forcing consensus. The article's contribution is to foreground artistic practice as a way of organizing environmental research by expanding who participates and what counts as evidence, while refusing closure into templates, solutions, or toolkits. In this register, research proceeds with the quarry and its more-than-human relations as a co-author that sets pace and constraint, keeping political and ecological questions active without resolving them in advance.
Latife Tekin's Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills marks a pioneering intervention by bringing the peripheral slum settlements to the forefront of urban discourse. Establishing a distinctive subgenre of "shantytown fiction" situated in a milieu of garbage, the text reorients representations towards literary urban studies. This article examines Berji Kristin through the framework of Mike Davis's "slum ecology" to uncover the mechanisms of "necropolitics" (Achille Mbembe) as the underpinning necropower structure. Engaging with waste critique to explore the symbolic ramifications of waste in perpetuating urban exclusion of informal settlers, and by employing Timothy Morton's notion of "hyperobjects," the study investigates the agential materiality of waste and its lethal entanglement with the precarious lives of the squatters in the novel. Through close reading, the article shows how waste operates as an amorphous entity of the social "Othering" by examining the intersection of occupation, location, and the socio-political accumulation of "waste."
This article examines the affective and spatial dynamics of the Museum of Broken Relationships (MOBR) in Zagreb, Croatia, through the conceptual lenses of resonance, theatricality, and assemblage. The MOBR curates personal objects donated by individuals to commemorate the end of intimate relationships. Through a multisensory and carefully staged exhibition design, the museum fosters emotionally charged encounters between visitors, objects, and narratives. Drawing on affect theory, critical geographies, and the ethics of care, this article explores how the MOBR becomes a space where absence is made present, and where spectators are invited to engage in a form of affective co-witnessing. The concepts of resonance and theatricality are deployed to analyse how visitors are moved-not necessarily through shared experience, but through a desire to connect, to "feel-with" the stories of strangers.
What do music and songs about volcanic eruptions reveal through their geographical and emotional content? This article explores the emotional geographies and the generative experience of volcanic eruptions through place-based specific analysis of song lyrics. We argue that, along with music's sensory nature, lyrics constitute a geopoetic and spatial practice, encompassing micropolitical, textual, and contextual dimensions of lived experiences. Their interpretation can contribute to spatial knowledge of eruptions, situated emotions, and the encodings of disaster afterlives. Through ethnographic and thematic analysis of song lyrics about ten volcanoes, we trace emotional geographies that span from grief to hope, with narratives that recall sensitive moments of what was lost, loved, yearned for, and reclaimed, framing eruptions as more than geological events. Crucially, the lyrics map and document a more-than-human healing process, following rupture, negotiation, and reconciliation with a volcano. Ultimately, the article probes the potential of songs as geo-located artifacts for affective storytelling, through close readings of the intimate interplay between geology, place and emotion, and its role - often overlooked - in shaping eruption experience.
In this paper we use graphic-novel style illustrations of early twentieth century American mothers' writings to visualize the stories of an often-overlooked population. Inspired by others' weavings of comics and geography, we bring together artistic, historical, and critical geographic methods to share and interpret handwritten letters sent to the U.S. Children's Bureau in the 1910s and 1920s. These letters serve as primary sources for our comics, which in turn illuminate the intersections of patriarchy, parenting, and place. Joining a growing body of work, we find comics to be appealing for critical historical geographies through their power to reveal and represent emotions and embodiment, positionality and place, and the (im)mobilities of women at the time.
Recent advancements in mapping technologies have prompted researchers to examine the shifting design traditions embedded within contemporary digital mapping software and platforms. This raises central questions: has digital mapping benefited every mapmaking tradition? If not, which traditions are marginalized? In this article, we present two cases that demonstrate the marginalization of traditional typographic labelling techniques in Arabic, Persian, and Chinese cartography, illustrating both the technical shortcomings and epistemic ruptures associated with these exclusions. We conclude by advocating for a more inclusive design paradigm-one that intentionally centers non-Latin scripts and incorporates cartographic designs and workflows from non-Western cultures, thereby actively promoting cultural diversity in the field of digital mapping.
This article explores the integration experiences of Kosovo Albanian temporary labor migrants in Germany and Switzerland, who initially arrived under the Gastarbeiter program, and their descendants who navigated shifting migration dynamics, that is the transformations on legal status, labor regimes, and political contexts that have reshaped pattern of mobility, settlement, and belonging from the socialist Yugoslav period to post-independence Kosovo. While earlier research has examined labor market participation and policy, few studies have traced how temporary migration evolves into long-term settlement and identity change across generations. Drawing on 23 biographical interviews conducted between 2014 and 2016, this study focuses on language learning, employment, and identity negotiation. First-generation migrants prioritized economic goals and maintained transnational ties, often delaying integration. Their children, 1.5 and second-generation migrants, followed distinct paths shaped by early schooling, social networks, and dual cultural affiliations. The study also reflects on the researcher's shared background and positionality, emphasizing the co-construction of knowledge through narrative. Findings highlight the complex, non-linear nature of integration and contribute to current debates on inclusive integration frameworks and the lasting legacies of so-called temporary migration.
In Spring 2025 a collective of artists, scholars, poets, curators, and designers exhibited A Smile Split by the Stars, which closely engaged a single poem, nourbeSe philip's "Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones." Working with philip and her archival materials, the installation sought to spatialize the poem by staging a series of multi-textured, multi-sensorial, and audio-visual compositions. This essay thus offers its own meditation on this experience through lessons learned about black feminist placemaking, drawing attention to a constellation of alternative imaginative and geographic practices of freedom, which in turn offer brief moments of reprieve, rebellion, and respatialization. Across seven interrelated sections, we reflect on how our curatorial process experimented with multidisciplinary and collaborative methodologies for engaging black women's creative texts beyond extractive scholarly conventions, while remaining attentive to institutional limits.
This research paper examines the relationship between tourism gentrification and the transformation of urban areas, with a focus on the role of fa & ccedil;ade colors in this process. The study explores fa & ccedil;ade color as a crucial component of a changing sensorial landscape that accompanies the cleanup and renewal of fa & ccedil;ades and streets for the purpose of tourism investment. It contrasts the loss of heritage and community with the tourism marketing of a historic neighborhood exemplified by new fa & ccedil;ade colors, which affects the community's affective bond with their neighborhood. Drawing on a case study of Mouraria in Lisbon, this paper employs walking interviews to gain a deeper understanding of its changing sensorial landscape and loss of authenticity. The findings show that in touristifying neighborhoods fa & ccedil;ade color becomes a socio-spatial marker of exclusion, triggering place memory and belonging and is often ignored as a cultural asset in favor of color schemes that stand out to attract tourism.
Sanborn map atlases, originally created for fire insurance assessments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, provide detailed insights into building characteristics and urban infrastructure. Despite their obsolescence as insurance tools by the 1950s, these maps have found new relevance in several academic fields, including urban planning and digital humanities, where they can support a variety of inquiries or community engagement. Using the example of Duluth, Minnesota, this paper outlines the technical processes involved in creating a web-based map tile service from scans of Sanborn map sheets, detailing the steps of acquiring, georeferencing, stitching, and tiling/publishing the scanned images. It also addresses the challenges of this labor-intensive endeavor, considering the potential of automation and crowdsourcing manage the burden, and concluding that better recognition of this type of scholarly practices is needed in academia.
This article is a collaborative piece, written between a group of geographers and artists. Together, we explore an "ad-hoc archive" of extraordinary and everyday objects associated with reproduction, broadly conceived. Some objects are directly or indirectly aimed at enhancing reproductive health or well-being, others at arresting or enhancing fertility, others still at expanding notions of reproduction beyond the genetic or biological. Objects are technological and "organic," and drawn from the past, present or even the speculative futures of reproduction. Together, the piece intends to incite critical reflection on histories of design and manufacturing and inequities of access. It hopes also, through participatory use of objects, to start to harness the lively powers of these "implosions," to shape and reshape what it means to be reproductive at particular places and times.
This article explores how volcanoes are represented as relational and affective entities in Poema de Chile by Gabriela Mistral, focusing on the poems "Volc & aacute;n de Villarrica" and "Volc & aacute;n Osorno." Combining literary analysis with insights from volcanology, we examine how poetic language generates a form of spatial knowledge that entangles geological processes with cultural meaning. Through close readings, we trace how volcanoes are rendered as living presences that shape and are shaped by human and more-than-human relationships. Rather than framing volcanic landscapes as passive or scientific objects, Mistral's poetry renders them as sites of coexistence, tension, and emotional attachment. The article contributes to geohumanities by foregrounding poetic language as a medium through which landscapes are sensed, inhabited, and storied, revealing how cultural texts can offer complex epistemologies of place grounded in relational ontology.
Geographic information systems (GIS) offer students powerful tools to visualize and explore narrative spaces. While GIS use is well established in geography and STEM courses, its pedagogical potential in literary studies remains underexplored, particularly in supporting students' ability to navigate the tensions between real and imagined spaces within narratives. This study explores how integrating a spatial lens using Google Earth facilitates student engagement with both measurable and imaginative dimensions in literary works. Study participants completed a qualitative survey reflecting on their experiences using Google Earth while reading Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Students suggested that visualizing the narrative's spatial references revealed connections between setting and thematic meaning, sharpening their interpretations. Findings also suggest that GIS activities can enhance close reading, helping students navigate and transform tensions between real and imagined spaces into opportunities for curiosity, critical thinking, and deeper interpretive engagement.
Between 1967 and 1996 Yi-Fu Tuan wrote letters to his sister Sze-Fu in Taipei. Sze-Fu kept these letters and on her death in 2003, the letters were returned. He included these letters in his self-published booklet Who Am I? A Sequel (2020). Together they reveal something of what it was like to be Yi-Fu Tuan in the years he became one of geography's best-known scholars. Here, I use fragments of these letters to create poetic renditions of Tuan's professional and personal preoccupations in these important years of his career. The fragments are themed around aphoristic wisdom, thoughts of home and travel, and the processes of aging and mortality. The poems contribute to the literature on biography and geographic thought as well as the creative turn within the geohumanities-both literatures that Tuan had an important role in inspiring.
Recent studies on urban street (re)naming practices have highlighted the importance of political power when changes occur from one political regime to another. However, longitudinal studies on different political power changes and their relationship to spatial ethnolinguistic contacts that are unfolding in the urban landscape have been little researched. By using a novel geohumanities methodology based on GIS mapping of all major maps published from the 1900s to the present time, in this study, we are interested in understanding how the changes of street naming have been reflected in the city of Timisoara, Romania in the last century and where and why some spatial ethnolinguistic contacts are visible in the public space. The findings indicate that street renaming and the long-time maintenance of some street names depend not only on the political power but also on preserving memories for certain local ethnic names. Findings also highlight that spatial ethnolinguistic contacts of street names are mainly preserved in central areas of the city. Therefore, political memory of past ethnic leaders is still inscribed in the city-text of Timisoara. Our results are important as Timisoara's street renaming in the last century could stand as a model of multiethnic survival names (i.e., names of German origin) as well as a dense spatial ethnolinguistic contact of some street names, given that some ethnic minorities are not so well reflected today in the ethnic structure of the city.
Using Urban Renewal in the 1960's, Athens-Clarke County and the University System of Georgia (USG) destroyed Linnentown-a thriving Black neighborhood-and replaced it with luxury student dorms. Decades later, the authors here were brought together, along with neighborhood descendants and our local community, Athens, Georgia in the U.S., to design a memorial honoring Linnentown. Drawing on socially engaged art (SEA), Black Geographies, and emergence, we designed a participatory mosaic to be built on the site of the former neighborhood. However, USG blocked the project, reflecting the stubborn challenges of recognition and repair. In response, we created two temporary "living" mosaics built and disassembled by the community to work towards recognition and redress of anti-Black violence. We find that SEA allowed (1) a process for remembering and telling stories of Black geographies, (2) a shared space for embodied reflection and ritual, and (3) a fluid and imaginative space for engaging politically and staying with the trouble.
