Promotional videos are a key site through which cellular agriculture (CellAg) companies present cultured meat as a response to food system and environmental crises. Yet research on promissory narratives around alternative proteins has focused mainly on textual and news media, leaving the audio-visual organization of these promises underexplored. This paper analyses 41 promotional videos produced by CellAg companies and asks how they translate cellular-level bio-technological processes and planetary-scale crises into persuasive narratives of sustainable protein futures. Using qualitative multi-modal coding, we identify six recurring narrative patterns through which videos link laboratory scenes, crisis imagery, consumer spaces, and ethical appeals. Interpreting these patterns through Latour's concept of translation, we show that the videos do more than describe a technology: they align scientific expertise, future-oriented promises, and affective attachments in ways that render CellAg intelligible and desirable to non-expert publics. We argue that these promotional videos function as translational infrastructures that help companies frame cultured meat as a credible, investable, and morally desirable component of future protein production. In doing so, this paper contributes to research on promissory narratives, multi-modal communication, and the politics of emerging food technologies.
The Songon sub-prefecture is now being overtaken by the urbanisation of the city of Abidjan. It is against this backdrop that the Ivorian government has entered into commitments with the customary landowners of the village of Songon-Kassemblé to transfer 439 ha of land. However, irregularities in the payment of compensation have led customary landowners to challenge the authority of the State through popular protests, giving them a leading role in negotiations related to land appropriation issues. One of the specificities of this case study lies in the modification of the interplay of actors during the development process of this urban fringe.
Attacks on academic freedom target mainly critical scholarship: academics who challenge, criticize and debate power relations and inequality lack confidence, not only in authoritarian countries but also in democracies such as Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Critical research in the fields of climate change, postcolonial studies and gender equality is increasingly under fire in public debates. These are the scientific fields in which many geographers do research and teach. With the authoritarian turnaround in many countries, neoliberal trends in research funding and the rising influence of online media activists on political decisions, attacks on researchers and research areas have taken on a new quality. In order to fight for academic freedom, it is important to understand the principles of and threats against freedom of expression, freedom of speech, university autonomy and academic freedom clearly. Restrictions of these freedoms have different consequences in the areas of teaching, university self-administration, research acknowledgement and the acquisition of third-party funding. This paper highlights the challenges and proposes measures to safeguard academic freedom for critical geography.
Abstract. This article presents an edited transcript of a roundtable discussion originally held at the conference Feminist Perspectives on the Platformisation of Care Work in European Cities at the Europa-Universität Flensburg in 2025, in which the panellists discuss the ways in which a feminist perspective might help to better understand digital platform labour in Europe, current developments in feminist theorising on platform labour and new concerns arising for research and practice. The point of departure is the question of how a feminist perspective informs each scholar's research on platform labour. It continues by considering the feminised sectors of platform labour, intersectional inequalities and gendered labour market dynamics, while also being attentive to the lens of social reproduction and the transversal links between waged and unwaged labour within and outside of the household. To conclude, participants address possibilities for transforming exploitative practices and reflect on directions for future research.
Abstract. In the wake of increasing geopolitical tensions and the disruption of supply chains, the EU has asked member states to develop a National Protein Strategy (NPS). This paper investigates the National Protein Strategy of the Netherlands, an important producer and global exporter of meat and dairy products that largely relies on the import of plant-based proteins from across the globe. The paper analyses the promissory narratives of protein futures as outlined in the NPS. It shows that the strategy is riddled with techno-optimist narratives that are promising to resolve the strategic deficit of proteins through a combination of increased legume production, innovative novel proteins, a scale leap in insect farming, and the optimization of waste flows. Only a surprisingly small role is reserved for a protein transition towards more plant-based consumption. A reduction in the production of meat and dairy for export is completely ignored. The paper concludes that the NPS primarily sustains and stabilizes the existing intensive livestock regime rather than transforming it.
Public libraries in cities offer a variety of uses. They are places where people with different interests must explore and negotiate their being together. Although these encounters have the potential to be conflictual, visitors, librarians and external representations of many libraries describe these places as urban spaces characterised by low conflict and smooth interaction. They associate this public infrastructure with idealised notions of togetherness, where acceptance of different behaviours, self-control, and a sense of obligation to maintain and shape these shared urban spaces are interwoven, enabling a sense of togetherness. This paper focuses on the specific nature of this sociality. Based on two independent library research projects conducted in Bremen, Germany, and Vienna, Austria, we demonstrate how community emerges as an idea and a sense of togetherness from distributed care practices that revolve around following, transgressing and enforcing rules and thus around a „library etiquette“.
The literature on ontological security has considerably improved our understanding of how crises, disruptions, and their perceptions lead to subjective insecurities or anxieties. In particular, it has illuminated how individuals cope with the insecurities of late modernity by searching for stabilizing anchors, such as routines and biographical continuity. While existing research on ontological security has largely examined narrative strategies and identity constructions, this article shifts the focus onto active, embodied, and situated practice. Based on a qualitative case study of the Schäferlauf – a biannual traditional festival in Bad Urach, Germany – we show how heritage practices can function as stabilizing anchors in times of crisis. Through qualitative fieldwork including interviews and photograph elicitation, we analyse how the festival enables individuals to anchor their identities through embodied and place-based practices, such as wearing traditional costumes and participating in preparations. These practices generate a sense of continuity in personal biographies, and reinforce social ties and place identity. This study provides new directions for research on festivals as sites of social and cultural stability and continuity, while also laying the groundwork for further research into ontological security as an embodied and situated practice.
This article underlines how cemeteries, despite being designed and managed as silent spaces, have recently started to see their soundscapes become increasingly entangled with the surrounding urban noise. I propose an analysis of the soundscape produced by local cemetery rules and regulations from the Lyon metropolitan area (France) through the lenses of legal geography before contrasting their normative ambitions with observed noise data. I then discuss those results' meaning through reference to H. Lefebvre's Right to the city (1968) and C. Chivallon's definition of the “in-human” (2023). The dead, as a socially produced category of people or things who or which, despite being granted a legal status that should shield them from degradation, lack the ability to leverage legal resources and are consequently deprived of their right to the city. While local rules and regulations aim to produce a silent soundscape, actual noise data show that contemporary urban cemeteries, because of their geographical locations within the metropolis, are noisier than expected.
This article introduces the deactivation network approach (DNA) to analyse conflicts in fossil fuel infrastructures as relational struggles between practices of continuity/legitimation and practices of destabilisation/disruption. The DNA is applied to Enel's power plants in Civitavecchia (Italy) across two contentious conversion cycles: an oil-to-coal project (2000–2010, realised) and a proposed coal-to-gas project (2018–2023, halted). Using an intentionally asymmetrical design, the study maps only the deactivation network and treats the fossil-support network as a structuring context shaping political opportunity structures. Event-based social network analysis, triangulated with interviews, documentary sources, and digital ethnography, compares changes in network composition, connectivity, and tie intensity across the two periods. Results show that mobilisation and activist cohesion alone did not produce disruption. Deactivation became effective when activists' destabilisation was brokered into institutional and labour arenas, enabling administrative and political interference with infrastructural continuity.
This article focuses on the experience of loss in urban spaces in late modernity, taking as a graphic example the construction of an urban highway and its consequences in a densely populated and geographically challenging area in western Germany. This article argues that the shift in social narratives during the transition from modern to late-modern society had a direct impact on the perception of loss caused by previously autocratic urban planning and, thus, also had a direct influence on urban construction projects in times “after the boom” of the 1960s and the early 1970s.
This article examines the experiences of pregnant asylum seekers and mothers with newborn babies living in federal asylum camps in Switzerland. We argue that the carceral nature of these camps affects women's reproductive lives through logics of fragmentation: a fragmented institutional system, insufficient spatial infrastructures within the camps, and a spatio-temporal fragmentation through constant transfers. However, some asylum-seeking women and their “allies” actively navigate and resist this fragmentation by seeking spaces of relief, thereby challenging the carceral nature of the asylum system. By combining carceral geographies with interdisciplinary studies of refugees' reproductive health, we provide a more nuanced understanding of the impact of the carceral system on reproductive lives.
Cellular agriculture (CellAg) emerges as a technology aiming to address critical issues within the food system by offering an alternative to conventional meat. The dissemination of information about it to non-scientific communities faces challenges regarding the translation of complex technical developments, with the public reliant on the coverage from media outlets. We developed a collaborative approach to contribute to this discussion, focusing on four cases: Brazil, India, Australia, and Germany. Newspapers from these countries were analyzed using a qualitative content analysis and a subsequent joint interpretation. A major finding was the striking similarity in the main topics covered by the media in the studied countries. In addition, a large proportion of newspaper articles adopted a positive and market-oriented perspective. Germany stands out for its emphasis on research and development news. Australia is characterized by its focus on market and consumption elements. India is notable for its prioritization of food security. Brazil highlights market factors and brings to light concerns about market barriers. The results deserve further studies as they reveal that societies across geographical areas are receiving mostly superficial positive news instead of perspectives with higher-quality analyses of all impacts that may occur.
This paper explores how marginal urbanities are produced, contested, and dismantled through grounded processes of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. While Latin American urban studies have extensively analysed structural territorial struggles, the lived everyday processes through which low-income individuals are (re)appropriating, defending, and losing territory remain poorly understood. Retracing the history of Terra de Deus, a self-built marginal urban settlement located within São Paulo's ecological peripheries, this study draws on Latin American traditions of situated oral history to re-centre residents' testimonies and expose what is at stake under lived (de/re)territorialization struggles. Based on 3 years of fieldwork (2022–2024) – including community workshops, in-depth interviews, and participatory cartography – this paper introduces the concept of grounded relationalities as the fragile socio-ecological relations emerging and conditioning the (de/re)territorialization process. This study exposes how grounded relationalities represent the emerging terrain on which marginalized communities dispute territorial appropriation and longevity.
The article analyses the production of spatialised communities in the Sants district of Barcelona from a historical-materialist perspective. For the analysis, (post-)operaist approaches to the social factory and class composition are expanded to include the concept of modes of relationships (Beziehungsweisen). The aim is to contribute a more theoretical-conceptual perspective on the discussions about spatialised communities. This avoids an a priori positing of communities as fixed entities, but instead places their contested production at the centre of the analysis. The case study outlines how rising rents, displacement and forced evictions threaten existing social structures, while at the same time new spatialised communities are produced in struggles against neoliberal urban development. In Sants, these communities are characterized by progressiveness, collectivity, and inclusivity, setting themselves apart from hegemonic capitalist processes. The composition of these struggles reflects an international, heavily feminized, and precarious working class. This leads to separations and new entanglements along the modes of relationships such as exchange value and use value or individualisation and collectivity.
This paper examines how military recruitment intersects with biopolitical governance and the forging of particular subjectivities for young people as subjects of (in)security. It considers young people's enrolment in the politics of killing and letting die as a form of necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003, 2019) that is enabled by generational injustice and the complex positioning of children and youth as political subjects within liberal governmentalities. It is shown that closer attention to the interrelations between sovereignty, discipline, and government is needed, considering also questions of authority, lethality, and coercion, in order to comprehend young people's contradictory subjectivations in and through military logics and practices. Based on the analysis of the three case studies of military recruitment and citizenship in France, Sweden, and Latvia, the paper argues for greater attention to the militarization of young people's lives and to the ethical and generational justice implications of this.
Geological disposal projects rest on the assumption that radioactive waste can be safely managed through its spatio-temporal separation from human life at the surface. This paper examines how a local farmer in the Zürcher Weinland – one of the regions considered for nuclear waste disposal – disrupted this assumption by rendering the radioactive hazard perceptible through a series of landscape interventions. Drawing on interviews, participatory observations, and document analysis, we show how these interventions – banners, barrels, and, most notably, a 30 t protest boulder, the menhir – provoked controversy over humanity's relationship with radioactive waste and its implications for the continuation of rural life. In dialogue with Jacques Rancière's work on aesthetics and politics, we argue that these interventions can unsettle the region's consensual political landscape and reveal how human and non-human actors can emerge as political subjects.
This article explores the evolving role of state development agencies in anchoring climate finance. It suggests that the financialization under the “Wall Street Consensus” results in a repositioning of state development agencies as facilitators of global financial flows. Focusing on Swiss-led development projects in Rajkot, a secondary city in India, the study examines how these initiatives locally “anchor” climate finance from different sources and provide technical assistance to translate it into climate-resilient infrastructure projects. The analysis reveals how Swiss development agencies shape urban climate responses in India while advancing Switzerland's position as a neutral intermediary and securing forward-looking interests in emerging climate markets. Applying conceptual perspectives on contemporary state capitalism, climate urbanism, and the financialization of development to empirical findings from Swiss development projects in Rajkot, this article pursues three objectives: (a) to investigate the facilitating role assumed by Swiss development agencies for climate-resilient interventions in Rajkot, (b) to identify how state-capitalist interests shape these projects, and (c) to enhance the understanding of how national development institutions adapt to the uneven landscape of global climate finance. It argues that Swiss development projects function as state–capital hybrids that advance national interests through ostensibly neutral technical assistance, illustrating how the strategic channelling of climate finance can serve anticipatory marketization in the Global South.
