In Kante, a coal mining village in Tajikistan, villagers use local idioms of honour/shame, variably found in Muslim and Central Asian societies' repertoires, to judge women miners' work. In this article, I draw on the lived experiences of these women informal coal miners to unearth what I conceptualise as the gendered geographies of shame in this extractive landscape. I do so by tracing the connections between shame as a gendered/ing discourse, a social practice and embodied emotion that produces spaces, places and bodies, and notions of agency as developed by Muslim feminist scholars. The article draws on three ethnographic vignettes of women miners and the voices of other villagers to show that economic/environmental pressures drive women into spaces of shame organised around a hierarchy of shame, reflecting diverse intersectional gendered positions and embodied labours in this extractive landscape. Women miners, however, are not passive victims, but also transcend shame, exhibiting a nuanced form of agency, which contrasts with liberal notions of freedom/emancipation, and rather operates as a discreet and embodied capacity for action within structures of subordination (Mahmood 2011). Spaces of shame are also ambivalent and can become productive spaces where people saw the seeds for the transformation of gender norms. By developing these gendered geographies of shame, this article adds to our understanding of the complex intersectional dynamics in emerging extractive landscapes while grounding theorisations of Muslim women's agency to a Central Asian context where practices of shame largely regulate social life.
Disciplines associated with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics enjoy considerable epistemic privilege and it remains quite common today for them to be regarded as neutral and objective knowledge. The project of revealing the situatedness of all scientific knowledge has been advanced by various feminist approaches and critical epistemologies. However, little attention has been paid to the case of engineering, and to the role played by how university spaces are inhabited or how gender performance is embodied in the places where knowledge experiences take place. This research aims to illuminate Chilean engineering students' experiences according to their gender identity and corporeality within the spaces where epistemic practices occur, such as classrooms and libraries. By using Relief Maps tool we explore how engineering students experience the somatic norm in classrooms and libraries on Chilean university campuses, and how gender relations, spatiality, corporeality, and knowledge experiences are mutually constituted. The study's findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how spatial and bodily dynamics impact the knowledge experiences and exclusion in these contexts, proposing new ways to advance gender studies in STEM by analyzing the interactions between body, space, and gender.
Mentoring in the academy is a laudable exercise, but it continues to be shaped by powerful institutional infrastructures of inherited, white, patriarchal privilege. Drawing on interviews that explore mentoring experiences with academic women from three South Australian universities, this article documents the discursive and embodied spaces of mentoring programs and relationships that entrap, do violence to, and enable flourishing to occur. Building on feminist and queer scholarship that problematises mentoring programs within academia, we position space and its gendered relations as central to mentoring experiences; detailing the material, discursive, metaphorical and emotional entanglements that frame both dominant mentoring practices and possibilities for alternative feminist forms of mentoring. As a form of creative disruption Jack Halberstam's architectural concept of 'unworlding' underpins our analysis, examining spaces where resilience and resistance thrive, where gendered bodies reclaim space and visibility, and alternative ways of doing and being can flourish. Within these broadened spaces, we reimagine feminist mentoring as a means of creation, disruption and protest.
For two decades, researchers in the field of 'gender divisions of domestic labour' have attended to diversity by studying families with a range of ethnic and racial identities, sexualities, genders (beyond binaries), marital and socioeconomic statuses, and cultures. But one important facet of diversity insufficiently incorporated into much of this research is place, and more specifically, the size, density, and remoteness of the communities in which households are located. Drawing on interviews with eleven families in rural, remote, and small-town places across Canada, in the context of a larger study including families from urban areas, we foreground place in three arguments. First, 'distance-to-density' has a direct impact on how families plan and divide paid and unpaid work, the 'mental load' of accessing services and amenities, and how households and communities coordinate and carry out childcare. Second, rural communities' lower population density in some cases means more and different kinds of work - a phenomenon we call 'the extra work of extra space' - but also more freedom for some children. Finally, we show how the subjective dimensions of rurality - the ideas that rural places are safer, closer to nature, and more neighbourly - shape household care/work relations and experiences. Attending to rurality's objective measures and subjective interpretations underscores the importance of understanding how all kinds of community characteristics, including urban ones, affect the logic, negotiations, strategies, meanings, and supports underpinning 'who does what' in households and communities.
Urban parks offer social, health and mobility benefits, yet many women and girls experience them as spaces of unease. Drawing on 67 interviews with women and focus groups with 50 teenage girls in West Yorkshire, UK, this article examines the 'safety work' that structures their park use-avoidance behaviours, pre-emptive strategies and situational tactics-and shows how parks' spatial and affective qualities as 'spaces apart' shape these practices. It illustrates how access to urban parks is often conditional, secured through routinised, invisible safety work that imposes mental and practical burdens, limits autonomy and constrains full use. We identify three interrelated forms of safety work: the work of avoiding parks, encompassing behaviours that prevent use; the work to access parks, involving pre-emptive strategies such as planning routes, adjusting timings and seeking companions; and the work in parks, including situational tactics such as monitoring surroundings, altering pace or changing direction. We argue that the benefits of parks are frequently accessible only through sustained safety work, revealing urban parks as gendered landscapes shaped by the social threat of male violence and by spatial and temporal constraints embedded in their design and governance. Policy significance is demonstrated through co-produced Safer Parks guidance embedded in national and international park accreditation and policing initiatives, creating pathways to shift responsibility for safety from individual burden to institutional action. We conclude by outlining design and governance principles and a research agenda for intersectional, co-produced park safety.
This paper examines postcolonial scientific masculinities in India and Ceylon/Sri Lanka1 through a comparative analysis of the lives of Arthur C Clarke and J B S Haldane, two of Britain's most influential science popularisers of the twentieth century, including the correspondence between them. It considers some well-understood tropes of imperial practise such as exploration, adventure and tropicality, alongside more nuanced topics including the vulnerability and mutability of the male body as scientific subject, the moral geographies of science across postcolonial space, and the queering of scientific masculinities. Initially, brief introductions to Clarke and Haldane are provided, including their lifepaths and some of their best-known works. Following a discussion of relevant literature, the paper explores their scientific identities in greater depth, drawing intertextually from archival, biographical and other published accounts. Subsequently, correspondence between the two writers that took place in the 1950s and 1960s are examined. The paper argues that postcolonial space enabled Clarke and Haldane to reconcile their scientific masculinities against hegemonic conceptions, in ways which can inform the geographies of masculinity in the present day.
This article reconceptualises social reproduction in Soviet Georgia through the lens of the geopolitics of care, arguing that care functioned not only as a domain of welfare provision but as a key technology of imperial governance. Drawing on feminist geopolitics, a pluralised Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), and the coloniality of welfare regimes, it examines how the organisation of labour, welfare, and everyday life simultaneously structured gender relations and mediated Georgia's position within the Soviet imperial order. It challenges mainstream SRT's capitalist focus by relocating analysis to a non-capitalist setting where life-making was centrally organised by the state. The study adopts a historical-discursive and interpretive approach, critically engaging secondary sources on Soviet policies, welfare arrangements and history. It develops a scalar analysis across two interlinked relations: women-state and state-empire, showing how socialist care infrastructures expanded women's participation in the labour market while reproducing gendered hierarchies, dependencies, and forms of state control. These contradictions are made visible through moments of resistance, approached as diagnostic sites where tensions between care and control become legible. It concludes by reflecting on how these historical formations continue to shape post-socialist imaginaries of care, dependency, and geopolitical belonging in Georgia today.
This article examines how urban accessibility in Quito's Historic Centre, Ecuador, shapes the everyday possibilities of care for women informal street vendors who work and care simultaneously in public space. Drawing on feminist urban geography and social reproduction theory, this investigation situates accessibility within colonial legacies, patrimonial governance and gendered informal labour regimes. Using a mixed-methods design that integrates network-based isochrones, participatory mapping and space-time visualisation, the study identifies a persistent gap between the formal presence of services and women's lived capacity to access them. Although childcare centres, parks and health facilities exist in central Quito, accessibility is mediated by regulatory precarity, insecurity, time poverty and embodied strain. Women rely on relational and improvised 'shadow care infrastructures' embedded in plazas and neighbourhood networks to sustain care under conditions of surveillance and enforcement. The article advances the notion of effective accessibility to reconceptualise access as an embodied and politically mediated condition rather than a neutral measure of proximity. Care emerges not as a private responsibility but as a spatial claim requiring a reorientation of urban governance toward the material conditions of social reproduction in public space.
The framing of trans/gender experience as a journey with a final destination has become increasingly contested, as gendered becoming extends beyond biomedical notions of linear stages and fixed identity endpoints. In this study we use an expansive notion of 'gender journey' to capture the ways in which urban spaces are perceived and lived as gendered dis/placements for non-binary individuals navigating Lisbon. Drawing on a collaborative, three-phase inquiry that applies walking interviews, we collected personal narratives from three non-binary individuals to explore their embodied urban experiences and their dis/connection with the 'journey' framework. Following a psychogeographical approach, we integrated narrative accounts with geo-spatial data that was analysed through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Walking in the city revealed nonlinear processes of struggle, disorientation and spatial reappropriation, with 'gender journeys' unfolding as recurring encounters with un/familiar places that shaped shifting senses of safety, belonging and self-recognition. These findings point to the continued relevance of the journey framework when understood as an open-ended and situated practice, highlighting the need for further research in more spatially demarcated LGBTQIA+ contexts.
This article introduces the concept of 'agrarian masculinities in displacement' to critically examine how displaced Greek Cypriot men reconfigured patriarchal rural identities following the 1974 mass displacement, amid wider processes of urbanisation and socio-economic transformation. Drawing on ethnographic research and oral history interviews with mostly middle-class men, it explores how masculinities formed within a pre-1974 rural habitus-where land ownership, gendered agricultural labour, and patriarchal lineage structured everyday life-were reinvented through practices that enabled a semblance of post-displacement reconstruction while simultaneously reinforcing conservative gender norms. Unlike existing scholarship on rural or displaced masculinities, this framework interrogates how such continuity not only provides a form of masculine symbolic 'repair' in the aftermath of displacement but also reproduces inequalities by marginalising women's agricultural contributions, sidelining alternative masculinities, and resisting broader social change towards gender equality. The analysis unfolds across three interrelated dimensions: men's determination to acquire farmland despite economic barriers, often enabled by service-sector incomes; the strengthening of kinship ties through intergenerational agrarian labour, which privileges patriarchal male lineage; and the gendered organisation of farming practices that continue to marginalise women. While grounded in Cyprus's history, 'agrarian masculinities in displacement' offers transferable insights into how displacement might intersect with post-colonial and post-displacement socio-economic transformations to sustain patriarchal structures. In doing so, the study advances critical geographies of displacement by questioning the political implications of symbolic 'resilience', highlighting how it may function not only as a resource for recovery but also as a barrier to gender equality and transformation.
The article summarizes the results of research on the presence of women in the memorial landscape of Latvia. Its categories of analysis are the memorial landscape as text, arena, and performance. The frequent changes in political power and systems over the past few centuries have had a significant impact on the memorial landscape. This determines that memorial sites are primarily dedicated to wars, their heroes, politicians, the crimes of totalitarianism, their victims, and resistance. Overall, these memorial sites embody masculine identity in collective memory. Only a few monuments dedicated to women have been erected, most of them located outside the capital. Women are placed in the periphery of the spatial context of the Latvian memorial landscape, and it also describes their secondary role in the collective memory as a commemorative actor. Monuments dedicated to women only rarely become political, social, and cultural arenas and performance sites. A gender imbalance can be observed in Latvia's contemporary memorial landscape.
This study examines how LGBTQ+ individuals from Vietnam's Mekong Delta navigate kinship obligations and emotional geographies when returning to their rural hometowns after urban migration. Drawing on narrative inquiry with twelve participants aged 25-30, the research shows that homecomings are emotionally charged encounters shaped by love, guilt, loyalty, and ambivalence. Participants confronted moral expectations around marriage, reproduction, and land inheritance while developing subtle strategies-selective concealment, humor, and filial performance-to sustain ties without rupture. Situating the analysis within feminist emotional geographies, queer rurality, and narrative identity theory, the study theorizes care-as-surveillance and affective debt as kinship logics that re-scale queer agency from individual assertion to relational maintenance. Rather than portraying rural Vietnam through a deficit lens, the findings foreground partial belonging, quiet resistance, and affective reciprocity as locally situated modes of survival and care. By centring the Mekong Delta as an affective and moral landscape, this Vietnam-based study contributes a Southeast Asian, kinship-centred perspective that nuances and extends Western visibility paradigms-showing how queer belonging is continually re-storied through emotion, duty, and hope within specific moral and familial contexts.
Part of a masculine and patriarchal sacred landscape, most Mongolian mountains are presumed to be inaccessible to women. Yet, the example of Gangaamaa Badamgarav, an elite Mongolian female mountaineer, stands out as an original figure of negotiation, performance, and agency within a world structured by gendered relations to sacred places. Drawing on her story, this paper explores the way Gangaamaa challenges both gendered constructions of the nation and of sacred mountains, offering an original response to mountaineering as a male hegemonic sport. Having scaled many renowned and difficult peaks all over the world in the name of Mongolia and its people, Gangaamaa has become a national asset. Her narrative illustrates how she entered the mountaineering sphere with ease and fluidity, breaking its glass ceiling. Indeed, she forged her own way of doing mountaineering by following a coherent, rigorous and pragmatic 'philosophy of the mountain'. Gangaamaa's unique agency as a mountaineer stems from her personal relationship with mountains, who support, protect and help her. In return, she respects and cares not only for the mountains themselves but also for their people, who are regarded as the mountains' children in Mongolian cosmology. While the conception and practice of mountaineering have excluded both female and non-Western mountaineers from its history and values, the person of Gangaamaa reveals alternative ways of relating to mountains as a climber: a connection that is more-than-human, personal, social and national altogether.
As evidenced by feminist geographies, decisions to make lesbian, gay and bi/pansexual relationships visible are complex, as they involve different space representations and identity practices performed in different contexts. The purpose of this article is to examine the experiences of such couples, in this case, living in gated communities or condominiums in Santiago, Chile. By doing so, it explores whether-and how-the experiences of individuals with greater economic capital differ from those of others in terms of the ways sexual and gender diversity is expressed and negotiated in urban spaces. To achieve this goal, we present the results of 24 cases, wherein life histories were gathered through in-depth interviews with lesbian, gay and bi/pansexual people who live with their partners in seven cities of different sizes in Chile. Through a comparative analysis between couples who live in condominiums and those who do not, we can discuss how differences in economic and cultural capital can produce dissimilar experiences of visibility, compared to those couples studied in upper class neighbourhoods of the Global North. To achieve this goal, we present the results of 24 cases, wherein life histories were gathered through in-depth interviews with lesbian, gay and bi/pansexual people who live with their partners in seven cities of different sizes in Chile. Through a comparative analysis between couples who live in condominiums and those who do not, we can discuss how differences in economic and cultural capital can produce dissimilar experiences of visibility, compared to those couples studied in upper class neighbourhoods of the Global North. What is most relevant in Chile, is lesbian, gay and bi/pansexual couples' capacity to make public spaces 'familiar' to avoid discrimination present in urban public spaces. But in the case of condominiums these personal strategies to privatize public spaces, transforming them into places where equality -and not difference- is the most relevant element of inclusion. Consequently, these couples within gated communities enjoy some sort of 'half-visibility', which still perpetuates different forms of discrimination present in the country.
This paper explores when, where, and how masculinity becomes reflexively foregrounded in people's lives and identities as an ethical question. Focusing on followers of Chinese Christian fundamentalist reformers Watchman Nee (1903-1972) and Witness Lee (1905-1997) in Taiwan and the UK, it examines how gender hierarchies emerge and are subtly contested within this transnational religious movement. The group's theology centres on a collective-feminine experience of worship, depicting the church as the Bride and Christ as the Groom, while simultaneously valorising masculine authority in leadership and family life. Through the story of one follower, Aiguo, and his migration from Taiwan to the UK, I trace how these tensions become apparent through shifting, embodied positionalities. In Taiwan, he encountered church hierarchy viscerally, situated within a male-dominated centre. Migration, however, placed him at a triple remove: geographically marginal, a non-elder, and not the household breadwinner. This dislocation enabled a shift in self-understanding, fostering what I call meta-masculinity - a reflexive, relational masculinity distinct from the group's dominant reactive masculinity. The paper thus demonstrates how the material and embodied shifts migration entails can generate alternative, non-hegemonic masculinities. It highlights the role of embodied marginalisation in producing a meta-level awareness of one's own and other's situated masculinities that is not disempowering but quietly transformative.
The Covid-19 pandemic has been described by geographers as a time of 'pause' and 'reflection' full of possibility for more sustainable relationships to non-human nature. This has been conceptualised as the 'Anthropause' during which an 'anthropause environmentalism' (re)configured human-nature relationships. Using a critical feminist lens, we challenge the notion of a 'paused' pandemic society by analysing the domestic and community foodwork of minority women in Manchester, England living in states of precarity and the volunteers whose improvised solidarities alleviated the burdens of hunger and isolation faced by many. We propose the notion of the 'Anthro-No-Pause' to suggest there was no pause dedicated to more and different connections to non-human nature. Instead, there was a continuing and/or deepening of physical, material and emotional 'vernacular labours' during pandemic lockdown periods. These labours and burdens during Covid-19 must foreground any geographical theorising of the uneven geographical, community and personal experiences of the pandemic.
Despite the global politicization of abortion, there is a paucity of research that examines the geopolitical implications of abortion legislation. In this paper, I explore how abortion acompa & ntilde;antes in Mexico respond to the widening legal access of abortion in Mexico to facilitate abortion care for those now stranded in legally-restricted settings in the United States following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with Mexican abortion advocates, I identify three central themes from the advocates' experiences of navigating the post-Roe landscape: (1) Creeping criminalization; (2) Disrupting transnational power imbalances; and (3) Reimagined care. These findings present a decolonial reimagining of reproductive geopolitics, highlighting how policies enacted in the United States have generated profound effects across the border, as well as how these reproductive geopolitics are reshaped through the knowledge and expertise of Mexican abortion advocates.
Despite decades of reform, housing systems remain ill-equipped to respond to domestic and family violence (DFV), with housing and safety responses fragmented across sectors and policy domains. This conceptual review synthesises peer-reviewed and grey literature across feminist care ethics, housing studies, feminist geography, public health, and DFV to advance the concept of housing as an infrastructure of safety. Through this lens, safety planning is treated as a socio-material practice that both shapes and is shaped by housing as an infrastructure of care. The review maps how an infrastructure of safety can be conceived across micro-, meso-, and macro-geographies, reframing safety as a collective, place-based practice grounded in housing provision. The review also proposes a series of propositions to support stronger coordination across housing, DFV, health, and legal systems, with the aim of enabling stability and recovery for survivors and their communities. Future research should examine how infrastructures of safety can be developed through Indigenous-led, decommodifying, and anti-racist practices.
This paper explores how institutional space in English universities functions as a site of racialised and gendered control, examining what it means to occupy or be denied space as a non-academic Black woman. Drawing from Black feminist thought and spatial theory, I argue that space is not neutral but a mechanism of power, shaping visibility, proximity, legitimacy, and erasure. Office layouts, desks, and corridors are not benign; they serve as technologies of racialisation, determining who is surveilled, who has access to decision-making, and who is rendered out of place. Using autoethnography and interviews with minoritised women in administrative roles across universities in England, I show how the question 'who gave you permission to be here?' structures spatial legitimacy. While inclusion policies may promote diversity, spatial arrangements tell a different story: where we sit, who sees us, and how we are positioned matter. The paper highlights how institutional architecture enforces segregation, desk hierarchies, spatial surveillance, and waiting areas as sites of symbolic exclusion. It demonstrates how power is made visible and how women resist through spatial refusal, reclaiming presence, and collective memory. This work contributes to Black feminist debates on belonging, access, and structural change, urging a rethinking of space as a political technology that must be redesigned through justice, dignity, and co-presence.
This study examines the social impact of a community solar project implemented in the tribal area of Khuded, rural India, employing a mixed-methods approach over a five-year period (2019-2024). Data collection included pre- and post-build surveys of 80 households, participatory filmmaking and interviews, with a particular focus on women in the community. The findings show the time benefits and social value created for women due to the reduction of labour-intensive tasks facilitated by solar-powered machinery. However, deep-rooted gender roles, particularly women's responsibilities for domestic tasks such as collecting firewood and water, limit their participation in income-generating activities. Societal norms also undervalue 'resting' as an acceptable use of the time saved. The study uncovers complex power dynamics and a social hierarchy within the tight-knit community, where better-off individuals, also women, benefit disproportionately. This research contributes to the existing literature, through place-based case study research, by challenging assumptions about linear progress between electricity access and women's empowerment, demonstrating that the impact is not immediate and requires social adaptation over time. It also reveals how women are both expected and willing to take on additional responsibilities, their labour perceived as indefinite. The findings emphasise the importance of social value in energy projects, particularly in cash-poor communities, where conventional metrics like income generation or kilowatt hours fail to capture the full scope of the impact.
