ABSTRACT In this intervention, I introduce the theme for the RGS‐IBG 2026 Annual Conference and argue that the complex geographies of inequalities are a key focus of the discipline and that the current moment requires urgent attention to be given to addressing such issues. Approaching the geographies of inequalities requires geographers to reflect on the relationships between injustices and inequalities, to consider the location and temporalities of inequalities, and to explore their structural and institutional dimensions. I consider the techniques and approaches used by geographers to interrogate inequalities, review key areas for further and ongoing investigation, and point to the need to reflect carefully on how we encounter and resist inequalities in our institutions, more broadly in our professional practices, and within wider society. I conclude by reflecting on some of the ways in which we can work towards creating just places.
ABSTRACT In global environmental governance, small island developing states (SIDS) are routinely described as vulnerable, fragile and capacity constrained. These characteristics are treated as natural consequences of smallness and are frequently interpreted as markers of deficit, despite the diversity, agency and resilience that characterise many SIDS. This intervention argues that this conversion of smallness from a neutral description of scale into a deficit category reflects the coloniality of measurement : the inherited systems of comparison, classification and valuation that establish smallness as a deviation from norms derived from larger states, that institutionalise that deviation and that assign it negative value. Drawing on examples from Caribbean SIDS, it examines how contemporary measurement regimes produce this deficit, and how Caribbean counter metrics challenge the assumptions embedded within them. In concluding, it establishes that sustaining small island futures requires questioning why global systems require SIDS to be small in order to be governed at all, refusing the terms on which smallness has been made to mean less and reclaiming the authority to redefine what smallness means.
ABSTRACT This intervention brings debates about tipping points into conversation with critical geographical thinking to suggest a more ‘oblique’ engagement with the concept. Such an approach is vital for rethinking the normative discourses and established imaginaries that dominate in the application of ‘tipping’ to understandings of environmental change. The use of the term ‘tipping point’ has grown exponentially over the last two decades within environmental sciences to describe accelerated, self‐amplifying and often irreversible changes to environmental systems. It has also garnered significant momentum in policy debates. Yet it is far from a universally lauded concept, with widespread concerns in the sciences about the validity and usefulness of defining such catastrophic points of no return and within the social sciences and humanities about the politics and ethics of tipping points. This intervention argues that human geography has a key role to play in this complex landscape in furthering critical engagements with tipping points as the concept continues to unfold and take hold. It calls for an unfixing of dominant understandings and framings through key geographical ideas: space and scale, time and temporalities and a/effect. These geographical ideas permit a redirection in current debates, especially around governance. Much is at stake in such a critique where tipping points may be productively questioned, imagined as something otherwise, or even outright refused as a guiding concept of our times. More equitable enquiries may emerge as a result.
ABSTRACT This Intervention reflects on the multiple, contradictory and ambivalent relations human geography has with ‘the new’. Some sort of relation with the new is an inescapable and necessary part of all practices of knowledge generation. Newness, whether it be an empirical finding, an idea, a concept or an approach, can fuel the interest, wonder, urgency or surprise that can animate and sustain academic life. Yet, relations with the new are fraught. Claims of newness are enrolled into materially consequential systems and practices of audit, and the desire for newness is inseparable from the digitally mediated political economy of academic publishing. Questions persist about whether contemporary human geography is too beholden to the same or too enamoured by the new. Developing from a plenary panel at the RGS‐IBG 2025 annual conference, five contributors reflect on their own and (sub)disciplinary relations with the new in the context of these necessary but fraught relations. In doing so, the aim of the Intervention is to generate reflection and discussion about the place of newness in our research, what kinds of newness geography values, and the political and ethical implications of different ways of relating to and valorising the new.
Short Abstract From now on, authors writing in Transactions will no longer be expected to count their reference lists within the 10,000‐word limit. In this editorial, we take the opportunity to lay out the reasons behind this decision, encouraging prospective authors to critically reflect on how they cite, and highlighting the role of journals, reviewers, and editors in moving towards more inclusive citational practices.
Housing precarity is often understood through economic constraints, investment mechanisms and structural conditions of urban housing markets. Yet, an overlooked dimension of housing precarity is the presence of mould, which frequently appears in district court cases on rent disputes and eviction proceedings. This paper develops a legal geography of mould by examining how mould becomes a legal, evidentiary and spatial object within rental disputes in Germany. Drawing on ethnographic research across more than 200 district court hearings in Germany, I show how mould emerged unexpectedly as a recurrent force in cases formally centred on rent arrears and termination. Because tenants often reduce rent in response to damp and disrepair, mould enters the courtroom not as a discrete habitability issue but as a procedural catalyst that transforms material deterioration into legally actionable arrears-arrears that, once two months accumulate, establish grounds for eviction. The paper's theoretical contribution lies in demonstrating how mould functions as a threshold object through which evidentiary norms, judicial logics and structural inequalities become visible. Mould disputes crystallise broader dynamics: the instability of evidentiary claims, the individualised assignment of blame and the uneven distribution of expert knowledge and digital tools. By tracing how mould travels from damp walls to judicial reasoning, the paper advances an account of how law materially shapes urban housing precarity. In doing so, it positions mould at the centre of debates on displacement, the politics of proof, the uneven distribution of urban habitability and the infrastructural role of legal systems within contemporary housing crises.
In their recent article entitled Root metaphors in cartography bridging critical and quantitative approaches, Ruizhe Hong, Bo Zhao and Shangyi Zhou (2025) highlight how metaphors can be used as a heuristic tool to renew critical approaches to digital cartography. Using Anne Buttimer's Four Root Metaphors (1982)-mosaic, mechanism, organism and arena-they explore the link between cartographic representation, socio-spatial inequalities and spatial justice in the context of technological developments marked by recent advances in spatial data science and geospatial artificial intelligence. While acknowledging that other metaphors could be used, the authors encourage readers to build on this exercise to further develop 'a mapping practice that is as diverse and dynamic as the landscapes it seeks to represent'. I have decided to seize this stimulating opportunity to propose a fifth metaphor which I call the patchwork metaphor. More specifically, I argue that the 'mosaic metaphor' creates an illusion which fuels neo-positivist visions of cartography that persist to this day. I therefore prefer the metaphor of 'cartographic patchwork' as I believe it is particularly effective in revealing the digital divides that characterise today's geospatial world.
The emergence of large numbers of educated unemployed people across the world remains a major social challenge. Research on unemployed young people has tended to emphasise a lack of agency. Many studies depict jobless youth as aimless and detached from their social and spatial situation. This paper uses an account of the practices of educated unemployed young people in Uttar Pradesh, North India, to challenge this depiction. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2004/2005 and 2022/2023 in Meerut City, by the first author and second author, respectively, the paper documents the capacity of jobless youth to adapt to employment scarcity over the first quarter of the twenty-first century. In 2004/2005 young people were often involved in cultures of waiting and passing time. Eighteen years later educated unemployed young people were much more focused on preparing for government employment. This adaptation has occurred in part through young people developing so-called 'libraries' across Meerut, which offer spaces in which they can study, socialise and 'prepare' ('taiyari') for government admissions tests. In documenting a shift in young people's activity and agency, the paper makes three contributions to wider human geographical work. First, it highlights a need to consider how non-elite sections of society can come to develop social agency over time. Second, the paper illuminates the potential of supplementary educational initiatives to serve as geographies of support. Finally, the paper discusses the value of long-term research in a single place that can connect social change to shifting strategies on the ground.
This article explores the growing influence of offshore finance on urban and territorial planning in the Global South by analysing the fast urbanisation of Sihanoukville, Cambodia's main port city. Since the early 2020s, a new master plan has been designed to transform the city and its province into a multi-purpose SEZ, while positioning Sihanoukville as a new offshore financial centre. We argue that this process exemplifies the emergence of what we conceptualise as offshore urbanism: a form of urban and territorial production inspired by, and deliberately oriented towards, offshore financial logics. Offshore urbanism emerges from the convergence of two interrelated dynamics. First, it builds on the long-standing role of spaces of exception within global capitalism. Second, it reflects the deepening financialisation of the global economy, in which offshore finance has become a central component. Drawing on empirical fieldwork and a critical engagement with the literature on financialisation, spaces of exception and transnational urbanism, this article shows how urban planning strategies actively produce regulatory, material and institutional environments tailored to offshore financial flows. The analysis demonstrates that offshore urbanism aims to 'plug' specific urban spaces into the grey circuits of global finance, thereby allowing national and transnational elites to circumvent structural constraints on economic development and to renew strategies of capital accumulation. In Cambodia, offshore urbanism is deeply embedded in a neopatrimonial politico-economic system, where economic opacity, rentier dynamics and weak regulatory oversight are reframed as comparative advantages. The article further highlights how offshore urbanism normalises the entanglement of legal, illegal and illicit economic activities, mirroring the operational logics of offshore financial centres. Ultimately, by hypothesising that offshore finance is increasingly emerging as a reference model for urban planning, this article sheds light on the underground logics of planetary urbanisation, which remain largely understudied in the academic literature.
Professional pest management (PPM)-the deliberate exclusion and removal of unwanted non-human life-is a form of academically overlooked and socially undervalued 'dirty work'. PPM technicians carry the physical and moral taint of unclean environments and animal execution. Yet, given its low public status and in a time of mass workplace alienation, why do so many pest controllers seem to love their jobs so much? Using interviews and participant observation, this research explores the everyday practices and experiences of UK-based pest management professionals, an empirically novel area of human-animal work. It reveals an unexpected and unalienated 'joy of pests' that is anchored in problem-solving variety, camaraderie and zoological curiosity. Invoking the transgressive resilience of pests, this research transposes ideas of autonomy from the non-human to the human. It proposes a theory of 'dialectical autonomy': autonomy that is not only dependent on others but produced through relations of antagonism and opposition. The unpredictability and pleasurable variety of the pest controller's daily work emerges directly from the autonomy of the pests that technicians seek to curtail. Meanwhile, technologies of containment generate biological and behavioural changes among pests that inhibit future control. Consequently, the increased adaptability of pests to human intervention and thus their ongoing capacities for wildness are co-produced by their adversaries, while preventing the alienating routinisation of the work, thereby also preserving the autonomy of the labourer. Innovatively using more-than-human geographical theory, this research thereby furthers labour geography's analysis of labour agency, illuminating workers' everyday practices of self-valorisation, encompassing moral concern for the non-human world amidst animal death and displacement. In doing so, it challenges the underestimation of expertise and pleasure found within current theorisations of dirty work. It thus advances understandings of multispecies entanglement, posing discomforting questions about the limits of interspecies coexistence.
Human-wildlife conflict has become a dominant framework for understanding the challenges of coexistence. In the context of global environmental change and new geographies of wildlife encounter, this paper intervenes in two bodies of work: 'Species on the Move' and human-wildlife conflict. We do so by drawing on two seemingly disparate examples that both concern animals on the move and the fraught politics of coexistence-urban gulls in Northern Europe and sharks at Australian city beaches. Using ethnographic research, the paper examines the makings of human-wildlife 'conflict' through three areas of concern: representations of conflict and the interplay between the media and policy; the relationship between mobility and the articulation of rights through property and deterrence; and emergent forms of multispecies justice through physical entanglement. We make two arguments: first, that foregrounding animals' mobilities is critical to reframing human-wildlife conflict and coexistence; and second, that the social sciences are fundamental to revealing the systems that shape and prohibit coexistence, while attending to the lived geographies of place. To conclude, we argue that discomfort and conflict should be considered central components of coexistence and that at a time of significant environmental change and harm, challenging the equation of coexistence with harmony is fundamental to advancing more plural conceptions of justice.
This article contributes to geographical scholarship on home as a place of ontological security by considering the multitemporal, long-term lived effects of housing precarity among labour migrants. Within migration and housing debates, housing precarity is often viewed as a material and temporary condition that labour migrants accept to achieve better living conditions in the future. In this paper, we argue that this misrepresents the experience of housing precarity. We draw upon the housing biographies of Polish labour migrants in the Netherlands and identify four distinct temporal logics of housing precarity showing how past, present and future intertwine in different ways. First of all, extreme precarity in early years can become a reference frame, leading people to accept marginally improved precarious conditions in subsequent housing. Second, memories of past precarity permeate into the present and future shaping how migrants navigate housing. Thirdly, expectations and aspirations for the future feed back into the present shaping the experience of living arrangements as precarious. Finally, the demands of the precarious present can be so consuming that past and future times are pushed away. Our findings show that we should rethink how housing precarity manifests itself, not only as a material and temporary housing condition but also as an ontological experience with long-lasting effects.
Africa has witnessed a FinTech fever, yet these financial dynamics remain largely off the map. To address this gap, this paper explores the geographical patterns of firm creation and investments in African FinTech and how they have evolved since the emergence of FinTech on the continent. Tracing flows of capital across firms, cities and countries, we interpret the geography of investment in African FinTech through the lens of the Global Financial Network (GFN) approach. The analysis, based on a unique purpose-built dataset of African FinTech firms, documents waves of firm creation and investment, starting in South Africa in the 1990s, led by Nigeria in recent years and concentrated in metropolitan areas. Our findings reveal an emerging specialisation in FinTech centres, including Mauritius as a diversified offshore FinTech jurisdiction and Seychelles as an offshore crypto-hub. After documenting the preponderance of non-African investment over cross-border African and domestic origins of funding, we map the networks of FinTech capital flows by subsector and examine institutional, technological and geographical factors, with examples from three Nigerian unicorns. This paper uncovers how FinTech connects Africa's financial centres and offshore jurisdictions with established centres west and east of the continent in a new stage of GFN expansion.
The 'affirmative turn' in Geography has generally been read positively for promoting care-full urban governance, repairing inter-group relations and enhancing socio-spatial justice, while largely neglecting the biopolitics, marginalisation and resistance embedded therein. Additionally, negative(ly-coded) emotions are often cast as the debilitating 'other' and excluded from the politics of the multitude. Drawing on the politics and sociality of emotions and Spinozian theory of affirmation, this paper dissects the affirmative biopolitics of parental educational anxiety and the affective regime transition in China. We conduct critical discourse analysis of policy documents and 45 in-depth interviews surrounding the national 'Double Reduction' education policy, which seeks to reduce parental anxiety by limiting excessive homework and off-campus tutoring. We argue that Double Reduction marks an 'affirmative turn' from the prior 'Positive Energy' affective regime and produces a 'sympathising state' in and beyond education. Yet it addresses only the surface-level 'effect' of anxiety (hyper-competition), rather than underpinning structural 'causes'-like education inequality and declining upward mobility. It thus operates as a biopolitical project to monitor, censor and produce more (re)productive, aspirational and creative bodies amid economic slowdown, low marriage and fertility rates. Middle-class parents largely reject the imposed 'duty' to feel less anxious, generating two emergent subjectivities-either intensified anxiety or managed-chill (foxi)-a positive form of non-performance and resistance. At the same time, this policy undermines the agency of less well-resourced parents, while prompting resourceful families to pursue alternative, often costlier, more competitive strategies (Juan). This study highlights how biopolitics, marginalisation and resistance are integral to the affirmative turn in emotional governance in China and argues for including negative(ly-coded) emotions in the analysis of the politics of the multitude. The case of educational anxiety and affective regime transition also positions education as both an apparatus of urban governance and as reshaping socio-spatial inequality.
Buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) services have rapidly expanded consumer credit access by enabling immediate consumption with interest-free instalment payments. This paper argues that BNPL platforms operate as topological-affective infrastructures that reconfigure indebtedness by simultaneously modulating spatial relations and felt intensities. Drawing on diaries and interviews with BNPL users in Singapore, the analysis reveals how platform mechanisms-automated deductions, instalment schedules, notifications-dynamically reorganise debt's proximity, stretching obligations across time while compressing distance through alerts that pull obligations into immediate affective presence. BNPL generates recursive movements across four affective registers: empowerment, anxiety, dissociation and ambivalence. Initial control gives way to vigilance as obligations accumulate, prompting dissociative strategies, yet ambivalence pervades the cycle. These dynamics are experienced unevenly: users with stable incomes frame BNPL as flexible budgeting, while those with tighter budgets describe heightened emotional labour and acute stress. These divergent experiences reveal how BNPL operates as 'more-than-debt'-payment method, budgeting tool and controlled spending device. By synthesising geographical scholarship on affect and topology, the paper demonstrates these dimensions must be analysed together to understand platform-mediated finance. BNPL exemplifies how digital infrastructures recalibrate financial life by folding, stretching and compressing relational proximities, producing differentiated affective topologies that are conditioned by socio-economic position.
This article focuses on the experiences of waste workers in Glasgow at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, to explore how the ordinary workings of the UK waste industry are pushing bodies and infrastructures to the point of collapse. Drawing on in-depth interviews with waste workers, and in conversation with Lauren Berlant's concepts of 'slow death' and the 'crisis ordinary', this article makes two key contributions. First, it reveals that waste workers are enduring conditions that are marked by chronic exhaustion, debilitation and poverty. Second, it argues that this experience of 'slow death' was not created by the 'COVID crisis' but by the 'crisis ordinary': the normal workings of neoliberalism that stretch workers beyond their limits in ways that are simultaneously egregious yet entirely ordinary. During the emergence of the pandemic, being designated a 'key worker' was not a cause for protection or compensation, but, rather, placed already marginalised bodies at greater exposure to risk, exploitation and exhaustion. Although the pandemic exacerbated long-standing challenges, it also brought them into sharper focus, creating spaces for resistance. Waste workers confronted slow death through radical acts of refusal, mobilising for labour justice during COP26, making their 'ordinary' crisis appear disordinary. This article situates these acts of refusal within a broader geographical framework, contributing to understandings of crisis as an ongoing process, deeply intertwined with the ordinary functions of neoliberal capitalism. The complex infrastructures that sustain our economic, political and biological lives-including the waste sector-depend on workers for whom 'slow death' has become a pervasive and commonplace crisis. By foregrounding the lived experiences of key workers, we can begin to make the ordinary crisis of neoliberalism feel disordinary, and confront the widespread 'state of acceptance' that has allowed slow death to persist for so many.
Nation and race are often theorised as closely intertwined, with nationalism frequently positioned as a driving force behind racism. The article advances an empirically grounded argument that challenges this assumed relationship. In particular, it explores how space, understood as a socially constructed category, is discursively mobilised in everyday conversations and interactions to articulate notions of nation and national belonging beyond race. Drawing on 32 individual interviews with racialised Italians living in the United Kingdom, the article shows how, outside Italy-a space regarded as saturated with whiteness-participants feel empowered to reclaim the nation from which they were excluded and to embrace alternative readings of nation which de-centre whiteness. These narratives reconfigure nation and national belonging not through opposition to racialised bodies ('who'), but through proximity to or distance from particular practices, objects and im/material spaces ('what'). The findings demonstrate that the race-nation nexus should not be conceptualised as an inevitable or intrinsic condition, but as a historical configuration rooted in a white fantasy of spatial hegemony which, while still powerful, is increasingly unsettled by the lived realities of growing racial diversity.
This article explores the role of the COVID-19 virus in changing healthcare policies in Wales and their effects on pandemic inequalities. It draws on the analysis of policy documents and key informant interviews with government and healthcare officials in Wales conducted during the cross-European study on the varying impacts of pandemic responses on vulnerable groups. Its contribution lies in the development of 'viral thinking' to reconsider both the biomedical approaches that overestimated rational pandemic responses and biopolitical interventions driven by the neoliberal logic of commodification of healthcare provision exacerbating patterns of exclusion. The analysis of viral contamination of Welsh healthcare is split into three parts and builds on post-structuralist conceptualisations of the virus and its interactions with the state in the form of coding, decoding and production of surplus value. The virus disturbed the linear logic of the healthcare system and attempts to make it visible by coding it in biological or economic terms, and exposed the discriminatory politics of viral coding naturalising death and justifying the orders of inclusion and exclusion. Our findings also illustrate viral decoding that blurred the boundaries between humans and non-humans, underscored the limitations of biopolitical management of life, indifference and naturalisation of inequalities in Welsh healthcare. The virus also produced collective and hybrid configurations of forces that undermined the key functions of healthcare as well as created new alliances, unusual forms of co-existence and expressive responses to illness and death. The paper concludes with reflections on the possibilities of viral thinking to resist fixed categories of inequality and embrace virality as a potentially transformative mode of political thought and organisation.
This paper demonstrates how multispecies relations co-constitute mobile work in road haulage under supply chain capitalism. Bringing labour and animal geographies into dialogue, we extend the concepts of carescapes and caringscapes to theorise the truck cab, route and logistical infrastructures as multispecies sites of care beyond the 'static' workplace. We use multiple methods to create multispecies narrative portraits, through which we reveal how caring labour-training and socialisation, embodied attunement, walking and the management of hygiene, risk and routine-enables truck dogs to travel and reshapes drivers' sensory orientations, working rhythms and well-being. We also show how organisational policies, regulatory regimes and infrastructural constraints render some forms of care legible as security, cleanliness, compliance and asset protection, whilst limiting or displacing others. At the same time, truck dogs offer companionship, routine and vigilance that can ease isolation and insecurity without resolving the structural harms of mobile work. We argue that supply chain capitalism is sustained through a mobile carescape in which care is continually negotiated across schedules, routes and institutional thresholds. By foregrounding these multispecies arrangements, the paper unsettles dominant accounts of where and how care is organised and advances a mobile geography of care attentive to the logistical conditions through which care is made possible, valued and constrained.
With the home at the forefront of political and public health responses to COVID-19, the thresholds between domestic space and the world beyond acquired a new significance in people's everyday lives. Whilst pre-pandemic research stressed the porosity of domestic thresholds and the capacity of home to stretch beyond domestic space, 'stay home' directives and lockdown restrictions demarcated home as a place of containment, separation and immobility at the height of the pandemic. By analysing interviews conducted with adults in London and Liverpool and maps drawn by children and young people throughout the United Kingdom, this paper introduces the concept of 'thresholding' to address three key questions: How were domestic thresholds secured, crossed and remade during the COVID-19 pandemic? How were people's everyday lives in pandemic times mediated by internal and external domestic thresholding practices? What are the wider implications for understanding geographies of home during and beyond the pandemic? We argue that the enhanced significance of domestic thresholds in pandemic times was materialised and embodied through new, reworked and more labour-intensive thresholding practices. We reveal not only the changing relational dynamics of homespaces during lockdown, but also how people's everyday lives continued to be shaped in varied and uneven ways by the world beyond, as well as within, domestic space. The concept of thresholding reframes the relational spatialities of home by foregrounding the ways in which internal and external thresholds are understood and materialised through embodied practice.
