The article presents and analyzes an unpublished epistolary corpus centered on the relationship between the writer Amelia Rosselli and her mother Marion Cave, preserved at the Centro Manoscritti of the University of Pavia. The documents, mostly dating from 1947 to 1949, provide new elements for understanding the complex family dynamics that characterize the relationship between the two. The correspondence is situated in a period of major geographical and personal changes: the family’s return to England, Rosselli’s completion of her secondary education, and her subsequent move to Florence to live with her maternal grandmother. The letters highlight, on the one hand, Marion Cave’s persistent concerns about her daughter’s future, particularly with regard to her educational and artistic choices, and, on the other, the difficulties of cohabitation linked to Amelia Rosselli’s introverted character and problematic behavior, in relation to which questions and fears about possible psychological distress begin to emerge. The death of Marion Cave, which occurred in London in 1949 while Amelia was in Florence, constitutes a clear breaking point in the documentation: the event is recorded in a postcard sent by Rosselli to her brothers John and Andrea, significantly written in English. After this episode, the correspondence relating to the maternal figure almost completely ceases.
This paper reflects on what it means to do critical geography today by tracing its complex history and situating it within my own positionality as a feminist political geographer inspired by post/de/anti-colonial perspectives. While critical geography is often located in the radical movements of the 1960s-1970s in North America and Europe, these accounts overlook wider and earlier histories of critique, and the contributions of non-white, non-male, and non-Anglophone thinkers. I argue that critical geography has always been plural, shaped by feminist, anti-racist, postcolonial, and Global South perspectives that have since become central to the discipline. Writing from a standpoint shaped by my own history of migration, displacement, and simultaneous privilege within academia, I emphasise that our positions influence the forms of critique we produce. I describe this approach as the production of knowledge from within out: a way of engaging with the world that acknowledges how embodied, emotional, and experiential ways of knowing can generate critical insight. From this perspective, I outline my two key commitments in doing critical geography today based on my own work. The first is a Politics of Visibilisation – making visible the systemic, intimate, and embodied violences of extraction, displacement, and exhaustion. The second is a Reparative Praxis, which asks how we might move beyond critique toward responsibility, creativity, and care. Drawing on feminist and art-based methodologies, I suggest that critical geography can be a reparative and participatory practice, one that not only exposes injustice but also nurtures resilience, connection, and the possibility of repair.
We stand at a perilous juncture wherein trans and gender diverse people in the UK and beyond are increasingly subject to authoritarian and eliminationist political forces. Following the UK Supreme Court judgement of April 2025 and amid the continual emergence of political and policy apparatuses that increasingly call for heightened control, surveillance, and restriction of the scope of trans people’s lives, including the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission’s Code of Practice, and the ‘Cass’ and ‘Sullivan’ Reviews, in this piece I ask: are critical scholars failing to act with urgency to protect trans people when most needed? I argue that critical scholars should resist the installation of logics that enforce rigid, hygienically-policed sex/gender binaries, question individuals’ selfhoods and autonomy, and undermine ethical standards, recognising in turn the consequences these hold for all marginalised groups and for conducting critical social science research. Moments of solidarity demonstrate the influence that critical scholars can wield to address the emergency nature of this moment, and to ensure that trans people and trans research can be valued and maintained within the academy. Failing to do so risks the loss of trans scholars and trans scholarship, one that critical scholars would carry as their failure and burden.
This article puts the notion of domicide – the deliberate destruction of home – into conversation with literature on assetization and the financialization of housing to account for the relational production of (un)inhabitable landscapes. As an ascendent ruling order that hinges in part on unmaking homes as places and recasting them as assets, financialization works upon an historical terrain forged through conquest and practices of dispossession to unevenly weave domicidal relations into the fabric of everyday life both within settler colonial and capitalist societies and across imperial geographies. In light of ongoing appropriations of land and the systemic character of housing insecurity under racial capitalism, the article contends that housing financialization constitutes a particular modality of domicide today: a deliberate attempt to destroy the conditions of possibility for political agency, democratic deliberation, and collective self-rule outside the channels of finance capital.
This article intends to read the effects of European border externalization policies from the “south,” taking into consideration Turkey’s autonomy and local dynamics in bordering processes, which merge and intertwine with EU ones. Based on ethnographic fieldwork during 2022 and 2023 in the Altındağ metropolitan district of Ankara, I analyse how this urban borderland became the focal point of governmental practices and narratives after the anti-Syrian lynching that exploded in August 2021. An event that marked a new direction in the government’s migration policies with the issuing of the so-called “dilution plan” which establishes a maximum threshold of 20 % of foreign residents in the neighborhoods of metropolitan areas like Ankara and in 63 other provinces with a huge migrant presence. I maintain that the Turkish government’s “dilution plan” highlights how the border is above all a mobile threshold that marks a hierarchy between people within the same space, creating mechanisms of “differential inclusion”. With this study, I aim to discuss how bordering processes and practices not only reconfigure the Mediterranean space but also mark the urban spaces of the countries involved, such as Turkey.
