ABSTRACT Drills in hand, three non‐binary—enby—tree‐ring researchers traverse through the spaces of soil, spiderwebs, and sawdust of a home under the big Montana sky to sample small cores of the cabin timbers to reveal their hundreds of years of growth shown in their annual rings. These samples—which will later be used for understanding the climate and social legacy in the region—entail, like many dendrochronological collections, physical and labour‐intensive incursions into a ‘field site’. The on‐the‐ground ‘fieldwork’ that dominates environmental and life sciences cannot be separated from the embodied precarities of queer trans livelihoods in these disciplines. In this essay, three non‐binary dendrochronologists braid together a visual and reflexive autoethnography, pulling from years of personal anecdotes, photographs and illustrations to reflect on being non‐binary in field‐based disciplines within environmental geography to tend towards our lived ‘enby ecologies’. We aim to problematise dominant scientific modes in which fieldwork is carried out and move towards trans ecological interventions within renderings of the ‘field’. We argue for enby ecologies as a praxis of trans‐forming the field and cultivating more queer trans field‐based geographers. In particular, we choose dendrochronology as our ‘field site’ for enby ecologies given our deep saturations in the discipline and our shared curiosity for the storied worlds tree rings hold within their bodies. We join in the call with allied disciplines like crip, feminist and BIPOC geographies to help build more inclusive and accessible ways in which field‐based sciences can think with bodily imaginaries of space and place.
ABSTRACT Public authorities are increasingly deploying automated and algorithmic systems to support decision‐making, often in the interests of efficiency and cost‐saving. However, people in vulnerable situations often bear the brunt of errors that arise when these systems are at fault or used incorrectly. This paper presents a brief vignette and discussion illustrating how issues of data and algorithmic justice impact on co‐produced geographical research, looking critically at the relationship between North–South collaboration and the UK government's use of algorithms to carry out public administration functions, specifically in the administration of visa applications by project partners from the Global South. The problem is outlined in the wider context of government automation, and questions for further investigation are raised concerning accountability and research ethics.
ABSTRACT The old tea forests of Jingmai Mountain in Yunnan, China, have been cultivated and maintained for centuries by indigenous Bulang and Dai communities through a unique ‘forest‐tea symbiosis’. We take this case as an entry point to examine a broader enquiry: how do a community's everyday ecological practices and their preservation simultaneously constitute issues of governance and social order? Using ecological citizenship as an analytical lens—a framework that comprises rights, obligations and the scale of citizen communities—this paper addresses a gap in the existing literature, which has focused largely on normative ideals and global universality while overlooking how ecological citizenship is produced through situated, historical practices of community‐making across scales. Viewed through this lens, the Jingmai case reveals a dynamic, three‐stage trajectory: (1) nascent features of ecological citizenship in low‐level disruption to nature under indigenous ecological ethics (tenth century–1960s); (2) threatened tea stewardship during state‐led agricultural modernisation (1960s–2000s); and (3) re‐articulated sustainable tea community under the ethos of human–nature harmony endorsed by nation‐state and global frameworks (2000s–present). We argue that what we see through the ecological citizenship lens in Jingmai Mountain is neither a pre‐formed ideal nor a static identity, but the performative, place‐based and cross‐scalar unfolding of community‐making, continuously constructed and contested through the complex interplays of situated community practices, governance interventions and environmental materialities. This study moves the conversation on ecological citizenship beyond ‘what it ought to be’ towards ‘how it is historically made in situ’, while acknowledging its relationality across different scales.
ABSTRACT Developing new ways of understanding environmental change is a critical topic of engagement across the sciences and humanities. Medicinal plant knowledges including Mexican curanderismo, Indigenous healing cultures and place‐based Western herbalism offer anticolonial approaches to re‐thinking environmental change. Based in Mexican curanderismo, I propose the concept of ecological susto as a culturally relevant framework for individual and collective recovery amidst environmental loss. Medicinal plants, who have survived previous mass extinction events and have been active agents creating habitable worlds for millions of years, are uniquely capable of guiding people into new ways of thinking about environmental change. This work expands on scholarship that recognises plants as agential, intelligent, communicative, meaning‐making beings with distinctive capacities. In this research, traditional plant medicine practitioners of the Middle Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, who steward plant knowledge in an array of cultural contexts, shared insights from ancestral teachings and lived experience for (re)conceptualising environmental change. Art, plática (intimate conservations of solidarity) and storytelling are methods for healing ecological susto and knowledge building within traditional plant medicine cultures. These anticolonial research methods undermine epistemic erasure of marginalised communities and expose the colonial harm that underlies environmental change while foregrounding the importance of place, Land and relationality. Art, plática and storytelling are appropriate for prioritising individual and collective healing of people and Land while also creating knowledge of value to the community. These methods bring forth plant medicine stories of many realities simultaneously unfolding, holding multiple ways of knowing, people coexisting within complex eco‐social communities and reverence for plants as non‐human ancestors. Medicinal plant stories reveal nonlinear time constructs, the creativity of death, and grief and loss as unifying experiences that bring the relationality of the living world into focus.
ABSTRACT This article examines Tirana's recent urban transformation through the lens of the state‐architecture nexus, analysing how successive Albanian regimes have mobilised architecture as a political instrument of legitimation, identity construction and geopolitical positioning. Focusing on the Bulevardi i Ri as one of the contemporary sites of intervention, the study situates current development within the broader post‐socialist transition and the neoliberal restructuring of Central and Eastern European cities. Drawing on post‐socialist urban scholarship and a cultural political economy framework, the article argues that architecture in Tirana functions not merely as a material outcome of economic change but as a key medium through which the state produces and stabilises the economic imaginary of European modernity. Based on discursive analysis, desk research and interviews with experts and residents, the paper reveals how architecture, centralised planning and the displacement of informal settlements are intertwined in a hegemonic urban project that reinforces state power while generating socio‐spatial tensions.
