In light of the continuing development of remote sensing technologies and their place within Antarctic research, this article demonstrates how remote sensing can be used to open up new perspectives on Antarctica’s past, as well as raising questions as to what it means to experience, access, or understand Antarctica – what it means, and has meant, to ‘go there’. Using three case studies from the early 20th century, I show how the wives of Antarctic explorers adapted remote sensing techniques such as the use of telepathy, dreaming, touchstones and constructed feelings of closeness to maintain emotional connections with their husbands throughout their absence. These connections both reassured these women of their husband’s wellbeing, and enabled them to access Antarctica and create their own imaginaries, experiences and understandings of the continent. By examining how these women used their remotely sensed knowledge in their efforts to preserve their late husband’s legacy, I also reflect on how those researching emotional histories also engage in a form of remote sensing – of looking to the archives in hopes of accessing a deeper understanding of their subject’s emotional worlds from an unnavigable distance. I argue that remote sensing, when used in this way, offers us fresh insights into what it means to have accessed or experienced Antarctica; the fundamental role of emotional connection within the events and writing of Antarctic histories; and the legacy of remote sensing and women’s work found in the literature that underpins the Antarctic historical canon that we work from today.
In this special issue, we seek to document alternative futures that emerge from racial disparities in the built environment. To do this, we focus on the ways that the built environment is made through processes of race and racism, which generate a site of encounter that contributes to ever-changing social relations. Our focus on the built environment emerged from on-the-ground, place-based struggles, where community building in the name of racial justice transformed streets, buildings, and public and private spaces into landscapes of mutual aid. By centering race, racism, and racialization, the articles in this issue take an ecological approach building from Black and Indigenous geographies to position the built environment as a site of struggle against the forces of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and anti-Blackness. Key to these formulations are the ways that loss and the remains of humans, non-humans, and objects continuously challenge how people engage with and draw meaning from the built environment. We argue, in disrupting how the built enviornment is constituted, marginalized human and non-human onto-epistemologies are sustained through their encounter with these spaces. This introduction traces the ways that archives, loss, and ecologies are central to understanding the role of race in the built environment.
Land use change is usually analysed through fixed spatial and temporal scales that flatten the diverse relational, multi-scalar and historical processes behind the observed spatial patterns. In a world more and more globally interconnected, this article presents a novel transdisciplinary methodological framework to investigate land use change across diverse geographical contexts and scales. Inspired by chronostratigraphic thinking applied to history, at the core of our method lies the chronostratigraphic matrix , an analytical tool we have developed to assemble local geonarratives of land use change as layered temporal sequences, enabling the identification of synchronicities, divergences and path dependencies across contexts and scales, without imposing a single spatial or temporal unit of analysis. Applied to 12 case studies in Europe, where geonarratives have been collected through participatory mapping workshops, our methodological framework reveals that similar land use categories often follow divergent temporal trajectories, while land use transitions similar in type unfold nonetheless at different speeds and intensities. These findings highlight the fundamentally asynchronous and multi-layered nature of land use change, demonstrating how such non-synchronicity can be itself a lens to further investigate underlying socio-economic, political and governance power dimensions. The article concludes by discussing the methodological and governance implications of adopting relational, process-oriented methodological frameworks in spatial analysis and land use planning.
This mediation opens with what kinds of plants survive in harsh conditions and how. Thinking through how certain plants, such as roses ( Rosa multiflora ), develop secondary compounds that people at once consider profitable and problematic, can help us understand how, why, and when capitalistic logics shift to extract value from what it previously discarded. Building on studies on waste, refusual, and fungibility, this meditation works to put four of this issue’s articles in conversation through ideas of ecology and racialization.
This paper fills out part of the missing story of the “second act” of the life of the maverick American-Canadian geographer, Bill Bunge. It is for the period Bunge lived in Ontario, Canada, from 1970 to 1978, first around London, and later in Toronto. During that time, he developed a Canadian version of his earlier celebrated neighbourhood study of Fitzgerald, Detroit. Carried out under the auspices of the Toronto Geographical Expedition (TGE) (1972–1974), it resulted in the 1975 volume, The Canadian Alternative: Survival, Expeditions and Urban Change , written by Bunge and Ron Bordessa, Chair of Geography at Atkinson College, York University. Drawing upon both publicly and privately held archival collections of Bunge’s papers along with long interviews with those who worked with him in Ontario, the paper uses a geographical biographical approach to tell Bunge’s story. The paper argues that the very geographical move made by Bunge to self-exile in Canada significantly changed both the expedition within Toronto compared with Detroit and the writing that stemmed from it.
