In this review of Erik Hansson’s The Begging Question: Sweden’s Social Responses to the Roma Destitute, I explore the book’s critical excavation of the circular logics that produce begging as a social and moral problem in Sweden. Drawing on Lacanian and Marxist theory, Hansson traces how begging produces anxiety by challenging Sweden’s self-image as a welfare state. This review focusses on Hansson’s intriguing ‘topological map of hegemony’, which models the interrelations of ideology, social conditions, national mythology, racialization, and unconscious processes. In my critical reading, I probe the limits of Hansson’s sophisticated analysis by asking whether psychoanalytic insights might destabilize rather than reinforce Marxist frameworks. Bringing Hansson’s analysis into conversation with Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (2021), I contemplate whether alternative, nonhegemonic understandings of need and reciprocity may unsettle the very category of ‘begging.’ The review closes by reflecting on the affective dynamics of begging across contexts, from Sweden to the United States, and on the possibility of counter-histories in which asking and giving are normalized acts of shared humanity.
Landscape, Law and Justice—20 Years is an edited collection that will no doubt be viewed as a seminal text in landscape studies. It is based on the papers presented at a symposium to mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of the conference of proceedings of the Landscape, Law and Justice research group at the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo in 2002–2003. This review is not a traditional critique of the book but provides some reflections from the perspective of a law academic with a particular focus on regulatory and governance approaches to environmental protection in Wales. In doing so, the aim is to consider how the book can contribute to wider scholarship in law and efforts to address the climate and nature crises.
This article examines the geographical dimensions of the arrival and reception of Keynes’s economic ideas in Finland from the late 1930s onwards. Specifically, the study focuses on how Keynes’s 1936 book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money found its way to Finland, how was it received and interpreted. Although the reception of Keynes’s ideas has been studied in various national contexts, Finland has received comparatively little attention. This article addresses that gap while also developing a theoretical framework for analysing the mobility of scientific ideas geographically. It brings the historical geography of science into conversation with policy mobility literature and adapts three concepts: scientific site, translation and assemblage. Furthermore, the article presents spatially informed narrative explanation and comparative content analysis as methods to meet the demands of the presented theoretical framework. Empirically, it examines the sites of economic science in Finland, focusing on their institutional settings, key actors, and knowledge practices. It also situates these sites within broader regional contexts, demonstrating how interpretations of Keynes’s theory were shaped by specific intellectual traditions, institutional structures, and historically contingent conditions thus producing a unique assemblage through a specific translation process. By comparing interpretations of Keynes’s book in Finland to those in the United Kingdom (Cambridge Keynesian) and Sweden (Stockholm School of Economics), the study highlights the specificities of the Finnish engagement with Keynes’s economic ideas.
The aim of this article is to formalise a model that can account for a contrasting, but global, dynamic that is seeing a rise in the numbers and desirability of pets, and is now being extended to the Global South. Our proposed ‘pet transition’ model offers a relational and evolutionary analysis of the connections among three major categories of animals (pets, livestock and wildlife) over four periods. It is a heuristic and comparative tool that contributes to a geography of pets and to the broader conversation about evolving human-animal relations in the Anthropocene. The issue of what a pet is, the role of companionship, and the different perceptions of the owner-pet relationship as an axiological model of relations with animals cast light on the role of veterinarians, the agri-food industry, the press, and animal studies in the recomposition of anthropozoological relations. The paper discusses the boundaries between animal categories, the narratives around domestication, and the idea of a new animal regime centred on pets. It calls for further work to be done to document the diversity and contrasts in human-animal relations in regard to the proposed pet transition model.
The volume, Landscape, Law and Justice—20 Years, revisits two decades of scholarship examining landscapes as socially constructed, relational sites shaped by law and justice. The collection, derived from a 2022 symposium, foregrounds the continuity of relational landscape analysis while reflecting on its evolving insights and contributions. Twelve chapters, authored by both original conveners of the Landscape, Law and Justice (LLJ) group, as well as newer scholars, address the influence of the LLJ perspective, its current status, and its potential relevance to pressing societal challenges. While many chapters emphasize reflection on past scholarship, there are compelling arguments advanced throughout the volume affirming landscape analysis as a critical heuristic for law, justice, and cultural understanding.
