This reflection on Davis Seamon's autoethnography of his seminal contributions to 50 years of humanistic geography provides an appreciation of the way his phenomenological perspective has helped shape the research and scholarship of both the authors and the field. But there are limitations of his approach. We propose augmenting this tradition through the lens of Deweyan pragmatism, centred on ongoing action to address the problematic of contingent, uncertain, and changing situations. This entails a different understanding of place, application informed by meliorism, and engaged social inquiry. We provide a case study illustration of this approach in Reimagining Home, an ongoing community-based programme of older adult housing-related initiatives in a North American city. We conclude that melioristically oriented pragmatism provides a useful direction for the progress and enrichment of humanistic geography over the next 50 years.
The ecological crisis is fundamentally a crisis of relationship: while societies are profoundly influenced by the physical landscapes that they inhabit, they also actively transform them. Historic Western conceptualisations of land have failed to 'respect' this reciprocity, resulting in private ownership systems that enable resource degradation, social exclusion, and the commodification of nature. Consequently, Scotland's legislative framework for community land ownership (CLO) presents an opportunity to challenge these extractive relationships born from traditional ownership. Existing scholarship has focused on the economic case for CLO and the mechanics of legal acquisition, however current discourse fails to appreciate how the post-acquisition lived reality actually shapes human-land relations. This research uses cross-sectional qualitative fieldwork across three distinct Scottish buyouts (Isle of Eigg, Evanton Community Wood, and the Langholm Initiative) to demonstrate that socio-ecological relationships are shaped less by legal title and more by the unglamorous, day-to-day work of administration and maintenance. Although adopting these 'mundane responsibilities' creates institutional strain, they act as a central mechanism for collective subject formation and a highly localised 'environmentality'. Ultimately, by grounding these relational dynamics in the tangible labour of local land stewardship, this study illustrates how CLO can reconfigure landed relationships for a more ecologically just future.
This paper explores how divergent multi-level governance architectures, US federal climate denialism and institutional retrenchment under Trump 2.0, compared to China's state-embedded decarbonisation commitment on the credibility, spatial implementation, and global governance pathway of national climate policy. We systematically analyse the dimensions of policy continuity, territorial governance and international credibility on the basis of a 'structured, focussed comparison' of the two largest global emitters in the period between 2020 and 2025 with empirically grounded and theoretically derived dimensions. The analysis finds that the US federal system creates high levels of institutional volatility, as the executive changes and inter-scalar conflicts emerge, making decarbonisation a dispersed process across states, while China's party-state system institutionalises long-term goals in its Five-Year Plans, but faces principal-agent risks from central directives and coal dependencies with local provinces. This study shows that governance structure is a key causal mechanism that shapes the potential of national commitments to lead to enduring decarbonisation pathways, by connecting scalar political architectures with territorially differentiated implementation outcomes. The findings contribute to the field of comparative climate governance by shedding light on the influence of the institutional design of domestic climates on international mitigation capacity and sub-national planning horizons of stakeholders.
Cognability offers human geography a timely conceptual framework to examine cognitive aging as a lifelong accumulation of place-based exposures and opportunities that shape how people think, remember, orient, connect, and sustain personhood. As public health and neuroscience increasingly turn to the 'exposome' to understand multifaceted environmental risk factors for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, human geography is needed to deepen understanding of the exposome through its theoretically and analytically rich attention to place, scale, power, identity, and embodiment. Cognability as a concept can bridge biomedical approaches and human geography. It asks not only which services, amenities, and hazards matter for dementia risk; but also how environments are produced, experienced, and perceived across the life course. This paper extends cognability beyond dementia prevention to consider everyday cognitive life, which includes the cognitive affordances and obstacles embedded in homes, neighbourhoods, institutions, technologies, and care environments. It introduces cognableism as a critical geographic concept to examine how places privilege normative cognitive capacities while marginalising neurodiversity. This paper outlines a research agenda to study cognitive health and neurodiversity as spatial, relational, and justice oriented. Cognability invites geographers to reconsider cognition as something navigated through often-disabling environments, uneven built and social infrastructures, and more-than-human relations.
This response to David Seamon's 'Celebrating Humanistic Geography' provides a brief account of my own entry into the field, at the same time as it also explores several key issues concerning the concepts of place and space as they figure in contemporary geographic thought. Picking up on Seamon's references to my own work as well as that of Ed Casey, I explain how the sort of philosophically framed approach to place that Casey and I have each developed converges with and diverges from ideas present in humanistic geography as well as in contemporary geography more broadly. Central to my discussion is the idea of place as a fundamental concept that is prior even to space and time, and this leads on to consideration of the way such an idea operates against the subjectivist tendency that remains commonplace across much of geographic thinking at the same time as it also suggests the need for a more genuinely reflective turn within geography back towards geography's own place.
