Short Abstract From now on, authors writing in Transactions will no longer be expected to count their reference lists within the 10,000‐word limit. In this editorial, we take the opportunity to lay out the reasons behind this decision, encouraging prospective authors to critically reflect on how they cite, and highlighting the role of journals, reviewers, and editors in moving towards more inclusive citational practices.

AbstractThis commentary reflects on an attempt to use ChatGPT to generate an image for a geography textbook. We explore why the image that was produced provoked surprise and intrigue and think through how our reactions revealed ingrained assumptions about educational spaces. Our discussion highlights the importance of intentionality in prompt design and offers a reminder of how seemingly neutral prompts can reproduce dominant narratives. We conclude by proposing that as generative AI becomes more prevalent in geography education, this take‐up needs to critically engage with the ethical and societal implications of AI use so we can actively challenge ourselves as well as the technology.

The projected increase in older people within the African population, alongside rapid urbanisation, points to the growing importance of understanding how older people navigate towns and cities across the continent. This aligns with wider concerns that geographical scholarship needs to pay more sustained attention to ageing in Global South contexts. Rather than treating these developments as problems or absences, we approach them as opportunities to explore how geographies of later life can generate new ways to conceptualise the urban experience. To this end, the paper draws on the local vernacular of older residents in the Ghanaian cities of Accra and Sekondi-Takoradi to decentre, contextualise and expand the vocabulary used to depict and interpret urban mobilities. The findings reveal 'hidden geographies of ageing' through three forms of mobility practice: Mpanyinfo ho hia (respectful mobilities), YE mboa nkoa (collective mobilities) and Me te fie (retired mobilities). These insights enrich conceptual understandings of city life by showing how older people navigate, engage with and shape social hierarchies, communal support networks and economic rationalities. By amplifying the voices of a population often overlooked in epistemological and policy deliberations, this intervention supports interdisciplinary efforts to reimagine how knowledge is produced with and about cities in the Global South. Crucially, the paper challenges the Southern urban critique to better reflect the plurality of marginality that influences everyday life in the Majority World.

Africa's rapid urbanisation is overwhelming formal waste management systems, necessitating reliance on informal systems to manage growing volumes of municipal solid waste. This paper explores the contributions, challenges, and lived experiences of informal waste pickers in African cities across four themes: sustainable communities, systemic marginalisation, social reproduction, and occupational hazards. It examines how waste pickers, through their informal work practices, help sustain essential urban functions and contribute to environmental management, particularly where formal systems are fragmented or under-resourced. This sheds light on the diverse value of informal labour in realising several Sustainable Development Goals, including those related to decent work, gender equality, and sustainable cities, while also offering new insights for more inclusive approaches to urban waste management. The paper concludes with recommendations to support more inclusive, equitable, and resilient urban waste management systems across the continent. In doing so, it calls for research on informal waste pickers to engage more closely with debates in urban studies that conceptualise "people as infrastructure", as a means of more fully accounting for the ways in which informal actors sustain, repair, and reproduce urban life in African cities.

International student mobilities (ISM) is an important but increasingly complex and controversial topic. Politically, the contested nature of international student mobilities is driven by the confluence of immigration policies, increasing demand for global education, and new higher education funding imperatives. Academically, international student mobilities is a key field of study which intersects with three subdisciplines of geography: political, population and social. Our intervention reveals, for the first time, how current UK migration management policies are actively 'producing' the international student as a population category. We illustrate the effects of this production through its operationalisation into universities and everyday student lives. We achieve this by developing an analytical framework informed by theorisations of 'dynamic nominalism', which is complemented by data from semi-structured interviews and policy documents. Our findings uncover the existence of multiple populations within the international student category, exposing the inherent complexities, hierarchies of privilege and contradictions therein. Notably, we identify a conceptual and empirical distinction between those produced as 'international students' based on their visa, and those produced as 'international students' via their tuition fee status. The implications of this intervention are important for the contentious landscape of higher education and immigration policy because the paper challenges assumptions about, and raises ethical questions regarding the treatment of, the 'international student'. Our analytical framework also has wider applicability beyond the subject of ISM, through its potential to aid geographers, and those in cognate disciplines, concerned with addressing fundamental questions about how and why categories are produced and the consequences of this production. International student mobilities (ISM) is an important but increasingly complex and controversial topic. This paper reveals, for the first time, how current UK migration management policies are actively 'producing' the international student as a population category. We uncover the existence of multiple populations within the international student category, exposing the inherent complexities, hierarchies of privilege and contradictions therein. Our intervention therefore challenges assumptions about, and raises important ethical questions regarding the treatment of, the 'international student'. The paper also has wider applicability beyond the subject of ISM because our analytical framework provides a creative way for scholars to address how and why categories are made up at different scales, by which means, and to what end.image

Concerns about runaway artificial intelligence (AI) – including large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT – are at the forefront of contemporary political, social, and scientific discourse. This commentary provides a first look at ChatGPT's capabilities and limitations in supporting geographic research, critical thinking, learning, and curriculum development. We assessed ChatGPT's geographic knowledge, synthesising abilities, and potential for extrapolation. ChatGPT was employed for writing assistance, research evaluation, curriculum material creation, and content generation. Despite achieving scores of 47% to 55% on an actual exam paper, ChatGPT exhibited shortcomings including the generation of false references. Ethical concerns regarding academic misconduct, model bias, robustness, and toxic output were also identified. We assert that AI and LLMs like ChatGPT have transformative potential in Geography education and knowledge production but demand critical usage. Accordingly, we urge geographers to enhance AI literacy to enable responsible and effective use of these assistive technologies in our academic practice.

This commentary addresses three objectives: (1) to situate and contextualise the ongoing military assault on Gaza within longer colonial histories in Palestine; (2) to collate resources that can equip geographers-specialist and non-specialist, academic and non-academic-with resources to build decolonial politics on Palestine-Israel; and (3) to contribute to discussions on what we, as geographers, can do to support Palestinian calls for liberation. These objectives are informed by a strong conviction that now is not a time for equivocation or silence. Palestinians, both in Palestine and in exile, need robust support and solidarity. This commentary offers one example of the form this support and solidarity can take in the context of academia. It does so by calling forth our discipline's plural and deep commitment to justice and thoroughgoing critique of the deleterious power structures and colonial legacies that have brought us to this current moment of crisis in Palestine.

This article discusses research on critical geographies of professional careers to contextualise and introduce the special issue contributions that develop this emerging field from different geographical, sectoral, and sociocultural perspectives. Aiming to expand on the spatial turn in the social sciences, we focus on the spatially sensitive themes of career mobilities and networks and career structures and environments. These themes are analysed in this special issue from a variety of international and intercultural perspectives in different African and European case study contexts. We argue that research on critical geographies of professional careers should productively embrace epistemic pluralism and further engage with critical poststructuralist theories from variegated positionalities to inform progressive discourses, practices, and policies for inducing spatial, social, and epistemic change.

The current intensification of Israel's on-going war on Gaza has killed over 25,000 people in less than four months; half of them children. Nearly 60,000 people have been injured, almost all civilians, and many of them children (UNICEF). Many more thousands are missing beneath the rubble caused by the 25,000 tonnes of explosives that have been dropped on Gaza since October 7, equivalent to two nuclear bombs. The IPC has reported that the entire population of 2.2 million people is facing acute food. In this viewpoint we argue that it is not tenable as critical childhood studies scholars to remain silent in the face of these grave and systematic violations of children's rights due to Israel's actions in the occupied Palestinian territories and especially in Gaza. We argue for an end to the violations of children's protection in international law, an immediate ceasefire, the restoration of schools and hospitals, and immediate provision of humanitarian aid including food, water and medicine. We urge scholars to use their academic platforms to vociferously oppose the ongoing murder, disablement and bereavement of children by Israel, not only in Gaza, but also in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the rest of Palestine-Israel.

The growth of girls' and women's football in Africa, coupled with increased professionalisation in Europe and the United States, has led to rising international migration of African female players. This trend reflects the longer standing culture of independent, transnational migration among African women since the late 1980s and of enlarged possibilities and responsibilities triggered by neoliberal reform across the continent. This article explores how these sporting, cultural and economic transformations have coalesced to influence the aspirations and agency of female youth and young women in Ghana. To do so, we draw on original data from ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana, Sweden and Denmark undertaken between 2015 and 2021. Our findings reveal that for ambitious, talented female footballers, transnational football migration is increasingly viewed as a speculative route to improve ones' life chances and negotiate intergenerational responsibilities to family. Significantly, the article also illustrates that in seeking to produce this highly prized form of migration, they must carefully navigate gendered social norms and hierarchies related to 'respectable' career and life trajectories. The conclusion proposes a critical research agenda to explore the interplay between sporting opportunities, migration aspirations and diverse socioeconomic conditions in Africa.

This is the first in a series of occasional editorials in which we guide our readers through groups of papers that we consider to be ‘way‐finding’ contributions to geographical debates. Our emphasis on ‘way‐finding’ and navigating through scholarly work engages a tension we identified around Transactions ' remit of publishing so‐called ‘landmark’ papers which are likely to stimulate and shape research agendas in Geography. We use this editorial as an opportunity to refocus attention away from the landmark paper as a static object of high repute that people come to visit, and towards the active role of landmarks as way‐finders used to navigate and engage with a landscape. The papers spotlighted in the editorial provide noteworthy examples of recent efforts to understand non‐human lifeworlds and the legitimisation of concepts and experiences constructed in/by Majority World scholarship. The papers are also notable for their careful approach to shaping agendas, marked by an awareness of past and present geographical scholarship, while also envisioning the discipline's future.

In this editorial we ask key questions about what it means to publish ‘a journal’ in a world of publishing which is driven by individual article metrics and online access. Seeing the value of journals as venues for intellectual debate, we therefore set out a renewed vision as to how the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers can provide space for more collective and collaborative approaches to geographical debate. This approach revolves around the idea of ‘transactions’ itself and creating spaces in the journal for more commentary, debate and dialogue, alongside continuing to publish landmark papers.

This paper examines the experiences of Nigerian Commonwealth Scholars, in the context of post-colonial migration management regimes, to enliven scholarship on the migration-development nexus. It does so by adopting an approach that integrates debates over 'brain gain' and 'brain drain' with theoretical discussions concerning the migration aspiration-ability continuum. Findings from our qualitative dataset extend these debates by introducing the concept of Obligatory Return Migration. We argue that this concept provides a novel way to simultaneously analyse migrants' agency and the structures influencing migration, and offers original insights on how return migration shapes career aspirations.

This chapter focuses on the various challenges that African migrant players encounter and navigate as they seek to reproduce career mobility in Europe and South-East Asia. Some of these challenges contour the African migrant experience more generally, and include adjusting to a different climate, food, language and culture. Others, though, are found to be more specific to football and incorporate the particularities of the football environment, culture, expectations and playing styles of any given club or league. African players frequently lack resources and advantageous relations while competing with thousands of others for a very limited number of opportunities. This situation is compounded by racialisation and experiences of racism. They must also negotiate and meet multiple expectations from families, agents, clubs and coaches, as well as those that are self-imposed. Therefore, most African players’ careers are dominated by pressures and ongoing uncertainty that often leads to downward mobility in the industry. Yet is argued that players’ embodied belief in their abilities to succeed, and the need to make their migration project valuable for themselves, their family and wider community frequently mitigate the disillusionment and setbacks that they often face abroad. This is because staying in the game and keeping the hope of ‘making it’ alive gives meaning to the struggle, regardless of how precarious the present may be.