TIBG

@tibg.bsky.social

1300 Followers 182 Following

Transactions is a geography journal which publishes high-quality papers and interventions that make a substantial theoretical or empirical contribution to the discipline. Edited by Beth Greenhough, @benandersongeog.bsky.social & @kbrickell.bsky.social.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in TIBG by Gediminas Lesutis (2026) entitled: '(Im)possibility of Redress: Mega-Infrastructures and the Voided Politics of Contestation' with a red banner at the top.

Drawing on critical geography's recent engagement with negativity, this article intervenes in dominant relational approaches to infrastructure by examining the (im)possibility of redress under mega-infrastructure development through a case study of the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor in coastal Kenya. Based on six months of ethnographic research conducted between 2019 and 2023 with displaced fishermen, civil society activists and state representatives, it traces how demands for redress are articulated, negotiated and continually deferred across legal, bureaucratic and everyday terrains of governance. Focusing on four interlinked configurations—law, representational legibility, compensation governance and everyday precarity—the article shows how redress, as a struggle over recognition, livelihood repair and futurity, is simultaneously pursued yet structurally foreclosed by the scalar, social and political-institutional conditions reproduced by mega-infrastructure. It argues that, under conditions of ongoing dispossession, relations generate recognition, claims and forms of accountability that are persistently enacted but rarely resolved, thereby revealing the limits of relational thinking that, even when attentive to disconnection and unevenness, presumes relations are analytically stable and politically generative. The article names this patterned failure a ‘void’: not an absence of politics or relation, but a structural and lived condition in which efforts towards repair persist precisely through their own foreclosure.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Anna Papoutsi & Antonis Vradis (2026) entitled: 'Ephemeral Lives Versus Colonial Afterlives: Building Decolonial Urbanisms Through Two African Culture Festivals in Athens' with a red banner at the top.

This paper examines how African migrantised and diasporic communities in Athens contest the city's dominant colonial imaginary through cultural festival practice. We argue that Athens has been constructed as a racialised chronotope: a frozen, whitened tableau anchored in classical antiquity that renders contemporary racialised presences peripheral, temporary, and illegible. Drawing on three years of Decolonial, Ethnographic, Participatory Arts-Based Research (DEPABR), including the co-organisation of two Afroathenian festivals in 2023 and 2024, we analyse how these ephemeral events functioned as methodological and political sites where questions of recognition, legitimacy, and belonging were actively negotiated. We show how debates over permits, venue selection, representation, and voice crystallised deeper chronopolitical tensions between present-oriented strategies of institutional recognition and longer horizons of autonomous, commoning-based claim-making. Rather than resolving these tensions, we treat them as analytically generative, revealing the uneven distribution of risk, audibility, and temporal orientation that structures Black urban life in Europe's southern cities. We conclude that festival ephemerality, far from undermining political force, operates as a decolonising method: temporarily suspending the city's imposed stillness and opening space for plural histories, solidarities, and futures. The paper contributes to debates on urban chronotopes, citizenship, and decolonial urbanism.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Craig Jeffrey, Avishek Jha & Jane Dyson (2026) entitled: 'Unemployed Youth Agency and Geographies of Educational Support in Urban North India' with a red banner at the top.

The emergence of large numbers of educated unemployed people across the world remains a major social challenge. Research on unemployed young people has tended to emphasise a lack of agency. Many studies depict jobless youth as aimless and detached from their social and spatial situation. This paper uses an account of the practices of educated unemployed young people in Uttar Pradesh, North India, to challenge this depiction. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2004/2005 and 2022/2023 in Meerut City, by the first author and second author, respectively, the paper documents the capacity of jobless youth to adapt to employment scarcity over the first quarter of the twenty-first century. In 2004/2005 young people were often involved in cultures of waiting and passing time. Eighteen years later educated unemployed young people were much more focused on preparing for government employment. This adaptation has occurred in part through young people developing so-called ‘libraries’ across Meerut, which offer spaces in which they can study, socialise and ‘prepare’ (‘taiyari’) for government admissions tests. In documenting a shift in young people's activity and agency, the paper makes three contributions to wider human geographical work. First, it highlights a need to consider how non-elite sections of society can come to develop social agency over time. Second, the paper illuminates the potential of supplementary educational initiatives to serve as geographies of support. Finally, the paper discusses the value of long-term research in a single place that can connect social change to shifting strategies on the ground.

Screenshot of a commentary abstract in Transactions by Matthieu Noucher (2026) entitled: 'From the Mosaic to the Patchwork Metaphor in Digital Cartography—A Response to the Article by Hong et al. (2025)' with a red banner at the top.

In their recent article entitled Root metaphors in cartography bridging critical and quantitative approaches, Ruizhe Hong, Bo Zhao and Shangyi Zhou (2025) highlight how metaphors can be used as a heuristic tool to renew critical approaches to digital cartography. Using Anne Buttimer's Four Root Metaphors (1982)—mosaic, mechanism, organism and arena—they explore the link between cartographic representation, socio-spatial inequalities and spatial justice in the context of technological developments marked by recent advances in spatial data science and geospatial artificial intelligence. While acknowledging that other metaphors could be used, the authors encourage readers to build on this exercise to further develop ‘a mapping practice that is as diverse and dynamic as the landscapes it seeks to represent’. I have decided to seize this stimulating opportunity to propose a fifth metaphor which I call the patchwork metaphor. More specifically, I argue that the ‘mosaic metaphor’ creates an illusion which fuels neo-positivist visions of cartography that persist to this day. I therefore prefer the metaphor of ‘cartographic patchwork’ as I believe it is particularly effective in revealing the digital divides that characterise today's geospatial world.

A graphical abstract for a paper in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers by Sarah Klosterkamp with the following text:

Spores of displacement: Legal geographies of mold, evidence and housing precarity. Examining how mold functions as a legal object in tenant-landlord disputes.

1) Mold as a legal threshold object: Court cases over mold growth expose evidentiary hierarchies between tenants and landlords.
2) De-renting and eviction: rent reductions intended to protect tenants paradoxically facilitate eviction and exclusion
3) Export knowledge and proptech: The use of building inspections and digital monitoring tools disadvantages tenants with limited resources.

Mold disputes illustrate how housing precarity is both produced and adjudicated through legal infrastructures.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Thom Davies, Angeliki Balayannis, Emma Garnett, Toni Gladding, Stephen Hinchliffe & Phillip Nicholson (2026) entitled: 'Slow Death and Key Workers: The Ordinary Crisis of Waste Work During the COVID-19 Pandemic' with a red banner at the top.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Dolly Loomans, Fenne M. Pinkster & Dorien Manting (2026) entitled: 'Remembering and Anticipating Precarity: A Temporal Perspective on Housing Experiences of Labour Migrants in the Netherlands' with a red banner at the top.

This article contributes to geographical scholarship on home as a place of ontological security by considering the multitemporal, long-term lived effects of housing precarity among labour migrants. Within migration and housing debates, housing precarity is often viewed as a material and temporary condition that labour migrants accept to achieve better living conditions in the future. In this paper, we argue that this misrepresents the experience of housing precarity. We draw upon the housing biographies of Polish labour migrants in the Netherlands and identify four distinct temporal logics of housing precarity showing how past, present and future intertwine in different ways. First of all, extreme precarity in early years can become a reference frame, leading people to accept marginally improved precarious conditions in subsequent housing. Second, memories of past precarity permeate into the present and future shaping how migrants navigate housing. Thirdly, expectations and aspirations for the future feed back into the present shaping the experience of living arrangements as precarious. Finally, the demands of the precarious present can be so consuming that past and future times are pushed away. Our findings show that we should rethink how housing precarity manifests itself, not only as a material and temporary housing condition but also as an ontological experience with long-lasting effects.

Screenshot of an editorial abstract in Transactions by Anna Lawrence, James Esson, Ben Anderson, Katherine Brickell & Beth Greenhough (2026) entitled: 'Citational politics in Transactions' with a red banner at the top.

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. Our purpose in removing references from the word limit is not to encourage authors to cram in as many references as they can to the detriment of their own voice, but rather to encourage practices of careful, conscious, and capacious citational generosity. Picking up on threads running through past editorials (Bailey et al. 2023; Esson et al. 2024), here we continue discussions of ‘care’ in scholarly publishing and what constitutes a ‘landmark paper’ within the discipline, this time through the lens of citational politics. This editorial proceeds by locating the decision within current debates around citational justice and citation as a reproductive technology (Ahmed 2013; Kim 2020), before considering the broader landscape of source discovery, reading and referencing in the digital/AI-crowded world, following the publication of the last ever print volume of Transactions in December 2023. We end with a discussion of how the practice of citation might be imagined differently, from the teaching of citation as a joyful praxis (Quave and Ohbi 2024) and the reflective insights collected around the #CiteBlackWomen movement (Smith 2022) to the rethinking of citation templates to better account for knowledge that sits outside of the Western episteme (MacLeod 2021). We encourage authors writing in Transactions to reflect on their own practices of reading and citing, and we highlight the role that journals, reviewers, and editors must play in moving forward with more inclusive citational practices.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in TIBG by Qiong He & Shenjing He (2026) entitled: 'The Affirmative Biopolitics of Anxiety in China: Ambivalence, Marginalisation and Resistance Under the ‘Double Reduction’ Policy' with a red banner at the top.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Julien Migozzi & Dariusz Wójcik (2026) entitled: 'Situating African FinTech in Global Financial Networks' with a red banner at the top.

Africa has witnessed a FinTech fever, yet these financial dynamics remain largely off the map. To address this gap, this paper explores the geographical patterns of firm creation and investments in African FinTech and how they have evolved since the emergence of FinTech on the continent. Tracing flows of capital across firms, cities and countries, we interpret the geography of investment in African FinTech through the lens of the Global Financial Network (GFN) approach. The analysis, based on a unique purpose-built dataset of African FinTech firms, documents waves of firm creation and investment, starting in South Africa in the 1990s, led by Nigeria in recent years and concentrated in metropolitan areas. Our findings reveal an emerging specialisation in FinTech centres, including Mauritius as a diversified offshore FinTech jurisdiction and Seychelles as an offshore crypto-hub. After documenting the preponderance of non-African investment over cross-border African and domestic origins of funding, we map the networks of FinTech capital flows by subsector and examine institutional, technological and geographical factors, with examples from three Nigerian unicorns. This paper uncovers how FinTech connects Africa's financial centres and offshore jurisdictions with established centres west and east of the continent in a new stage of GFN expansion.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Sergei Shubin & Diana Beljaars (2026) entitled: 'Organising Inequality: Viral Contamination of Healthcare Policies During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Wales' with a red banner at the top.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Marco Antonisch (2026) entitled: 'Rethinking the Race–Nation Nexus: Spatial Narratives of Racialised Italians in the United Kingdom' with a red banner at the top.

Nation and race are often theorised as closely intertwined, with nationalism frequently positioned as a driving force behind racism. The article advances an empirically grounded argument that challenges this assumed relationship. In particular, it explores how space, understood as a socially constructed category, is discursively mobilised in everyday conversations and interactions to articulate notions of nation and national belonging beyond race. Drawing on 32 individual interviews with racialised Italians living in the United Kingdom, the article shows how, outside Italy—a space regarded as saturated with whiteness—participants feel empowered to reclaim the nation from which they were excluded and to embrace alternative readings of nation which de-centre whiteness. These narratives reconfigure nation and national belonging not through opposition to racialised bodies (‘who’), but through proximity to or distance from particular practices, objects and im/material spaces (‘what’). The findings demonstrate that the race–nation nexus should not be conceptualised as an inevitable or intrinsic condition, but as a historical configuration rooted in a white fantasy of spatial hegemony which, while still powerful, is increasingly unsettled by the lived realities of growing racial diversity.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Neha Arora & Debbie Hopkins (2026) entitled: 'Truck dogs: Advancing a mobile geography of multispecies relations of care' with a red banner at the top.

This paper demonstrates how multispecies relations co-constitute mobile work in road haulage under supply chain capitalism. Bringing labour and animal geographies into dialogue, we extend the concepts of carescapes and caringscapes to theorise the truck cab, route and logistical infrastructures as multispecies sites of care beyond the ‘static’ workplace. We use multiple methods to create multispecies narrative portraits, through which we reveal how caring labour—training and socialisation, embodied attunement, walking and the management of hygiene, risk and routine—enables truck dogs to travel and reshapes drivers' sensory orientations, working rhythms and well-being. We also show how organisational policies, regulatory regimes and infrastructural constraints render some forms of care legible as security, cleanliness, compliance and asset protection, whilst limiting or displacing others. At the same time, truck dogs offer companionship, routine and vigilance that can ease isolation and insecurity without resolving the structural harms of mobile work. We argue that supply chain capitalism is sustained through a mobile carescape in which care is continually negotiated across schedules, routes and institutional thresholds. By foregrounding these multispecies arrangements, the paper unsettles dominant accounts of where and how care is organised and advances a mobile geography of care attentive to the logistical conditions through which care is made possible, valued and constrained.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Yafa El Masri (2026) entitled: 'When ‘Yes’ Means No: Understanding Infiltration as Refusal of Cultural Heritage Research in Palestine' with a red banner at the top.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers by William Monteith (2026) entitled: 'Green Refrontierisation: Critical Cartographies of the Hydrogen Rush in Africa' with a red banner at the top.

Land is a critical requirement of low-carbon energy transitions, driving global land acquisitions on an unprecedented scale. Under pressure to diversify and decarbonise their energy mix, European states and investors have begun to map the ‘green hydrogen potential’ of territories on the African continent, producing powerful new visualisations of energy space. This article provides a critical cartographic analysis of the green hydrogen (GH2) maps present within the reports of European states, lobby groups and investment bodies to examine the role of geographical knowledge in the production of low-carbon energy frontiers. It identifies three spatio-political strategies present within these maps: spatialising hydrogen potential, territorialising hydrogen space and (re)mobilising fossil fuel infrastructure. Together, these strategies form part of a broader process that I term ‘green refrontierisation’: the assembling of low-carbon energy frontiers atop the remnants of colonial and carbon frontiers. Through a particular focus on the Namibian case, the article's findings advance debates at the intersection of energy geographies and critical cartography by demonstrating how low-carbon energy frontiers (re)spatialise land around a series of dynamic environmental processes rather than the subterranean resources that have historically guided geographical thinking.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Emma McRae (2026) entitled: 'Visualising the Urban Imaginary: Failure and Irresolution in an Urban Digital Twin' with a red banner at the top.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Nikko Stevens and Jack Jen Gieseking (2025) entitled: 'A Reply on Responsibility and Repair in AI: Lessons From Outer Space, Agriculture and Gay Hookup Apps' with a red banner at the top.

This afterword examines artificial intelligence (AI) as the latest iteration of digital capitalism's utopian promises and resultant violences, while situating AI within broader conversations on responsibility and repair in digital geographies. Building from what Lucy Suchman describes as its ‘strategic vagueness’, and much like ‘big data’ in the 2010s, AI is promoted through power and manipulation: supposedly able to solve social, political and environmental crises, while obscuring its colonial and racist infrastructures. Responding to interventions by Katarzyna Cieslik, Yung Au and Margath Walker with Jamie Winders, we trace the ways AI's supply chains span from agricultural megafarms to outer space, and we bring in another intimate geography of AI: the work of Trust & Safety professionals, particularly those working in dating and hookup apps. We argue that AI itself cannot serve as an agent of repair in the harms it causes. Instead, repair emerges through human networks of accountability and care, informed by feminist, Black, queer, trans and decolonial frameworks.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Katarzyna Cieslik (2025) entitled: 'The Dismal Harvest: The Uneven Landscapes of AI in Agriculture' with a red banner at the top.

In this intervention, I examine artificial intelligence (AI) in agriculture through a political ecology lens, analysing how promises of productivity, efficiency, and sustainability take shape across uneven postcolonial landscapes. Building on feminist and critical agrarian perspectives, I focus on the material relations of farming to show that AI in agriculture, often portrayed as immaterial, relies on deeply material infrastructures—sensors, data centres, energy systems, and extractive supply chains. Tracing how AI-driven digital agriculture and smart agriculture reconfigure relations between farmers, land, and technology, I argue that care for agroecosystems is increasingly displaced by care for digital infrastructures, with dire consequences for the social and ecological relations that sustain rural labour, land, and livelihoods. Focusing on emergent applications of AI in agriculture in the Global South, I show how these technologies consolidate corporate power, erode agrarian knowledges, and reproduce postcolonial inequalities under neoliberal capitalism. I conceptualise AI as a socioecological fix, stressing the need to re-spatialise and historicise technological change in the context of agrarian change, by attending to its infrastructural and ecological entanglements. I situate this analysis within debates on economies of repair, arguing that understanding AI in agriculture requires attention not only to breakdown and failure but also to the everyday practices of repair—technical, ecological, and social—that sustain digital infrastructures and reveal the uneven burdens of maintaining them across agrarian worlds. This intervention contributes to the Themed Intervention, 'Geographies of Responsibility, Care and Repair in Digital Worlds of AI'.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Yung Au (2025) entitled: 'Computers in Our Cosmos: Intersections in Geographies of Care, Abolition Geographies and Worker Movements' with a red banner at the top.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Margath Walker & Jamie Winders (2025) entitled: 'Artificial Intelligence and the Temporalities of Responsibility and Risk' with a red banner at the top.

As creators of artificial intelligence (AI) begin to express regret over their role in its development, some are suggesting the need to take responsibility for the technology‘s effects. As part of the TIBG Themed Intervention which asks, ‘What does it mean to take responsibility and enact care and repair in the realm of AI?’, we consider how responsibility is being mobilised in and through AI. We first track the spatio-temporal dimensions of responsibility in AI and, second, chart the connections and gaps between a language of responsibility and a language of risk in recent AI developments. Thinking through where, and when, responsibility surfaces in the genealogy of AI and how responsibility does, and does not, feed into conversations around AI, we suggest, is essential to better understanding the complicated spatio-temporalities of responsibility to, within, and of AI systems.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in TIBG by Jessica McLean, Louise Reid, Karen P. Y. Lai, Markus Roos Breines & Sneha Krishnan (2026) entitled: 'Geographies of Responsibility, Care and Repair in Digital Worlds of AI: Introduction to the Themed Intervention' with a red banner at the top.

The presence of AI in everyday life has dramatically increased and intensified in the last few years. From playing a role in teaching and research activities within educational institutions, to becoming a ubiquitous feature in search engines and in all manner of apps, AI is now omnipresent. While geographers have long examined the role of AI in various ways, in this Themed Intervention we highlight often overlooked dimensions of responsibility, care and repair in the mobilisation and impacts of AI. This Themed Intervention questions the genealogy of AI and its creators' duty of care towards the real-life impacts of its operationalisation, how AI might be (responsibly) governed to reduce these impacts and how responsibility is or should be devolved across different actors (e.g., individualistic or collective responsibilities). We acknowledge that despite its potential for positive ends, AI has already caused damage to people, societies, environments and therefore question whether repair (of the people–AI relation, of AI consequences) is possible, what form this can or should take as well as how the faults of AI can be corrected. By exploring care, the contributors share concern with caring for and of AI, including its current impacts and futures, with each contribution ruminating on how caring relations are configured. We argue that if we focus on dimensions of care and repair when critically evaluating the discursive and material realities of AI, issues relating to responsibility are impossible to ignore.

Screenshot of an intervention abstract in Transactions by Jay JD Todd & Felicity Callard (2026) entitled: 'A Critical Response to the UK's ‘Sullivan Review’ Into Sex and Gender in Research and Data' with a red banner at the top.

This intervention argues that the UK Government-commissioned independent review of data, statistics and research on sex and gender (the ‘Sullivan Review’) implicitly promotes the erasure of trans and gender diverse people from research and data collection protocols and carries worrying implications for the inclusion of trans people within UK institutions and for critical social science research. Set in a context where trans and gender diverse people's rights are being rolled back in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, the Review attempts to install a singular model of binary, immutable, ‘biological’ sex as incontrovertible across data gathering on sex and gender across public bodies including government, universities, the health service and research organisations. It does so via appeals to science and to ‘clarity’, and by proposing to limit or even in certain cases remove default ethical review processes. The intervention argues that the Review can be situated within broader attempts to erase critical inquiry into the complex, intersectional production of social categories including sex, gender and sexuality, as well as inquiries that extend what ethical principles and governance involve. In sum, we contend that the Review carries deleterious consequences for geography and other social scientific disciplines and call upon scholars to refuse its vision and implications.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Hector Becerril, Ben Anderson & Alejandro de Coss Corzo (2026) entitled: 'The Life of Events: Exception and Everyday Life in Acapulco, Mexico' with a red banner at the top.

The paper focuses on the event of ‘Ingrid-and-Manuel’—a Hurricane and Tropical Storm that hit Acapulco, Mexico in 2013. It traces what this event was and how it remains for people in and beyond Acapulco. It does so in the context of a place where the lines between events and everyday life are often blurred, and yet the event was still named and felt as an exception to ordinary life. By focusing on how exceptionality was and is produced, the paper supplements how human geography understands and relates to events, arguing for an approach that focuses on the ‘life of events’: following how events begin, happen, change, end and live on. This approach sits between social constructivist and realist approaches to events, orientating inquiry to the ongoing mediation of impactive experience, via Lauren Berlant's work. Through this approach, the paper tracks the affective-material variations through which Ingrid-and-Manuel became and remains an exception: excess, (dis)connection, loss and damage, recovery.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Hanno Brankamp (2025) entitled: 'Fugitive Junctures: Life-Seeking, Route-Finding and the Mobile Ensemble at Kenya's Borders' with a red banner at the top.

Fugitivity has become an important conceptual frame to understand the illegalised mobilities of contemporary migrants. Their furtive movements in the shadows of modern border regimes echo enslaved people's historical lines of flight and enact similar spatial praxes through which they aim to seize their own freedom. Thinking from Kenya, and drawing on qualitative research with migrants, border officials, activists, police and smugglers, this article critically intervenes in these debates by offering an analysis of ‘fugitive junctures’: decisional moments in time when individual flightpaths conjoin, are renegotiated and reworked by migrants on the run. Drawing on recent debates in Black geographies, critical migration studies and abolitionist scholarship, the article develops a detailed understanding of these junctures to give more texture to the notion of ‘fugitivity’ whose relative mutability has often limited its analytical value in migration research. While their locus may be shifting depending on context, fugitive junctures are nonetheless recognisable by the three existential pursuits that they mediate during migrant journeys: life-seeking, route-finding and the mobile ensemble. In examining what structures different stages of escape mobilities, this article ultimately sheds light on the building blocks of a living counter-cartography of freedom which lays bare the difficult and circuitous road to abolition.

A graphic showing the title page of Transactions on a read background with TIBG in large letters on the right hand page. On the left hand page are nine tiles sharing 6 papers in a Themed Intervention and 3 standard articles, with the names of papers in the issue.

1) Worlding geography, area studies and the study of area
Han Cheng, Deen Sharp

2) Egypt's geographical tradition: The post-independence moment and shifting regional imaginations
Aya Nassar

3) Constructing and contesting meta-geographies in Russian area studies debates
Vera Smirnova

4) Geography and area studies as critical bedfellows? The view from Singapore
Brenda S. A. Yeoh

5) Global China's spatial ambition and area studies with geography
Han Cheng

6) Beyond the Limpopo: Geography and the worlding of South(ern) Africa
Maano Ramutsindela

7) Unseasonable seasons: Shifting geographies of weather and migration mobilities
Kaya Barry

8) Staged ecologies: Aesthetics, nature and infrastructure in the late-modern metropolis
Zuhri James

9) Multispecies slavery–environment nexus in resource extraction and animals' ecological politics: Coercive donkey labour in Indian river sand mining
Yamini Narayanan

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Leiboyu Xiang & Neil Lee (2025) entitled: 'Finding Stars: Mapping the Geography of the World's Scientific Elites' with a red banner at the top.

This paper presents the first systematic city-level mapping of global scientific talent, analysing the top 200,000 star scientists across 3635 cities worldwide annually between 2019 and 2023. We use a novel Knowledge Generation Index (KGI) that combines researcher quantity with research impact to reveal extreme spatial concentration in knowledge production. Just four cities—New York, Boston, London and the San Francisco Bay Area—host 12% of the world's star scientists, while much of the Global South remains virtually excluded from frontier research. Beijing's ascent into the global top 10 represents a rare challenge to established hierarchies. Our analysis uncovers striking disciplinary variations. Resource-intensive fields like clinical medicine cluster heavily, and traditionally dispersed disciplines are increasingly gravitating towards major hubs. Despite these differences, concentration is intensifying across most scientific fields. Even the pandemic's remote collaboration experiment failed to level the playing field. Established innovation centres continued strengthening their advantages while peripheral regions fell further behind. Overall, we find that geography remains destiny, with profound implications for innovation policy confronting widening spatial inequalities in global scientific capacity.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by JoAnn McGregor, Mohamed Alikhan, George Masimba, Ahmed Omer & Michael Collyer (2025) entitled: 'Evictability—A Relational Comparison: Fears, Manoeuvres and Regimes of Housing Insecurity in Rapidly Urbanising Cities' with a red banner at the top.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Handuo Deng, Fulong Wu & Fangzhu Zhang (2025) entitled: 'Green Space Production as a State Project in Urban China' with a red banner at the top.

This study investigates the production of urban spaces shaped by political intentions that transcend capitalist imperatives. We examine the politics of developing Chengdu's greenway project by operationalising state entrepreneurialism—a perspective of territorial logic and capitalist logic in urban governance—through strategic embeddedness and tactical mobilisation. Strategic embeddedness refers to the institutional integration of the market into the state apparatus to achieve the state's strategic goals, while tactical mobilisation refers to the constrained manoeuvres employed by state agencies to mobilise external interests. In Chengdu, state actions strategically embedded market finance into the ecological project of political significance through large-scale state–capital coordination and tactically mobilised a pro-growth coalition for financialised housing development. The state politics differ markedly from the new urban politics that mainly serve global mobile capital. In this context, capitalist logic becomes secondary to the contextualised territorial logic underpinning China's ecological agendas. This study contributes to the literature on entrepreneurial cities and state-led ecological spaces by foregrounding the intentional dimension of statecraft and advancing state entrepreneurialism as a conceptual and analytical framework.

Screenshot of a paper in Transactions by Mark Griffiths (2025) entitled: 'Geopower, Geos and the colonisation of Palestine' with a red banner at the top.

While the majority of geographical work on colonialism in Palestine centres on territory and land, this article foregrounds geopower and geos in the making of spatial relations. Three arguments are made over three corresponding sections. The first draws on recent writing on geopower and geos (primarily that by Elizabeth Grosz, Elizabeth Povinelli and Kathryne Yusoff) that addresses the idea that political order and subjectivities grow from geological formations and life/non-life divisions. Following this work, I make an argument with obvious significance for geographers: the geos is a theoretically under-explored spatial unit that may predicate manifold spatial relations (e.g., the practices and politics that produce ‘land’ or ‘territory’). The second section considers historical accounts of early Zionist and Israeli settlement to show how geopower underpins the conceptualisation of Palestinian space as alternatively life-sustaining or life-threatening in ways that predicate the sequester of land and territorial claims. The stakes are not merely historical or theoretical: the third section focuses on three contemporary sites—(i) the war-affected soils of Gaza, (ii) the cultivation of olive trees in the West Bank (iii) and practices of agri-resistance in Bethlehem—to explicate how geopower and geos remain central to ongoing colonial control and struggles in Palestine.

Screenshot of an Intervention abstract in Transactions by Thomas Dekeyser, Casey R. Lynch & Sophia Maalsen (2025) entitled: 'AI Authoritarianism: Towards an Analytical Framework' with a red banner at the top.

This intervention offers a call for investigating the deepening alignment of artificial intelligence and authoritarian politics. The paper highlights three key features of AI that inflect the workings and logics of authoritarianism: (selective) inhumanisation, the cult of intelligence and scaling. We argue that AI, through these features, is not simply extending, but actively modulating, key dynamics of authoritarianism. To account for this, we propose a flexible analytical framework designed to grapple with the rapidly changing materialisations of the confluence of AI and authoritarianism and suggest focusing on how what we call ‘authoritarian tendencies’ are introduced on the level of the techno-material, the ideological and the everyday. The framework recognises that both AI and authoritarianism are relational practices and thus requires geographers to trace these relations across multiple sites and actors while being attentive to the ways AI and authoritarianism mutually shape one another in ever-shifting ways.

Screenshot of the abstract for a 'Statement on Academic Freedom in Geography' from Jenny Pickerill, Peter Hopkins, Beth Greenhough, Ben Anderson & Katherine Brickell

"A short statement on academic freedom in the current political climate as it relates to academic geographers, from representatives of the RGS-IBG RHE Committee and the Editors of TIBG."

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Anna Pearce (2025) entitled: 'Asylum as Artifice: Race, Law and Capital as Regimes of Abstraction in the United Kingdom's Asylum Accommodation System' with a red banner at the top.

Taking as its case study the category of the ‘asylum seeker’ in UK law, this paper develops on latent concerns in legal geographies with processes of abstraction. Following Bhandar and Toscano, race, law and capital are here understood as different, co-articulating modalities of abstraction, through which the ‘asylum seeker’ is constituted and reconstituted by spatial practice and law over time. The case study charts the history of the category in UK law with the corresponding developments in the material and spatial infrastructures of asylum accommodation, from the point at which the ‘asylum seeker’ was first codified in UK law in 1993 to the delegitimisation of asylum itself in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and the Illegal Migration Act 2023. As well as providing the application of Bhandar and Toscano's innovative methodology to a new empirical area, I further make the case that, as well as functioning as organisational nodes for race and capital, legal objects may also serve as conduits. In this way, these differing regimes of abstraction are put into mutually influential relationships with one another, with particularly concerning implications for the independence of law from capital. Though the case study and its legislative context are necessarily narrow in order to properly trace the contours of this particular legal object, the potential application of the theoretical arguments developed from this tight focus is broad, contributing to studies of immigration law, asylum reception and processing, as well as legal geographies more widely.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Dora Sampaio (2025) entitled: 'Towards Geographies of Silence: Unspoken Boundaries' with a red banner at the top.

Despite its social and spatial significance, silence remains an under-explored and under-theorised subject in geography. This paper addresses this lacuna by examining silence as a boundary-making practice in geographically distant relationships. Silence as boundary-making is used as a new frame for conceptualising transnational intergenerational acts of care and the complexity that characterises transnational family life. These conceptual discussions are empirically examined through the experiences of transnational families whose lives stretch between Brazil and the United States. The analysis shows how research participants conceal, select, avoid, redirect and reframe conversations in order to sustain and protect relationships embedded in, and strongly affected by, broader structures of inequality. The paper puts forth a fourfold typology of silence as boundary-making and shows how these evolving boundaries, shaped by tacit agreements, tactics of withdrawal and self-disciplining, function as acts of care and ways to avoid negative emotions, self-preservation, controlling self-image and as forms of resistance and empowerment. The paper's conceptual discussion and typology lay the foundation for a broader research agenda that attends to the significance of silence in geographical research.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Rachael Squire & Kimberley Peters (2025) entitled: 'Crafting the Ocean: The Geographies of Environmental World-Making' with a red banner at the top.

This paper brings cultural and environmental geographies into further conversation by linking theories of crafting and world-making together, via the lens of the contemporary public aquarium and nascent oceanic geographies. Far from a niche example, the public aquarium—which represents, and in some form aims to replicate (and preserve), the ocean ‘out there’—demonstrates how crafting aims to establish particular connections with environmental worlds amidst change. Drawing on fieldwork from six UK aquariums, both privately run and those with charitable status, the paper unpacks the politics of crafting in the making of aquarium tanks as well as the oceans they represent. Building on interviews with key actors (aquarists, curators, outreach and education officers, managers), visual and discourse analysis of promotional materials (websites, flyers, information boards, documentaries, memoirs, etc.) and ethnographic observations at each site, the paper offers a critical examination of three distinct modes of marine world-making behind the glass: (1) exploring how water is itself crafted, (2) the crafting of more-than-human worlds in the storying of species selection and (3) crafting light in dark, fabricated, ocean worlds. This paper thus enables a deeper understanding of craft and world-making in the context of the aquarium, also situating this space within broader geographical thought and ocean geographies. Finally, the paper draws together work on aquariums, craft and oceans in excess to argue for renewed attention on analogue worlds. It explicates how, through processes of replication, preservation and remaking, they might hold space for an ocean (and planet) undergoing profound change both now and in the future.

Screenshot of an intervention abstract in Transactions by Yu-Shan Tseng (2025) entitled: 'Re-spiritualising geographies of subjectivity through Daoism' with a red banner at the top.

This intervention seeks to advance geographical interpretations of the body as the ‘usual’ and ‘universal’ site for understanding subjectivity and spirituality in human geography. Affective and emotional geographies have predominantly located subjective experiences within the lived body—the site where bodies actively engage with the world through embodied practices such as sensing, affecting and feeling. Through these bodily engagements with the world, geographers have mapped the landscapes of embodied subjective experiences and space-making. However, the geographies of subjectivity face significant challenges in understanding spirituality beyond worldly embodiments and without equating it with religious faiths and their spatial productions.

Drawing on Daoist philosophy, I propose an alternative account that re-spiritualises the geographies of subjectivity. In Daoist thought, re-spiritualisation is seen as processes of relocation, reconnection and respatialisation of subjectivity in the Universe. Subjective experiences are relocated from the lived experiences of bodies to the spiritual place—the Heavenly heart in the Universe. They are reconnected within its mind, body and spirit, and with the Universe as Oneness, through the spiritual, understood as vital and life-giving energies. They are respatialised through spiritual energies making different spiritual spaces (e.g. the empty, the unbounded, the transcendental) in the Heavenly heart. Such spatial–spiritual processes are animated by three actions: emptying, resonating and awakening. Daoist geography makes a cosmological call for an ethical–political movement that harmonises spiritual disconnections through invoking the cosmological in selfhood without subjectivisation.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, Cheikh Abdoul Ahad Mbacké Ba, Sophie Buhnik, Marine Duc, Juliet J. Fall, Marie Gibert-Flutre, Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, Renaud Le Goix, Laura Péaud & Charlotte Ruggeri entitled: 'Worlding geographies: A question of languages' with a red banner at the top.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in TIBG by Tyler Blackman & Daniel Cockayne (2025) entitled: 'Subtractive, ambient and bifurcated attention at work and when working from home: Towards a geography of workplace attention' with a red banner at the top.

In this commentary, we draw on research on working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada, to expand on Bissell, Crovara, Gorman-Murray and Straughan's (2025) paper ‘What does it mean to be present at work? Negotiating attention, distraction and presence in working from home’. We corroborate and add to their analysis of attention in relation to working from home in two ways. First, we develop further how their analysis of attention relates to social difference in working from home settings. Second, we consider through additional examples how attention relates to a working from home politics. These points lead us to push for the importance of the multiplicious theory of attention that the authors outline in their paper, against the declension narratives that often accompany solely subtractive theories of attention that they critique in their conclusion. We emphasise a theory of attention that is ambient, bifurcated, open, complex and multifaceted, as well as one that is, under certain circumstances, subtractive. We see these former ideas of attention as more central to notions of presence and better foreground the broad range of subjective experiences of work and working.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Ruizhe Hong, Bo Zhao & Shangyi Zhou (2025) entitled: 'Root metaphors in cartography: Bridging critical and quantitative approaches' with a red banner at the top.

The evolution of contemporary cartography has long been attributed to two significant trajectories: the adoption of new technologies like computers, the Internet, and Artificial Intelligence into the map-making process, and the critical examination of cartographic methods and practices. Existing literature has rarely explored the potential of bridging these specialised parallel developments because of their seemingly inconsistent epistemological basis. This article argues that Anne Buttimer's four root metaphors—mosaic, mechanism, organism, and arena—provide a valuable lens to scrutinise these dynamics. These root metaphors, deeply embedded in the understanding of human–environment interactions, present a multifaceted framework for exploring the nexus of map representation, socio-spatial inequalities and spatial justice, all within the context of evolving technological shifts, marked by recent advances in spatial data science and geospatial artificial intelligence. We further examine the potential of these metaphors to foster a deeper appreciation of the interplay between established geographical and cartographic knowledge systems, to critically assess their limitations and to probe the synergy between cartography and emerging metaphorical constructs. This article encourages a flexible adoption of these metaphors to address the unique cartographic challenges of our time, advocating for a broader, more inclusive cartographic discourse.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Thomas Cowan (2025) entitled: 'High-resolution property: Drone enclosures in digital India' with a red banner at the top.

Drawing from ethnographic research on the implementation of Svamitva, one of the largest digitalized property titling schemes in the world, this paper examines how new drone and geospatial technologies are being deployed to enclose rural customary lands across contemporary India. Focusing on the initial processes of droney survey, GIS mapping and data-creation under the scheme, the paper argues that the creation of ‘high-resolution property’ is achieved not through simple technological observation, but rather via the imposition of a new regime of perception. One coordinated through the speculative and ideological property-making practices of drone surveyors, GIS technicians, and local residents. This new regime of perception aims to extract individual ownership lurking within collectivity, subdivide collectivised lands, and cleanly link rural property to global asset markets and digital public infrastructures. In doing so the paper seeks to provincialise contemporary geographical scholarship on property technology or PropTech, drawing from the diverse property systems and emerging technological apparatus of the Global South, and examine the lively and mediated sociotechnical practices required to convert hundreds of thousands of rural territories into high-resolution private titles and data-points. In doing so, the paper seeks to challenge the overt techno-determinism and solutionism within official debates concerning property digitalization, highlighting instead the ways digitialized property remains socially, ecologically and institutionally mediated.

A graphic showing the title page of Transactions on a read background with TIBG in large letters on the right hand page. On the left hand page are eight tiles with 2 interventions and 6 standard articles, with the names of papers in the issue.

1) 'On limit and love in times of environmental crises' by Ihnji Jon
2) 'Geographies of creativity/creative geographies' by Pat Noxolo
3) '‘My body was no longer a problem’: Electric mountain biking, disability, and the cultural politics of green exercise' by Jim Cherrington & James Brighton
4) '‘A wonderful day and a wonderful crossing!’: Internment (im)mobilities, ambivalence, and the residual tourist gaze in Second World War Britain' by Michael Holden & Peter Adey
5) '‘Smartness’ narratives: A critical discourse analysis of smart eldercare in urban China' by Yi Yu
6) 'Critique beyond relation: The stakes of working with the negative, the void and the abyss' by David Chandler & Jonathan Pugh
7) 'Poetics in the work of three urban photographers: Love for the chaotic city from the site of urban rooftops' by Paulina Nordstrom
8) 'Places as refrains: A non-constructive alternative to assemblage thinking' by Peter Merriman

This is the graphical abstract to this paper in Transactions. It shows a historical map of the Alde and Ore estuary, drawn by Ananias Appleton in 1588.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by James Esson, Ebenezer F. Amankwaa, Katherine V. Gough, Peter Mensah, Katie McQuaid & Ross Wignall (2025) entitled: 'Later life mobilities at the margins of urban geography' with a red banner at the top.

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), YƐ 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.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Maano Ramutsindela (2025) entitled: 'Beyond the Limpopo: Geography and the worlding of South(ern) Africa' with a red banner at the top.

This paper contributes to the discussion on the relationship between geography and area studies and the proposed reorientation of the critical geography of ‘area’ by situating the production of geographical knowledge in South Africa in national and regional contexts. It argues that Southern Africa provides a useful entry point for geography-African studies dialogue because of the region's shared histories and struggles, and the changing roles played by South Africa in the region. This regional context is useful for illuminating the convergence of the study of area and nationalism, and why and how geography became disconnected from African studies. The paper attributes this disconnect to parochialism and the prevailing negative views of Africa as a place of lack. It concludes that deconstructing Africa as ‘a disaster area’ and reorientating the South African Geographical Journal as a platform for African geographies are critical for bridging the geography-African studies gap.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Han Cheng (2025) entitled: 'Global China's spatial ambition and area studies with geography' with a red banner at the top.

This paper critically evaluates the contemporary remaking of China's area studies and world geography as part of a nationalist project of spatial knowledge production, by examining an emerging landscape of individuals, institutions and ideologies. Two arguments are made. First, China's area studies and world geography are shaped by not only their milieus, but also the ‘milieu of milieus’ as defined and delimited by the state-disciplinary apparatus which impedes a geography–area studies interface. Second, both milieus are underpinned by reductive epistemologies, engendering depolitised discourses that omit critical self-reflections and other geographies of knowing. As well as offering insights for China's ongoing and unfinished ‘world-writing’, this paper draws particular attention to the geographical scales and spatialities of knowledge translation, consumption, circulation and reproduction.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Brenda Yeoh (2025) entitled 'Geography and area studies as critical bedfellows? The view from Singapore' with a red banner at the top.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Vera Smirnova (2025) entitled: 'Constructing and contesting meta-geographies in Russian area studies debates' with a red banner at the top.

This paper contributes to broader efforts to examine how ‘world-writing’ practices operate beyond dominant area studies debates through the case of Russia. It traces the evolution of Russia's discipline of area studies through its two core meta-geographies—the East and Eurasia, showing how they were constructed, contested and repurposed to make sense of other regions across the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Moving from anti-colonial solidarities, in which the Soviet ‘East’ mediated knowledge exchange between Moscow and the decolonising world, to the revival of ‘Eurasia’ as a geopolitical project, academic production increasingly aligned with foreign policy ambitions, often framed in civilisational and expansionist terms. By situating Russian area studies within its geopolitical, institutional and disciplinary contexts, the article interrogates its entanglement with imperialist legacies and its selective engagement with Western debates, reproducing past hierarchies under the guise of alternative epistemologies.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Aya Nassar (2025) entitled: 'Egypt's geographical tradition: The post-independence moment and shifting regional imaginations' with a red banner at the top.

The aim of this intervention is to respond to the provocation of how different worlds and regions are imagined from the non-west. This ‘non-west’ is often regarded as the object of area studies, rather than an author of geographical knowledge and cannons. Egypt represents a classic example of this. The concomitant aim of this task is not to package these ‘other’ traditions as useful additions that diversify the histories of geography (as this reinforces the centrality of Anglocentric questions through an add-and-stir approach), but to acknowledge these traditions as evolving, and possibly problematic but always already in conversation with worldly intellectual and geopolitical traditions. To do this from the vantage point of Egypt, I start with the specific moment of post-independence to show how it was complex and imbricated in intellectual inheritances, shifting geopolitical orders, national revisions of worldly orientations and geopolitical ambitions. For many, an Egyptian regional geographic imagination finds its bedrock in the post-independence moment. It was at this time that Egypt, as an anticolonial world actor, sought to redefine its geopolitical global and regional commitments. Indeed, the post-independence moment saw a strong and forceful regional geographical imagination and praxis, in politics as well as in intellectual geography.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Han Cheng & Deen Sharp (2025) entitled 'Worlding geography, area studies and the study of area' with a red banner at the top.

This paper introduces the collection of five short papers written by scholars from Egypt, Russia, Singapore, China and South Africa that advance this journal's ‘Geography in the World’ initiative through a more robust engagement between geography and area studies. Geographers have increasingly addressed the troubled relationship that their discipline has with the field of area studies. Less registered, however, in Anglophone debates are the presence and politics of other geographical traditions of area studies. In this themed intervention, we propose a reoriented critical geography of ‘area’ by closely assessing non-Western geography's relationship with its area studies counterpart across a range of (geo)political, economic, institutional and cultural contexts beyond the Anglo-American ‘core’.

Screenshot of a commentary abstract in Transactions by James D. Sidaway (2025) entitled 'Decolonial limits to Henri Lefebvre's spatial revolution' with a red banner at the top.

This commentary appreciates Hamish Kallin's (2024) account of the prospects for reconciliation of anarchist and Marxist approaches via engaging Henri Lefebvre's work, but signals equivocation about Lefebvre triggered by his depictions of colonialism, Islam and the tropics. I argue that these are inconsistent with ongoing decolonial moves in geography.

Screenshot of a Themed Intervention abstract in Transactions by Ankit Kumar, Chandni Singh, Lauren Hermanus, Lalitha Kamath, Wangui Kimari, Mark Pelling & Harriet Bulkeley (2025) entitled: 'Crisis of imagination/(re)imaginations for a (climate) crisis' with a red banner at the top.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Mojgan Taheri Tafti (2025) entitled 'The spatiality of encounters: Contesting planning decisions in Tehran' with a red banner at the top.

How do urban activists and the state organise their encounters under constrained conditions for dissent? What spatialities do these encounters involve, and how do they mediate power relations? This paper examines these questions, focusing on eight instances of contestation in Tehran's middle-class neighbourhoods, centred on resistance to top-down urban planning and governance. Drawing on Deleuzian thought, particularly his interpretation of Spinoza's concept of encounter, the paper focuses on the spatiality of encounter as a critical site of analysis. It argues that space mediates and conditions the fragmented encounters between residents and the state by reconfiguring their power to act. The spatialities of these encounters, in turn, reflect and reproduce both the political character of urban governance and the forms of resistance it provokes.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Sarah M. Hughes (2025) entitled 'Theorising legal gaps geographically: Exploring the transition from asylum seeker to refugee in the UK' with a red banner at the top.

For many asylum seekers in the United Kingdom, being awarded refugee status signals the end of a prolonged period of waiting. At this point, they and their dependants are predominantly given permission to stay in the United Kingdom for five years. However, when a positive decision is granted, a new refugee has limited time before their existing government support (housing, finance) terminates. This transition is termed the ‘move-on period’, and, at the time of research, new refugees had only 28 days to navigate this change. Whilst civil society groups argue that the period following a positive decision poses urgent political questions, the legal gap between these two systems of governance has yet to garner significant academic attention. Scholarship has often been epistemically siloed into research looking at the governance and lived experiences of asylum seekers or the challenges and integration of refugees; the transition, or ‘gap’ between these legal categories has yet to receive sustained analysis. Building upon work on legal edges (Jeffrey 2019) this paper proposes a geographical reading of legal gaps, emerging from and speaking beyond the specifics of new refugees. It explores the construction and governance of the move-on period, together with the role of material technologies in paradoxically mediating and creating this gap. Bringing these two themes together, the paper contributes to debates on the role of materials in the governance of forced migrants and puts forward a relational theorising of legal ‘gaps’.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Jan Simon Hutta (2025) entitled 'Hide and rule: Accumulation by disappearance and necro-periurbanisation in Brazil' with a red banner at the top.

This paper examines how peri-urban spaces are governed through practices of concealment and obfuscation, thus undermining and displacing techniques of making things legible. Focusing on the Baixada Fluminense region north of Rio de Janeiro, it connects clandestine practices of ‘grilagem’, or state-sponsored land fraud, to the obfuscation of violence as part of territorial strategies. Methodologically, the article combines a genealogical approach to analysing obfuscation as a multi-pronged technology of power with empirical research on the violent control of peri-urban neighbourhoods. In Rio de Janeiro's hinterland, it is argued, the obfuscation of land entitlements has long been linked to the invisibilisation of violence and atrocities, facilitated by racialised conditions of willed ignorance and opacity. At a conceptual level, the paper contributes to nascent works in urban geography and anthropology that are committed to developing context-sensitive approaches to necropolitics in peri-urban and fringe spaces of the Global South. Moreover, it draws on work on uneven spatial development, control grabbing and forced disappearance to develop the notion of ‘accumulation by disappearance’. Such an approach complicates assumptions around modern power being built on ‘state projects of legibility’ (James Scott) and violent spectacles, while also extending engagements with racialised opacity by drawing attention to cunning techniques of obfuscation that traverse the governance of people and spaces. What emerges is a context-sensitive approach to interrogating powerful, yet contested processes of ‘necro-periurbanisation’.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Austin Read (2025) entitled 'Infrastructure as archive: Examining the colonial geographies of rivers' with a red banner at the top.

Exploring the colonial geographies that have shaped Britain, this paper argues that recent debates regarding the ecological status of British rivers must centre colonialism and racial capitalism as the crucial drivers of river decline and thus prioritise developing anticolonial ecological politics. I anchor this argument in the River Severn in southwest Britain, which, until recently, was fragmented by hydraulic infrastructures such as weirs and canals. I examine here a conservation project that has built fish passes to reconnect the Severn's divided ecologies and unsettle technocratic framings of it as a silver bullet solution that bypasses political quagmires. I point instead to the five centuries of racial capitalist geographies that have shaped the Severn and insist that these cannot be avoided through engineering ingenuity. This paper's arguments are complex because entrenched spatial dichotomies of core/periphery have resulted in a lack of attention to how colonial geographies have shaped British ecologies like the Severn. The central contribution of this article is thus its development of a spatially relational theory and method of infrastructure as a colonial archive that can disrupt dichotomous core/periphery imaginaries and render spatially discontinuous and differential colonial geographies visible. I empirically develop this theory of infrastructure as an archive by deploying it to analyse the records of the Severn Navigation Commissioners (1835–c.1948), the body responsible for the infrastructural disciplining of the Severn.

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Ifigeneia Dimitrakou (2025) entitled: 'Gaming the system through temporary housing: Real estate intermediaries and the law in short-term rental markets' with a red banner at the top.

This article contributes empirical and conceptual insights to emerging debates on the regulation of short-term rentals (STRs) by delving into the socio-legal foundations of this housing market segment. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted between September 2022 and June 2023 focused on the governance of for-profit temporary housing (i.e., serviced, furnished, interim housing) in Zurich, it examines how real estate intermediaries in the temporary housing business interact with regulations and carve out niches in tight rental markets. Through an approach that understands temporary housing as a socio-legally constructed asset and a profit-maximising rental strategy within deregulated housing markets, the analysis reveals regulatory blind spots through which intermediaries exploit existing legal tools to circumvent or substitute laws governing rent relations and transactions in the housing market. In doing so, they promote tenure flexibilisation, shaping new pathways to rent extraction. The article foregrounds the concept of gaming to understand intermediaries' interactions and use of legal tools to serve their business interests, suggesting that opportunities for gaming the system of rental regulation are central to creating these assets, making temporary housing itself a strategy for driving housing deregulation and semi-formality. To bring the corruption of rent relations into sharper focus, it is necessary to expand and move beyond debates focused on regulating land use categories towards an understanding of the nexus between market and legal practices and their influence on restructuring rent relations.

Screenshot of a website tile showing the text 'Translation: ‘Geografías de la esclavitud en Les Malouines/Las Malvinas/Falklands Islands: La conexión cimarrona/quilombola’ by Ana Zavala Guillen, TIBG' with a historical map of Las Malvinas/the Falkland Islands at the top.

A photograph of a climate demonstration with a homemade sign reading 'How can I tell him they could have stopped it but they didn't?' with blurred out pictures of a little boy and an Extinction Rebellion sticker on the sign.