GeoforumPub Date : 2024-12-02DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104166
Ana Watson , Conny Davidsen
{"title":"Remoteness and subjectivity in gas extraction: Indigenous agency and the roadless design","authors":"Ana Watson , Conny Davidsen","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104166","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104166","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Past research has confirmed how ‘green’ extractive projects can reproduce exclusion and displacement overall, but constructions of otherness and remoteness that emerge in such green illusions of extractivism and their resistance remains little understood. Peru’s Camisea liquid natural gas (LNG) extraction in the Peruvian Amazon has been framed as an environmentally friendly flagship project because of its enclave or roadless design that enables a smaller environmental footprint. Drawing on a political ecology analysis of subject formation and co-production of remoteness, this paper analyzes the agendas and effects of constructed “remoteness” in its resource extraction as a strategy to design, legitimize, and enforce territorial control. This analytical lens moves away from strict binaries of the powerful and the powerless towards a continuum of power in the resistance of extraction. We found that the notion of ‘remoteness’ is a central rhetorical strategy that paradoxically enables and limits corporate expansion, neoliberal agendas and Indigenous tactics to negotiate access to benefits. This study contributes to and works toward a more diversified power knowledge base on the ways in which environmental claims in extractivism are assessed.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"158 ","pages":"Article 104166"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2024-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142759026","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2024-11-29DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104157
Natasha A. Webster , Qian Zhang
{"title":"Strategic silences for normative work: Inclusions and exclusions of migrant labour in policy foregrounding of the Swedish gig economy","authors":"Natasha A. Webster , Qian Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104157","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104157","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Migrants constitute a sizable portion of vulnerable workers in digitally-mediated work, particularly in the gig economy. They face wide-scale labour exploitation as well as exclusions and further marginalization from existing labour markets and welfare systems. Policy intervention is a focal point of debate in the expanding gig economy literature. In Nordic countries, it is often assumed the welfare state will regulate the gig economy, but due to ambiguous understandings of what the gig economy is, debates are focused on topics such as taxation, often downplaying complexities. This study aims to explore how strategic silences towards migration underpin policy narratives relating to the foregrounding of gig economy in welfare contexts, specifically Sweden. Our approach highlights silence as an agentic and strategic process. Based on twenty-three selected <em>Swedish Government Official Reports</em> (SOU series) issued between 2016 and 2022, we first mapped the main themes regarding the gig economy in the Swedish policy arena. We show the Swedish state is shifting to recognize migrants and the gig/platform economy, but the role of structural inequalities remains ambiguous. We further critically analyzed contents of ten reports and show silence is strategic in two ways: first maintaining normative work forms as the key interest of the state and second, positioning precarious migrant labour as a sphere of exclusion. This study provides new perspectives and insights into the governance of the gig economy by highlighting the role of strategic production of silences regarding structural inequalities and the tensions within welfare-labour relations.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"158 ","pages":"Article 104157"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2024-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142744492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2024-11-28DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104175
Boris Michel, Yannick Ecker
{"title":"Seeing economic development like a large language model. A methodological approach to the exploration of geographical imaginaries in generative AI","authors":"Boris Michel, Yannick Ecker","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104175","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104175","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The recent hype surrounding the disruptive potential of AI technologies in the form of large language models or text to image generators also raises questions for geographical research and practice. These questions include the power relations and inequalities inscribed in these systems, their significance for work and labor relations, their ecological and economic impact, but also the geographical and spatial imaginaries they reproduce. This article focuses on the latter and formulates a series of theoretical and methodological considerations for dealing with the output of these systems. As we assume that outputs generated by large language models will play an increasing role in the future, both in public and media discourses as well as in the discourses and practices of spatial planning and economic policy making, we consider it important to gain a critical understanding of these socio-technical systems. The empirical object of investigation of this paper is generated output that deals with questions of regional development and economic challenges in three European regions that are currently particularly affected by the transition to a climate-neutral economy and are designated by the European Union as Just Transition Fund Territories. We are particularly interested in how geographical imaginaries about these regions are formulated, how economic and social problems of these regions are presented and how this is translated into planning advice and development plans.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"158 ","pages":"Article 104175"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2024-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142744402","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2024-11-27DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104165
Alexis Farr , Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita
{"title":"‘Never turn your back on the Ocean’: Conversations with Fear on Yuin Sea Country","authors":"Alexis Farr , Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104165","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104165","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article discusses fear as a geographical concept that can contribute to contemporary debates about human relationships with oceans. Fear is an emotional response and state of being which permeates the mind and alters the body. In relationship with the material liveliness of an ocean, fear can feel alert, anxious, and uncomfortable, charged with anger, or coupled with shame. Fear with the ocean can also feel refreshing, bring into contrast experiences of thrill, play, and wonder, and inspire deep respect for Country. This research examines fear in conversation with ocean-people living on Yuin Gadu (Sea Country), Australia. Embracing a ‘wet ontology’ (<span><span>Steinberg and Peters, 2015</span></span>) we analyse fears that are embodied in ocean geographies and evolve in liquid ways, across place and time. The paper is framed with feminist understandings of the body, as it examines bodies in transformation, more-than-human assemblages, and the strategies used by ocean-people to navigate and negotiate with fear.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"158 ","pages":"Article 104165"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2024-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142720490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2024-11-26DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104167
Daniele Tubino de Souza , Karolien van Teijlingen , Rutgerd Boelens , Gabriela Ruales
{"title":"Seeing rivers otherwise: Critical cartography as a form of critical pedagogy","authors":"Daniele Tubino de Souza , Karolien van Teijlingen , Rutgerd Boelens , Gabriela Ruales","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104167","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104167","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Counter-maps have become an increasingly important practice for social movements to claim their rights and to articulate emancipatory actions against extractive intervention plans and dominant territorial reconfiguration projects, especially in the contested field of water governance. Yet the emancipatory nature of these counter-maps should not be taken for granted: much depends on the way in which power relations and different knowledges are negotiated in the critical process of map-making. In this article we therefore investigate how counter cartography, and in particular counter-mapping processes by water justice movements, may benefit from insights from the field and praxis of critical pedagogy. We argue that there is great potential to be unlocked in exploring critical cartography from that perspective. Rather than dissecting the outcomes produced by a critical cartographic practice, we turn our attention to unveiling the transformative and actionable potential that can be found in the mapping process itself. We explore this topic within the context of the grassroots movements that have water as one of their central issues given its relevance and potential for the promotion of more just and sustainable river practices. To this end, we analyse two social arenas in Ecuador where local collectives are engaged in river struggles: the Amazonian Napo province and the Andean district of Licto, Chimborazo province.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"158 ","pages":"Article 104167"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2024-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142698024","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2024-11-26DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104168
Tobias Zumbraegel
{"title":"The Technopolitics of Hydrogen: Arab Gulf States’ Pursuit of Significance in a Climate-Constrained World","authors":"Tobias Zumbraegel","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104168","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104168","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Despite uncertainties surrounding the hydrogen economy’s emergence in terms of technological innovation, production, storage and transport, policy and regulation, economic viability, and environmental impact, countries worldwide actively pursue initiatives to engage in this critical energy transition. Politicians, analysts, and global experts see ‘clean’ hydrogen as the ultimate solution for addressing the climate crisis. This optimism is shared by several major oil and gas-exporting nations, which are investing heavily in hydrogen infrastructure to establish themselves as future global hubs. Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are especially well-positioned, benefiting from strategic advantages over other hydrogen-producing regions in the Global South. Advocates in these countries view hydrogen as a potential ‘silver bullet’ for sustaining political and economic influence in a world increasingly shaped by climate constraints. Western technology and expertise play a significant role in supporting these efforts. By using various qualitative methods, this paper employs and expand the concept of technopolitics to evaluate the role of industrialized nations in endorsing the Gulf states’ authoritarian, top-down, techno-optimistic approach to their sustainability agenda.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"158 ","pages":"Article 104168"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2024-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142698025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2024-11-25DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104145
Charlotte-Anne Chivers , Damian Maye , Gareth Enticott
{"title":"Culling optimism: Circulating neoliberal affects in entrepreneurial animal disease policy","authors":"Charlotte-Anne Chivers , Damian Maye , Gareth Enticott","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104145","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104145","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Using Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, this paper explores how animal disease eradication can represent an unimaginable fantasy, the pursuit of which is an obstacle to farmers’ emotional and financial prosperity. The paper shows how atmospheres of optimism surrounding disease eradication are constructed and linked to policy mobilities. These apparent <em>trans</em>-national circulations of neoliberal logics of ‘ownership’ provide policy legitimacy at times of crisis, but also disguise the emotional experiences of neoliberal policy lives and serve political interests by marginalising alternatives to the allure of eradication. The paper bases these arguments within an analysis of the development of animal disease policy in England since 1997, and recent interviews and workshops exploring future policy options for disease control with farmers and other stakeholders. Following the development of bovine Tuberculosis policy, the paper shows how the transnational mobility of neoliberal policies promoting farmer ownership were used to legitimise farmer- owned culling companies to control infected wildlife. In describing how these policies unravelled through emotional burnout and disillusion amongst farmers, the paper describes the difficulties of detachment from a relation of cruel optimism, either marked by tragedy and trauma, or an incompleteness defined as ‘attached detachment’. In conclusion, the paper calls for further attention to other rural and agricultural fantasies to shed further light on the inequities of neoliberal life and need for just transitions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"158 ","pages":"Article 104145"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2024-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142698023","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2024-11-23DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104162
Chris Zebrowski
{"title":"Postneoliberal resilience: Interrogating the value of the resilience multiple in the post-Covid-19 conjunctural crisis","authors":"Chris Zebrowski","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104162","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104162","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The COVID-19 response has revived scholarship on the end of neoliberalism. And yet resilience, long associated with neoliberalism by critical scholars, has persisted as a norm orienting state action. This article explores how resilience ideas are being adopted and adapted within a period of postneoliberalism. Employing a conjunctural approach, this article details how resilience ideas are being reinscribed within an emergent set of critiques, rationalities, and reforms in the wake of Covid-19. Analysis centres on how resilience is invoked both as a paradigm, through which problems of pandemic preparedness are being framed and as a core idea, for building back better within Covid-19 recovery plans. Rather than being overdetermined by neoliberalism, this article examines how resilience ideas are being drawn upon to support projects that aim to depart from or oppose neoliberal logics of governance. This affirmational approach, I argue, departs from a critique of resilience based on rejection, and instead operates by affirming the value of resilience and repeating it differently. Here, the multiplicity, mutability and, indeed, resilience of resilience ideas enables the concept to not only support distinct political programmes, but to consolidate disparate ideas, policies and institutions into new political configurations and state forms. I argue that that the remarkable persistence of the value of resilience has been achieved by the ability of resilience ideas to support emergent assemblages of diverse political ideas, programmes, and institutions in a time of postneoliberal conjunctural crisis.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"158 ","pages":"Article 104162"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2024-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142698103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2024-11-15DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104161
Karina Raña Villacura
{"title":"Mapping the spatial and temporal patterns of housing instability in Malmö","authors":"Karina Raña Villacura","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104161","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104161","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Housing instability is closely related to housing precarity and inequality. Households experiencing housing instability change residences frequently, facing difficulties in staying put, which has been proven detrimental for families. This study explores the geographical outcomes of housing instability showing how this phenomenon distributes in Malmö, Sweden, creating different spatial and temporal patterns. The paper relies on registered-based data aggregated to geographical coordinates to identify places of transience and uses k-nearest neighbour for measuring the intensity of unstable moves in spatial terms. Furthermore, the mapping of housing instability across four distinct time frames spanning from 1990 to 2020 illustrates the temporal unfolding of these patterns. The findings indicate a progression of housing instability spreading from specific spatial points to a more widespread dispersion of transience. This suggests an overall change in the city which may be linked to transformations in housing politics and policies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"157 ","pages":"Article 104161"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142664184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
GeoforumPub Date : 2024-11-14DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104156
Diego Astorga de Ita
{"title":"Of ships and soundboxes: Contrapuntal explorations of hydrocoloniality and the materiality of music","authors":"Diego Astorga de Ita","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104156","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104156","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper I explore the relation between music, (enviro)materiality, and coloniality by examining <em>son</em> Jarocho, the music of the Mexican region of Sotavento in southeast Mexico. This essay brings together geography, blue humanities, and ecomusicology, using notions of hydropoetics and hydrocolonialism, building upon the material turn in music geographies. I approach the phenomenological confluence of Sotaventine cedar chordophones and ships using and critiquing Foucauldian theoretics, alongside Hofmeyr’s hydrocolonialism and Gilroy’s circumpelagic theories. I survey the regional histories of luthiery, shipyards and timber trade and their connections, counterpointing these histories with the poetics of son Jarocho and with materials gathered through interviews and music-making alongside musicians and luthiers in Sotavento. From this I propose that musical aesthetics emerge from navigations that are topophilic and imperial. I counterpoint the Sotaventine case with the history of violins and their link to <em>pau-brasil</em> exploitation in Brazil, following ecomusicological works. Surveying histories of cedar and <em>pau-brasil</em> I argue that exploitation and exploration are a univocal aspect of the hydrocolonial project that entangles the biological, geographical, military, and mercantile into the endeavour of the <em>exploração</em> and that this informs musical materialities, poetics, and aesthetics to this day<em>.</em> Lastly, I briefly consider the implications of the hydrocolonial history of musical matters in the context of the Anthropocene. <em>Una versión en español de este texto está disponible en los materiales suplementarios.</em></div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"157 ","pages":"Article 104156"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2024-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142664183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}