GeoforumPub Date : 2025-05-13DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317
Federico Ferretti
{"title":"Geopoetics of distance: The anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic Negritude","authors":"Federico Ferretti","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div><em>This paper addresses origins, diasporic networks and main output of Lusophone Negritude geopoetics. Less famous than its French-speaking counterpart, this literary and political movement was inaugurated by 1942 poetry book</em> Ilha de Nome Santo <em>by São Tomé e Príncipe-born geographer and poet Francisco José Vasques Tenreiro (1921</em>–<em>1963). It culminated with the 1953 collection</em> Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa <em>that Tenreiro co-edited with anticolonial Angolan intellectual and future MPLA leader Mário Coelho Pinto de Andrade (1928</em>–<em>1990), displaying works of young poets/activists who will become protagonists of liberation struggles in Portuguese colonies. Based on a range of multilingual archival sources, this paper first argues for considering transnational Lusophone Negritude geopoetics, including its origins in early anticolonial and anarchist dissidence, as a founding step in the construction of anticolonial discourses in Lusophone Africa and beyond, being an autonomous part of these processes. Second, extending literature on (Luso)tropicality and decolonial geopoetics and overtaking Anglo-American centralities in these fields of study, this paper breaks the rigid disciplinary cases in which historians, geographers and literary scholars have tended to insert complex figures such as Tenreiro. It namely demonstrates that only applying transnational, multilingual and transdisciplinary research methods one can understand transnational and complex geographies of decolonisation.</em></div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"163 ","pages":"Article 104317"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143941994","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 : 2025-05-13DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104316
Giovanna Gini
{"title":"Transcorporeality and thick time in an era of climate uncertainty: relocation on the Island of Cardoso","authors":"Giovanna Gini","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104316","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104316","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This ethnographic study focuses on the planned relocation of Enseada da Baleia, a small island fishing community on the south coast of Brazil. It examines the entangled mobilities of human and non-human agents—such as water and marine life—in the context of climate change. In 2016, following a cyclone and significant erosion of the sandspit where they had been living, the inhabitants of Enseada da Baleia relocated to a new site on Cardoso Island. The put the questions: how these geographic and ancestral mobilities support adaptation and continuity. It finds that the community’s relocation was not solely a material response. Nor did it represent a crisis and rupture as depicted in much of the climate migration literature. Instead, it reflects deeper temporal and spatial connections between the community, their ancestral lands, and non-human entities such as fish and trees. It suggests these connections are captured in the concept of ’thick time’ where past and futures are entangled in the present. This temporality includes ’transcorporeality,’ the impossibility of separating human bodies from non-human agents. This is central to understanding the decision to relocate to a place where their elders once lived. The relocation reestablished relationships with both material and immaterial aspects of their history, reinforcing their cultural continuity in the context of adaptation to climate change. The community’s relocation draws on ancestral knowledge to adapt to socio-environmental changes. In the case of Enseada, relocation operates as a culturally embedded adaptation strategy. Through this lens, the paper engages with broader debates on climate migration, decolonial approaches, and the politics of time, arguing that Enseada’s relocation represents a translocal adaptation process that opens political possibilities for decolonizing climate change agendas by emphasizing the intimacy of the relocation process.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"163 ","pages":"Article 104316"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143937470","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 : 2025-05-12DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104299
Samuel B. Feldblum
{"title":"Liberal water law against itself: Acequias and legal contestation in New Mexico's South Valley","authors":"Samuel B. Feldblum","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104299","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104299","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The passage of New Mexico’s water code of 1907 enshrined water as a publicly owned good distributed to individuals via private use rights. This system of water governance threatened the communitarian practices of Hispano and Indigenous irrigators in the state. In the area surrounding Albuquerque, the subsequent institution of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District in 1923 rationalized management, and absorbed and obviated acequias—community irrigation ditches autonomously governed according to Spanish custom—surrounding the state’s urban core. The dual thrust of these processes was the colonial enclosure of small farmers in the region via legal means. Six decades later, statewide acequia activism and the threat of water transfer to a large development west of Albuquerque spurred a resurgence of acequia life in the South Valley. Drawing on and informing an insurgent Hispano identity, the water struggles of the South Valley acequieros contest the outcomes of liberal water law using the tools of the same legal code that had earlier dispossessed them. This process refashions both acequias and the liberal systems into which they are absorbed, demonstrating that while colonial water law acts as a structure constraining the agency of hydro-social actors, legal-political struggle by these constrained agents dialectically reshapes the legal edifice within which they act. Water law thus appears as both a structuring condition of hydro-social life, codifying colonial social relations, and an object of struggle by which those relations might be remade from within.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"163 ","pages":"Article 104299"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143937469","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 : 2025-05-09DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104301
Alexander Craig-Thompson, Magdalena Kuchler
{"title":"Surfacing the urban underground: Knowledge production, modes of envisioning, and politics of visibility","authors":"Alexander Craig-Thompson, Magdalena Kuchler","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104301","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104301","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The subsurface is increasingly considered the final frontier of urban development, with marked potential to improve urban spatial problems, resilience and sustainability. At the same time, the literature recognises Urban Underground Space (UUS) as a finite and multi-functional resource that requires holistic and strategic management. However, knowledge of the invisible urban subsurface is obscured by secrecy, fragmented across disciplines, and built on extractive knowledge practices. A lack of long-term planning of UUS perpetuates a first-come-first-served development approach that risks jeopardising future infrastructures and urban sustainability. To address this, there is an effort to gather ever more subsurface data, rendering the invisible visible to urban decision-makers. We analyse and reflect on the limits of current underground planning knowledge, responding to the socio-political gap in UUS literature. We focus on the ontological challenges facing sustainable planning of UUS and present the need to critique how practices of power and politics in UUS knowledge production envision subsurface futures. We present four <em>modes of envisioning</em> the urban subsurface, which negotiate its characteristics of invisibility and complexity to shape volumetric potential and possibility. We argue that governance of this invisible urban frontier requires deeper reflection on how the subsurface is rendered visible and in anticipation of which futures. We suggest that a more nuanced lens is required to account for the interplay between power, depth, and volume through the intersections of plural urban subsurface imaginaries.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"163 ","pages":"Article 104301"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143921863","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 : 2025-05-08DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104295
Paula Serafini
{"title":"Cultural extractivism and its undoing: Towards socioecological transformations through cultural production","authors":"Paula Serafini","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104295","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104295","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper argues that the cultural industries are a key field for research and action in the context of a socioecological crisis because they are simultaneously entangled in extractivist logics and processes and generating models, spaces and narratives for non-extractive socioecological transformation. Adopting a relational approach to extractivism, the paper first discusses the ways in which the cultural industries enhance and reproduce extractivism through dynamics like greenwashing, the cooptation of culture, and growth-oriented development narratives, what can be understood as cultural extractivism. It then argues for the potential that the cultural industries hold for contributing to socioecological transformations in-and-through-culture that move us away from extractivism. To investigate this, the paper draws on empirical research conducted with cultural producers and workers in Argentina, which aimed to understand how they position their work in relation to the socioecological crisis, and to figure out pathways towards forms of cultural production that are situated in local struggles against extractivism. The study identifies new lines of enquiry for researching the potential of cultural production in enacting socioecological transformations, including the decentralization of cultural production, the development of new indicators of success for the sector, questions around the future of the cultural sector as an industry and culture as work, and the relationship between autonomous cultural production and the state. The paper demonstrates the strength of a situated approach to research for unpacking possible avenues of action for socioecological transformations at local scale that can connect with and inform initiatives at a larger scale.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"163 ","pages":"Article 104295"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143921862","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 : 2025-05-07DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104297
Fidèle Ebia , Rory Horner
{"title":"Colonial threads to made in China: Togo and the restructuring of African print textiles value chains","authors":"Fidèle Ebia , Rory Horner","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104297","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104297","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>From the colonial era onwards, African print textiles (APT) trade was dominated by a North-South value chain (NSVC), involving production in the Netherlands for distribution and consumption in West Africa and with Togolese ‘Nana-Benz’ traders playing a key role. Yet the dynamics of APT trade have changed in the 21st century as APT manufacturing has shifted to China as part of a South-South value chain (SSVC). Drawing on primary fieldwork in Lomé, Togo, long a hub of APT distribution in West Africa, we analyse the emergence of the SSVC and its characteristics – including the involvement of a newer group of Togolese traders known as Nanettes in a more flexible, trader-driven trade. We argue that the rise of the SSVC has disrupted the monopoly of the lead firm-governed NSVC, which has not been completely replaced, but forced to adapt. The case contributes to emerging discussions of SSVCs, which are mostly focused on opportunities for producers serving new forms of consumption, by showing how SSVCs challenge NSVCs within long-standing Southern end markets and by demonstrating the crucial and changing roles of traders in this context.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"163 ","pages":"Article 104297"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143911566","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 : 2025-05-06DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104300
Gerald E. Arhin , Pritish Behuria
{"title":"Why do countries invest in geological investigations for minerals? A comparative analysis of contrasting outcomes in Ghana and Rwanda","authors":"Gerald E. Arhin , Pritish Behuria","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104300","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104300","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Several resource-rich developing countries still have insufficient knowledge of their domestic mineral deposits and have not made sufficient investments in geological surveys. The political geography literature has highlighted how geological investigations form part of a government’s repertoire to extend three-dimensional control over territories. Yet there are few studies – particularly, of African countries – that examine why some countries may invest in geological surveys more than others. This paper adopts a political economy lens to investigate why the Rwandan government has invested more than the Ghanaian government in geological surveys. We combine insights from political settlements analysis (PSA) and the political geography literature to unpack the political economy dynamics underpinning the decisions to invest in geological mapping. Our findings suggest that Ghanaian politics has been characterised by consistent competition between political parties, which have hindered the capacity of ruling elites to maximise control over their territories through prioritising geological mapping. In contrast, Rwanda’s cohesive ruling party has prioritised investing in geological surveys because maximising control over territory is central to preserving its rule. The Rwandan case also highlights how goals of maximising control over subterranean territory, which require long-term investments, are hindered because of conflicting priorities. Instead, Rwanda’s structural vulnerabilities, as well as the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front’s material incentives and conflicting ideological goals, result in the prioritisation of trading DRC’s minerals rather than investing in its own domestic minerals sector.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"163 ","pages":"Article 104300"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143906481","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 : 2025-05-06DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104298
Mehebub Sahana
{"title":"Hindu nationalism, climate reductionism, and the political ecology of dalits on Char Islands: Does caste matter for climate resilience in India?","authors":"Mehebub Sahana","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104298","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104298","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Understanding the unequal impacts of climate change is essential, particularly in examining how climate reductionism intersects with subalternism in the Global South and the political ecology of Dalits in South Asia. In this article, I introduce a new perspective by questioning the validity of caste dynamics within the contemporary context of Hindu nationalism, climate reductionism, and climate resilience in India. The primary focus of this article lies in presenting a scholarly argument about the underestimation of caste issues in building climate-resilient societies and how this oversight challenges climate reductionist narratives in both Indian and global contexts. The study centres on three distinct case study locations on char islands in West Bengal, India, where Dalit communities face extreme socio-economic marginalisation, alongside issues of disaster inequalities and climate vulnerability. These dual burdens have introduced a new dimension to their struggle, encompassing issues of identity and citizenship shaped by Brahmanical Hindu nationalist supremacy. Drawing on qualitative ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2024, I provide evidence to support my argument while advancing the theoretical framework. This article concludes that a critical reassessment of caste dynamics is essential for fostering truly climate-resilient societies in India. The rise of Hindu nationalism and the dominance of Brahmanical forces have exacerbated the marginalisation of Dalits, intensifying their vulnerabilities in the context of climate change. The political ecology of Dalits emerges as a vital area of inquiry within the contemporary climate change discourse, highlighting the profound disparities in disaster resilience and environmental justice in India.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"163 ","pages":"Article 104298"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143906482","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 : 2025-04-30DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104290
Katinka Wijsman
{"title":"Accountants of adaptation? Cost benefit analysis and the politics of resilience","authors":"Katinka Wijsman","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104290","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104290","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The role of expertise in climate adaptation has been widely debated in the field of resilience. Scholars argue that resilience is either a form of technocratic expertise to dealing with complex issues through top-down managerial interventions, or that resilience marks a limit to expert knowledge due to complexity thus indicating that planning is futile; both casting resilience as depoliticizing as a result. However, these works do not adequately grapple with the fact that expertise is not only deployed but also demanded to bring about interventions in the wake of climate change, and the unsettled and unsettling nature of expert knowledge and its production. In this paper, I address the issue of expertise in the making of resilience with special attention to its role in the opening up of political possibilities through facilitating rather than short-circuiting debate and contestation about resilience. Specifically, I look at the practice of Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) in coastal resiliency projects in New York City, showing how this expert practice is used to articulate – and debate – the substantiation of resilience in specific geographical contexts. I argue that CBA gives resilience a practical reality in infrastructural interventions by framing a whole set of quintessentially political questions around scope and valuation, and that CBA is best understood as organizing resilience politics. The search for resilience can be an exercise in democracy – and a politicization of ways of living revolving around the potentiality of future environments – if instead of viewing expertise and ‘the technical’ as something to be minimized we understand it as a site of problematization.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"162 ","pages":"Article 104290"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143890600","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 : 2025-04-30DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104296
Ariane Gienger, Melissa Nursey-Bray
{"title":"Towards co-governance: An evaluation of co-management advantages, challenges and ways forward in South Australia","authors":"Ariane Gienger, Melissa Nursey-Bray","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104296","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104296","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recent decades have been marked by a transition from exclusionary to collaborative and community-based conservation. This transition has been underpinned by the aim to enhance the field’s contribution to human coexistence and environmental sustainability. Yet while the language of collaboration is now firmly entrenched in the global conservation rhetoric, collaborations too often remain restricted to community participation in pre-determined programs at local scales. Using South Australia as a case study, we illustrate this restriction and its implications in the context of co-management between the state and Aboriginal nations. Specifically, we draw on co-management legislation, agreements and reports, observations of co-management meetings of the Ngaut Ngaut and Gawler Ranges Parks co-management boards as well as interviews with co-management board and committee members, policy makers and park rangers. We illustrate that collaboration only exists within park management planning and does not extend to the design and administration of the legislative framework under which it occurs. As this restriction disproportionately affects the realisation and realisability Aboriginal nations’ aspirations, we propose a transition from co-management of protected areas to co-governance of the entire framework moving forward. We further highlight similar power and knowledge imbalances within the new conservation paradigm more broadly and make the case for an expansion of current forms of collaboration to conservation policy and practice on all scales.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"162 ","pages":"Article 104296"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143888044","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}