GeoforumPub Date : 2025-03-27DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104269
Stew Motta , Johanna Koehler
{"title":"Fractured hegemony and Vietnamese pragmatism in the Red River basin","authors":"Stew Motta , Johanna Koehler","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104269","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104269","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In the transboundary Red River basin, Viet Nam is the downstream country with China PRC and the Lao PDR situated upstream. The Red River has been rapidly developed with hydraulic infrastructure both in China and Viet Nam, accelerated by UNFCCC funding for dams through the Clean Development Mechanism. This rapid and simultaneous construction of dams has brought about many changes to the river in a shared basin that does not have the transboundary institutional capacity nor cooperation to jointly monitor and manage these changes. This is typically a scenario that has been found to lead to increased hydropolitical tensions and conflict. However, given the fractured hegemonic power of China as an upstream neighbor and the importance of the China relationship for Viet Nam, neither conflict nor cooperation around shared water are realistic options. Instead, Vietnamese actors are operating pragmatically in the spaces between. Experimentation in ‘what is possible’ given the asymmetric relationship is diverse, decentralized, and widespread. Distributed sensemaking by Vietnamese actors, while not able to overcome the power imbalance, does decrease gaps of uncertainty and allow for Viet Nam to enhance its ideational power of how and why change is happening in the Red River. This enhanced understanding through pragmatic sensemaking improves the knowledge and bargaining power of Viet Nam with a fractured upstream superpower.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"161 ","pages":"Article 104269"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143705030","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 : 2025-03-25DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104270
Fernando Schrupp Rivero, Jannes Willems, Maria Kaika
{"title":"Socialización and labor unions in waterway port development in the Bolivian Amazon","authors":"Fernando Schrupp Rivero, Jannes Willems, Maria Kaika","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104270","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104270","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article critically examines Bolivia’s <em>socialización</em> (public participation) process in large-scale infrastructure projects through an institutional ethnography lens. The 2013 Bolivian <em>Socialización</em> Law, a post-neoliberal participatory framework, mandates that infrastructure project design and implementation involve participation of all ‘organized civil society actors’, including Indigenous groups, labor unions, and other social movements. Here we examine labor union participation in waterway modernization through a case study of the new Ichilo-Mamoré waterway ’Stretch 1’ (<em>Tramo I</em>) in the Bolivian Amazon, which borders the municipality of Santa Ana del Yacuma, where the Regional Labor Central (COR-SAY) has expanded its support base and political relevance since 2017 with MAS party support. The <em>socialización</em> process yielded partial victories for labor unions, with the inclusion of a labor-formulated Municipal Port Terminal in the national waterway program and recognition of COR-SAY as the local representative in infrastructure projects. The port terminal integrated expert and local knowledge, though COR-SAY’s new role diminished the influence of Indigenous organizations. Despite these labor gains, the article reveals constraints in achieving deeper democratic change through infrastructure program participation. This stems from the State’s focus on managed consensus-building, which contrasts with labor unions view of <em>socialización</em> as a means to advance sectoral demands through infrastructure development. Thus, in Bolivia’s post-neoliberal context, consensus over infrastructure projects—potentially harmful to Indigenous livelihoods—generates new struggles for socio-economic progress.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"161 ","pages":"Article 104270"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143687969","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 : 2025-03-24DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104266
Merissa Gavin, Joost Jongerden
{"title":"A Place to Transit: The seasonal migrant workers of Huelva’s strawberry industry","authors":"Merissa Gavin, Joost Jongerden","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104266","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104266","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Embodying the paradox of being essential yet unprotected, undocumented migrant agri-workers navigate a terrain of precarious in-betweenness. Policy-making affords little urgency to addressing their routine exploitation or facilitating dignified solutions for their working and living conditions. Focusing on seasonal migrant workers in the strawberry fields of Lepe (Huelva, Spain), this article examines how temporality structures endurance, agency, and vulnerability.</div><div>Drawing on four months of ethnographic fieldwork—including participant observation, informal conversations, and semi-structured interviews—this study reveals how workers endure exploitation in expectation of future documentation through <em>arraigo</em> policies. However, the temporal horizon of <em>arraigo</em> not only sustains individual endurance but also dampens collective resistance, rendering precarity a structured condition rather than a momentary hardship. Because <em>arraigo</em> systematically encourages endurance over resistance, precarity becomes a long-term structural reality, with temporality actively shaping workers’ vulnerabilities. This process individualises what is essentially a shared struggle, further sedating collective action and reinforcing exploitation. While migrants in Lepe internalise temporality as a survival strategy, disruptions—such as withheld contracts—demonstrate the limits of endurance and trigger resistance.</div><div>This study advances scholarship on migrant precarity by shifting the focus from spatial or economic dimensions to the performative construction of sequential time as a mechanism that both sustains and constrains migrant agency. In highlighting how European agricultural policies prioritise productivity while obscuring labour exploitation, these findings underscore the need for interventions addressing both the legal limbo of undocumented workers and the temporal structures that sustain their vulnerability.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"161 ","pages":"Article 104266"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143682472","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 : 2025-03-19DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104246
Alexis Metzger , René Véron , Emmanuel Reynard
{"title":"Remaking land–water boundaries in the Rhone plain in Switzerland: A reinterpretation of past and present river training using a ‘postcolonial mirror’","authors":"Alexis Metzger , René Véron , Emmanuel Reynard","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104246","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104246","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>River training in Europe has recently shifted from a focus on hard infrastructure toward river widening and renaturation. Inspired by postcolonial studies on land–water dichotomies, this article seeks to examine the material and ideational remaking of land–water boundaries through past and current river interventions on the Rhone River in the Valais, Switzerland. Based on an analysis of historical and contemporary documents, we show how the first two major river projects between the mid-19th and mid-20th century led to a gradually increasing separation of land and water. The current river-training project gives more space to the river, but it deepens the land–water demarcation through reinforced flood protection. Using a ‘postcolonial mirror’, a heuristic tool to uncover ontologies, discontinuities and continuities across space and time, we then identify the historical continuities of different forms of domination of the river, ranging from scientific knowledge and conceptualizations to commodification and the creation of false memories. We conclude that the colonial mirror is a useful heuristic tool to uncover usually hidden processes.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"161 ","pages":"Article 104246"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143643491","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 : 2025-03-18DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104262
Dan Wu , Yang Zhan
{"title":"Urbanization’s mediator: Reassembling rural tibetan lives through pig breed changes","authors":"Dan Wu , Yang Zhan","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104262","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104262","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This is a study of the reasons underlying the disappearance of a local Tibetan pig breed, as well as pigs’ role in driving urbanization. It is based on immersive participant observation in a Tibetan village in Sichuan, China. Villagers’ transition from raising local Tibetan pigs to hybrid breeds has detached pigs from households due to a decline in pig rearing duration. Simultaneously, as pigs had previously played a crucial role in connecting humans to the land, the change in pig breeds also led to a loosening in the relationship between humans and the land, stimulating population mobility and liberating time and labor for villagers to engage in urbanization. The change in pig breed has led to the continual reorganization of human life in response to urbanization, a process that involves not only human participation but also the agency of various non-human actors. Through reexamining the concept of urbanization through changes in human-nonhuman relationships, this paper speaks to the material turn in anthropology, which has provided a new theoretical perspective for the study of urbanization in China.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"161 ","pages":"Article 104262"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143641793","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 : 2025-03-18DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104240
Christine Winter , Shaakirah Kasuji , Daniel Whittall
{"title":"“They’re probably quite used to this idea of us and them”: The racialising assemblage and development discourses in school geography in England","authors":"Christine Winter , Shaakirah Kasuji , Daniel Whittall","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104240","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104240","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>School geography classrooms are crucial sites where the international is taught and learned. In English school geography, the dominant mode through which the international is taught is via global development education. This article analyses ethnographic research with teachers to examine their experiences of teaching about global development in GCSE geography. Based on their accounts, it identifies the circulation of problematically racialised development discourses. Furthermore, our analysis finds evidence of epistemic, material and affective dimensions (<span><span>Sriprakash et al, 2022</span></span>) through which a racialising assemblage (<span><span>Weheliye, 2014</span></span>) is constructed around global development education in English school geography. Guided by the research question ‘How do geography teachers experience teaching about global development in the English GCSE geography curriculum in England?’, we explain how four dominant curriculum framings of comparison, simplification, decontextualization and post-racialisation function to maintain whiteness as hegemonic in the curriculum. Teachers respond to these framings with feelings of discomfort and awkwardness, yet navigate the complexities of the racialised assemblage in ways that reinforce it, but also have potential to create space for resistance to it. Throughout, we draw attention to how neoliberal educational structures of governance and surveillance reinforce the racialising assemblage and shape the labour that teachers do. We understand school classrooms as geopolitical sites of struggle (<span><span>Lizotte and Nguyen, 2020</span></span>) within which racialised discourses are assembled, promoted and contested. We conclude with suggestions for how the racialising assemblage we identify might be contested and overcome.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"161 ","pages":"Article 104240"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143641792","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 : 2025-03-17DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104261
Yulia Kisora , Clemens Driessen
{"title":"Can wild geese remake a zoo? The promise of more-than-human heterotopia for a politics of living with urban wildlife","authors":"Yulia Kisora , Clemens Driessen","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104261","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104261","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>With biodiversity in crisis globally, there is an urgent need to include wildlife in urban planning and governance – not merely as passive elements but as political actors with their own interests and needs. We propose addressing this challenge by rethinking the role of urban zoos in shaping human-animal relations. Drawing on a case-study of a colony of wild geese nesting in Korkeasaari zoo, Finland, we tap into the productive ambivalence of Foucauldian heterotopias. This lens reveals how a zoo simultaneously functions as a socially ordered and tightly controlled institution of captivity, shaping and being shaped by human discourses on wildlife, but also as a real place, dynamically made and re-made through more-than-human agencies, relations, and materialities. This tension results in discourses and practices that stage a mode of open-ended interspecies exchange, politicising the shared use of space between human and non-human animals. In the context of intensive management policies and restrictive measures applied to non-human animals in urban contexts, Korkeasaari zoo stands out as an interspecies experiment where wildlife has been allowed to settle −at least in part- on their own terms. The paper concludes by exploring the potential of such more-than-human heterotopias to offer models for co-existing with non-human animals on mutually negotiated political terms. We advocate for a research focus on similar ‘other’ places where non-human creatures catalyse a reimagining of anthropocentric spaces, offering pathways to rethink urban living and human-animal relations that constitute it.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"161 ","pages":"Article 104261"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-03-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143637420","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 : 2025-03-15DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104205
Aino Korvensyrjä
{"title":"The ‘Borders of Berlin’: West African protests and the coloniality of Euro-African deportation cooperation","authors":"Aino Korvensyrjä","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104205","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104205","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article examines diaspora-led protests in Germany and actions in West Africa opposing Euro-African deportation cooperation after 2015. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2015–2021) with West Africans facing deportation in Germany and activists, it investigates how the protests effectively challenged the role of West African authorities and embassies in German deportations. As the European Union sought to increase ‘returns’, the protesters contested this framing of deportation, which presupposes symmetrical nation-states, reciprocity, and harmonious belonging. They exposed colonial continuities in European deportation policies and asymmetries in sovereignty, mobility, and access to resources. Building on longstanding West African diaspora critique, the protesters denounced Euro-African borders as the ‘Borders of Berlin’, traced to the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference and reinforced after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They urged African governments to reject deportations and subordination to Europe, reframing migration as decolonisation and redress. Yet, by voicing demands as citizens to nation-state representatives, they also affirmed the identities and nation-states created by the Borders of Berlin. The article contributes to scholarship on colonialism’s influence on European borders and externalisation by centring the analyses and agency of marginalised actors in shaping deportation, Euro-African relations, and international law. It challenges the view of externalisation as Europe’s territorial expansion, highlighting colonial continuities and violence within Europe. Moreover, it underscores the persistence of the national as a frame for resistance and the fragility of the Borders of Berlin as a radical, decolonising imaginary, in contrast to the nation-state order enforced through deportations.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"161 ","pages":"Article 104205"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143628652","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}
{"title":"Resistance in a “sacred geography”: Critical perspectives on land, ecology, and activism among Dersimi Alevis in Turkey","authors":"Hayal Hanoğlu , Dobrosława Wiktor-Mach , Wendelmoet Hamelink , Marcin Skupiński","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104263","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104263","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Environmental actions related to sacred geographies have recently intensified, leading to growing research interest. Many studies have explored indigenous struggles to defend the land, its ecosystems, culture and identity, especially in the Americas. This article employs the concept of sacred geography in Dersim (Tunceli), Turkey, to investigate the unique relationship between the indigenous Alevi population and their land and natural environment. Dersim is also unique for its internal politics and left-wing identity politics, which are rooted in a history of state violence, discrimination and coloniality of nature. Focusing on environmental resistance and women’s initiatives within contemporary Kurdish socio-cultural, environmental and political activism, this article explores the relationship between land and identity and how this connection motivates environmentalist actions in Dersim. Based on ethnographic findings and analysis of secondary sources, we argue that the territorialised Dersimi Alevi identity, rooted in the physical and imaginative realms of the natural landscape, its representations, and its sacredness, is intertwined with widespread resistance to state hegemony, coloniality, and neoliberal and neo-extractivist policies. Social struggles exist in multiple forms, such as protests in defence of a sacred geography; affective relations with the land; and cross-border engagement and social mobilisation through cultural initiatives, for example, the Munzur Festival where culture, environmentalism and politics come together.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"161 ","pages":"Article 104263"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143628770","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 : 2025-03-11DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104264
Mikel Oleaga
{"title":"Knowledge exchange in peripheral coworking spaces: A study of proximities using social network analysis","authors":"Mikel Oleaga","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104264","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104264","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>As coworking spaces expand beyond large urban centres into more peripheral regions, they are emerging as potential entrepreneurial hubs, fostering knowledge exchange networks among entrepreneurs, self-employed individuals and other relevant economic actors. However, the factors influencing the formation of these networks and the role that different actors play remain underexplored. This study analyses the structure of the network of a coworking space and identifies the variables that influence knowledge exchanges, measuring the effect of different proximity dimensions. Using a case study of a well-established coworking in Petrer, a small ‘left-behind’ city in Eastern Spain, the study employs a social network analysis approach to analyse the knowledge-sharing network. In contrast to previous studies, it includes a full-network survey of the community, including not only coworkers but also coworking managers, ex-coworkers, and other collaborators of the space. Additional interviews, a focus group, and participatory observation contribute to providing deeper insights. By mapping and analysing the knowledge exchange network, the study sheds light on the behaviour of the different groups in knowledge sharing, highlighting the relevance of the coworking managers in building these networks. Furthermore, the study employs a multivariate exponential random graph model to demonstrate that while more frequent co-location strengthens social ties, temporary proximity is sufficient to stimulate knowledge exchanges. Moreover, non-geographical dimensions of proximity, such as organisational, social, and, to a lesser extent, institutional, are found to have an effect on knowledge sharing, while cognitive proximity does not appear to be significant.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"161 ","pages":"Article 104264"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143592328","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}