cultural geographies

This article seeks to advance recent literatures exploring the important role of poetry in the production and circulation of geographical knowledge. It does this by critically analysing a poem that was written by the traveller and scholar Wiliam Healey Dall during the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition. This leisurely excursion travelled along the coastlines of Alaska and the Siberian peninsula, and involved a series of encounters with the indigenous Yupik/Yup’ik communities inhabiting this region. It was these encounters that provided the basis for Dall’s problematic poem. As the analysis presented demonstrates, this pseudo-ethnographic poem contained a range of ‘temperate normative’ descriptions of these Indigenous Arctic peoples. This in turn perpetuated erroneous depictions of these peoples within the geographical imaginations of non-Indigenous peoples across Europe and North America. The article therefore argues that geographers and other scholars must take poetry and other forms of verse seriously as a crucial means by which geographical knowledges pertaining to Indigenous peoples were circulated during the long 19th century. This will in turn reveal their vital role in supporting and justifying troubling colonial interventions into the lives of Indigenous peoples across the Arctic and beyond.

This paper argues that the nuclear deserts of Pokhran in Northwest India are appropriated under ‘developmental regimes’ that employ wastelanding and erasure as strategic tools. Mobilizing Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s concept of ‘geontopower’ and Karen Barad’s ‘agential realism’, we read Uday Singh’s fictional treatment Pokhran: A Novel (2020), which deals with the Pokhran-I nuclear test carried out in 1974, as narrating a tale of power that not only seeps through institutions related to human/life/bio but also as probing socio-materialities through active geo/nonlife/nonhuman entities. These critical taxonomies frame Pokhran-I as a complex site of human-nonhuman entanglements. Human agency has predominantly informed the prevailing discourses on desert(ed) scapes as ‘sacrifice zones’ devoid of agency. However, we interrogate Pokhran as a discard scape, first, via geontopower which evidences wastelanding and erasure, and second, as a potent agential nonhuman entity.

Many popular songs describe journeys to the Ajusco mountain range, south of Mexico City, sentimentally extolling the region’s colours and natural abundance. The connection between music and place is so close that songs are frequently described as ‘maps’ or ‘guides’. This article explores these songs-as-maps in relation to a distinction between expressivities which are complicit in enclosure, and those involved in dwelling; and it argues for an understanding of songs-as-maps as palimpsestic, over-layered compositions of matter, meaning and sonority on the pathways traversed through Ajusco. In some cases, songs-as-maps describe journeys with an end goal – often the appropriation of a landscape presumed empty – and in others, these songs focus on and enact the process of walking and path-making. At a time when the extension of paths and roads from Mexico City into the Ajusco region has drastically impacted patterns of land tenure – with implications, in turn, for the viability of a densely forested region commonly described as the ‘lungs of Mexico City’ – the affordances of popular song for distinct spatialities is a subject of great importance. We cannot research spatially dynamic musicianship, it is argued here, while sitting still.

This paper proposes a new perspective on the geographies of the far right by focussing on literary geographies. We have conducted a geographical reading of three novels dealing with the spatial patterns of far-right violence. These books are considered part of an ongoing public debate about the ubiquity and normality of far-right violence in the early 1990s in East Germany. The analysed narratives explore this experience against the background of a fundamental societal transformation and adolescence. Drawing on examples from these books, we propose a three-dimensional literary geography of far-right violence represented within them: Firstly, the everyday geographies of far-right violence in East German cities and towns; secondly, the perceived absence of the police force and other state institutions; and thirdly, the unfolding of this in uneven geographies, in which Berlin takes a central role. This novel approach extends the focus of existing work on the geographies of the far right through adding in a perspective from its literary representations. These representations, on the one hand, shed light on the subjective experiences of far-right violence, and, on the other hand, we postulate that this literary geography speaks to contemporary far-right geographies, voicing an oppositional stand through cultural production, given the widespread reception of these books.

Recent studies in Nordic and European architectural- and urban history have emphasized the importance of commercial modernism in the making of European welfare societies. However, as this research has predominantly approached architecture from a planning and design angle, we know little about the actual use of these spaces and their socio-spatial flexibility and capacity in negotiating welfare on an everyday scale. Focusing on four shops located in Grantoften Shopping Center, this article introduces the concept of ‘more-than-mercantile relations’ to capture the multifaceted negotiations and exchanges through which local actors mobilize the spatiality of Grantoften Shopping Center into forms of everyday welfare. Combining archival studies and ethnographic data, the article examines how welfare at a local level is negotiated through specific temporal entwinements of spatial locations and everyday practices of care. By reimagining shopping centers as spaces of care and community interaction, this article contributes to research discussions on the geography of care, emphasizing the capacity of everyday commercial spaces to shape and be shaped by welfare practices.

Over the past two decades, cultural geographers have been paying increasing attention to the performative, habitual, affective and atmospheric qualities of nations, nationalist movements and national identities. In this paper I utilise the concept of the refrain (ritournelle) from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari to trace the very different rhythmic refrains and movements which may or may not gain a certain consistency in the world and affect bodies of different kinds. Refrains may be material, embodied and/or vibrational perturbations which attain a certain rhythm and consistency, and I examine how they are central to the processes of individuation and collective individuation by which nations, national subjects and national identities become crystallised and unfold. In the latter part of the paper I draw upon archival research on the Festival of Britain 1951 to argue that it can usefully be approached through the refrain. In contrast to accounts which present the Festival as a largely London affair which positioned Welsh, Scottish and Irish narratives as reflective of the regional diversity of Britain, I reveal the different responses of Welsh individuals and organisations to the idea of a Festival of Britain. I trace the importance of the Welsh language in setting a different tone or refrain for national events, and I examine how a range of material infrastructures, one-off staged events, and celebrations functioned as refrains of Welshness and/or Britishness. The paper outlines the reactions of Welsh nationalists and republicans for whom British refrains were seen as negative affective forces that would continue to subordinate Wales under a nation-state ruled from England (and specifically London).

This poem and commentary explore how small, habitual gestures – such as a child waving at a rusted pipe on the walk to school – can constitute a form of affective infrastructure. Through a combination of poetry and critical commentary, it traces how everyday acts of noticing, repetition and relational attention shape our emotional experience of urban space. Drawing on recent work in emotional and affective geographies, the piece argues that such gestures are not trivial but infrastructural: they stabilise attachments, generate meaning and cultivate a form of urban care. The poem operates not as an illustration of theory but as a mode of inquiry in its own right, foregrounding embodied, situated knowledge that resists abstraction. The commentary situates this poetic practice within broader debates around creative methods, affect and the micrologics of the city, making the case for devotion – both as theme and as method – as a form of geographic understanding.

To cultivate emotionally engaged and embodied geographical research, we, as human geographers, need to engage more closely with sensory perception and aesthetics in geographical writing. Put simply, we need to write (more) about beauty and pleasure. This commentary uses wine as a touchpoint to explore how such writing can be done. Drawing on the work on geographical writing, the interdisciplinary study of food and wine, and food and wine writing, I accentuate not writing about perception, but writing with perception. I bring the lexicon of subjective sensory experience into the lexicon of standard disciplinary analysis so that the former can enrich the latter. In doing so, I foreground what we gain intellectually and politically from more direct engagement with aesthetics and perception – beauty and pleasure – in human geography. Such engagement can help us value and practice qualitative, embodied, and sensorially present research and writing.

In 2023 and 2024, we engaged in a collaborative dance project in Cambois, England, a coastal village with a contested history. The research involved movement workshops with a community group responding to creative instructions called ‘scores’ that conceived and improvised novel relationships with the coast via seaweed. Informed by geographical thinking on dark ecologies and multispecies relations, we explored how spending time with, and attending to, seaweeds facilitated fresh perspectives on the Northumberland seascape and its contemporary and future challenges. The Secret Dance of the Seaweed envisioned how humanity might live better with, and care for, multispecies who are active in co-constituting subjectivities and worlds. This paper reflects on the conceptualisations emerging from three co-produced movement scores – draping, attaching, and shapes – that included embodied and sensuous improvisations, knowledges, memories, and imaginaries of seaweeds and the seascape. It speculates on how movement scores contribute to cultural geographers’ interests in creative writing and somatic prompts for knowledge production, as well as to collaborations between academia, artists, and communities for ecological research praxis and the critical creative possibilities of scores as multispecies method that braid socio-environmental thought and mutual entanglement.