Progress in Human Geography

Scholarly interest in ruins and derelict spaces has intensified over the last decade. We assess a broad selection of the resulting literature and identify several key themes. We focus on how ruins may be used to critically examine capitalist and state manifestations of power; we consider the way in which ruins may challenge dominant ways of relating to the past; and we look at how ruins may complicate strategies for practically and ontologically ordering space. We speculate about the motivations for this surge of current academic interest, draw out resonances with current trends in geographical thinking, and suggest directions for future research.

The emergent field of environmental epigenetics, which studies health effects of ‘xenobiotic’ chemicals, fundamentally challenges standard models of the biochemical pathways that shape bodies and human health. This article explores the implications of these discoveries for geographic knowledge in the nature-society and spatial traditions of human health, both of which have tended to black-box the material, biochemical body and treat the environment as an inert setting. Discoveries in epigenetics suggest that the environment is a biochemically active inducer of phenotypical development. In addition, understandings of the delayed temporality and intergenerational effects of epigenetic mechanisms challenge methodologies that privilege space.

Geographers to date have resisted writing about feelings, affects, places and spaces of love. It is timely to put love on the geographical agenda. We begin by addressing the question ‘what does love do?’, and we review the work of geographers who have been thinking about love via a number of different theoretical lenses. We then argue for a consideration of love as spatial, relational and political. We prompt geographers to think critically about love in its entire multisensory, lived, embodied, felt and contradictory guises. Finally, the work of Ahmed, Sedgwick and Berlant is useful for furthering geographers’ insights on love.

Detention is a pressing empirical, conceptual, and political issue. Detained populations, detention facilities, and industries have expanded globally. Detention is also a fundamentally geographical topic, yet largely overlooked by geographers. We argue that detention be conceptualized as a series of geographical processes. Operating through these processes are contradictory sets of temporal and spatial logics that structure the seemingly paradoxical geographies underpinning detention. These logics include containment and mobility, bordering and exclusion. We trace these logics through an emergent literature, synthesizing and analyzing important geographic themes in the field. We identify contributions by and new avenues of inquiry for geographers.

The shaping of geography as a discipline has been the result of a combination of productive and successful communication and missed opportunities, of presence and absence, of fluid travels of ideas and projects, but also of closures, impediments, good lessons that got lost. This paper suggests that using a counterfactual approach to draw attention to specific geographies that remained unfulfilled and poorly known helps to think beyond linear genealogies. By discussing a particular book called Le Metafore della Terra by Giuseppe Dematteis, published in Italian in 1985 but largely unknown in English-language geography, we reflect on what happened when it was published – and also specifically what did not happen and, cautiously, what might have happened. In his book, Dematteis took issue with geography and geographers’ past and contemporary mistakes, suggesting that the depoliticization of geographical knowledge had served merely powerful interests, rendering the imagining of alternative worlds impossible. He picked apart sacred tenets of the geographical tradition: escapist fantasies of exploration and conquest, the poorly problematized use of scale, the faith in the power of cartographic reason, the metaphysics of organicism, and the magical belief in the power of the market. Here, by extending the idea of counterfactual histories to look inwards to the discipline of geography itself, we choose to engage with what might have happened if this particular critical approach to geography had become better known, exploring why this radical project for the discipline was cast aside, including by the author himself. In so doing, we consider how scholars are located in so-called ‘peripheral’ places of production of geographical knowledge, discussing how this helps to understand the circulation and non-circulation of certain ideas. We use these alternatively rewritten geographies to show how dominant linear narratives of the emerging of critical thinking in the 1980s tell us an incomplete story, suggesting instead a tangled, multiple history of the discipline. We are interested in how scientific knowledge is communicated and received, how this exposes both the multi-sited nature of knowledge production and circulation, and cultural and national differences in the reception of science, and what this says about the possibility of critical thinking and progressive ideas having real impact.

In my second report discussing the state of historical geography, I review some of the ways historical geographers have made use of digital technologies and digital media. I also highlight how digital data, research, and presentation are affecting related humanities disciplines and inspiring their practitioners to engage more fully with geographic concepts of space, place, and cartography. I argue that information technologies and digital media can deepen the place of historical geography in the academy and in the public’s eye.

The intimate turn in geography has centralized approaches to race and ethnicity which foreground bodily encounters. The quirky spatialities of intimacy, involving not just proximities but also distancing and borders, operate in racial and ethnic ‘contact zones’. Skin is one of these, and it is central to an understanding of race and ethnicity as arising through bodily encounters in places. Geographic scholarship emphasizing embodied racial and ethnic topics has highlighted processes of approximation, distancing, and bordering in race and ethnicity as lived events. Set within the intimate turn, this work has the potential to inform geographers and geographic scholarship with respect to criticality, the stickiness of place, and visceral geographies. In addition, the need to elucidate further the relationship between race and ethnicity is underscored.

There are increasing calls from the global environmental change research community for new strategies for translating knowledge into action. Such calls are not new, yet they are often based on the assumption that more solutions-oriented knowledge about environmental problems will lead to desired outcomes. In this progress report, I argue that it is time to shift attention to the issue of change itself, and to question some of the assumptions that reproduce certain types of knowledge and certain types of action over alternatives. I discuss an approach for challenging big assumptions, which draws greater attention to a broad body of social science research that renders many of the paradigmatic assumptions ambiguous or problematic. Finally, I consider the implications for human geography, including whether some of our own disciplinary assumptions are complicit in perpetuating paradigms that contribute to continued global environmental change.