Progress in Human Geography

Digitality is deeply implicated in sociospatial processes of exclusion, adverse incorporation, impoverishment and enrichment. Theorizing digital practices of life and thriving is politically and epistemologically urgent, and more robustly intersectional theory in digital geographies scholarship offers crucial pathways. I argue for theorizing digital geographies at the intersection of feminist relationality and Black, queer and feminist code studies. I demonstrate these theoretical horizons through an analysis of ‘glitch politics’ that refuse normative digital-social-spatial relations of technocapitalist urban life, and catalyze sociospatial relations of thriving otherwise, drawing examples from digital practices of street newspapers sold by unsheltered people in cities worldwide.

Urban political ecology (UPE) focuses on unsettling traditional understandings of ‘cities’ as ontological entities separate from ‘nature’ and on how the production of settlements is metabolically linked with flows of capital and more-than-human ecological processes. The contribution of this paper is to recalibrate UPE to new urban forms and processes of extended urbanization. This exploration goes against the reduction of what goes on outside of cities to processes that emanate unidirectionally from cities. Acknowledging UPE’s rich intellectual history and aiming to enrich rather than split the field, this paper identifies four emerging discourses that go beyond UPE’s original formulation.

While practice theories and diverse economy approaches are widely employed by human geographers, the two literatures have developed in parallel, rather than in dialogue. This article argues that this has constrained understandings of postcapitalist social change and traces an emerging theoretical conversation between these traditions. It outlines the potential of scholarly engagement with what we term ‘diverse practices’, especially when discussing the scalar possibilities and constraints of community activism. By grounding diverse economic scholarship in practice-theoretical conceptions of power, politics, and scale, the article proposes a materialisation of postcapitalist possibility and explores the barriers and facilitators of transformative geographies.

Political ecology has grown rapidly over the past four decades, incorporating insights from wide-ranging swaths of the academy. One topic it has not yet substantively engaged with, however, is religion. This article argues that the failure to critically engage with the study of religion has led political ecologists to neglect important factors in their analyses and has resulted in incomplete conceptualizations of interpersonal power relations. It does this by first reviewing the scattered literature across political ecology engaging with religion before suggesting potential paths for scholars interested in further incorporating religion into political ecology.

This article identifies two major problems within emerging formulations of ‘post-phenomenology’ in geography: its approach to the subject and its limited analytical engagement with concepts of social difference. I review these problems at length before putting post-phenomenology into conversation with another contemporary strand of phenomenological thought, critical phenomenology, which has responded to similar problems in classical phenomenology while retaining a focus on subjectivity and social difference. Ultimately, I recommend that post-phenomenologists learn from critical phenomenology and bring its insights together with developments in contemporary human geography in order to address these shortcomings in its theoretical foundations.

New municipalism is a nascent global social movement aiming to democratically transform the local state and economy – but what, precisely, is so new about it? I situate new municipalism in its geographical, political-economic and historical contexts, by comparison with earlier waves of municipal socialism and international municipalism, arguing that it re-politicises traditions of transnationalism, based not on post-political policy mobilities but on urban solidarities in contesting neoliberal austerity urbanism and platform capitalism. This article identifies three new municipalisms – platform, autonomist, managed – whose characteristics, contradictions, interconnections and potentials are explored in terms of state-space restructuring, urban-capitalist crisis and cycles of contention.

Although geographers have long argued that time and space are interwoven in everyday life, far less attention has been paid to complex and multiplex connections among temporal rhythms/cycles, the experience of temporal relations and a sense of temporal modalities in the domestic sphere. This article harnesses the notion of ‘timescape’, which emphasises the association between practices in space and time, to seek the time-spaces and temporalities in the domestic. It argues that geographies of home need to pay more attention to the links across everyday time and temporality, life-time and large-scale time and their wider implications in diverse contexts.

Despite three decades of this vibrant sub-discipline, this is the first progress report on lesbian geographies. They are crucial to contemporary sexualities focusing on female-identified same-sex lives, relationships, desires, practices and discriminations. Lesbian placemaking explores intersections of sexualities and gender, and race, class and age that are central to the mutual reconstitution of people and place. Overall, this report demonstrates both the vibrancy of lesbian geographies and the importance of exploring the intersections of gender and sexualities in engaging with the underpinning premise of human geography, namely the mutual constitution of people and place.

Humans kill and care for animals in a multitude of contexts. These themes – killing and caring – form the focus of this second report on animal geographies research. Most notably, killing and caring take place through conservation and the production and consumption of food. Other realms of recent research include killing through climate change, formal arrangements of care, how animals are made killable, and the significance of the individual and collective. Further to these two major themes, the review identifies other approaches to animal geographies research in recent years; namely, political and relational. Finally, the propensity for humans to kill and care for animals is highlighted by crisis. I open and close the review by considering connections between animals and two contemporary emergencies: the fires that burned south-eastern Australia over summer 2019–20 and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Social justice is regarded as a key underpinning principle of social geography. This report focuses on social justice in social geography and related issues of inequality, discrimination and intolerance. I appraise debates about social justice in social geography and then pay specific attention to issues of poverty and welfare, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity. I argue for social geography to be committed to social justice and conclude by calling for action to commit to promoting social justice in our teaching, research, in our professional practices and in how we challenge our universities to operate.

In two previous reviews, we examined how human geographers currently report on projects involving their preferred qualitative methods – interviews and ethnographic observation. This final review steps back from specific techniques to evaluate some of the broader presentational conventions that typify this work. What can be inferred from where these geographers discuss data collection in their papers? Why do they develop new methods and what do they say about fieldwork failures? How often do they reflect on the provisional status of their findings? And what are the implications of how they define their purpose in working with qualitative material?