Progress in Human Geography

This paper develops an affective post-foundational political geography to better attend to how affects might shape, and be shaped by, political processes. It foregrounds (extra)ordinary affects, sensory experiences, and atmospheres as central to how politics is felt, encountered, and experienced in nonlinear ways that exceed discourse. Attuning to affects, this paper enables human geographers to better engage with ordinary events as they unfold, traverse political registers, and potentially surface in extraordinary moments. This framework offers epistemological insight into how difference can be affectively registered and negotiated within political processes, while building points of connection between critical geography and activist praxis.

This paper addresses the policy mobilities approach’s relative inattention to counter-hegemonic activism and contentious politics. It outlines one way to expand the literature’s engagement with the political. By introducing the notion of “moving ideas”—ideas that circulate among places and also move people to political action—it outlines five avenues for policy mobilities scholars to advance the approach: situated knowledge on-the-move; persuasive storytelling; encounters in physical “truth-spots”; the temporalities of activism; and the role of “futuring” in policy change. It ends with notes on the framework’s possible applicability to numerous social movements and its challenges and limitations.

An energy transition is needed to mitigate climate change, but the shift to renewables is also a broader opportunity to reduce disaster risk. This article integrates perspectives from energy geographies and critical disaster studies to examine how energy transition intersects with disaster risk reduction. Unpacking the energy-disasters interface, ‘energy’ is conceptualised in two ways: first, as a hazard produced socio-naturally in energy hazardscapes; and second, as a requirement for people to achieve essential capabilities in the face of hazards. Scholarship on energy vulnerability and energy justice provides concepts for achieving more equitable disaster preparedness, recovery, and risk reduction.

We theorize the epistemological orientations and methodological possibilities of cycling as a sociotechnical, kinesthetic, and emplaced practice relevant across human geography. Foregrounding the liminalities, contingencies, and improvisational potentials of cycling, we highlight how its unique pacing and capacity to traverse and transcend infrastructural and social constraints foster embodied engagements. Our cycling experiences illustrate the activity’s generativeness across research lifecycles. We conceptualize cycling as an exemplar of kinesthetic methodologies, which integrate body, machine, and motion in ways that deepen embodied knowing, inspire serendipitous interactions, prompt reflection on positionality, and expand possibilities for understanding the world in and across place.

The Vietnam War is one of the most profound episodes to occur in the twentieth century yet geography’s influence on appraising the conflict is scarcely known inside the discipline and typically ignored outside of it. This paper responds to these issues by presenting three concepts on the global nature of the war: territory, circuitry, and memory. Moving beyond the myth of a singular Vietnam and United States, my argument centers on the global Vietnam War, leading to clarity about what geography has accomplished in advancing a wider spatial-temporal understanding of the war. The conclusion critiques geography’s gaps concerning the war.

This report situates migration within the global economy. Whereas migration scholars once framed analyses in terms of privatization and the migration-industrial complex, subsequent analyses have approached the role of migration within the global economy in more varied and nuanced ways. I develop a perspective through the lenses of surplus populations and spatial fixes towards a more expansive approach centered on understanding the value of migration. Three key areas are surveyed in which geographers are examining how value is generated: the value of migrant labor, the value of migrant infrastructure, and the geopolitical value of migration. As numbers of migrants increase, protections for forced migrants become ever more tenuous, and the economic impacts of border enforcement strategies continue to grow, this is an important moment to reconsider migration within the global economy.

This second progress report critically reviews the intersection of GIS and disability, tracing its evolution from a few isolated studies toward modest growth in recent scholarship. Through a contemporary literature analysis (N = 240) structured around four themes—wayfinding, spatial accessibility, cartography, and spatial epidemiology—we identify persistent conceptual and methodological gaps, including differing terminology and limited representation in leading journals. The advancement of disability GIS requires not a retrofit but a redesign that hinges upon explicitly integrating embodiment, participation, intersectionality, and meaningful engagement with disability studies.