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tibg.bsky.social
TIBG
@tibg.bsky.social
1.3K followers 180 following 160 posts
Transactions is a geography journal which publishes high-quality papers and interventions that make a substantial theoretical or empirical contribution to the discipline. Edited by Beth Greenhough, @benandersongeog.bsky.social & @kbrickell.bsky.social.
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tibg.bsky.social
New in TIBG:

'Asylum as artifice: Race, law and capital as regimes of abstractions in the United Kingdom's asylum accommodation system' by Anna Pearce

This paper charts the history of the category of 'asylum seeker' from 1993 to 2023.

doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Anna Pearce (2025) entitled: 'Asylum as Artifice: Race, Law and Capital as Regimes of Abstraction in the United Kingdom's Asylum Accommodation System' with a red banner at the top. Taking as its case study the category of the ‘asylum seeker’ in UK law, this paper develops on latent concerns in legal geographies with processes of abstraction. Following Bhandar and Toscano, race, law and capital are here understood as different, co-articulating modalities of abstraction, through which the ‘asylum seeker’ is constituted and reconstituted by spatial practice and law over time. The case study charts the history of the category in UK law with the corresponding developments in the material and spatial infrastructures of asylum accommodation, from the point at which the ‘asylum seeker’ was first codified in UK law in 1993 to the delegitimisation of asylum itself in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and the Illegal Migration Act 2023. As well as providing the application of Bhandar and Toscano's innovative methodology to a new empirical area, I further make the case that, as well as functioning as organisational nodes for race and capital, legal objects may also serve as conduits. In this way, these differing regimes of abstraction are put into mutually influential relationships with one another, with particularly concerning implications for the independence of law from capital. Though the case study and its legislative context are necessarily narrow in order to properly trace the contours of this particular legal object, the potential application of the theoretical arguments developed from this tight focus is broad, contributing to studies of immigration law, asylum reception and processing, as well as legal geographies more widely.
November 20, 2025 at 10:33 AM
tibg.bsky.social
New in TIBG:

'Towards geographies of silence: Unspoken boundaries' by @dorasampaio.bsky.social

This paper examines silence as a boundary-making practice in geographically distant relationships within transnational families living across Brazil & the U.S.

doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Dora Sampaio (2025) entitled: 'Towards Geographies of Silence: Unspoken Boundaries' with a red banner at the top. Despite its social and spatial significance, silence remains an under-explored and under-theorised subject in geography. This paper addresses this lacuna by examining silence as a boundary-making practice in geographically distant relationships. Silence as boundary-making is used as a new frame for conceptualising transnational intergenerational acts of care and the complexity that characterises transnational family life. These conceptual discussions are empirically examined through the experiences of transnational families whose lives stretch between Brazil and the United States. The analysis shows how research participants conceal, select, avoid, redirect and reframe conversations in order to sustain and protect relationships embedded in, and strongly affected by, broader structures of inequality. The paper puts forth a fourfold typology of silence as boundary-making and shows how these evolving boundaries, shaped by tacit agreements, tactics of withdrawal and self-disciplining, function as acts of care and ways to avoid negative emotions, self-preservation, controlling self-image and as forms of resistance and empowerment. The paper's conceptual discussion and typology lay the foundation for a broader research agenda that attends to the significance of silence in geographical research.
November 17, 2025 at 10:37 AM
tibg.bsky.social
New in TIBG:

'Crafting the Ocean: The Geographies of Environmental World-Making' by @squirerachael.bsky.social & Kimberley Peters

This paper explores more-than-human crafting and marine world-making, drawing on fieldwork conducted across six UK aquariums.

doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Rachael Squire & Kimberley Peters (2025) entitled: 'Crafting the Ocean: The Geographies of Environmental World-Making' with a red banner at the top. This paper brings cultural and environmental geographies into further conversation by linking theories of crafting and world-making together, via the lens of the contemporary public aquarium and nascent oceanic geographies. Far from a niche example, the public aquarium—which represents, and in some form aims to replicate (and preserve), the ocean ‘out there’—demonstrates how crafting aims to establish particular connections with environmental worlds amidst change. Drawing on fieldwork from six UK aquariums, both privately run and those with charitable status, the paper unpacks the politics of crafting in the making of aquarium tanks as well as the oceans they represent. Building on interviews with key actors (aquarists, curators, outreach and education officers, managers), visual and discourse analysis of promotional materials (websites, flyers, information boards, documentaries, memoirs, etc.) and ethnographic observations at each site, the paper offers a critical examination of three distinct modes of marine world-making behind the glass: (1) exploring how water is itself crafted, (2) the crafting of more-than-human worlds in the storying of species selection and (3) crafting light in dark, fabricated, ocean worlds. This paper thus enables a deeper understanding of craft and world-making in the context of the aquarium, also situating this space within broader geographical thought and ocean geographies. Finally, the paper draws together work on aquariums, craft and oceans in excess to argue for renewed attention on analogue worlds. It explicates how, through processes of replication, preservation and remaking, they might hold space for an ocean (and planet) undergoing profound change both now and in the future.
November 12, 2025 at 11:27 AM
tibg.bsky.social
New in TIBG:

'Re-spiritualising geographies of subjectivity through Daoism' by Yu-Shan Tseng

This intervention draws on Daoist philosophy to provide an alternative account of spiritual selfhood, re-spiritualising the bodily geographies of subjectivity.

doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
Screenshot of an intervention abstract in Transactions by Yu-Shan Tseng (2025) entitled: 'Re-spiritualising geographies of subjectivity through Daoism' with a red banner at the top. This intervention seeks to advance geographical interpretations of the body as the ‘usual’ and ‘universal’ site for understanding subjectivity and spirituality in human geography. Affective and emotional geographies have predominantly located subjective experiences within the lived body—the site where bodies actively engage with the world through embodied practices such as sensing, affecting and feeling. Through these bodily engagements with the world, geographers have mapped the landscapes of embodied subjective experiences and space-making. However, the geographies of subjectivity face significant challenges in understanding spirituality beyond worldly embodiments and without equating it with religious faiths and their spatial productions. Drawing on Daoist philosophy, I propose an alternative account that re-spiritualises the geographies of subjectivity. In Daoist thought, re-spiritualisation is seen as processes of relocation, reconnection and respatialisation of subjectivity in the Universe. Subjective experiences are relocated from the lived experiences of bodies to the spiritual place—the Heavenly heart in the Universe. They are reconnected within its mind, body and spirit, and with the Universe as Oneness, through the spiritual, understood as vital and life-giving energies. They are respatialised through spiritual energies making different spiritual spaces (e.g. the empty, the unbounded, the transcendental) in the Heavenly heart. Such spatial–spiritual processes are animated by three actions: emptying, resonating and awakening. Daoist geography makes a cosmological call for an ethical–political movement that harmonises spiritual disconnections through invoking the cosmological in selfhood without subjectivisation.
October 30, 2025 at 3:17 PM
tibg.bsky.social
New in TIBG:

'Worlding geographies: A question of languages' by Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary et al.

This intervention responds to the 'Geography in the World' series, shifting focus to the process of worlding geographies & practices of multilingualism in the academy.

doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geo
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, Cheikh Abdoul Ahad Mbacké Ba, Sophie Buhnik, Marine Duc, Juliet J. Fall, Marie Gibert-Flutre, Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch, Renaud Le Goix, Laura Péaud & Charlotte Ruggeri entitled: 'Worlding geographies: A question of languages' with a red banner at the top.
October 28, 2025 at 2:55 PM
tibg.bsky.social
New commentary in TIBG:

'Subtractive, ambient and bifurcated attention at work and when working from home: Towards a geography of workplace attention' by @tylerb.bsky.social & @dcockayne.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
Screenshot of a paper abstract in TIBG by Tyler Blackman & Daniel Cockayne (2025) entitled: 'Subtractive, ambient and bifurcated attention at work and when working from home: Towards a geography of workplace attention' with a red banner at the top. In this commentary, we draw on research on working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada, to expand on Bissell, Crovara, Gorman-Murray and Straughan's (2025) paper ‘What does it mean to be present at work? Negotiating attention, distraction and presence in working from home’. We corroborate and add to their analysis of attention in relation to working from home in two ways. First, we develop further how their analysis of attention relates to social difference in working from home settings. Second, we consider through additional examples how attention relates to a working from home politics. These points lead us to push for the importance of the multiplicious theory of attention that the authors outline in their paper, against the declension narratives that often accompany solely subtractive theories of attention that they critique in their conclusion. We emphasise a theory of attention that is ambient, bifurcated, open, complex and multifaceted, as well as one that is, under certain circumstances, subtractive. We see these former ideas of attention as more central to notions of presence and better foreground the broad range of subjective experiences of work and working.
October 27, 2025 at 11:03 AM
tibg.bsky.social
New in TIBG:

'Root metaphors in cartography: Bridging critical and quantitative approaches' by Ruizhe Hong et al.

This article uses Anne Buttimer's 4 root metaphors - mosaic, mechanism, organism, & arena - to bridge the gap between critical and quantitative cartography.

doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Ruizhe Hong, Bo Zhao & Shangyi Zhou (2025) entitled: 'Root metaphors in cartography: Bridging critical and quantitative approaches' with a red banner at the top. The evolution of contemporary cartography has long been attributed to two significant trajectories: the adoption of new technologies like computers, the Internet, and Artificial Intelligence into the map-making process, and the critical examination of cartographic methods and practices. Existing literature has rarely explored the potential of bridging these specialised parallel developments because of their seemingly inconsistent epistemological basis. This article argues that Anne Buttimer's four root metaphors—mosaic, mechanism, organism, and arena—provide a valuable lens to scrutinise these dynamics. These root metaphors, deeply embedded in the understanding of human–environment interactions, present a multifaceted framework for exploring the nexus of map representation, socio-spatial inequalities and spatial justice, all within the context of evolving technological shifts, marked by recent advances in spatial data science and geospatial artificial intelligence. We further examine the potential of these metaphors to foster a deeper appreciation of the interplay between established geographical and cartographic knowledge systems, to critically assess their limitations and to probe the synergy between cartography and emerging metaphorical constructs. This article encourages a flexible adoption of these metaphors to address the unique cartographic challenges of our time, advocating for a broader, more inclusive cartographic discourse.
October 16, 2025 at 9:04 AM
tibg.bsky.social
New in TIBG!

'High-resolution property: Drone enclosures in digital India' by @termcern.bsky.social

This paper examines how drone & geospatial technologies are being deployed to enclose rural customary lands across India.

doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Thomas Cowan (2025) entitled: 'High-resolution property: Drone enclosures in digital India' with a red banner at the top. Drawing from ethnographic research on the implementation of Svamitva, one of the largest digitalized property titling schemes in the world, this paper examines how new drone and geospatial technologies are being deployed to enclose rural customary lands across contemporary India. Focusing on the initial processes of droney survey, GIS mapping and data-creation under the scheme, the paper argues that the creation of ‘high-resolution property’ is achieved not through simple technological observation, but rather via the imposition of a new regime of perception. One coordinated through the speculative and ideological property-making practices of drone surveyors, GIS technicians, and local residents. This new regime of perception aims to extract individual ownership lurking within collectivity, subdivide collectivised lands, and cleanly link rural property to global asset markets and digital public infrastructures. In doing so the paper seeks to provincialise contemporary geographical scholarship on property technology or PropTech, drawing from the diverse property systems and emerging technological apparatus of the Global South, and examine the lively and mediated sociotechnical practices required to convert hundreds of thousands of rural territories into high-resolution private titles and data-points. In doing so, the paper seeks to challenge the overt techno-determinism and solutionism within official debates concerning property digitalization, highlighting instead the ways digitialized property remains socially, ecologically and institutionally mediated.
October 14, 2025 at 10:51 AM
tibg.bsky.social
📢New issue of TIBG📢

Transactions' September Issue features two interventions on environmental crisis & geographies of creativity, 21 papers, and two commentaries on the war in Ukraine.

22/25 pieces are #OpenAccess and available to read here⬇️

rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14755661...
A graphic showing the title page of Transactions on a read background with TIBG in large letters on the right hand page. On the left hand page are eight tiles with 2 interventions and 6 standard articles, with the names of papers in the issue. 1) 'On limit and love in times of environmental crises' by Ihnji Jon 2) 'Geographies of creativity/creative geographies' by Pat Noxolo 3) '‘My body was no longer a problem’: Electric mountain biking, disability, and the cultural politics of green exercise' by Jim Cherrington & James Brighton 4) '‘A wonderful day and a wonderful crossing!’: Internment (im)mobilities, ambivalence, and the residual tourist gaze in Second World War Britain' by Michael Holden & Peter Adey 5) '‘Smartness’ narratives: A critical discourse analysis of smart eldercare in urban China' by Yi Yu 6) 'Critique beyond relation: The stakes of working with the negative, the void and the abyss' by David Chandler & Jonathan Pugh 7) 'Poetics in the work of three urban photographers: Love for the chaotic city from the site of urban rooftops' by Paulina Nordstrom 8) 'Places as refrains: A non-constructive alternative to assemblage thinking' by Peter Merriman A graphic showing the title page of Transactions on a read background with TIBG in large letters on the right hand page. On the left hand page are nine tiles with standard articles, with the names of papers in the issue. 1) Climate change, bodies and diplomacy: Performing watery futures in Tuvalu Liam Saddington 2) Digital animal deathscapes: The online circulation of animals killed for conservation Alexandra Palmer 3) The medium is the message: The geographies of cryptocurrency remittances to Venezuela Daniel Robins 4) ‘One school, two systems’: Navigating the geographies of alternative education in an elite primary school in China Zhenjie Yuan, Huiyu Xie, Hong Zhu 5) Translating India to India: Travelling translations, Patanjali Ayurveda, and the visual language of spiritual consumerism Raksha Pande, Alastair Bonnett 6) Urban political ecologies of sewage surveillance: Creating vital and valuable public health data from wastewater 7) Constructive (in)visibility and the trafficking industrial complex: Leveraging borders for exploitation Audrey Lumley-Sapanski, Katarina Schwarz 8) Translations, translocations, and pluralism: A transnational and multilingual analysis of the circulation of radical geographical knowledge Federico Ferretti 9) From biopower to affirmative biopolitics: A (bio)political ecology of becoming with wolves Valerio Donfrancesco, Chris Sandbrook A graphic showing the title page of Transactions on a read background with TIBG in large letters on the right hand page. On the left hand page are eight tiles with 6 standard articles and 2 commentaries, with the names of papers in the issue. 1) Mining an Anthropocene in Japan: On the making and work of geological imaginaries Deborah P. Dixon, Carina J. Fearnley, Mark Pendleton 2) Uneven ambient futures: Intersecting heat and housing trajectories in England and Wales Caitlin Robinson, Lenka Hasova, Lin Zhang 3) Examining the ‘gendered’ places and spaces of UK doctoral education using multilevel modelling Laura Harriet Sheppard, Jonathan Reades, Richard P. J. Freeman 4) The (non-)performance of the financial frontier: Building investment pipelines for the Sustainable Development Goals in Ghana Abbie Yunita 5) Thinking through an ethnography of infrastructure: Commonsensical reasoning, road sharing, and everyday infrastructural settlements Alan Latham, Russell Hitchings, Michael Nattrass 6) (Re)wilding London: Fabric, politics, and aesthetics Jonathon Turnbull, Tom Fry, Jamie Lorimer 7) Resilient education: The role of digital technology in supporting geographical education in Ukraine Simon M. Hutchinson, Elizabeth R. Hurrell, Kateryna Borysenko, Vladyslav Popov, Dariia Kholiavchuk, Yana Popiuk 8) Imagining post-war futures amid cycles of destruction and efforts of reconstruction Constance Carr, Olga Kryvets
October 1, 2025 at 2:33 PM
tibg.bsky.social
#OpenAccess in TIBG

'Infra-culture and infrastructures: Relational placemaking at the coast' by Julian Clark

This paper explores the concept of 'infra-culture', illustrating how cultural practices & material interactions influence the development of physical infrastructures
doi.org/10.1111/tran...
This is the graphical abstract to this paper in Transactions. It shows a historical map of the Alde and Ore estuary, drawn by Ananias Appleton in 1588.
September 25, 2025 at 12:12 PM
tibg.bsky.social
#OA in TIBG:

'Later life mobilities at the margins of urban geography' by James Esson et al.

This paper examines how older people navigate African cities, focusing on Ghana, & contributes to reimagining how knowledge is produced with & about cities in the Majority World.

doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by James Esson, Ebenezer F. Amankwaa, Katherine V. Gough, Peter Mensah, Katie McQuaid & Ross Wignall (2025) entitled: 'Later life mobilities at the margins of urban geography' with a red banner at the top. The projected increase in older people within the African population, alongside rapid urbanisation, points to the growing importance of understanding how older people navigate towns and cities across the continent. This aligns with wider concerns that geographical scholarship needs to pay more sustained attention to ageing in Global South contexts. Rather than treating these developments as problems or absences, we approach them as opportunities to explore how geographies of later life can generate new ways to conceptualise the urban experience. To this end, the paper draws on the local vernacular of older residents in the Ghanaian cities of Accra and Sekondi-Takoradi to decentre, contextualise and expand the vocabulary used to depict and interpret urban mobilities. The findings reveal ‘hidden geographies of ageing’ through three forms of mobility practice: Mpanyinfo ho hia (respectful mobilities), YƐ mboa nkoa (collective mobilities) and Me te fie (retired mobilities). These insights enrich conceptual understandings of city life by showing how older people navigate, engage with and shape social hierarchies, communal support networks and economic rationalities. By amplifying the voices of a population often overlooked in epistemological and policy deliberations, this intervention supports interdisciplinary efforts to reimagine how knowledge is produced with and about cities in the Global South. Crucially, the paper challenges the Southern urban critique to better reflect the plurality of marginality that influences everyday life in the Majority World.
September 23, 2025 at 1:10 PM
tibg.bsky.social
6) 'Beyond the Limpopo: Geography and the worlding of South(ern) Africa'

The final contribution to this collection is by Maano Ramutsindela, examining the gap between Geography and African Studies in South Africa.

doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Maano Ramutsindela (2025) entitled: 'Beyond the Limpopo: Geography and the worlding of South(ern) Africa' with a red banner at the top. This paper contributes to the discussion on the relationship between geography and area studies and the proposed reorientation of the critical geography of ‘area’ by situating the production of geographical knowledge in South Africa in national and regional contexts. It argues that Southern Africa provides a useful entry point for geography-African studies dialogue because of the region's shared histories and struggles, and the changing roles played by South Africa in the region. This regional context is useful for illuminating the convergence of the study of area and nationalism, and why and how geography became disconnected from African studies. The paper attributes this disconnect to parochialism and the prevailing negative views of Africa as a place of lack. It concludes that deconstructing Africa as ‘a disaster area’ and reorientating the South African Geographical Journal as a platform for African geographies are critical for bridging the geography-African studies gap.
September 19, 2025 at 2:55 PM
tibg.bsky.social
5) 'Global China's spatial ambition and area studies with geography'

This contribution by Han Cheng evaluates the remaking of China's area studies and world geography as part of a nationalist project of spatial knowledge production.

doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Han Cheng (2025) entitled: 'Global China's spatial ambition and area studies with geography' with a red banner at the top. This paper critically evaluates the contemporary remaking of China's area studies and world geography as part of a nationalist project of spatial knowledge production, by examining an emerging landscape of individuals, institutions and ideologies. Two arguments are made. First, China's area studies and world geography are shaped by not only their milieus, but also the ‘milieu of milieus’ as defined and delimited by the state-disciplinary apparatus which impedes a geography–area studies interface. Second, both milieus are underpinned by reductive epistemologies, engendering depolitised discourses that omit critical self-reflections and other geographies of knowing. As well as offering insights for China's ongoing and unfinished ‘world-writing’, this paper draws particular attention to the geographical scales and spatialities of knowledge translation, consumption, circulation and reproduction.
September 19, 2025 at 8:56 AM
tibg.bsky.social
4) 'Geography and area studies as critical bedfellows? The view from Singapore'

Brenda Yeoh's contribution to this collection considers the challenges faced by Singapore-based geographers operating both inside and outside Euro-American traditions.

doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Brenda Yeoh (2025) entitled 'Geography and area studies as critical bedfellows? The view from Singapore' with a red banner at the top.
September 18, 2025 at 12:55 PM
tibg.bsky.social
3) 'Constructing and contesting meta-geographies in Russian area studies debates'

In this contribution, @vrsmirnova.bsky.social examines the evolution of Russian area studies and its geopolitical imaginations from the Soviet to the post-Soviet era.

doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Vera Smirnova (2025) entitled: 'Constructing and contesting meta-geographies in Russian area studies debates' with a red banner at the top. This paper contributes to broader efforts to examine how ‘world-writing’ practices operate beyond dominant area studies debates through the case of Russia. It traces the evolution of Russia's discipline of area studies through its two core meta-geographies—the East and Eurasia, showing how they were constructed, contested and repurposed to make sense of other regions across the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Moving from anti-colonial solidarities, in which the Soviet ‘East’ mediated knowledge exchange between Moscow and the decolonising world, to the revival of ‘Eurasia’ as a geopolitical project, academic production increasingly aligned with foreign policy ambitions, often framed in civilisational and expansionist terms. By situating Russian area studies within its geopolitical, institutional and disciplinary contexts, the article interrogates its entanglement with imperialist legacies and its selective engagement with Western debates, reproducing past hierarchies under the guise of alternative epistemologies.
September 18, 2025 at 8:57 AM
tibg.bsky.social
2) 'Egypt's geographical tradition: The post-independence moment and shifting regional imaginations'

In her contribution, @ayanassar.bsky.social considers how different worlds and regions are imagined in the non-west from the vantage point of Egypt.

doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Aya Nassar (2025) entitled: 'Egypt's geographical tradition: The post-independence moment and shifting regional imaginations' with a red banner at the top. The aim of this intervention is to respond to the provocation of how different worlds and regions are imagined from the non-west. This ‘non-west’ is often regarded as the object of area studies, rather than an author of geographical knowledge and cannons. Egypt represents a classic example of this. The concomitant aim of this task is not to package these ‘other’ traditions as useful additions that diversify the histories of geography (as this reinforces the centrality of Anglocentric questions through an add-and-stir approach), but to acknowledge these traditions as evolving, and possibly problematic but always already in conversation with worldly intellectual and geopolitical traditions. To do this from the vantage point of Egypt, I start with the specific moment of post-independence to show how it was complex and imbricated in intellectual inheritances, shifting geopolitical orders, national revisions of worldly orientations and geopolitical ambitions. For many, an Egyptian regional geographic imagination finds its bedrock in the post-independence moment. It was at this time that Egypt, as an anticolonial world actor, sought to redefine its geopolitical global and regional commitments. Indeed, the post-independence moment saw a strong and forceful regional geographical imagination and praxis, in politics as well as in intellectual geography.
September 17, 2025 at 4:01 PM
tibg.bsky.social
1) 'Worlding geography, area studies and the study of area'

Han Cheng & @deensharp.bsky.social's introduction to the collection proposes a reoriented critical geography of 'area' by examining geography's relationship with area studies beyond the Anglo-American tradition.

doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Han Cheng & Deen Sharp (2025) entitled 'Worlding geography, area studies and the study of area' with a red banner at the top. This paper introduces the collection of five short papers written by scholars from Egypt, Russia, Singapore, China and South Africa that advance this journal's ‘Geography in the World’ initiative through a more robust engagement between geography and area studies. Geographers have increasingly addressed the troubled relationship that their discipline has with the field of area studies. Less registered, however, in Anglophone debates are the presence and politics of other geographical traditions of area studies. In this themed intervention, we propose a reoriented critical geography of ‘area’ by closely assessing non-Western geography's relationship with its area studies counterpart across a range of (geo)political, economic, institutional and cultural contexts beyond the Anglo-American ‘core’.
September 17, 2025 at 11:36 AM
tibg.bsky.social
New in TIBG!

Geography in the World, part 3: Area Studies

Han Cheng & @deensharp.bsky.social's collection draws together authors from Egypt, Singapore, China, South Africa & Russia to explore non-Western geography's relationship with Area Studies.

Read all papers here ⬇️

tinyurl.com/5n72yt46
A graphic advertising a new collection of papers in Transactions called 'Geography in the World 3: Area Studies' with the title curved around a black and white image of the globe in the centre, and the Transactions logo next to the Royal Geographical Society logo at the top of the red background. With contributions from: Aya Nassar, Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Deen Sharp, Han Cheng, Maano Ramutsindela & Vera Smirnova
September 17, 2025 at 10:40 AM
tibg.bsky.social
New commentary in Transactions:

'Decolonial limits to Henri Lefebvre's spatial revolution' by James D. Sidaway

In this commentary, Sidaway responds to @hamishkallin.bsky.social's recent TIBG paper on the reconciliation of anarchist and Marxist approaches in geography.

doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Screenshot of a commentary abstract in Transactions by James D. Sidaway (2025) entitled 'Decolonial limits to Henri Lefebvre's spatial revolution' with a red banner at the top. This commentary appreciates Hamish Kallin's (2024) account of the prospects for reconciliation of anarchist and Marxist approaches via engaging Henri Lefebvre's work, but signals equivocation about Lefebvre triggered by his depictions of colonialism, Islam and the tropics. I argue that these are inconsistent with ongoing decolonial moves in geography.
September 16, 2025 at 10:46 AM
tibg.bsky.social
New in TIBG!

'Crisis of imagination/(re)imaginations for a (climate) crisis' by @ankitkumar.bsky.social et al.

This collection comes out of a Chair's Plenary at the 2023 RGS-IBG conference, asking the question 'is our work on climate change facing a crisis of imagination?'

doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Screenshot of a Themed Intervention abstract in Transactions by Ankit Kumar, Chandni Singh, Lauren Hermanus, Lalitha Kamath, Wangui Kimari, Mark Pelling & Harriet Bulkeley (2025) entitled: 'Crisis of imagination/(re)imaginations for a (climate) crisis' with a red banner at the top.
September 11, 2025 at 9:33 AM
tibg.bsky.social
New in Transactions:

'The spatiality of encounters: Contesting planning decisions in Tehran' by Mojgan Taheri Tafti

This paper examines resistance to top-down urban planning and governance in Tehran's middle-class neighbourhoods.

doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Mojgan Taheri Tafti (2025) entitled 'The spatiality of encounters: Contesting planning decisions in Tehran' with a red banner at the top. How do urban activists and the state organise their encounters under constrained conditions for dissent? What spatialities do these encounters involve, and how do they mediate power relations? This paper examines these questions, focusing on eight instances of contestation in Tehran's middle-class neighbourhoods, centred on resistance to top-down urban planning and governance. Drawing on Deleuzian thought, particularly his interpretation of Spinoza's concept of encounter, the paper focuses on the spatiality of encounter as a critical site of analysis. It argues that space mediates and conditions the fragmented encounters between residents and the state by reconfiguring their power to act. The spatialities of these encounters, in turn, reflect and reproduce both the political character of urban governance and the forms of resistance it provokes.
September 10, 2025 at 8:17 AM
tibg.bsky.social
#OpenAccess in TIBG:

'Theorising legal gaps geographically: Exploring the transition from asylum seeker to refugee in the UK' by @sarahhughes90.bsky.social

This paper explores the '28-day gap' between the approval of an asylum claim and the ending of government support.

doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Sarah M. Hughes (2025) entitled 'Theorising legal gaps geographically: Exploring the transition from asylum seeker to refugee in the UK' with a red banner at the top. For many asylum seekers in the United Kingdom, being awarded refugee status signals the end of a prolonged period of waiting. At this point, they and their dependants are predominantly given permission to stay in the United Kingdom for five years. However, when a positive decision is granted, a new refugee has limited time before their existing government support (housing, finance) terminates. This transition is termed the ‘move-on period’, and, at the time of research, new refugees had only 28 days to navigate this change. Whilst civil society groups argue that the period following a positive decision poses urgent political questions, the legal gap between these two systems of governance has yet to garner significant academic attention. Scholarship has often been epistemically siloed into research looking at the governance and lived experiences of asylum seekers or the challenges and integration of refugees; the transition, or ‘gap’ between these legal categories has yet to receive sustained analysis. Building upon work on legal edges (Jeffrey 2019) this paper proposes a geographical reading of legal gaps, emerging from and speaking beyond the specifics of new refugees. It explores the construction and governance of the move-on period, together with the role of material technologies in paradoxically mediating and creating this gap. Bringing these two themes together, the paper contributes to debates on the role of materials in the governance of forced migrants and puts forward a relational theorising of legal ‘gaps’.
September 9, 2025 at 10:32 AM
tibg.bsky.social
#OpenAccess in TIBG:

'Hide and rule: Accumulation by disappearance and necro-periurbanisation in Brazil' by @jshutta.bsky.social

This paper examines the governance of peri-urban spaces near Rio de Janeiro, connecting land fraud to the systemic hiding of violence.

doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Jan Simon Hutta (2025) entitled 'Hide and rule: Accumulation by disappearance and necro-periurbanisation in Brazil' with a red banner at the top. This paper examines how peri-urban spaces are governed through practices of concealment and obfuscation, thus undermining and displacing techniques of making things legible. Focusing on the Baixada Fluminense region north of Rio de Janeiro, it connects clandestine practices of ‘grilagem’, or state-sponsored land fraud, to the obfuscation of violence as part of territorial strategies. Methodologically, the article combines a genealogical approach to analysing obfuscation as a multi-pronged technology of power with empirical research on the violent control of peri-urban neighbourhoods. In Rio de Janeiro's hinterland, it is argued, the obfuscation of land entitlements has long been linked to the invisibilisation of violence and atrocities, facilitated by racialised conditions of willed ignorance and opacity. At a conceptual level, the paper contributes to nascent works in urban geography and anthropology that are committed to developing context-sensitive approaches to necropolitics in peri-urban and fringe spaces of the Global South. Moreover, it draws on work on uneven spatial development, control grabbing and forced disappearance to develop the notion of ‘accumulation by disappearance’. Such an approach complicates assumptions around modern power being built on ‘state projects of legibility’ (James Scott) and violent spectacles, while also extending engagements with racialised opacity by drawing attention to cunning techniques of obfuscation that traverse the governance of people and spaces. What emerges is a context-sensitive approach to interrogating powerful, yet contested processes of ‘necro-periurbanisation’.
September 3, 2025 at 11:43 AM
tibg.bsky.social
#OpenAccess in TIBG:

'Infrastructure as archive: Examining the colonial geographies of rivers' by @austinread.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky #geo
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Austin Read (2025) entitled 'Infrastructure as archive: Examining the colonial geographies of rivers' with a red banner at the top. Exploring the colonial geographies that have shaped Britain, this paper argues that recent debates regarding the ecological status of British rivers must centre colonialism and racial capitalism as the crucial drivers of river decline and thus prioritise developing anticolonial ecological politics. I anchor this argument in the River Severn in southwest Britain, which, until recently, was fragmented by hydraulic infrastructures such as weirs and canals. I examine here a conservation project that has built fish passes to reconnect the Severn's divided ecologies and unsettle technocratic framings of it as a silver bullet solution that bypasses political quagmires. I point instead to the five centuries of racial capitalist geographies that have shaped the Severn and insist that these cannot be avoided through engineering ingenuity. This paper's arguments are complex because entrenched spatial dichotomies of core/periphery have resulted in a lack of attention to how colonial geographies have shaped British ecologies like the Severn. The central contribution of this article is thus its development of a spatially relational theory and method of infrastructure as a colonial archive that can disrupt dichotomous core/periphery imaginaries and render spatially discontinuous and differential colonial geographies visible. I empirically develop this theory of infrastructure as an archive by deploying it to analyse the records of the Severn Navigation Commissioners (1835–c.1948), the body responsible for the infrastructural disciplining of the Severn.
August 29, 2025 at 11:20 AM
tibg.bsky.social
New in Transactions:

'Gaming the system through temporary housing: Real estate intermediaries and the law in short-term rental markets by @ifidimi.bsky.social

This paper explores how rental regulation is strategically engaged with in Zurich's temporary housing market.

doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Ifigeneia Dimitrakou (2025) entitled: 'Gaming the system through temporary housing: Real estate intermediaries and the law in short-term rental markets' with a red banner at the top. This article contributes empirical and conceptual insights to emerging debates on the regulation of short-term rentals (STRs) by delving into the socio-legal foundations of this housing market segment. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted between September 2022 and June 2023 focused on the governance of for-profit temporary housing (i.e., serviced, furnished, interim housing) in Zurich, it examines how real estate intermediaries in the temporary housing business interact with regulations and carve out niches in tight rental markets. Through an approach that understands temporary housing as a socio-legally constructed asset and a profit-maximising rental strategy within deregulated housing markets, the analysis reveals regulatory blind spots through which intermediaries exploit existing legal tools to circumvent or substitute laws governing rent relations and transactions in the housing market. In doing so, they promote tenure flexibilisation, shaping new pathways to rent extraction. The article foregrounds the concept of gaming to understand intermediaries' interactions and use of legal tools to serve their business interests, suggesting that opportunities for gaming the system of rental regulation are central to creating these assets, making temporary housing itself a strategy for driving housing deregulation and semi-formality. To bring the corruption of rent relations into sharper focus, it is necessary to expand and move beyond debates focused on regulating land use categories towards an understanding of the nexus between market and legal practices and their influence on restructuring rent relations.
August 15, 2025 at 11:10 AM