A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Investigates the way that nature is enrolled in, and a site of, social and cultural politics, attending specifically to discourses, governance and practice.
Jennifer Atchison and Lesley Head’s article “Eradicating bodies in invasive plant management” appears in issue 6 of the 2013 volume of Society and Space. As an accompaniment to the article, this photo gallery follows the practice and politics of invasive plant management through photographs taken by Atchison and Head as part of Head’s Australian Laureate fellowship project ‘The Social Life of Invasive Plants’.
Cities: An Environmental History by Ian Douglas is therefore a welcome reflection on a wide range of urban environmental issues. The title is somewhat misleading; this is not really a ‘history’ with a clearly periodised metanarrative that traces the evolution of urban environments. Instead, the book is structured around thematic chapters that cover an impressive range of issues.
In this piece we wish to emphasise that the kind of practices the move to declare cetaceans ‘non-human persons’ engenders are decidedly exceptionalist and reiterate the binomial logic of Human and Animal. What more-than-human and multispecies scholarship calls for, then, would be relational legislation grounded in relational ethics.
The author intends to provide us with “biographies” of all his rivers. Now, what is exactly a “river's biography”? It certainly includes a clear description of the river, with its hydrology (sources, flows, landscapes) and its people—those that lived with and changed the river, and possibly vice versa.
Drawing on a heatwave case study in Western Sydney, Australia, the paper explores how practices of thermal comfort for particular, often privileged, bodies may be understood as sensory enablers of climate change denial.
This paper explores the policy concept and community enactments of ‘shared responsibility’ for disaster resilience in the context of wildfires in Victoria, Australia.
Hannah Arendt developed a twofold account of ‘being earthbound’ directly relevant to Anthropocene debates regarding the political. For Arendt, both senses of ‘being earthbound’ arose as humans began to act into nature, not merely upon it.
In this article I examine the enlistment of Arctic ice to tell grand, universal stories about humanity’s origins and endings. To upend temperate-normative ideals of landscape and livelihood, I analyze a poem titled “Exceeding Beringia” by Joan Naviyuk Kane (Inupiaq) wherein Inupiaq relations to more-than-human kin articulate transit and migration as a mutual, obligatory responsibility.
Using Paraguay as a site of genealogical engagement, this paper by Kregg Hetherington explores agribiopolitical relations through three phases of the Green Revolution, culminating in the current age of monocrops.