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.
By attending to chemicals through the mundane work of removal, Angeliki Balayannis' paper opens up different lines of inquiry for studies of waste, and enriches understandings of materiality by considering how visual representations make a difference.