is a chemical that travels. Better known as misoprostol, it was designed as a stomach ulcer drug but is now used around the world as an abortion pill due to the self-experimentation of Latin American communities who were seeking ways to end unwanted pregnancies. We develop a chemical geography approach to misoprostol that allows us to scale inward to understand the chemical properties of this medication while also being able to scale out to understand how medicinal effects are interwoven with and determined by global politics. Misoprostol as a chemical alone does not guarantee a successful abortion and instead 'scaffolding' in the form of mobility and information is required to transform misoprostol from a chemical to a safe and effective technology of abortion. First, we examine how misoprostol is moved by feminist networks in Mexico and Peru. Second, we argue that in order to be useful it is not enough just to access the pills, information on how to use them is required. These themes culminate in our contribution of 'pharmacokinetical geographies'; the micro-geography of the placement of pharmaceuticals in and on a body and its ramifications. The chemical geographies of misoprostol tell a story of power, bodily autonomy, and resistance.

A coevolutionary perspective is adopted to understand the dynamics of exposure to mountain hazards in the European Alps. A spatially explicit, object-based temporal assessment of elements at risk to mountain hazards (river floods, torrential floods, and debris flows) in Austria and Switzerland is presented for the period from 1919 to 2012. The assessment is based on two different data sets: (1) hazard information adhering to legally binding land use planning restrictions and (2) information on building types combined from different national-level spatial data. We discuss these transdisciplinary dynamics and focus on economic, social, and institutional interdependencies and interactions between human and physical systems. Exposure changes in response to multiple drivers, including population growth and land use conflicts. The results show that whereas some regional assets are associated with a strong increase in exposure to hazards, others are characterized by a below-average level of exposure. The spatiotemporal results indicate relatively stable hot spots in the European Alps. These results coincide with the topography of the countries and with the respective range of economic activities and political settings. Furthermore, the differences between management approaches as a result of multiple institutional settings are discussed. A coevolutionary framework widens the explanatory power of multiple drivers to changes in exposure and risk and supports a shift from structural, security-based policies toward an integrated, risk-based natural hazard management system.

Health geography has emerged from under the "shadow of the medical" to become one of the most vibrant of all the subdisciplines. Yet, this success has also meant that health research has become increasingly siloed within this subdisciplinary domain. As this article explores, this represents a potential lost opportunity with regard to the study of global health, which has instead come to be dominated by anthropology and political science. Chief among the former's concerns are exploring the gap between the programmatic intentions of global health and the unintended or unanticipated consequences of their deployment. This article asserts that recent work on contingency within geography offers significant conceptual potential for examining this gap. It therefore uses the example of alcohol taxation in Botswana, an emergent global health target and tool, to explore how contingency and the emergent, contingent geographies that result might help counter the prevailing tendency for geography to be side-stepped within critical studies of global health. At the very least, then, this intervention aims to encourage reflection by geographers on how to make explicit the all-too-often implicit links between their research and global health debates located outside the discipline.

Disparate residential hazard exposures based on disadvantaged gender status (e.g., among female-headed households) have been documented in the distributive environmental justice literature, yet no published studies have examined whether disproportionate environmental risks exist based on minority sexual orientation. To address this gap, we use data from the US Census, American Community Survey and the Environmental Protection Agency at the 2010 census tract level to examine the spatial relationships between same-sex partner households and cumulative cancer risk from exposure to hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) emitted by all ambient emission sources in Greater Houston (Texas). Findings from generalized estimating equation analyses demonstrate that increased cancer risks from HAPs are significantly associated with neighborhoods having relatively high concentrations of resident same-sex partner households, adjusting for geographic clustering and variables known to influence risk (i.e., race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, renter status, income inequality, and population density). However, HAP exposures are distributed differently for same-sex male versus same-sex female partner households. Neighborhoods with relatively high proportions of same-sex male partner households are associated with significantly greater exposure to cancer-causing HAPs while those with high proportions of same-sex female partner households are associated with less exposure. This study provides initial empirical documentation of a previously unstudied pattern, and infuses current theoretical understanding of environmental inequality formation with knowledge emanating from the sexualities and space literature. Practically, results suggest that other documented health risks experienced in gay neighborhoods may be compounded by disparate health risks associated with harmful exposures to air toxics.

Alcohol and alcohol related harm are key public health challenges. Research has shown that individual level factors, such as age and sex, are important predictors of alcohol consumption, but such factors provide only a partial account of the drivers of consumption. In this paper we argue that individual level factors with features of the 'risk environment' to increase the vulnerability of individuals to such environments. Features of the alcohol 'risk environment' include the density of alcohol premises in a neighbourhood. Previous research has shown that neighbourhoods with a higher density of alcohol outlets have higher levels of both alcohol consumption and alcohol related harm. There has however been a distinct lack of attention paid to the differential ways in which particular socio-demographic groups may be more vulnerable to such 'risk environments'. In this paper we address the risk environment through a primary focus on the local supply and availability of alcohol products (captured using a measure of outlet density) and the relationship with the harmful use of alcohol. Using responses to the Scottish Health Survey (2008-2011) we explore vulnerability through the interaction between individual level socio-economic position, measured using household income, and environmental risk to assess differential social vulnerability to such environments. We report findings showing that those in the lowest income groups may be disproportionately affected by outlet density. This evidence suggests that risk environments may not affect us all equally and that there may be socially differentiated vulnerability to such environments.

Time-location data collected from location-sensing technologies have the potential to advance our understanding of human mobility. Existing human activity studies tend to ignore a critical issue in data collection-the time period for which the activity data will be collected. Our study investigated this significant gap in the literature on temporal aspects of human mobility behavior-how many days constitute a period long enough to capture individuals' highly organized activity episodes and how they vary among individuals with heterogeneous demographic and social-economic characteristics. To determine a minimum number of days to capture individuals' highly organized activity episodes in activity space, we examined a distribution of Kullback-Leibler divergence indexes. To evaluate the differences in the minimal number of observation days per subgroup whose demographic and economic characteristics are heterogenous, we used a Bayesian profile regression model. Our study showed that the estimated minimum number of days required to capture routine activity patterns was 13.5 days with a standard deviation of 6.64. We found that participant's age, employment status, size of household, and accessibility to downtown, food, and physical activity, as well as economic status of residential environment, are important factors that affect temporal aspects of mobility behavior.

How do technologies animate more-than-human geographies after extinction? How can geographical scholarship evoke, or bring presence to, extinct biota? In an epoch simultaneously characterized by biotic loss at an unthinkable scale and the increased presence of representations depicting nonhuman life through mass media and digitization, we examine the epistemic, affective, and ethical possibilities of extinct animal traces to shape more-than-human geographies. We show how technological apparatuses inaugurate afterlives of extinction troubling binaries of extinct-extant and absence-presence. Specifically, we consider audio and visual remains of two taxa producing awkward and unsettling postextinction geographies: the ivory-billed woodpecker and the bucardo. Sound recordings and other historical traces continue to forge contemporary connections between human searchers and the ivory-billed woodpecker, although no sighting of the ghost bird has been universally accepted since 1944. The bucardo was declared extinct in 2000, but it was tentatively reanimated through a failed 2003 cloning project; in this milieu, visual technologies and representations conjure alternative presence and speculative futures beyond technoscientific spectacle. Through conversing our own situated, speculative, and technologically mediated relations with these taxa-and situating the technological assemblages themselves-we present some of the lively, contested, and dispersed ways technological apparatuses affect and inaugurate animated geographies after extinction.

In the late 2000s, several U.S. states and local governments enacted legislation to make work and life difficult for unauthorized immigrants within their jurisdictions. We investigate how these devolved immigration enforcement laws affected the migration of Latinos to these states. We find that after these hostile policies came into effect, noncitizen and naturalized Latinos from states without such policies were much less likely to move to states with them than in the 1990s. U.S.-born Latinos exhibit migration aversion to hostile states, albeit at a weaker level. Fear of discrimination and the blending of Latinos with different legal status within families might account for this broad Latino group migration response. Hostile policies produced no significant change in the interstate migration patterns of a control group of U.S.-born whites. A counterfactual analysis indicates that absent these enforcement regimes, the migratory redistribution of Latinos to hostile states from other states in the late 2000s would have continued the dispersive pattern of the late 1990s. We draw parallels between our research and state policy effects on U.S. internal migration for other groups.

Emerging research suggests that the extent to which activity spaces - the collection of an individual's routine activity locations - overlap provides important information about the functioning of a city and its neighborhoods. To study patterns of overlapping activity spaces, we draw on the notion of an ecological network, a type of two-mode network with the two modes being individuals and the geographic locations where individuals perform routine activities. We describe a method for detecting "ecological communities" within these networks based on shared activity locations among individuals. Specifically, we identify latent activity pattern profiles, which, for each community, summarize its members' probability distribution of going to each location, and community assignment vectors, which, for each individual, summarize his/her probability distribution of belonging to each community. Using data from the Adolescent Health and Development in Context (AHDC) Study, we employ latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to identify activity pattern profiles and communities. We then explore differences across neighborhoods in the strength, and within-neighborhood consistency of community assignment. We hypothesize that these aspects of the neighborhood structure of ecological community membership capture meaningful dimensions of neighborhood functioning likely to co-vary with economic and racial composition. We discuss the implications of a focus on ecological communities for the conduct of "neighborhood effects" research more broadly.

The prevailing labor migration regime in Asia is underpinned by rotating-door principles of enforced transience, where low-wage migrant labor gains admission into host nation-states based on short-term, time-limited contracts and where family reunification and permanent settlement at destination are explicitly prohibited. In this context, we ask how migrant-sending families in Southeast Asian "source" countries-Indonesia and the Philippines-sustain family life in the long-term absence of one or both parents (often mothers). Through temporal concepts of rhythm, rupture, and reversal, we focus on how temporal modalities of care for left-behind children intersect with gendered power geometries in animating transnational family politics around care. First, by paying heed to the structuring effects of rhythm on social life, we show how routinized care rhythms built around mothers as caregivers have a normalizing and naturalizing effect on the conduct of social life and commonplace understanding of family well-being. Second, we explore the potential rupture to care rhythms triggered by the migration of mothers turned breadwinners and the extent to which gendered care regimes are either conserved, reconstituted, or disrupted in everyday patterns and practices of care. Third, we examine the circumstances under which gender role reversal becomes enduring, gains legitimacy among a range of poly care rhythms, or is quickly undone with the return migration of mothers in homecoming. The analysis is based primarily on research on Indonesian and Filipino rural households conducted in 2017 using paired life story interviews with children and their parental or nonparental adult caregivers.

This work advances the critical urban studies literature on "planetary urbanization" by emphasizing the everyday struggles experienced by the people who live in and through planetary transformations. Specifically, we empirically investigated people in Eastern Montana who experienced the intensive and extensive oil and gas production of the Bakken Boom via interview and survey data. In the process, we interrogated Henri Lefebvre's notion of the "blind field," and conclude that what we call the "Bakken blind field" represents a deeply engrained "habit of the mind" that functions for the energy industry as a means of neutralizing the transformative potential that always lurks in response to persistent socio-environmentally exploitative practices. We suggest that the degree of illumination that results from personal hardships can determine the degree to which local exploitation is rejected (or accepted) as a necessary result of living with oil and gas.

This paper addresses the challenge of sharing finer-scale Protected Health Information (PHI) while maintaining patient privacy by using regionalization to create higher resolution HIPAA-compliant geographical aggregations. We compare four regionalization approaches in terms of their fitness for analysis and display: max-p-regions, REDCAP, and self-organizing maps (SOM) variants of each. Each method is used to create a configuration of regions that aligns with census boundaries, optimizes intra-unit homogeneity, and maximizes the number of spatial units while meeting the minimum population threshold required for sharing PHI under HIPAA guidelines. The relative utility of each configuration was assessed with measures of model-fit, compactness, homogeneity, and resolution. Adding the SOM procedure to max-p-regions resulted in statistically significant improvements for nearly all assessment measures whereas the addition of SOM to REDCAP primarily degraded these measures. These differences can be attributed to the different impacts of SOM on top-down and bottom-up regionalization procedures. Overall, we recommend REDCAP which outperformed on most measures. The SOM variant of max-p-regions (MSOM) may also be recommended as it provided the highest resolution while maintaining suitable performance on all other measures.

Geographically isolated places are often sites of exported environmental risks, intense resource extraction, exploitation and marginalization, and social policy neglect. These conditions create unique challenges related to vulnerability and adaptation that have direct disaster management implications. Our research investigates the relationship between geographic isolation and flood-related social vulnerability across Peru's ecological regions. Ecoregions have different relationships with colonialism and capitalism that shape vulnerability, and we hypothesize that the relationship between vulnerability and geographic isolation varies across ecoregions. Using mapping techniques and spatial regression analysis, we find that relationships between vulnerability and geographic isolation vary regionally, with differences that suggest alignment with regional contexts of extraction. We find notable differences in vulnerability related to public health infrastructure and access to services and between ecoregions with sharply contrasting histories of natural resource extraction and investment and disinvestment.

This article explores approaches to managing pests that are being developed in response to the faltering effectiveness of antibiotic regimes of chemical control. It focuses on black-grass (), an endemic plant in European agriculture that has emerged as a serious yield-robber with increasing levels of herbicidal resistance. Following farmers and agronomists who have developed "integrated" approaches to black-grass management, the article identifies approaches to biosecurity that do not target unwanted life so much as they modulate ecological systems in their entirety. Pathogenesis, in this relational understanding, follows not from breaches of dangerous life into healthy space, but from ecological intra-actions that enable the proliferation of some life to compromise the multispecies livability of the body in question. The article contributes to the literature by detailing how this configurational approach works in the world. It traces the polymorphic spatial imaginaries required to map pests well; the process of knowledge intensification needed to reveal which configurations can resist pathogenesis; and the probiotic biopolitical interventions used to safeguard farmland productivity. The article uses black-grass to present a temporal metanarrative of intensive farming causing ecological blowback, leading to the development of approaches to pest management predicated on a pragmatic tolerance toward unwanted life.

While agent-based models (ABMs) provide an effective means for investigating complex interactions between heterogeneous agents and their environment, they may hinder an improved understanding of phenomena being modeled due to inherent challenges associated with uncertainty in model parameters. This study uses uncertainty analysis and global sensitivity analysis (UA-GSA) to examine the effects of such uncertainty on model outputs. The statistics used in UA-GSA, however, are likely to be affected by the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP). Therefore, to examine the scale varying-effects of model inputs, UA-GSA needs to be performed at multiple spatiotemporal scales. Unfortunately, performing comprehensive UA-GSA comes with considerable computational cost. In this paper, our cyberGIS-enabled spatiotemporally explicit UA-GSA approach helps to not only resolve the computational burden, but also to measure dynamic associations between model inputs and outputs. A set of computational and modeling experiments shows that input factors have scale-dependent impacts on modeling output variability. In other words, most of the input factors have relatively large impacts in a certain region, but may not influence outcomes in other regions. Furthermore, our spatiotemporally explicit UA-GSA approach sheds light on the effects of input factors on modeling outcomes that are particularly spatially and temporally clustered, such as the occurrence of communicable disease transmission.

Recent health threats, such as the SARS, H1N1, and Ebola pandemics, have stimulated great interest in network models to study the transmission of communicable diseases through human interaction and mobility. Most current network models have focused on an individual-centric perspective where individuals are represented as nodes, and the interactions among them as edges. Few of these models are concerned with the discovery of the spatial patterns and dynamics of epidemics. We propose a location-centric, transmission network approach, in which nodes denote locations and edges denote possible disease transmissions between locations. We then identify the dynamics of transmission flows, the dynamics of critical locations, and the spatial-temporal extent of transmission pathways to assess the impact of these spatial dynamics on the evolution of an epidemic. Results show that transmission flows shift from elementary schools to middle schools and finally universities and professional schools at different phases of an epidemic. Critical locations, identified using network analysis, are responsible for the upsurge in transmission flows during the peaks of the epidemic. The length of transmission pathways shows a power law distribution and their spatial extent is rather small. Insights gained from this study will help devise spatially sensitive strategies to control communicable diseases.

Area-level estimates of temperature may lead to exposure misclassification in studies examining associations between heat waves and health outcomes. Our study compared the association between heat waves and preterm birth (PTB) or non-accidental death (NAD) using exposure metrics at varying levels of spatial resolution: ZIP codes, 12.5 km, and 1 km.

Social scientists regularly rely on population estimates when studying change in small areas over time. Census tract data in the United States are a prime example, since there are substantial shifts in tract boundaries from decade to decade. This study compares alternative estimates of the 2000 population living within 2010 tract boundaries to the Census Bureau's own re-tabulation. All methods of estimation are subject to error; this is the first study to directly quantify the error in alternative interpolation methods for U.S. census tracts. A simple areal weighting method closely approximates the estimates provided by one standard source (the Neighborhood Change Data Base or NCDB), with some improvement provided by considering only area not covered by water. More information is used by the Longitudinal Tract Data Base (LTDB), which relies on a combination of areal and population interpolation as well as ancillary data about water-covered areas. Another set of estimates provided by NHGIS uses data about land cover in 2001 and the current road network and distribution of population and housing units at the block level. Areal weighting alone results in a large error in a substantial share of tracts that were divided in complex ways. The LTDB and NHGIS perform much better in all situations, but are subject to some error when boundaries of both tracts and their component blocks are redrawn. Users of harmonized tract data should be watchful for potential problems in either of these data sources.

Reliance on digital navigation aids has already shown negative impacts on navigators' innate spatial abilities. How this happens is still an open research question. We report on an empirical study with twenty-four experienced (male) taxi drivers to evaluate the long-term impacts of in-car navigation system use on the spatial learning ability of these navigation experts. Specifically, we measured cognitive load by means of electroencephalography (EEG) coupled with eye tracking to assess their visuospatial attention allocation during a video-based route-following task while driving through an unknown urban environment. We found that long-term reliance on in-car navigation aids did not affect participants' visual attention allocation during spatial learning but rather limited their ability to encode viewed geographic information into memory, which, in turn, led to greater cognitive load, especially along route segments between intersections. Participants with greater dependence on in-car navigation aids performed worse on the spatial knowledge tests. Our combined behavioral and neuropsychological findings provide evidence for the impairment of expert navigators' spatial learning ability when exposed to long-term use of digital in-car navigation aids.