Dialogues in Human Geography

Counter-collaborations towards alternative bio-securitizations
Arefin MR and Prouse C
In this commentary, we argue that geographical thought and praxis must engage with repressive biosecurity and biosurveillance systems and fight for alternatives. In doing so, geographers can contribute to an emerging anti-colonial and anti-racist interdisciplinary science. We suggest two counter-collaborations towards alternative bio-securitizations: working with those who have been cast out of biopolitical worlds and have long been fostering life for their communities; and working with practitioners of hegemonic science to re-direct biomedical efforts. Building these collaborations would orient biosecurity praxis to those biosecuritizations that already exist at the margins of violent security programs and foster communal and just care relations as the foundation for a liberatory and interdisciplinary science.
Centering the geographical imaginations of research participants in narrating speculative futures
Nelson E
In this commentary, I consider how geographers narrating speculative futures might risk disempowering their research participants. Reflecting on my work with community cultural organizations, I discuss the importance of centering participants and their geographical imaginations of their own futures in qualitative research projects. I then consider restructuring researcher-participant voice in the narration of speculative futures, and my use of future-focused questioning.
Struggling over new asset geographies
Birch K and Ward C
In this response, we address criticisms of our definition of assetization from an accounting perspective, its overlap with financialization, and the relationship between value and valuation it posits. We reflect on a future agenda around assetization emphasizing the political dimensions of externalizing future costs and the implications of rising inflation.
Assetization and the 'new asset geographies'
Birch K and Ward C
An asset is both a resource and property, in that it generates income streams with its sale price based on the capitalization of those revenues. Although an asset's income streams can be financially sliced up, aggregated, and speculated upon across highly diverse geographies, there still has to be something underpinning these financial operations. Something has to generate the income that a political economic actor can lay claim to through a property or other right, entailing a process of enclosure, rent extraction, property formation, and capitalization. Geographers and other social scientists are producing a growing literature illustrating the range of new (and old) asset classes created by capitalists in their search for revenue streams, for which we argue assetization is a necessary concept to focus on the moment of enclosure and rent extraction. It is a pressing task for human geographers to unpack the diverse and contingent 'asset geographies' entailed in this assetization process. As a middle range concept and empirical problematic, we argue that assetization is an important focal point for wider debates in human geography by focusing attention on the moment of enclosure, rent extraction, and material remaking of society which the making of a financial asset implies.
Islam's weight in global history: A response to Sidaway
Llopart I Olivella P and Mostowlansky T
In this commentary, we discuss three major themes that Sidaway raises in his article, 'Beyond the Decolonial: Critical Muslim Geographies': the problem of Muslims as 'others'; the fraught role of religion as a universal category; and Muslim geographies as perceived in area studies and global history. Along these lines, we argue that Sidaway makes a number of important interventions aimed at changing the social science focus on Muslims in the West, highlighting the importance of Islamic concepts, and dislocating spaces of Islam from predefined geographical areas. After a critical discussion of the specific approaches presented in the article, we follow up on Sidaway's encouragement to think beyond the decolonial. We see this as an invitation to formulate our own vision of a new global history of Islam that takes into account traces of the influence of Muslims and of Islam more broadly speaking from Indigenous Australia to China to the Americas, and from everyday culture in Europe to extinct empires in Iberia, Sicily, and the Balkans. From this perspective, we argue, a more serious engagement with the multitude of global Islamic influences beyond Muslim communities might turn into a powerful force of decolonization.
Geography's contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals: Ambivalence and performance
Nightingale AJ
Building on Liverman's critique of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), I argue SDGs must be conceptualized as by (i) unpacking the black box of social, political and intellectual consensus behind indicators and (ii) reimagining development goals as dynamic performances that are uneven over time and space for both populations and individuals. Poverty, justice and other targets of SDGs are not a state of being but rather a punctuated experience for the individuals and populations in question. For the SDGs to be effective, they need to go beyond simple statistics to account for how situated, performative aspects of lives , rather than as they
Comparative approaches to gentrification: Lessons from the rural
Phillips M and Smith DP
The epistemologies and politics of comparative research are prominently debated within urban studies, with 'comparative urbanism' emerging as a contemporary lexicon of urban studies. The study of urban gentrification has, after some delay, come to engage with these debates, which can be seen to pose a major challenge to the very concept of gentrification. To date, similar debates or developments have not unfolded within the study of rural gentrification. This article seeks to address some of the challenges posed to gentrification studies through an examination of strategies of comparison and how they might be employed within a comparative study of rural gentrification. Drawing on Tilly (. New York: Russell Sage), examples of four 'strategies of comparison' are identified within studies of urban and rural gentrification, before the paper explores how 'geographies of the concept' and 'geographies of the phenomenon' of rural gentrification in the United Kingdom, United States and France may be investigated using Latour's (. London: Harvard University Press) notion of 'circulatory sociologies of translation'. The aim of our comparative discussion is to open up dialogues on the challenges of comparative studies that employ conceptions of gentrification and also to promote reflections of the metrocentricity of recent discussions of comparative research.
Comparative ruralism and 'opening new windows' on gentrification
Phillips M and Smith DP
In response to the five commentaries on our paper 'Comparative approaches to gentrification: lessons from the rural', we open up more 'windows' on rural gentrification and its urban counterpart. First, we highlight the issues of metrocentricity and urbanormativity within gentrification studies, highlighting their employment by our commentators. Second, we consider the issue of displacement and its operation within rural space, as well as gentrification as a coping strategy for neoliberal existence and connections to more-than-human natures. Finally, we consider questions of scale, highlighting the need to avoid naturalistic conceptions of scale and arguing that attention could be paid to the role of material practices, symbolizations and lived experiences in producing scaled geographies of rural and urban gentrification.
Gendered violences and rule of/by law in Cambodia
Brickell K
This intervention is based on research in Cambodia on domestic violence and forced eviction. It draws on the distinction between rule of/by law to examine women's experiences of rights claiming. While 'rule law' is a value to be respected and a mechanism via which to guarantee justice and human rights to all citizens, 'rule law' is a distortion that is more easily conceived of as an instrument of power and oppression. The intervention's emphasis on the blurring between these distinctions highlights the stark absence of feminist geography work in the growing field of legal geographies.
Gendering Islamophobia, racism and White supremacy: Gendered violence against those who look Muslim
Hopkins P
Defendants in both racist and religiously motivated hate crimes in the United Kingdom are usually White men, with these incidents tending to take place in public spaces, especially those close to religious and community buildings. Focusing on the experiences of Muslim men and women in the United Kingdom - including others who Muslim - I explore common forms of religiously and racially motivated violence and argue that these constitute gendered violence. Policies targeted at key groups who are victims and perpetrators of religiously and racially motivated violence ignore the issue of violence and fail to acknowledge its gendered nature.
Big data, smart cities and city planning
Batty M
I define big data with respect to its size but pay particular attention to the fact that the data I am referring to is urban data, that is, data for cities that are invariably tagged to space and time. I argue that this sort of data are largely being streamed from sensors, and this represents a sea change in the kinds of data that we have about what happens where and when in cities. I describe how the growth of big data is shifting the emphasis from longer term strategic planning to short-term thinking about how cities function and can be managed, although with the possibility that over much longer periods of time, this kind of big data will become a source for information about every time horizon. By way of conclusion, I illustrate the need for new theory and analysis with respect to 6 months of smart travel card data of individual trips on Greater London's public transport systems.