A clear consensus has emerged that innovations are important for adapting to drought and overcoming other biophysical limitations in smallholder farming systems; however, women are notably marginalized from agricultural innovations. We examine whether and how gendered roles and responsibilities shape the adoption and usage of improved wheat varieties and simultaneously uncover opportunities to address and lessen gender-based differences in agricultural innovations. The field data were collected using snowball sampling from seven communities (three in Morocco and four in Uzbekistan) among 574 farmers (half men and half women) of different generations, genders, social statuses, and social classes. Our findings demonstrate how the complex interactions of biophysical constraints, intra-household (spousal and kinship) relations, and the broader macro-level political economy of agriculture converge to influence different identities of women and men farmers' wheat production and processing practices. We argue that without focusing on the socio-cultural factors affecting agriculture, new seed varieties alone cannot address the multifaceted problems confronting farmers in all parts of the world.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic highlighted the need for novel tools to promote health equity. There has been a historical legacy around the location and allocation of public facilities (such as health care) focused on efficiency, which is not attainable in rural, low-density, United States areas. Differences in the spread of the disease and outcomes of infections have been observed between urban and rural populations throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this article was to review rural health disparities related to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic while using evidence to support wastewater surveillance as a potentially innovative tool to address these disparities more widely. The successful implementation of wastewater surveillance in resource-limited settings in South Africa demonstrates the ability to monitor disease in underserved areas. A better surveillance model of disease detection among rural residents will overcome issues around the interactions of a disease and social determinants of health. Wastewater surveillance can be used to promote health equity, particularly in rural and resource-limited areas, and has the potential to identify future global outbreaks of endemic and pandemic viruses.

Parental labour migration requires recalibrations of care arrangements within the left-behind family. Existing studies of left-behind families, however, have largely concentrated on parental rather than grandparental caregiving of grandchildren. We argue that grandparents are pivotal to care work and changing family formations within migrant-sending villages. Grandparents provide supplementary care, substitutive care and even reconstitutive care, depending on the migration and marital status of the parents. The paper emphasizes the often unilateral care-contracts between grandparents and migrant parents, drawing on material primarily from the qualitative interviews of grandparent carers of left-behind children, and the grandchildren themselves. By considering a variety of family contexts in flux as a result of parental migration (mother, father or both parents) and marital dissolution amidst migration, we examine family situations holistically by taking into account the different modes of care provided by grandparents (occasionally in tandem with aunts) within changing care contexts.

With the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic and concern regarding the subsequent vulnerabilities of houseless populations, countries have sought to adapt and enhance emergency housing policies with a view of better protecting this population. Drawing on the poverty management perspective, this article focuses on local government and its role in managing houselessness during the COVID-19 pandemic. It achieves this by treating local council meetings as sites of problematization, in which the management of houselessness is rationalized and solutions negotiated. We transcribed local council meetings in Bristol, England and Edmonton, Canada, for an 18-month period from March 2020. Our analysis found that a common set of 'problem spaces' - systems, strategic opportunism and power - were evoked by municipal officials in both cities. Under the umbrella of 'doing what we can', local councils: conceptualized houselessness as complex and systemic; identified what does and does not work; discussed jurisdictional limitations and their impact; and defended new forms of accommodation. Significantly, despite the discursive desire to 'build back better', and a slightly rebalanced poverty management landscape in terms of care and control, local governments alone were unable to end houselessness within the post-COVID city.

Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce the transmission of Covid-19 had different repercussions for domestic, regional and global value chains, but empirical data are sparse on specific dynamics, particularly on their implications for value-chain stakeholders' local livelihoods. Through research including weekly phone interviews (n = 273 from May to July 2020) with panellists in six Mozambican communities, our research traced firstly how the baobab and charcoal value chains were affected by Covid NPIs, particularly in terms of producers' livelihoods. Secondly, we ask how our findings advance our understanding of the role of civic-based stakeholder conventions and different types of power in building viable local livelihoods. Our conceptual lens is based on a synthesis of value-chain and production-network analysis, convention theory and livelihood resilience focusing on power and risk. We found that Covid trading and transport restrictions considerably re-shaped value chains, albeit in different ways in each value chain. The global baobab value chain continued to provide earnings particularly to women, when other income sources were eliminated, with socially oriented stakeholders altering their operations to accommodate pandemic restrictions. By contrast, producers involved in the domestic, solely market-oriented charcoal value chain saw their selling opportunities and incomes reduced, with hunger rising in charcoal-dependent communities. Our paper argues that local livelihoods were more resilient under Covid NPIs if civic-based conventions and collective, social power were present.

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically expanded the role of algorithmic governance in everyday mobility. In China, urban and provincial governments have introduced health codes app as a national contract tracing and quarantine enforcement method to restrict the movements of "risky" individuals through malls, subways, railways, as well as between regions. Yet the health codes have been implemented with uneven efficacy and unexpected consequences. Drawing on glitch politics, we read these unintended consequences as "bugs" emerging from the introduction of platform-based management into everyday life. These bugs mediated individuals' lived experiences of the digital app and the hybrid space constituted by population governance, individual digital navigation, and technology. Drawing on a database of posts scraped from Zhihu, a popular Chinese question-and-answer site, we examine three dimensions of the bug: the algorithmic bug, the territorial bug, and the corporeal bug. This paper sheds light on the significance of end-user experiences in digital infrastructure and contributes to our understanding of the digital geographies of bugs in algorithmic governance and platform urbanism.

The need for physical proximity and face-to-face communication in financial information flows is contested. But the movement restrictions imposed across Asia during the COVID-19 pandemic, together with the elevated information needs as financial markets became stressed, provided the unique circumstances for a natural experiment to test the extent to which physical interaction is important in the origination and distribution of financial information. Drawing upon 70 interviews undertaken across Asia during 2021, primarily with sell-side analysts who act as information intermediaries in the financial ecosystem, this article provides evidence that physical proximity and face-to-face communication remains highly valued, particularly when accessing information embedded in informal local networks and originated through reciprocal client relationships. Analysts physically restricted from contacts at corporates and within their associated operating environments, reported a degradation of knowledge, especially versus more proximate competitors. The enforced physical separation also weakened previously strong social and reciprocal relationships with clients, even those co-located in the same city. Although these trends may be gradual and incremental rather than dramatic, they are persistent and self-reinforcing, and demonstrate the continued benefits of proximity and face-to-face interaction, with longer-term implications for financial geographies.

The article offers a qualitative examination of compounded precarity in creative work during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on repeated in-depth interviews with twelve creative workers operating in the creative industries in Ghana, we examine one of the most prevalent practices for navigating, coping with, and managing compounded precarity: that of hustling. We empirically identify and discuss three interrelated practices of hustling in creative work: digitalization, diversification, and social engagement. We present a new way of conceptualizing creative work in precarious geographies by theorizing hustling, and the associated worker resourcefulness, improvisation, savviness, hopefulness, and caring not merely as an individualized survival strategy, but rather as an agentic and ethical effort to turn the vicissitudes of life into situated advantages and opportunities, and even social change.

Rapid economic stimulus in response to COVID-19, typically based on 'shovel-ready' infrastructure, has opened up new political spaces of hope to 'Build Back Better' and transform economies. This research seeks to link the public 'taking place' of hope, representing the aspirations of various groups for investment or change stimulated by this fund, with the less visible ways governments 'organise' hope, the expert, technical processes and rationalities that help determine which hopes become realised and why. Using the Aotearoa New Zealand 'shovel-ready' fund as a case study, and drawing upon press releases, media, Official Information requests, and Cabinet documents, we first provide a discourse analysis of the various government and non-government hopes that became attached to this stimulus. We then trace how these became translated into project proposals, before unpacking and analysing the urgent processes developed to assist political decision makers. While crises and hope can be positioned as having significant disruptive potential, we reveal how this was stifled by the technical processes and practices of the processual world enacted at the national scale, which was given significant power. Further, although public discourses reflected a plurality of multi-scalar and temporal hopes for investment, in practice the less visible organisation privileged a much more business-as-usual approach. Consequently, any government aspirations for transformation were rendered less likely due to the processes they themselves established. Overall, we emphasise the need for those committed to reform to bring technical processes and rational practices to greater prominence in order to reveal and challenge their power.

This paper considers the nature of social surveillance through the physical activity tracking app MapMyRun and examines how this was experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic during the UK and USA summer 2020 lockdowns. In contributing to debates in digital geographies around the entanglements of the fleshy and digital body, the paper responds to calls for research to recognise the increasing sociality of self-tracking (Couture, 2021), specifically considering how, during the COVID-19 pandemic, these apps offered a form of connection during a time of isolation. Using data from email and video interviews, I argue that whilst a Foucauldian account of surveillance can be used as a point of departure, it is limited in accounting for the social aspects of self-tracking. I therefore propose that applying Robinson's (2000) concept of 'noisy surveillance' to self-tracking is useful for understanding the messiness of surveillance in terms of the complications and noisiness involved in interactions in digital spaces, as well as the opportunities for performance management online particularly during lockdown.

How has the idea of community featured in attempts to build resilience to emergencies? The paper explores this question by presenting evidence from interviews with emergency responders across the world in the midst of the early and uncertain phases of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although reflecting different contexts, we discern two ways in which the notion of community featured in authorities' narrations of their efforts to respond to the pandemic. Firstly, we demonstrate how community was deployed as a discursive mechanism that offered a particular framing of the vulnerabilities the pandemic instigated. Departing from accounts that reduce people's identities to demographic categories, the deployment of community stressed that the pandemic's effects should be understood by the different, yet coexistent, vulnerabilities it brought to the surface for people. Such renditions of vulnerability paved the way for styles of governance that prioritised adapting to the pandemic's uncertain and indeterminate unfolding in the absence of prepared plans. Secondly, addressing a register of collective social life between individuals and the state, an emphasis on community engendered the decentralised arrangement of emergency governance with which resilience has become synonymous. Here, community proved pivotal in temporarily expanding resources to deal with an emergency whose effects threatened to exceed governments' pre-existing capabilities. We substantiate this claim through examining how allusions to community worked to enrol non-state based efforts at response into a broader public security apparatus. Enveloped within the broader politics of emergency resilience, community shaped how the pandemic's effects were understood whilst also ensuring adequate provisions for its governance.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a re-examination of our societies and in particular urban health. We argue that urban health needs to address three inter-related challenge areas - the unequal impacts of climate change, changing patterns of urbanization, and the changing role of the local government - across multiple spatial scales: from individual, households to neighbourhoods, cities, and urban hinterlands. Urban health calls for nimble institutions to provide a range of responses while adapting to crisis situations, and which operate beyond any one spatial scale. We illustrate our argument by drawing on South and Southeast Asian examples where responses to the pandemic have confronted these challenges across scales. A multiscalar definition of urban health offers an opportunity to challenge dominant approaches to urban health in research, policy, and practice.

The Covid19 pandemic has led to speculation about the place of offices in the future world of work - while working-from-home was initially mandated by employers (and governments), recent research has reported that the practice has gained popularity among employees. However, most such research is based on experiences of workers in the Global North. The article challenges the conflation of the Global North with global and shifts the focus from 'flexible working' and 'work-life balance' to issues of access to work infrastructures, including space, internet, and care. It draws upon existing scholarship on home-based work and precarious work, especially gig work, to outlines ways to analyse the implications of working-from-home in diverse settings. Illustrated with the story of Prachi, a young e-commerce worker in Delhi, the article offers work-from/at/for-home as a wider framework that accounts for inequalities in labour and life conditions of workers around the world.

This paper challenges geographers to examine the lucrative, but vastly understudied, global supplementary education sector (e.g. private tuition; learning centres; cram schools). It marks a break from research in Geographies of Education on locational, socio-cultural and political-economy issues, by concentrating directly on the economic geography of this metaphorically monikered 'shadow education' sector. Centred on the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, the paper's aim is to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the economic vitality, business spatiality and societal value of private tuition in England. Methodologically, it utilises in-depth interviews with tutors providing one-to-one instruction in English, maths or science in the regionally-differentiated tuition market. The findings demonstrate business vitality was impacted: COVID-19 related disruption to schooling produced a profound economic shock for the tuition industry, though new opportunities also emerged from the crisis. Business spatiality was fundamentally rewritten, not only in terms of delivery but also as local markets became national ones. The social value of the industry was drawn into question, as the service was both vital and regressive in its distribution. In conclusion, the paper argues geographers of education must: (i) Embrace research on supplementary education in its own right and as it articulates with state education provision; (ii) Pursue economic analyses which consider both how markets work to produce unequal outcomes for potential consumers, and how they emerge as a space of educational entrepreneurship for those seeking to make a living; and (iii) Urgently examine how the coronavirus pandemic is rewriting processes across the education system.

The present economic system is geared towards increasing specialization and infinite growth. This orientation may have led to efficiency and new ways of increasing wealth but it has also led to unsustainable practices and, in some cases, loss of traditional knowledge. Many a systems thinker like the Limits to Growth's Club of Rome have suggested ways to avoid the negative consequences of the current economic system but these entail radical changes that cannot be afforded by deeply-entrenched practices of the worldwide economy. In this paper, another alternative is proposed, which may not only be desirable to an envisioned ecological society but also may also be logical to the unsustainable society of today. Looking at rural indigenous livelihoods may show us how an ecological society should be like. Exemplifying collectivism, indigenous peoples continue to cultivate empathy while at the same time inculcating sense of responsibility. Before "multi-hyphenated" became fashionable, indigenous peoples were already engaged in different occupations that, in turn, result to a diversified livelihood portfolio similar to what banks today advise clients on their investments. However, the difference lies in the indigenous tradition of only having enough for what is needed and rarely hoarding to the point of exhausting resources. This paper proposes that the diverse indigenous livelihood portfolio can be a valuable economic framework for an ecological society. It does not limit growth, but it makes sure growth happens in a sustainable manner.

Waste plays an essential role during the COVID-19 crisis. This includes increased attention to the amount of waste produced, concerns with how hazardous materials are discarded and handled, or unease that sustainability and recycling efforts are derailed. However, there is a human side to waste: the people who work directly with these materials. Waste pickers are the men, women, and children around the world who rely on tossed away items for their livelihoods. Across dynamic and generally informal networks, waste pickers collect, transport, and separate our discarded materials. They are recyclers, entrepreneurs, and a key component of solid waste management systems in many countries. However, they are also subject to discrimination and unsafe working conditions. The pandemic has shed light on the nuances between vulnerability and opportunity for waste pickers. This intervention considers economic and societal structures during and beyond COVID-19 to highlight underlying concepts of health, hygiene and sustainability and how these may shape experiences of waste pickers.

The burgeoning financial technology scene in Singapore has seen the emergence of robo-advisors, which aim to disrupt traditional financial advisories by using algorithms to automate client advising and investment recommendations. Using an ecologies concept to explore how lay investors are articulated into global financial networks through robo advisors, this paper contributes to studies on the "financialization of everyday life". It argues that investors are rendered passive by the disciplinary tools of algorithms, contemporary finance theories and elements of robo-advisor platforms that feed into these sociotechnological assemblages. The state's role in embedding citizen investors in these human-machine relationships is considered. The fragmented landscape of free, nonprofessional online financial advice and the opaque qualities of investing algorithms make investor subject formation incomplete and uncertain, especially when markets are highly volatile. This paper explores how both financial inclusion and exclusion operate simultaneously in robo-advisors and argues that robo-advisors may weaken efforts to promote financial literacy and education.

The last few decades have witnessed increasing trends in urbanization as a global phenomenon. In this regard, the concept of liveability has appeared as elementary for evaluating the degree of living standards of cities. The present review investigates a comparative critical assessment of the existing liveability approaches in urban studies. Based on the assessment, the review concludes that a gap prevails concerning liveability approaches between global cities in different parts of the world.

Technological leaps in DNA sequencing and synthesis are disrupting tenuous access and benefit-sharing (ABS) arrangements between 'users' and 'providers' of genetic resources. For some this signals a new era of open-source gene banks to address global challenges, but to others it threatens a new wave of unjust digital biopiracy. This paper explores the issue of digital sequence information (DSI) at the 2016 Cancun negotiations of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and its Nagoya Protocol on ABS, and its continued relevance today. While some research has addressed potential solutions to digital sequencing and ABS, little attention has been paid to the problematization of the issue itself. This paper addresses this gap with a fine-grained view of the negotiations as an ethnographic site of contestation. We approach the Nagoya Protocol as an assemblage seeking to govern ABS. We trace how the unruly component of DSI threatens this already fragile assemblage by disrupting simplified notions of genetic resources, scientific discovery, and R&D. Our data from the negotiations reveals three major points of tension: the materiality of genetic resources; the problem's novelty; and the problem's urgency. Two opposing solutions raised in response to these contestations reveal underlying faultlines that we argue will continue to destabilise the broader ABS assemblage if left unresolved. Our attention to processes of assemblage (trans)formation offers insights to the historically fragile arrangements of ABS and, more broadly, assemblages of global environmental governance in the context of rapid technological change.

This article describes and analyses an encounter in the Colombian Amazon between Indigenous practices and arrangements to manage their environment and the conservation policies of the State. Indigenous peoples understand their world as populated by powerful human and nonhuman beings; for them, the moral duty of achieving happiness and abundance for all implies sustaining reciprocal and respectful relations with these beings (including the State). In contrast Colombian environmental policy distinguishes between nature and culture, seeking to safeguard landscapes from human interference so that natural processes can unfold unhindered. In practice these partially connected, yet incommensurable worldviews make for a 'perfect storm' - opening opportunities for illegal mining. Drawing on recent fieldwork among the Andoke, an ethnic group well acquainted with extractivism in its different historical modalities and presently affronting the fallout of gold dredge mining we narrate how a parallel, non-state governance system makes it difficult for them to care for their land and entertain mutual and respectful relations with human and nonhuman beings (which we translate as 'territorial health'). We conclude by arguing for the need to re-imagine environmental governance in ways that more closely engage with what we call pluriversal governance: a form of (environmental) governance that does ontological justice to those involved in the environmental conflict - including, crucially, Indigenous people.

This paper examines the spatial value of live popular music by adopting an inter-disciplinary approach grounded in urban and music studies. What is understood of the relationship between live music and the built environment is improved, with a focus on how this cultural form contributes to performing, (re)developing and narrating urban spaces. The post-industrial city has become a stage for events that serve a wide range of social, cultural, economic and spatial objectives. However, the densification of the built environment has led to a debate about the extent to which live music's positive outcomes outweigh the nuisance experienced by residents in terms of noise and the unavailability of public spaces. Furthermore, small venues in many cities are struggling with issues of gentrification, implying that the spatial value of music is part of wider concerns about who owns the city and which forms of culture can be produced and consumed in urban centres. Against this background, the paper asks the following questions concerning the spatial value of live music: how can it be defined? What are the challenges to achieving it? How can it be supported in urban planning? The study is grounded in a qualitative content analysis of 24 live music reports and strategies, as well as 10 in-depth interviews with policymakers, festival organisers and venue owners. Also discussed is how the spatial value of live music can be supported in urban policies by building interdisciplinary networks, establishing strategies, and creating and sustaining places for live music events.