The discomforting rise of ' public geographies': a 'public' conversation.

In this innovative and provocative intervention, the authors explore the burgeoning ‘public turn’ visible across the social sciences to espouse the need to radically challenge and reshape dominant and orthodox visions of ‘the academy’, academic life, and the role and purpose of the academic

Global unions: chasing the dream or building the reality?

This article takes as its theme the global restructuring of capital and its impact on worker organization. It argues for a reassertion of class in any analysis of global solidarity, and assesses the opportunities and barriers to effective global unionization. Rooted in the UK experience, the article analyzes the impact of the European social dimension on trade unions, before taking the discussion into a global dimension. It concludes by suggesting that there are reasons for cautious optimism in terms of solidarity building, despite difficult historical legacies and the common replacement of action with rhetoric

Reply to 'Broaden research on the human dimensions of climate change'

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Please mind the gap: students’ perspectives of the transition in academic skills between A-level and degree level geography

This paper explores first-year undergraduates’ perceptions of the transition from studying geography at pre-university level to studying for a degree. This move is the largest step students make in their education, and the debate about it in the UK has been reignited due to the government’s planned changes to A-level geography. However, missing from most of this debate is an appreciation of the way in which geography students themselves perceive their transition to university. This paper begins to rectify this absence. Using student insights, we show that their main concern is acquiring the higher level skills required for university learning

Everyday life and environmental change

This paper explores how daily changes in the physical environment intersect and connect with people’s everyday lives, routines and practices in the Maldives. Day-to-day life is often regarded as mundane and ordinary, and therefore not particularly worthy of study. As this paper argues, however, the everyday is central to understanding how environmental change occurs and how people respond to it. Much recent work has challenged the ontological separation of the human and non-human, yet approaches to examining environment-everyday connections have, to date, been largely one-directional, focusing on either how the environment impacts on human practices or is impacted by them. Using the notion of the everyday, this paper explores how ‘impacting on’ and ‘impacted by’ are entangled, ongoing cyclical processes that unfold daily. It draws on a series of innovative methodologies conducted with island-based communities to examine three keys changes in the physical environment that are taking place in the context of the recent and rapid development of tourism on inhabited islands: sand excavation and erosion, the appearance and removal of rubbish and debris, and the expansion of the built environment. The paper reveals the significance of these day-to-day changes and the ways in which they are accommodated by, and incorporated into, the spatial and temporal dimensions of people’s daily practices. It concludes by suggesting that an appreciation of the everyday can contribute to new understandings of human/non-human entanglements

Towards a synthesized critique of neoliberal biodiversity conservation

During the last three decades, the arena of biodiversity conservation has largely aligned itself with the globally dominant political ideology of neoliberalism and associated governmentalities. Schemes such as payments for ecological services are promoted to reach the multiple ‘wins’ so desired: improved biodiversity conservation, economic development, (international) cooperation and poverty alleviation, amongst others. While critical scholarship with respect to understanding the linkages between neoliberalism, capitalism and the environment has a long tradition, a synthesized critique of neoliberal conservation - the ideology (and related practices) that the salvation of nature requires capitalist expansion - remains lacking. This paper aims to provide such a critique. We commence with the assertion that there has been a conflation between ‘economics’ and neoliberal ideology in conservation thinking and implementation. As a result, we argue, it becomes easier to distinguish the main problems that neoliberal win-win models pose for biodiversity conservation. These are framed around three points: the stimulation of contradictions; appropriation and misrepresentation and the disciplining of dissent. Inspired by Bruno Latour’s recent ‘compositionist manifesto’, the conclusion outlines some ideas for moving beyond critique

Economies of space and the school geography curriculum

This paper is about the images of economic space that are found in school curricula. It suggests the importance for educators of evaluating these representations in terms of the messages they contain about how social processes operate. The paper uses school geography texts in Britain since the 1970s to illustrate the different ways in which economic space has been represented to students, before exploring some alternative resources that could be used to provide a wider range of representations of economic space. The paper highlights the continued importance of understanding the politics of school knowledge