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As academics, research participants and readers can now write more together online, this paper reflects on the way that a review article on the Geographies of Food was written out of online conversations between 26 authors. This process began as an emailed invitation, moved online into blogged conversations, and produced a paper that aimed to stretch the journal format to capture and continue that conversation. This was an experiment in creative collaborative writing, writing that was intended to be evocative and engaging, writing that imagined its readers not as recipients of its expertise, but as participants in its creative process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Jinn of Islamic and Middle Eastern popular mythology play a role in maintaining spatial divisions between sacred and profane space, public and protected areas, and acceptable and exceptional behaviour. Though research on jinn continues to be of importance in cross-cultural psychology, the rich relationship between jinn and place has largely been lost or severed. This paper seeks to restore this link through an examination of the relationship between unseen spirits and place in Palestine and throughout the Levant (Bilad ash-Sham). Drawing upon both European and Palestinian historical ethnographic writing, as well as oral history interviews with Palestinian elders, this paper examines spatial practices that can attract, prevent, or heal harm from jinn and other unseen forces, as well as places where such spirits dwell, including graveyards, caves, wells, sacred trees, and shrines. Jinn play a dual role in helping to protect the sanctity of these places, while also threatening to violate the intimate space hearth and home. In this way, jinn play an important role in both establishing, and at times blurring and negotiating social mores and their related physical boundaries. In examining how jinn threaten the sanctity of homes and bodies, but also how place-dwelling spirits help to heal bodies and sooth souls, this paper moves beyond mere metaphorical understandings of spectral geographies to understand the material implications of unseen and imagined forces. By doing so, this paper builds upon recent research exploring the deep connection between the environment and spiritual/sacred understandings of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geography is a discipline rooted in the idea of 'earth writing', yet until recently human geographers had left the study of the very matter of the earth – the soil beneath our feet – to natural scientists. If human geographers – amongst other humanities scholars – have begun to address human-soil relationships there is a need to attend to meanings invested in and generated by being with the soil. This paper attempts to address this by analysing the relationship with the soil by those who made their living by tilling and tending it, rural agricultural workers, those who laboured on (and in) the soil. Specifically, it focuses on the 'long 19th century', the period at the start of which when labourers remained the largest occupational sector but when agricultural 'improvement', industrialisation and rapid urbanisation were challenging human-soil entanglements. Drawing upon novels, poetry and biographical writing, this paper plots three key ways in which the relationship between rural workers and the soil was figured: as the link to the past; as inheritance, the promise of the future; and through the affective nature of tilling. In so thinking about these multi-layered meanings, the paper shows not only the value of excavating past human-environmental entanglements but also the need to adopt a cultural geographical methodology and sensibility. In sum, it is shown that soil was a crucible not just of life but of meaning in life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationships between humans and more-than-humans through the analysis of the rhythmic elements of the contemporary art installation Ajuar para un conquistador. An interdisciplinary approach bridges Art Studies and More-Than-Human Geographies to examine Ajuar and its environmental concerns, including the relationships between human and non-human worlds. Through 'rhuthmanalysis' – a new concept and word developed in the paper – textual and image analysis, and conversations with the artist, this study examines the social, cultural, and ecological meshwork of rhythms articulated within and by the art installation. 'Rhuthmanalysis' expands upon Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier's rhythmanalytic project by incorporating Indigenous knowledge and an ecocritical standpoint while redefining the understanding of rhythm. The analysis explores how Ajuar, concerned with the endangerment of Patagonian birds, promotes a performative understanding of the artwork's capacities in the context of the interplay between the affective dimensions and politics of the creation of the Argentine nation-state. The paper argues that Ajuar participates in the social and political production of space and place, opening new forms of being together and challenging colonial narratives through a rhythmic lens. Moreover, this study seeks to offer a singular perspective on how approaching art as a rhythmic configuration of an intricate choreography of coexistence can provide unique insights into space and the environment. The paper concludes that 'rhuthmanalysis' is a privileged tool to address the need for a transdisciplinary methodology capable of giving account of the mutual unfolding of human and non-human existences and decolonising posthumanist geographies and rhythm studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the lure of redemption in contemporary academic and accounts of exhaustion, endurance, and biopolitical life. Drawing on, and contributing to recent work on negativity in cultural geography, the paper analyses how optimism and redemption find their way in to academic writing on the contemporary condition. It interrogates the optimism in these literatures, paying attention to the genealogical roots of the propensity to redeem accounts of slow and attritional violence and biopolitical subjectivity. In particular, the paper charts the implicit politics and ethics at play in the invocation of the Deleuzian 'otherwise' which haunts many accounts of the transformatory potential of exhaustion, and the remnants of dialectical historicism and Christian morality at the heart of redemption narratives in accounts of endurance. The paper ends by questioning the motives behind such hopeful readings, and asks what it might entail to refuse to redeem tales of violence with optimistic glimmers of an as-yet unspecified world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a reflective discussion of the research method developed by a small research team over a 5-year period as it intra-acted with the south Asian monsoon in three south/southeast Asian cities. It reflects on how the team's practice was transformed from being research on or about the monsoon as a discrete unit of analysis, to research in the monsoon and with its agential materiality. The paper first outlines the theoretical resources from cultural geography, anthropology, feminist theory, posthuman theory, and science and technology studies that the project drew from. After this theoretical section, the paper then discusses the practical implications of the method and the two emergent strands of research ('weather matters' and 'construction matters') that were followed in Chennai, Dhaka, and Yangon. The final section of the paper reflects on the extension of the method into the formatting of a book and an online exhibition. The paper concludes by arguing that what the method offers to cultural, weather-based research in monsoonal and other climes, is a situated, non-formulaic method that recognizes the affordances of the Earth's agency, of matter and of other-than-human lives for generating knowledge of and ways of being in changing weather-worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to demonstrate the critical utility of the concept of the absurd in the exploration of the combined and uneven apocalypse known as the Anthropocene. Drawing inspiration from absurdist literature, and based on extensive field research, it takes the form of a psychogeographical journey down a non-existent highway in the Peruvian Amazon. The route of this long-promised megaproject is inhabited by people adrift in the midst of meaningless ruins, haunted by spectral infrastructures that were promised but never came, and plagued by monstrous apparitions of extractive violence. Consistent with absurdist method, the paper resists the temptation to leap out of this disconcerting domain into the normalizing rituals of academic sensemaking, and aims instead to grasp and convey the disorienting lived experience of 'space out of joint'. In doing so, it suggests that an absurdist sensibility can contribute to current debates in cultural geography on spectrality, psychogeography, and creative writing, through its emphasis on irrationality and indeterminacy, its exploration of chaotic and disintegrating spaces, and its evocation of fragmentation and disjuncture in the form of jagged shards of stark and vivid prose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a time of multiple, competing, and nested crises, the draw to storytelling is intuitive. Stories help us make sense of the world around us. People are drawn to stories because of their emphasis on community, and the way they create possibilities when it feels like there are none. This paper builds upon geographic research on storytelling, articulating how stories are critical for creating meaning in light of crises. Based on 14 months of fieldwork with storytellers in Appalachia and Alaska, two regions facing profound social, climatic, and economic change and with culturally rich storytelling traditions, research for this paper discusses the practice of storytelling, as told by storytellers, and how different approaches to storytelling help address the climate crisis specifically with notes for crises more broadly. Further, considering calls to use storytelling to address climate change, this paper examines and critiques the stories that are currently being told and valued. Finally, this paper outlines the kinds of stories that could be told to address crises, noting specifically how stories are sites of cultural and political struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including changing cultures of education in English schools, cultural-historical geographies of British movement 'Woodcraft Folk' and cultural policies within institutional spaces.

We find instead that direct observation, far from being a mere ragpicker, is an explo ration by the form-seeking and form-imposing mind, which needs to understand but cannot unless it casts what it sees into manageable models.1 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the cultural popularity of 'ambient music' playlists on digital streaming platforms as a paradigm of the technical fabrication of atmospheres and the modulation of affect in some of the media environments of contemporary capitalism. Ambient music names a style of non-intrusive, gentle background music designed to assist the listener in relaxing or focussing on work. At the centre of the paper is the argument that ambient music demonstrates how the intimate tonalities of human behaviour are increasingly shaped through media technologies in ways that hold significant implications for how we feel and perceive our senses of being in the world today. Developing this argument, the paper advances two claims. First, drawing on the work of Peter Sloterdijk, that ambient music exemplifies the 'immunological' character of atmospheric envelopment. Second, that ambient music points towards the role of digital technologies capable of supporting new atmospheric envelopments as facilitating what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call 'investments of desire', new conjunctions between flows of information, behaviours, value and affects that are central to the processes of contemporary capitalism. Finally, the paper speculates on ambient music in its relation to the atmospheric conditions of life in contemporary capitalist societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops cultural geographic understandings of more-than-human comfort and conviviality by analysing emails sent to trees living in the City of Melbourne, Australia. The emails arrive from near and far, sharing personal dilemmas, jokes, poetry, confessions, political concerns, and more. These messages provide a unique opportunity to consider how trees become foregrounded in people's everyday lives. Working through the geographies of comfort expressed in these emails, the paper develops understanding about the politics of dis/comfort by examining how it is generative of conviviality. In doing so, the paper builds on a small body of work exploring more-than-human conviviality by bringing comfort into these discussions. The paper argues this sensibility provides insights into: how and why attachments between humans and other-than-humans are fostered and maintained; how trees shape and are shaped by urban places; and, how comfort, as an overlooked element of more-than-human conviviality, can be politically generative, assisting in the re-imagining of human and tree togetherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reassesses and rediscovers the intellectual legacy of French geographer Eric Dardel (1899–1967). First discovered by geographers in the 1970s and 1980s, Dardel's book L'Homme et la Terre was considered as a work predating alternatively humanistic approaches and postmodern critiques of positivism, which justifies why it passed substantially unperceived when it was first published in 1952. Yet, most of these authors have manifestly only read that book despite Dardel's production was much larger, labelling Dardel as a 'phenomenologist' in a quite reductive way. Drawing upon recent literature on material agency and on phenomenology/post-phenomenology in geography, and based on the analysis of Dardel's complete body of work, I argue that the contribution of the French geographer cannot be reduced to matters of phenomenology and subjective perception. To this end, I especially focus on Dardel's references to the 19th-century tradition of Naturphilosophie that argued for a consubstantiality of 'humankind' and 'nature'. Hence, I show how Dardel's willingness to take seriously the materiality and agency of 'the Earth' through his notion of géographicité [geographicity or geographicalness] can give new and original insights to current geographies dealing with materiality, affect, human-nature hybridity and relational ontologies. Questioning dualisms such as humankind/nature, subject/object and nature/culture, early geographical understandings of the planet as a complex living being can foster the relevance of geography for both the 'material turn' advocating for plural agencies and for critical debates denying the principle of human supremacy over the planet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are eight underwater hotels in the world. Drawing from our on-site observations and reflections, in this paper we discuss how one of them, Singapore's Equarius Hotel, may at first be understood as a heterotopia – a concept coined by Michel Foucault to denote a fully realized utopia. However, we will argue that our original concept of alloútopia (from the Greek alloú, for elsewhere, and topia, for place) is better suited to make sense of the more-than-human dynamics shaping underwater hotel rooms and the human-animal encounters taking place therein. We develop our original concept by drawing from contemporary geographical literature on heterotopias, and more-than-human geographies of aquatic animal encounters. We further outline the usefulness of the concept for a variety of applications across tourist geographies and more-than-human geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]