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"The Unsettling Outdoors: Environmental Estrangement in Everyday Life" by Russell Hitchings examines the concept of environmental estrangement and how urban residents experience nature in their daily lives. The book challenges the assumption that nature is always beneficial and explores why some individuals may not derive these benefits. Through extensive research and interviews, Hitchings uncovers the complex and contradictory relationships people have with nature in various settings. The book emphasizes the importance of understanding social practices and questioning assumptions about human-nature relationships. It also highlights the significance of cultural perspectives and environments in studying these interactions. Overall, "The Unsettling Outdoors" provides valuable insights into the intricate connection between humans and nature. [Extracted from the article]

This paper is concerned with the situated production of opinions in human geography research. Drawing on an online focus group project in which university students were asked to discuss smartphone use in urban greenspace, I'm interested in how our methods can make opinions as much as collect those that are already assumed to exist. Why were these students inclined to speak of having and sharing opinions? How important should opinions be to us if they are not actively influencing the everyday lives of those who we hope to understand in our studies? And what does this all say about staging effective group discussion in the discipline? This paper considers how opinions feature in human geography research and how focus groups are organised most effectively. It does this by drawing on a study in which university students were asked to discuss smartphone use in urban greenspace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New migrants display unique use patterns and relationships with their host country's natural spaces. Understanding migrants' values about and interactions with nature requires identifying the meanings, benefits and capabilities that arise from their socio‐ecological interactions.This research seeks to understand how new migrants' engagement with their host country's urban nature affects their lives, behaviours and identities post‐migration. Using qualitative semi‐structured interviews and background surveys, this study characterizes the ways in which 27 recent international female migrants to Metro Vancouver use, perceive and derive value from their relationships with their host country's nature.Participants were all female migrants of low socio‐economic status, whose particular interacting marginalized identities provided a unique, though potentially limited, understanding of migrants' relationships to their host countries nature. However, they also came from diverse geographic and cultural backgrounds, indicating that common experiences may be indicative of broader trends.Participants expressed a deep value of a generalized conceptualization of 'Canadian nature'—a relational value that nature is special and to be enjoyed—which informed their use and experiences of Metro Vancouver's natural environments. They felt that their interactions with these spaces provided therapeutic and acculturative ecosystem services by helping them learn about their host country's sociocultural landscape and engage with their own evolving identities relative to their new environment.These findings highlight the complexity of migrant–nature relationships in Canada. Understanding these relationships is further complicated by the interacting influences of intersectional identities with gender and class being particularly relevant to this study. This research highlights how nature's non‐material contributions to people can impact an individual's understandings, meanings and values about places and themselves. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the possibility of overt political disagreement between human geographers and their students. Recent literature suggests that geographers should encourage their students to become more politically engaged through innovative teaching methods that could include frank discussion of the various positions taken by lecturers and students alike. Yet this same strategy could easily run against established pedagogical arguments about how teacher neutrality gives students the space to develop their views in whatever direction they choose. This paper investigates the practical management of this tension by drawing on qualitative interviews with a sample of current practitioners that centred on the occasions when personal politics have previously featured in their undergraduate teaching. It describes why overt political discussion is often squeezed out of these encounters, the careful ways in which these academics manage their political views during the times when such discussion occurs along with the degree to which they felt they should reveal them, and how students themselves commonly seemed to perform opinion in a relatively superficial way because doing so could be much less stressful. The conclusion that follows reflects on the broader implications of these findings for current debate and future practice in the discipline where it particularly emphasizes the importance of being sensitive to the interpersonal dynamics at hand.

This article explores some new theoretical ground to reveal the many intentions at play within the home. Specifically, I am interested in intentions that are not always reducible to the [...]

Whether new technologies will have a positive impact on how societies experience nature depends on how particular devices and populations come to interact.This paper reviews two bodies of work that have sought to understand and influence these interactions with reference to the smartphone.The first is associated with a group of researchers interested in how smartphone apps might help people to engage with their surroundings in beneficial ways.The second comes from a set of scholars hoping to learn from the analysis of the social media datasets associated with smartphone interactions outdoors.After comparing these how these two bodies commonly see the social world, the paper considers how other approaches might augment these endeavours.We argue for more studies that explore what different social groups have to say about life with the smartphone and how norms of technology use emerge.We also suggest that this area of research might engage more fully with wider academic work on how smartphones are reshaping our societies. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two previous reviews, we examined how human geographers currently report on projects involving their preferred qualitative methods – interviews and ethnographic observation. This final review steps back from specific techniques to evaluate some of the broader presentational conventions that typify this work. What can be inferred from where these geographers discuss data collection in their papers? Why do they develop new methods and what do they say about fieldwork failures? How often do they reflect on the provisional status of their findings? And what are the implications of how they define their purpose in working with qualitative material? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely believed that people living in cities have fewer and poorer daily experiences of nature, and that this contributes to the biodiversity crisis on the basis that if people do not know nature, they will not care for its conservation. In 1978, Pyle coined the term 'extinction of experience' to reflect the loss of opportunities to experience nature as urbanization progresses.However, evidence of an emotional disconnect from nature arising from an extinction of experience remains poorly documented. Here we repeat a study conducted in 1996 comprising household surveys and bird surveys in a neighbourhood of Singapore, one of the world's most densely populated cities. We investigate empirically whether experiences of nature, opportunities to experience nature and the emotional connection between people and nature have changed across 22 years.We discover that emotional connection with nature has actually increased among greenspace users and non‐users, while the frequency and duration of greenspace visits remained unchanged. Among greenspace users, the number of different nature elements experienced also remained unchanged and more frequent users demonstrated a stronger emotional connection with nature. We further found an increase in opportunities to experience local nature, as measured by bird species richness and abundance.While we found no evidence for an extinction of experience or an emotional disconnect from nature in this particular setting and timeframe in urban Singapore, similar studies elsewhere are necessary to explore whether there may be geographical, cultural or temporal variations. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review examines how ethnographic methods currently feature in the work of human geographers. The ethnographic approach continues to be a popular choice amongst those hoping to learn from how social life unfolds in particular places and settings. But what visions of ethnography do geographers draw on to attain authorial authority? What are the implications of how they present their field experiences? How, linking back to our last review, is their ethnographic work connected to the interview? And what are some of the downsides to how the term is deployed in the discipline? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first in a series of three reviews that scrutinise the conventions of doing and describing qualitative research that currently predominate in human geography. Since we find that interviews are the most widely used method in this field, we begin with an examination of how they feature in the work of today's human geographers. How many people do geographers speak with and what do they say about their interviewing procedures? What do they imagine their interviews to be in terms of the social occasion? And how do they present the empirical material that is thereby generated? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With reference to an ethnographic study on garden centres in London the social lifestyles, commercial activities and materialistic behavior of present-day urban population and their lack of connectivity with other life forms is examined. The implications of urbanite behavior for environment are analyzed.