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Responding to the war in Ukraine, unleashed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and ongoing at the time of writing, this article carries the edited transcript of a conversation with Vitali Vitaliev, an independent journalist, author, travel-writer and ‘geographer’. Ukrainian-born with Russian as his first language, and now living and working in the UK, Vitaliev is being deeply affected – intellectually and emotionally, professionally and personally – by the horrors of the current situation. Over the course of the interview transcribed here, he covers aspects of his biography, in Ukraine and elsewhere, as well as reflecting on the geographical sensibility that shapes his writing and then elaborating, in various ways, his interpretation of what is unfolding presently in Ukraine. Fiercely critical of the forms of ‘Russian fascism’ underlying the assault on Ukraine ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Vitaliev discusses the psychological, historical and geopolitical roots of Putin’s actions. He also describes the cementing of a newly confident and dignified Ukrainian identity as a ‘counterforce’ to Putin’s ‘force’, hastening a trajectory whereby most Ukrainians, in both western and eastern Ukraine, are now attempting to escape the hauntings of the Soviet era.

Nearest‐neighbor analysis (NNA)—a method for assessing the degree to which a spatial point pattern departs from randomness in the direction of being either clustered or regular—was imported into academic geography from an article published in 1954 by ecologists Clark and Evans. In its simplest form, concerned with distances to the first nearest neighbor, NNA hinged on the behavior of the “nearest‐neighbour statistic,” Rn, supposed to vary between 0 (complete clustering) and 2.15 (complete regularity). NNA and the wider body of work on point pattern analysis quickly gained in sophistication, meaning that this simple test statistic only featured briefly in the frontline research literature of geographical analysis. Nonetheless, given its easy‐to‐grasp logic, it became and remains a staple of quantitative geography textbooks for undergraduate students and statistical methods training in school‐level geography curricula. The purpose of this paper is to chart the history of NNA and its test statistic in academic geography, and to provide an analytical demonstration that the value of 2.15 has been mistakenly identified as an upper limit for the latter. Broader speculations are then offered about what may be learned from the history of how the discipline has handled this statistic.

This paper reconstructs a fragment of psychiatric-psychoanalytical geography, interfacing it with the ‘new walking studies’, centring on a walk conducted in 1935 by a man experiencing mental health problems in Glasgow, Scotland. This man, a patient of the psychiatrist Thomas Ferguson Rodger, had mobility problems that rendered walking difficult – prone to stumbling, staggering, wavering – but with the likelihood of these problems being psychosomatic in origin. Through analytic sessions enacting a kind of ‘make-do’ psychoanalysis, the patient reflected on his mobility problems, as when relating his own walking ‘experiment’. Explanations advanced for his difficulties mixed psychoanalytic tropes with a gathering self-awareness of how fraught childhood experiences, had created the frame for an adult existence continually shying away from wider encounters and challenges beyond the domestic sphere. Central here was forward momentum being lost, whether walking or advancing through a life-course, with material and metaphoric senses of being stalled or stuck – spatially, environmentally – constantly entraining one another. This case study is deployed to illustrate claims about the ‘worlding’ of psychoanalysis, and to offer provocations for how such a psychiatric-psychoanalytic geography fragment might be illuminated by work on the cultural geographies of walking.

This paper opens a special issue (SI) commemorating the contributions of Ronan Paddison (1945–2019), founder and original Editor-in-Chief of Space and Polity. It outlines Paddison’s academic accomplishments before introducing the pieces that follow. It narrates Paddison as scholar, teacher, theorist and critic based on reading a student geographical magazine, the Drumlin, ‘published’ annually 1955–2009. This medium allows glimpses of Paddison as a ‘radical geographer’ nourishing eclectic versions of political and urban geography. The paper raises signposts for many of the concerns, to do with Paddison’s conceptualizing, practising and instructing about ‘space and polity’, covered by the SI as a whole.