Juliana Mansvelt: Geographies of consumption: engaging with absent presences. Progress in Human Geography, 2009. (Original DOI: 10.1177/0309132509339934). The sentence at the bottom of the second page is incorrect. It should read: Demonstrating how divisions of labour in colonial economies and conflicts of empire and class are obscured, she argues that 'it is in the images of daily life that the forgotten histories of the cultural and the political are read and given meaning' (p. 467).

Global transformations are rapidly altering people’s experiences of growing up. This report offers a comparative perspective on some of the challenges facing young children and youth across the world, focusing especially on young people’s practices in the fields of education and employment. The paper discusses conceptual frameworks for analyzing young people and evaluates these theoretical ideas through attention to interdisciplinary writing on educational restructuring, the privatization of school curricula, children’s work, and youth unemployment. The common predicaments or ‘vital conjunctures’ (Johnson-Hanks, 2002) of children and youth – for example, their inability to remain in formal schooling or experience of unemployment after leaving education – offers a basis for a globally comparative human geography attuned to the relationship between structural change and sociospatial marginalization.

In this report I focus on encounter, and the manner in which tourism catalyses entanglements of people, places and identities. Antecedent were earlier theories of the tourist gaze, and critiques of tourism as neocolonialism. One response was the emergence of an ethical tourism industry – branded as such because of commitments to pay decent wages, respect local cultures and tread lightly on nature. While the ethical tourism industry has made strides on these issues, I critique its reliance on binary thinking, and failure to accommodate contradictions and variable ethical conduct in the moments of encounter. By contrast, recent work in geography has sought to explore the multisensory and affective dimensions of tourism encounters without recourse to ethical essentialism. In research on embodiment, emotions and sensory encounters, risks of diluting critique are weighed against opportunities to sharpen ethical concepts. A focus on encounter enables closer dissection of the moments and spaces in which power is exercised, and relations of care extended.

The burgeoning subfield of the geography of religion has largely advanced under the assumption that secularization is marginal to understanding contemporary religion. This assumption, evinced in terms such as ‘postsecular’, suggests that the theory of secularization has little to offer geography. This paper elaborates on the current debates over secularization theory’s validity within geography and across other disciplines in an effort to salvage several key geographical insights from the most advanced work in secularization theory. It is argued here that secularization theory, far from being irrelevant, offers geographers of religion a powerful theoretical framework for analyzing and interpreting modern religion.

This paper identifies the need to develop a conceptual approach that moves away from dichotomous thinking about pro-environmental behaviour by considering the meso level of reality, through which macro level change can be observed and micro level activity can be contextualized. The discussion reviews pro-environmental behaviour literatures, presenting an alternative conceptual approach that incorporates the importance of scale and the social units to which people belong. In particular, the paper argues that greater understanding of the household, as a unit within the meso level, offers an opportunity to rethink the future research agenda for the study of pro-environmental behaviour.

Economic geography has become increasingly fragmented into a series of intellectual solitudes that has created isolation, producing monologues rather than conversation, and raising the question of how knowledge production should proceed. Inspired by science studies and feminism, we argue for an engaged pluralist approach to economic geography based on dialogue, translation, and the creation of ‘trading zones’. We envision a determinedly anti-monist and anti-reductionist discipline that recognizes and connects a diverse range of circulating local epistemologies: a politics of difference rather than of consensus or popularity. Our model is GIS that underwent significant shifts during the last decade by practicing engaged pluralism, and creating new forms of knowledge. Similar possibilities we suggest exist for economic geography.

Erratum for Patricia L. Price, 2009: At the crossroads: critical race theory and critical geographies of race.

This report proposes that if cultural geography seeks to continue to be ‘world-class’ and ‘international’ in its outlook and in praxis it then needs to shift the interface between the academy and the ‘other’ both within it and without. There is, in particular, a need to make academic aspirations more international and to make practice within the academy more inclusive and politically orientated towards valuing scholarship and scholars at the edges and margins of, and ‘other’ to, the usual moral geographies of the discipline.

This review considers how international migration is related to development, and focuses on how knowledge about the so-called ‘migration-development nexus’ has been expanded through analyses of gender. My specific objective is to understand the ways in which the migration-development nexus is understood to be ‘gendered’ through the intersecting activities of multiple agents as they negotiate and transform transnational and postcolonial contexts of mobility and development. The contemporary migration-development nexus appears distinctive, and is growing and commanding a portfolio of resources sufficient to hardwire relations between societies, economies, and generations for a long time.

This article explores the current landscape of literary geography against the backdrop of a broadened interest in geography’s textual traditions. It suggests that after a period of relative health in the mid- to late twentieth century literary geography has been seemingly lost within wider debates over textual knowledges and practices as they pattern out within the discipline’s scientific history. Drawing on work from literary studies and geography, it goes on to propose three areas where there is opportunity for a literary geography to reassert itself and contribute forcefully to geographical debates.

Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book The world is flat was meant as a wake-up call to those in the United States who direct its corporate boardrooms and govern its political/economic state, a warning that globalization has brought about a level economic ‘playing field’ in which the United States might be losing the game. As rhetoric, the title certainly works well to raise fears about North America’s future economic role. It also works in concretizing a popular view of globalization, a view that obscures its uneven, discordant, and decidedly unflat processes and practices. In this paper I help deconstruct this view by fleshing out the everyday ways through which United States expanded economically in its early (1890–1927) global empire. Based on archival work in Argentina, Russia, Scotland, and the United States, I provide a historical look at encounters between North American business men and women and their foreign customers, students, and workers. Focusing on the diverse practices and personal encounters that were critical to the early global efforts of select United States-based corporations, I expose the uneven, contested, and messy ways in which economic expansion works. By analyzing early global encounters when the economic dominance of the United States was just becoming apparent, I am able to highlight the sheer complexity and truly relational nature of United States’ expansion in the early twentieth century.

This article builds on geography’s engagement with ethics by asking what normative geographies focused on human health might look like. We use the ethics of care and human rights law to frame a normative approach to health geography. The article explores the content of these frameworks before grounding them in a particular instance of inequality found in South Africa. Our goal is to demonstrate how care ethics and human rights can powerfully complement one another and inspire a new type of praxis relevant to geographers engaged with ethics and ethical philosophy.

In this second of three reports exploring the incorporation of human geography theory within political ecology I focus on regions. I review how regions are theorized in human geography and conclude that political ecologists have used the concept inconsistently. I suggest that three trajectories in recent studies offer possibilities for a more rigorous theorization of regions within political ecology: (1) work employing theorizations of the social production of space and the co-constitution of nature, space, and society; (2) engagements with the political economy of natural resources literature, especially resource conflict; and (3) work linking historical materialist-oriented ‘new’ regional geography with discourse theory.

In recent years, a new type of determinist environmental thinking has emerged. It can be understood to be one strand in a much broader realm of ‘environment talk’. Many human geographers have expressed a combination of scepticism and surprise at the apparently inexorable rise of the neo-environmentalist arguments which differ from early twentieth-century environmental determinism yet continue to draw upon biologistic accounts of human culture. Although geography has in recent years been at the forefront of the academic discussions of environmental change in relation to science, institutional context, political costs and human impacts, the discipline nevertheless has to contend with a widespread misperception of the place of environment in human affairs and the world’s future. This Forum discusses the context for the rise of, and consequences of, determinist accounts.

This review examines emerging research on the geoweb, particularly recent efforts to assess the social, political and disciplinary shifts associated with it. The rise of the geoweb is associated with shifts in the processes and power relations of spatial data creation and use, reconfigurations in previously bounded disciplinary knowledge sets, and shifts in the subjectivities and social relations that are produced through the geoweb’s technologies, data, and practices. This early research on the societal implications of the geoweb is drawing productively upon conceptual frameworks from critical GIS, public participation GIS, and spatial data infrastructure research, but must also theorize beyond these existing bodies of work.