Our Human Geography list tackles the big issues, from equality to population growth to sustainability, publishing in cultural and social geography, development geography, political geography, qualitative and quantitative research methods and urban geography.
The list includes internationally renowned names such as Danny Dorling, Loretta Lees and Anne Power. We publish a range of formats including research books that bridge theory and apply it to practice.
Human Geography
This chapter discusses emergent questions about energy justice and climate justice scholarship, pedagogy and praxis, based on several interdisciplinary, community-engaged research projects in India and the United States. Based on qualitative research and fieldwork-based methods, the chapter argues that rather than a fixed set of principles or ideas, the concepts of energy and climate justice are polysemic and grounded in the environmental and social justice struggles of specific geographic contexts. The chapter concludes with several questions for researchers to grapple with, centring questions of responsibility, positionality, reciprocity and building just relations across international contexts or across institutional identities while conducting fieldwork, and across epistemic divides in interdisciplinary teams with both positivist and critical scholars across the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and engineering.
This chapter reflects on the volume’s contributions, recognizing the varied and contested ways we enact justice in our work and lives. Critically, this book does not represent a singular view of justice, but instead uses a plurality of perspectives to argue for a broad view of justice as praxis. What emerged from these diverse accounts were a common questioning of the purpose of the university, the role that a contemporary academic ought to play, the importance of context in determining our capability to do just research and the little-discussed emotional labour all research entails. The chapter develops a set of core elements for ‘best practice’ alongside a series of reflective questions that researchers can use to support engagement with just research as a messy and constant work-in-progress. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of being responsive to the dynamic, multidimensional and intersectional contextuality of research to make space for the reflexive and dialogical nature of justice.
This chapter offers an analysis of the power dynamics of practising epistemic justice in research, by examining the spaces created for collaborative knowledge production about Rwanda. Drawing on reflections on the Rwanda Diaspora Youth Partnership Programme (RDYPP), a one-year participatory study seeking to understand how British youth from Rwandese backgrounds experienced engagement with post-genocide reconstruction, we argue that co-created spaces can work towards producing scholarship that is ‘organic to the contexts’ (Nhemachena et al, 2016) while also centring multiple epistemic contributors as part of a critical and pluralized academic landscape. However, we also acknowledge the inherent tensions and tradeoffs associated with the influence of academic environments and the day-to-day spaces of collaborators’ lives. We conclude by emphasizing the potential of collaboration as a tool for intersubjective learning and un-learning within networks of differently positioned knowledge holders, and therefore as vital for disrupting the pre-existing frameworks that contribute to epistemic injustices in Rwandan research.
This chapter mobilizes feminist action research together with Fraser’s three dimensions of social justice (economic, socio-cultural and political) to navigate (food) injustices across different scales in and beyond academia. It expands the framework by incorporating ethics of care to focus on the micro-dimension of the day-to-day research activities. Applying a care-full participative justice lens brings to the fore the mundane, messy practices, which are explored alongside the ‘spectacular’ decisions about recruitment of participants, the choice of methods or the questions of dissemination. It advocates a justice approach in academia as a humble way of being and performing everyday more-than-research decisions, rather than disconnected, disengaged pieces of research activities and writing.
Reflecting on the appeal for ‘multispecies justice for all’, this chapter argues how this might be addressed to better challenge speciesism, and inform new radical geographies of liberation. To these ends, the main body of the chapter is composed of four case studies, commentaries and reflections, in which each author draws on a range of personal experiences and context to think through ways in which they are trying to share space more justly. Looking to the future, the chapter argues for the importance of embracing a vegan praxis more fully, to better inform and animate multispecies justice research, teaching and activism.
This chapter focuses on the justice of sharing voices and stories, using case studies from my qualitative research; this always partial and challenging process of storytelling is viewed through performative timespaces of encounter as a means to reflect on the potential for transformative research from the perspective of researchers and participants. The chapter discusses interviews as encounters through which voices can be shared, brought to a different audience and potentially be empowering. The chapter on performative storytelling through research encounters in timespace uses case study projects on my past research. This includes work on Palestinian and Greek diasporic identity and politics in Greece and Australia respectively, migrant women in Athens and immigration policy changes in the UK, as well as my recent project on young people’s identity and politics in the Greek, Jewish and Palestinian diasporas in England.
This chapter reflects on the relationship between International Relations theory, theories of justice and the Arctic. It discusses how the ‘perspectives from the top’ can be understood from expressions of geography, environmental processes, as well as politics and decision-making. In answering three questions, it considers what is the role of justice in shaping research interests, how ideals of justice influence engagement with research participants and research practices, and, finally, what justice contributes to understandings of the Arctic. It concludes that justice is a vector that can bring a more nuanced understanding of the scales and substance of injustice to create pathways towards bringing about more just conditions not only for the Arctic but for all of the international system.
