The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has fuelled concerns ranging from 'existential risk for humanity', framed as evolutionary competition with machines, to predictions of the 'end of work' via ...widespread substitution of humans by robots. Yet these extreme scenarios tend to operate at the intractable scale of 'humanity' and lack a geographically nuanced conceptual scaffolding. This article proposes such a scaffolding, starting with a conceptual dyad that is core to the geographical tradition: place and space. This perspective is intended to inform and situate debates about the role of AI in the construction and transformation of the capitalist space economy.
Trans-national medicine, historically associated with colonial politics, is now central to discourses of global health and development, thrust into mainstream media by catastrophic events ...(earthquakes, disease epidemics), and enshrined in the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Volunteer human-resource is an important contributor to international health-development work. International Voluntary Health Networks (IVHNs, that connect richer and poorer countries through healthcare) are situated at a meeting-point between geographies and sociologies of health. More fully developed social-geographic understandings will illuminate this area, currently dominated by instrumental health-professional perspectives. The challenge we address is to produce a geographically and sociologically-robust conceptual framework that appropriately recognises IVHNs’ potentials for valuable impacts, while also unlocking spaces of constructive critique. We examine the importance of the social in health geography, and geographical potentials in health sociology (focusing on professional knowledge construction, inequality and capital, and power), to highlight the mutual interests of these two fields in relation to IVHNs. We propose some socio-geographical theories of IVHNs that do not naturalise inequality, that understand health as a form of capital, prioritise explorations of power and ethical practice, and acknowledge the more-than-human properties of place. This sets an agenda for theoretically-supported empirical work on IVHNs.
•IVHNs are crucial in constituting the phenomena of global health.•They are positioned at the interface between health geography and health sociology.•Conceptualising place in relation to IVHNs entails engagement with social theory.•Conceptualising the social characteristics of IVHNs shows their embeddedness in place.•In combination these ideas provide guidance for critically studying IVHNs.
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.
The geographic problematic stems from the fact that we cannot accept reality as it is and so we create places to transform reality into what we think it ought to be, and then transform this new ...reality, and on and on. This paper explains how our place-making is essential in this transformation because place is a humanly constructed instrument that works much like a loom, helping us weave together elements of nature, meaning, and social relations to create projects and thus change reality into a new one. Understanding place's effect as an indispensable instrument sheds light on problems of identity, essentialism, scale, spatiality, the generic and specific, postmodernism, and our role as geographic agents.
At a time when the environmental problem is becoming one of the major political and socio-economic issues, geography seems to face difficulties in approaching the subject. Although the study of ...society-nature interactions was the very foundation on which geography built itself as an academic discipline at the end of the previous century, today’s geographical work reveals a deep gap in the representations of physical and human processes. We shall discuss the historical production of this gap through an explanation of the rise of modern sciences and a brief history of geographical approaches of nature. In doing so, the paper tries to draw attention to the major concepts that could help combining physical and human geographies in a new and more promising manner. Using ‘political ecology’ and ‘historical materialism’, we shall demonstrate how society and nature can be seen as dialectically linked to each other, and how geography is able to analyse the socio-ecological processes that shape the ‘world’. This analysis merges together space, society and nature in a single framework without falling into the earlier dualist perspectives (i.e. determinism and possibilism).
Japanese society has recently seen growing public concern about the issues of food. The government increasingly takes responsibility for food security in the globalized food systems, while new types ...of food practice are certainly emerging in farms, markets, restaurants and household. How can we understand such complicated situations? The food geography, tackling these issues especially in the western developed countries, probably provides a significant arena for the inter- and intra-disciplinary discussion. In order to attend this arena, as well as to understand the current situation of food production and consumption in Japan itself, it is necessary to share the key concepts and frameworks, which have dominated some recent subjects of food geography. This paper presents some discussion about how we can approach the issues of food in particular in the political-economic and socio-cultural contexts of Japan, conceptually focusing on the notions of the food regime, the global commodity chain, food deserts, the food network, the economics of conventions and actor-network theory, respectively. Most if not all of these notions have been articulated in the contexts of Anglo-American and European countries. This paper attempts to explore the possibilities of applying them to the Japanese context, with reference both to the academic background of their proponents and to the contextual difference between western and Japanese societies. As concluding remarks, we argue that we need further international and inter-disciplinary discussions and empirical studies from cross-cultural perspectives.
Book Reviews
Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
19/6/1/, Letnik:
84, Številka:
2
Book Review
Recenzirano
Book Reviewed in this article:
Landscape Sensitivity. D. S. G. Thomas and R. J. Allison, eds.
Reviewed by Laurence A. Lewis
Atmospheric Pollution: A Global Problem. 2nd ed. Derek M. Elsom.
Reviewed ...by Andrew C. Comrie
Rocky Mountain Divide: Selling and Saving the West. John B. Wright.
Reviewed by Paul F. Starrs
Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture. Robert McC.
Reviewed by Gregory Knapp
Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii. Patrick V. Kirch and Marshall Sahlins.
Reviewed by Robert Kuhlken
Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems. Carville Earle.
Reviewed by Andrew Herod
Veracruz Merchants, 1770-1829. A Mercantile Elite in Late Bourbon and Early Independent Mexico. Jackie R. Booker.
Reviewed by Peter W. Rees
Sonora: Its Geographical Personality. Robert C. West.
Reviewed by William E. Doolittle
French America: Mobility, Identity, and Minority Experience Across the Continent. Dean R. Louder and Eric Waddell, eds.
Reviewed by Malcolm L. Comeaux
Les Minorités Ethniques en Europe. André-Louis Sanguin, ed.
Reviewed by Marvin W. Mikesell
Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology. David Seamon, ed.
Reviewed by Judith Kenny
Political Geogaphy of the Twentieth Century: A Global Analysis. Peter J. Taylor, ed.
Reviewed by Alexander B. Murphy
Health and Health Care in Latin America During the Last Decade: Insights for the 1990s. Connie Weil and Joseph L. Scarpaci, eds.
Reviewed by Janet Momsen
Elderly Migration and Population Redistribution: A Comparative Study. Andrei Rogers, ed.
Reviewed by Peter A. Rogerson
Unions and Communities Under Siege: American Communities and the Crisis of Origanized Labor. Gordon L. Clark.
Pensions and Corporate Restructuring in American Industry: A Crisis of Regulation. Gordon L. Clark.
Reviewed by Mickey Lauria
Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory. Frans J. Schuurman, ed.
Reviewed by Richard Peet
Postmodern Contentions: Epochs, Politics, Space. John Paul Jones III, Wolfgang Natter, and Theodore R. Schatzki, eds.
Reviewed by Michael R. Curry
Society, Action and Space: An Alternative Human Geography. Benno Werlen.
Reviewed by Patricia Gober
The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State: A History of Property Mapping. Roger J. P. Kain and Elizabeth Baigent.
Reviewed by Louis De Vorsey, Jr.
A Scholar's Guide to Geographical Writing on the American and Canadian Past. Michael P. Conzen, Thomas A. Rumney, and Graeme Wynn, eds.
Reviewed by Bruce Ryan
Book Reviews
Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
June 1994, Letnik:
84, Številka:
2
Book Review
Recenzirano
Book Reviewed in this article:
Landscape Sensitivity. D. S. G. Thomas and R. J. Allison, eds.
Reviewed by Laurence A. Lewis
Atmospheric Pollution: A Global Problem. 2nd ed. Derek M. Elsom.
Reviewed ...by Andrew C. Comrie
Rocky Mountain Divide: Selling and Saving the West. John B. Wright.
Reviewed by Paul F. Starrs
Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture. Robert McC.
Reviewed by Gregory Knapp
Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii. Patrick V. Kirch and Marshall Sahlins.
Reviewed by Robert Kuhlken
Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems. Carville Earle.
Reviewed by Andrew Herod
Veracruz Merchants, 1770–1829. A Mercantile Elite in Late Bourbon and Early Independent Mexico. Jackie R. Booker.
Reviewed by Peter W. Rees
Sonora: Its Geographical Personality. Robert C. West.
Reviewed by William E. Doolittle
French America: Mobility, Identity, and Minority Experience Across the Continent. Dean R. Louder and Eric Waddell, eds.
Reviewed by Malcolm L. Comeaux
Les Minorités Ethniques en Europe. André‐Louis Sanguin, ed.
Reviewed by Marvin W. Mikesell
Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology. David Seamon, ed.
Reviewed by Judith Kenny
Political Geogaphy of the Twentieth Century: A Global Analysis. Peter J. Taylor, ed.
Reviewed by Alexander B. Murphy
Health and Health Care in Latin America During the Last Decade: Insights for the 1990s. Connie Weil and Joseph L. Scarpaci, eds.
Reviewed by Janet Momsen
Elderly Migration and Population Redistribution: A Comparative Study. Andrei Rogers, ed.
Reviewed by Peter A. Rogerson
Unions and Communities Under Siege: American Communities and the Crisis of Origanized Labor. Gordon L. Clark.
Pensions and Corporate Restructuring in American Industry: A Crisis of Regulation. Gordon L. Clark.
Reviewed by Mickey Lauria
Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory. Frans J. Schuurman, ed.
Reviewed by Richard Peet
Postmodern Contentions: Epochs, Politics, Space. John Paul Jones III, Wolfgang Natter, and Theodore R. Schatzki, eds.
Reviewed by Michael R. Curry
Society, Action and Space: An Alternative Human Geography. Benno Werlen.
Reviewed by Patricia Gober
The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State: A History of Property Mapping. Roger J. P. Kain and Elizabeth Baigent.
Reviewed by Louis De Vorsey, Jr.
A Scholar's Guide to Geographical Writing on the American and Canadian Past. Michael P. Conzen, Thomas A. Rumney, and Graeme Wynn, eds.
Reviewed by Bruce Ryan
PDF
