Progress in Human Geography

This paper offers a theory of detachment as a distinctive social-spatial (non)relation as a contribution to recent debates about relations and relationality in contemporary human geography. It argues that ‘detachment’ has thus far served as other to and problem for the literatures concerned with (non)relational geographies. As part of an approach to relationality that advocates for an orientation to multiple, different kinds of (non)relation, the paper proposes three complementary understandings of detachment: detachment as the absence of a promise; detachment as the imminent loosening of a promise; and detachment as the ending of a promise.

In this article, we analyze and then conceptually combine separately developed frameworks of displacement in urban and migration research. We consider internationally displaced migrants’ continued and multiplied experiences of displacement in cities and urban areas as an entry point through which to explore the intersections between international and urban displacement. In doing so, we move beyond disciplinary divides and take some preliminary conceptual and analytical steps toward developing a more rigorous, interdisciplinary, and comprehensive framework of displacement: one that enables us to see connections, similarities, and differences between a variety of displacement processes, forms, and experiences.

The global rise of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) presents an international public health policy challenge. Critical agents in this global trend are the activities and growth strategies of large transnational companies (TNCs) producing, selling and marketing unhealthy commodities including tobacco, alcohol and ultra-processed food. However, little geographical scholarship has considered the corporate activities of TNCs and the implications for global health. We utilise the ‘Commercial Determinants of Health’ framework to develop a cross-disciplinary agenda for geographical scholarship to deepen our understanding of how TNCs are drivers of global health geographies and implicated in the rise of NCDs and health inequalities.

Numerous quantitative techniques exist for protecting geoprivacy, but often require significant expertise and may not always provide adequate protection. We propose cartographic privacy as a framework for protecting sensitive spatial data. Cartographically private approaches favor using design techniques to obfuscate data rather than statistical ones, appealing to intuitive rather than technical understandings of geoprivacy. We explore this concept using two case studies of sensitive geonarrative interviews that focus on mapping the topology and friction of trajectories described by participants, and in doing so protect geoprivacy. We conclude by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of qualitatively driven approaches to geoprivacy protection.

This article offers a nuanced understanding of the biopolitics of migration, interrogating the ways in which migrants are object of value extraction by being devalued and debilitated. The paper introduces the concept of governing by debasing that encapsulates the twofold process of socio-economic devaluation and psycho-social debilitation. To develop such a concept, it intertwines geography literature on biopolitics with debates on extractivism. Drawing on feminist debates on social reproduction, it shows that hampered social reproduction activities underpin modes of governing by debasing. The article calls for a research agenda that investigates a biopolitical hold grounded on the de-accumulation of life.

This article traces geographical writings on monstrosity, magic(k) and spectrality which have developed over the last three decades. By framing these various works as ‘occult geographies’ and ‘geographies of the occult’, we show how this work is both thematically and theoretically linked and impacts current and emerging lines of thought in human geography more broadly. Surveying a body of non-specialist writings on occult landscapes, this paper contributes to human geography by showing how these practices and writings inform experiences of environment, identity, and belonging, whilst revealing political tensions for those deploying occult terminology and phenomena in their human geographical accounts.

This paper responds to debates over the politics of knowledge in the Anthropocene, which often centres on affirmational and negative approaches to posthuman theory. In dialogue with post-foundational geography, the paper outlines a different critical direction that utilises Rancière’s conception of ‘the poetics of knowledge’. It argues that this approach centres the possibility-reconfiguring power of radical politics as an analytical vantage point to critically examine the kinds of spaces, actors, and practices that posthuman theories can support and sustain or contest and disrupt. Doing so offers a means of critical traversal that can reorient posthuman theory to radical political horizons.

Rather than attempting to find some sort of unitary definition of regions, here the aim is to consider how the term has been mobilised to open up geographical thinking about the spaces of social, economic and political life – moving beyond and building on relational and structural ways of thinking. The dominant contemporary approaches to regions and regionalism can be clustered along three main axes: the possibility of regional identity and the bordering of regional spaces; the practices of regional planning; and the generation of spatial inequality. In each case, the significance of combined and uneven development is fundamental.

This third progress report on financial geography focuses on the everyday lives of finance. Moving beyond firm- and state-centric analyses, research increasingly foregrounds how financialisation permeates households, care relations and daily practices through variegated financial subjectivities, debt-based survival strategies and digital intermediation. Drawing on feminist political economy and critical approaches, the report highlights intersections of finance with social reproduction, gendered and racialised inequalities and the rise of fintech as a transformative yet potentially exploitative force. It concludes by identifying gaps in research on age and on state-technology relations, calling for intersectional, multi-scalar perspectives on finance’s lived and affective dimensions.