ALBERT

Description: Staat und Raum: Theoretische Debatten in der Politischen Geographie Geographica Helvetica, 69, 217-219, 2014 Author(s): M. Müller

Description: A constructionist defence of environmental ethics: the case of the Swiss hunter Geographica Helvetica, 69, 203-211, 2014 Author(s): T. Tait-Jamieson Castree argues that, due to implicit and explicit forms of material essentialism within many environmental ethicist arguments, a post-environmental ethics may be inevitable. The purpose of this article was to examine this claim by putting authors Castree and Proctor into a dialogue, situated within the social context of hunting in Switzerland, with the aim of navigating a path beyond the ontological mine field that environmental ethics has recently become. The results show that the critique that Castree offers can be turned into a mode of enquiry that highlights the need for environmental ethics to move beyond normative prescription to normative description. Such a move, as highlighted by the case of the Swiss hunter, allows for enquiry into how environmental ethics are socially discussed and produced, as well as offering avenues in which to interrogate and make sense of the different ways that people understand and interact with the natural world.

Description: The SAGE handbook of transport studies Geographica Helvetica, 69, 215-216, 2014 Author(s): M. Wilde

Description: Von Interaktion zu Transaktion – Konsequenzen eines pragmatischen Mensch-Umwelt-Verständnisses für eine Geographie der Mitwelt Geographica Helvetica, 69, 171-181, 2014 Author(s): C. Steiner Questions about how human-environment-relations can be conceptualized in a non-dualistic way have been intensively discussed throughout the last decades. The majority of the established realist and constructivist perspectives aim at explaining a given situation by analytically dissecting it. Unfortunately, such an interactionist perspective systematically reproduces the dualistic division between humans, environment and nature. In contrast, this paper offers a transactive perspective origin in classical pragmatism and discusses its meta-theoretical consequences for human-environment-research. A transactionist perspective interprets the world as a flow of unique and entangled events. Instead of ontologically separating humans and environment, it advocates to look at their relations as being part of a "connatural world". Such a point of view raises new ethical and political questions for geographical human-environment research, argues for a renaissance of ideographic methodologies and hints to a fruitful unity of geographical inquiry.

Description: Critical geography and the poison of Heidegger's thought Geographica Helvetica, 69, 145-146, 2014 Author(s): B. Korf No abstract available.

Description: Ist Kreativität ein subjektives oder ein kollektives Phänomen? Über eine ungeklärte Frage in der Non-representational Theory und eine denkbare Antwort der Philosophie der symbolischen Formen Geographica Helvetica, 69, 147-155, 2014 Author(s): P. Dirksmeier The micro-macro-problem of the social sciences is also present in human geographies' discussions of creativity. Creativity could be conceptualized either as a capability of subjects or as emerging from interaction processes. A direct consequence of this theoretical indecision is an inconsistent notion of creativity in Nigel Thrifts' nonrepresentational theory (NRT) that is originally developed to valuate creative praxis. The paper advances a proposal for conceptualizing creativity in NRT by using the philosophy of symbolic forms established by Ernst Cassirer. First, the paper develops a notion of individual creativity that is implied in Cassirers' work on symbolic pregnance and symbolic forms and via Bourdieus' interpretation of Cassirer also in the French sociologists' theory of incorporation. Second, the paper shows two possibilities to include the outlined notion of individual creativity in NRT. Creativity could be linked with NRT by modifying Bourdieus' concept of incorporation as used to establish a notion of nonrepresentational praxis. The second possibility of including creativity is a connection of affect and experience, which leads directly to the emergence of novelty.

Description: Political Waters. Governmental water management and neoliberal reforms in Khartoum/Sudan Geographica Helvetica, 69, 221-222, 2014 Author(s): L. Crombé

Description: The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics Geographica Helvetica, 69, 223-224, 2014 Author(s): C. B. Tansel

Description: Peripheralization. The Making of Spatial Dependencies and Social Injustice Geographica Helvetica, 69, 213-214, 2014 Author(s): S. Rettberg

Description: Antisemitismus, Großstadtfeindlichkeit und reaktionäre Kapitalismuskritik in der deutschsprachigen Geographie vor 1945 Geographica Helvetica, 69, 193-202, 2014 Author(s): B. Michel In der Forschung zur Geschichte der Geographie besteht eine auffällige Leerstelle bezüglich antisemitischen Denkens vor 1945. In diesem Beitrag wird versucht die Rolle und Funktion antisemitischer Elemente in der deutschsprachigen Geographie des Landschaftsparadigmas vor 1945 nachzuzeichnen. Es wird die These vertreten, dass die antisemitische Figur des Judentums als einem raum- und bodenlosen Volk, nicht nur tief in das geographische Denken eingelagert ist, sondern mit der seit 1918 stark antimodernen und abstraktionsfeindlichen Ausrichtung der Disziplin das Judentum gerade auch als Personifikation für die verhassten Momente von Modernisierung, Liberalismus und Urbanität fungiert. Wenn antisemitisches Denken im Vergleich zu nationalistischen und eurozentrischen Momenten auf den ersten Blick relativ unsichtbar erscheint, so liegt eine Ursache für diese geringe Sichtbarkeit im geringen Interesse landschaftskundlicher Geographie an Stadtgeographie und Prozessen der gesellschaftlichen Modernisierung.

Description: Appropriating "modernization" – indigenous anti-hegemonic resistance in the Argentine Chaco Geographica Helvetica, 69, 183-191, 2014 Author(s): S. Weißermel The incorporation of indigenous territories into the Argentine Republic must be considered as a complex process of colonization which encompassed space, the word and the body. It enabled the dominant settler society to establish socioeconomic and sociocultural hegemony. The example of the Toba community in Clorinda elucidates the extent to which hegemonic worldviews have infiltrated their self-perception and produced the barrio (urban district) and the campo (rural area), as two places infiltrated with symbolisms and ideology. Through a postcolonial perspective, this article aims to examine the way the community deals with this "modernization", as the Toba themselves call the process. It is pointed out that, by appropriating the hegemony's logic, the Toba actively create spaces of resistance in order to maintain or regain self-determination. Discussing indigenous alternative concepts of modernity, this article advocates a greater consideration of those diverse social realities in the scope of Western development geography.

Description: Materialität und Macht im Spiegel der Assemblage-Theorie: Erkundungen am Beispiel der Waldpolitik in Thailand Geographica Helvetica, 69, 157-169, 2014 Author(s): A. Mattissek and T. Wiertz Nature and technology are at the core of many ongoing social transformations and political struggles. While constructivist approaches in general and poststructuralist theories in particular point to the discursive negotiation of materiality, they have so far failed to adequately account for its constitutive role in stabilizing and destabilizing social relations. We argue that theories based on a "flat ontology" offer a way to re-materialize social theory while keeping the sensitivity to power-knowledge relations that poststructuralist theories have developed. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and recent discussions on Assemblage Theory in Human Geography, we sketch out a theoretical framework that conceptualizes the relations between symbolic and material entities in a non-deterministic way. Using the example of recent shifts in forest politics in Thailand under the influence of climate change policies, we discuss some of the empirical aspects that can be analyzed with the help of Assemblage Theory.

Description: Kiel 1969 – ein Mythos? Geographica Helvetica, 69, 291-292, 2014 Author(s): B. Korf No abstract available.

Description: Mobility, multilocality and translocal development: changing livelihoods in the Karakoram Geographica Helvetica, 69, 259-270, 2014 Author(s): A. Benz The people of the Karakoram have broadened the basis of their livelihoods over the last two to three generations by diversifying their income sources and activities along sectoral and spatial lines. Formal education, off-farm income generation and professional employment in the cities complement and partly substitute local agricultural activities. Intensifying processes of mobility and migration have created translocal rural–urban livelihoods, straddling between various and often geographically distant places. Social ties in multilocal configurations of households, families and communities have established highly effective local-to-local connections, which directly interlink processes of change and development in different locations. This article traces in a historical analysis the specific interrelations of mobility dynamics, livelihood change and socio-economic development for the Wakhi community of Gojal in northern Pakistan and discusses the potential of translocal livelihoods to overcome local constraints and facilitate development in structurally disadvantaged regions.

Description: Framing smallholder inclusion in global value chains – case studies from India and West Africa Geographica Helvetica, 69, 239-247, 2014 Author(s): M. Franz, M. Felix, and A. Trebbin A resurrected interest in agriculture has brought in its wake growing interest in smallholders in the global South by scholars, companies, governments and development agencies alike. While non-governmental organisations and development agencies see the potential to reduce poverty, companies look upon smallholder agriculture as a widely untapped resource for the sourcing of crops and as a sales market for agricultural inputs. While the important role of large corporate buyers of agricultural produce as lead firms in value chains is often discussed and emphasised, the power of providers of technology and agricultural inputs is being rather neglected. In this paper, we analyse two case studies of technology and input providers in agricultural value chains and their role in smallholder inclusion with the aim of finding out how such companies impact the governance of the value chains. To do so we combine insights from the value chain literature with the concept of framing/overflowing.

Description: Der Kieler Geographentag 1969: Wunden und Wunder Geographica Helvetica, 69, 319-320, 2014 Author(s): I. Helbrecht No abstract available.

Description: Kiel 1969 – Leuchtturm oder Irrlicht? Geographica Helvetica, 69, 293-299, 2014 Author(s): B. Werlen No abstract available.

Description: Was der Mythos der modernen Geographie nach Kiel ausschließt Geographica Helvetica, 69, 305-307, 2014 Author(s): B. Belina No abstract available.

Description: Alte Zeiten, neue Zeiten – Ein Bericht, verbunden mit einigen Gedanken über neugierige Identitätssuche Geographica Helvetica, 69, 313-317, 2014 Author(s): U. Eisel No abstract available.

Description: Wir sind nie revolutionär gewesen – Zum Mythos des Kieler Geographentags als der Geburtsstunde einer neuen Geographie Geographica Helvetica, 69, 301-303, 2014 Author(s): B. Michel No abstract available.

Description: New ruralities – old gender dynamics? A reflection on high-value crop agriculture in the light of the feminisation debates Geographica Helvetica, 69, 281-290, 2014 Author(s): S. Bieri While a remarkable continuity in smallholder agricultural production has been identified, the shift from subsistence orientation towards more wage dependence appears in a different light when analysed under a gender perspective. "Feminisation" has been a catchphrase to characterise some of these processes; however, the debate has been subject to overgeneralisation, and can only inadequately grasp the gender dynamics in what has been referred to as "new ruralities". Illustrated for high-value crop production as an expression of agricultural transition in the Global South, this contribution offers a critical account of the feminisation thesis. Instead of discarding the notion of feminisation, it advocates a reassessment of its potential as a comprehensive framework against which empirical findings can be reflected. While conventional uses of the feminisation thesis have, in their great majority, come up with the conclusion that for women it can always only get worse, I propose a perspective which reveals gains and risks and how they are shared between men and women as they engage in new agricultural labour markets. This perspective rests on a methodology for case-based, comparative studies developed in this paper as a contribution for assessing the nature of agricultural transition and to investigate the qualitative change associated with new ruralities. A distinctive appreciation of the substance of agricultural change for different members of the rural society – namely men and women, but also different men, and different women – is the premise for overcoming barriers to shared development, and for framing effective governance in the context of global development.

Description: Conventional or alternative development? Varying meanings and purposes of territorial rural development as a strategy for the Global South Geographica Helvetica, 69, 271-280, 2014 Author(s): K. Koop This paper discusses the increasing interest in the territorial dimension of rural development in the Global South. Adapting the local development approach of the 1970s to the changing context of globalization and to the competitiveness discourse, mainstream development agencies and scholars currently see territorial development (TD) as an attractive model for the integration of rural regions into globalization dynamics. However, territory serves not only conventional mainstream ideologies, but also post-development thinking. It is shown that territory has turned out to be a crucial element for social movements in the defense of alternative visions of modernity and in the constitution of life worlds outside the conventional development path. The analysis of the meaning development actors give the term territory and the focus on the purposes for which it is mobilized allows a variety of possible development paths for the rural South to be identified, thus going beyond the prevailing modernist vision.

Description: Wenn Utopien zu Mythen werden Geographica Helvetica, 69, 309-312, 2014 Author(s): J. Hasse No abstract available.

Description: "Investors are good, if they follow the rules" – power relations and local perceptions in the case of two European forestry companies in Tanzania Geographica Helvetica, 69, 249-258, 2014 Author(s): M. Locher and U. Müller-Böker The rapidly increasing interest of foreign investors in land in the global South, also termed land grabbing , has been widely discussed as potentially supportive, but often rather harmful for local populations. Combining a critical livelihoods perspective with access theory and a bargaining model, this study scrutinizes local people's perceptions of the land investments, power relations during land negotiations and intra-community differences. By analysing two European forestry companies in Tanzania, we have chosen a sector and a country with presumably more positive outcomes for local populations. The deals resulted in not only labour opportunities and infrastructural improvements, which are mainly perceived as positive, but also cases of violated land rights, inadequate compensation and decreased food security. Hence, even under favourable preconditions, the consequences for local people are ambivalent. With this study, we contribute to a differentiated analysis of the contested role of large-scale land deals in contemporary rural development.

Description: New rural dynamics and challenges in the Global South Geographica Helvetica, 69, 225-226, 2014 Author(s): T. Rauch, M. Schmidt, and D. Segebart No abstract available.

Description: New ruralities in the context of global economic and environmental change – are small-scale farmers bound to disappear? Geographica Helvetica, 69, 227-237, 2014 Author(s): T. Rauch While development practicians tend to celebrate the renaissance of rural development, critical scholars are concerned about the increasing commoditisation of rural resources in the global South coinciding with the end of the peasant mode of production. The new debate on the future of rurality is associated with trends such as price hikes for rural products, climate change, food crisis, institutional change and multi-local livelihood systems. Usually, these trends are analysed from different perspectives. While many geographers look at it from a livelihood systems perspective, political economists focus on global food markets, whereas climate change research considers rural dynamics predominantly as a response to climate. This article argues that the new rural dynamics can only be understood by taking a holistic multi-dimensional approach which puts those different perspectives into context, rather than arguing which is more relevant. Based on a multi-dimensional analytical framework, the article investigates economic, environmental, social and political-institutional dynamics behind the actual trends.

Description: Transnational productions of remoteness: building onshore and offshore carceral regimes across borders Geographica Helvetica, 69, 389-398, 2014 Author(s): A. Mountz and J. Loyd This article examines transnational framings of domestic carceral landscapes to better understand the relationship between offshore and onshore enforcement and detention regimes. US detention on mainland territory and interception and detention in the Caribbean serves as a case study. While the US domestic carceral regime is a subject of intense political debate, research, and activism, it is not often analyzed in relation to the development and expansion of an offshore "buffer zone" to intercept and detain migrants and asylum seekers. Yet the US federal government has also used offshore interception and detention as a way of controlling migration and mobility to its shores. This article traces a Cold War history of offshore US interception and detention of migrants from and in the Caribbean. We discuss how racialized crises related to Cuban and Haitian migrations by sea led to the expansion of an intertwined offshore and onshore carceral regime. Tracing these carceral geographies offers a more transnational understanding of contemporary domestic landscapes of detention of foreign nationals in the United States. It advances the argument that the conditions of remoteness ascribed frequently to US detention sites must be understood in more transnational perspective.

Description: Governing refugee space: the quasi-carceral regime of Amsterdam's Lloyd Hotel, a German-Jewish refugee camp in the prelude to World War II Geographica Helvetica, 69, 365-375, 2014 Author(s): M. Felder, C. Minca, and C. E. Ong Through analysing the correspondence between key refugee camp commanders based at Amsterdam's Lloyd Hotel and different authorities involved in Dutch refugee matters, this paper examines how "the Dutch state" responded to German-Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in the prelude to World War II. Using a largely Foucauldian approach to discipline, power, security and governmentality to examine the bio-, macro- and micro-politics behind the management of these refugees and their lived spaces, we seek to illustrate how the Lloyd Hotel formed part of a quasi-carceral spatial regime implemented to segregate and contain those with an unclear legal status at a time of political confusion. The article also seeks to show how the involvement of different authorities at different scales brought serious implications for the status, spatial regimentation, mobilities and future of the refugees.

Description: Alone inside: solitary confinement and the ontology of the individual in modern life Geographica Helvetica, 69, 355-364, 2014 Author(s): B. Story The long-term solitary confinement of prisoners causes fundamentally debilitative psychological damage. This violence, inherent to the socio-spatial organization of solitary confinement, diminishes prisoners' capacity to function as human beings. Yet while violence might characterize the ends of solitary confinement, individuation defines the means. This paper argues that solitary confinement, while an extreme case, shares crucial characteristics with other spaces, structures, and modes of organization familiar to Western society. The actual experiences of prisoners subjected to conditions of total isolation, moreover, contradict the prevailing ontology of the individuated subject. The irreconcilability of this paradox invites inquiry into the political and material problematic of individualism itself. The violence of solitary confinement's spatial practice therefore holds important implications for a critical reassessment of any or all socially isolating institutions and individuating ideologies within the structural fabric of modern life.

Description: "Green" prisons: rethinking the "sustainability" of the carceral estate Geographica Helvetica, 69, 345-353, 2014 Author(s): D. Moran and Y. Jewkes This exploratory paper introduces the notion of the "green" prison, uncovering the ways in which environmental sustainability inflects carceral policies and practices. Focusing on the United States, it highlights the construction of an "organizational sustainable development" discourse within the correctional system, and argues that it is the system, rather than the environment, which is being "sustained", through the promulgation of a "green" prison discourse which serves to deflect attention from the mounting human and financial costs of mass incarceration. It examines the ways in which "sustainability" plays out in correctional facilities, narrowly structured around compliance with "green" environmental and energy-related regulations, and the provision of "green-collar" training for inmates. Drawing on architectural geographies and notions of therapeutic landscapes, the paper theorizes an alternative interpretation of the "green" prison as a nurturing environment, but argues that this model functions only in decarcerative settings imbued with a rehabilitative, rather than a retributive, atmosphere.

Description: Introduction: Criminality and carcerality across boundaries Geographica Helvetica, 69, 321-323, 2014 Author(s): J. Turner No abstract available.

Description: The production of bedspace: prison privatization and abstract space Geographica Helvetica, 69, 325-333, 2014 Author(s): M. L. Mitchelson This paper reports results from a critical discourse analysis of Annual Reports for Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group, Inc. (formerly Wackenhut), the two largest private prison firms currently operating in the United States. Considerable geographic scholarship has analyzed privatization, on the one hand, and imprisonment, on the other. However, geographers have paid less attention to explicitly for-profit imprisonment. In particular, geographers have overlooked or ignored the emergence of bedspace, a concept that now pervades penal discourse. Rather than continuing conventional public-versus-private prison debates, this paper identifies bedspace as the discursive common ground upon which private prison industrialists and the state actually converge. Applying Henri Lefebvre's theorization of "abstract space" to imprisonment, I argue that the discursive creation of bedspace produces a nondialectical representation of space that is fully commodified and bureaucratized. However, the paper concludes that this nondialectical space problematically severs the immanently human geography of imprisonment, which is a "messy" space that is always lived and experienced in particular ways, from its inanimate architectural infrastructure (i.e., beds). Beyond the potential ethical and empirical challenges raised by the production of such an abstract space, bedspace signals the discursive and material convergence of state punishment with capital flows that build and often move beyond prison boundaries while obscuring violent geographies.

Description: Examining the everyday micro-economies of migrant detention in the United States Geographica Helvetica, 69, 335-344, 2014 Author(s): D. Conlon and N. Hiemstra Securitization of immigration, the rise of interior immigration policing, and forces of carceral privatization have occasioned a remarkable expansion of immigrant detention throughout the United States. Previous studies have drawn attention to the importance of the daily rates paid by the federal government to individual facilities in driving the emphasis on detention. This paper, in contrast, argues that tracing the political and economic geography of money inside detention facilities is also critical for understanding detention expansion and its consequences. We define the processes, mechanisms, and practices of generating profit above and beyond the "per-bed" daily rate as "internal micro-economies" of migrant detention. Drawing on an ongoing examination of migrant detention facilities in the greater New York City metropolitan area, we identify four micro-economies evident in detention facilities: the commissary systems, phone and other forms of communication, detainee labor, and detainee excursions outside detention. These economies show how detained migrants' needs and daily routines are tailored in ways that produce migrants as both captive consumers and laborers. Recognition of multiple micro-economies also highlights the fact that the numbers of individuals and entities invested in the incarceration of immigrants proliferate in tandem with the objectification of detainees. The paper further suggests that attending to relationships embedded in the inner workings of detention exposes economic links across carceral boundaries, rendering visible the porosity between government, private companies, and publics.

Description: Expanding carceral geographies: challenging mass incarceration and creating a "community orientation" towards juvenile delinquency Geographica Helvetica, 69, 377-388, 2014 Author(s): E. Brown Increasingly, governments are adopting alternative strategies to mass incarceration and drawing on the rhetoric of community to create softer and less restrictive sanctions. This paper argues that this transition provides an opportunity for geographers concerned with incarceration to consider a more expansive understanding of the carceral state. To call for a more geographically expansive consideration of incarceration, this paper draws upon a study of one juvenile court that sought to end racialized over-incarceration by promoting a "community orientation". As a consequence, juvenile detention now acts as a single node in a broader process of sorting, placing, and punishing, but the carceral aspects of juvenile court involvement did not lessen. Instead, the community orientation encapsulated a range of practices that are traditionally outside the state, yet extended the power of the state over a broad geography that resulted in the coerced mobility of children and subjection to greater insecurity. By tracing how the carceral apparatus extends into neighborhoods, community programs, probation practices, and residential placement, I argue that paying more attention to variegated carceral practices is necessary to more fully consider how incarceration has permeated places outside the prison.

Description: Dark Territory in the Information Age. Learning from the West German Census Controversies of the 1980s Geographica Helvetica, 69, 121-122, 2014 Author(s): N. Zurawski

Description: Editorial Urbane Ungleichheit in vergleichender Perspektive – Konzeptionelle Überlegungen und empirische Befunde aus den Americas Geographica Helvetica, 69, 67-78, 2014 Author(s): E. Rothfuß and U. Gerhard Research on urban inequality has a long tradition in human geography as well as sociology. This special issue seeks to amplify the discussion by introducing some new theoretical approaches to the analysis. The first is to open up a research setting for comparative urbanism. By looking at urban life-worlds of marginalized neighbourhoods in the two Americas, the contributors do not want to search for similarities or disparities between different countries, but try to shed light on societal contexts and their spatial settings. The idea is to develop a reconstructive perspective to understand the uneven place-making within cities. With this, a second task is circumscribed: by describing and interpreting every-day life practices in Brazilian favelas and US ghettos, we want to contribute to a better understanding of patterns and spaces of urban inequality. Despite the wide array of (mostly quantitative) studies on urban inequality and segregation we declare a lack of understanding how these marginalized localities are experienced and reproduced. How do unprivileged inhabitants cope with everyday negligence and discrimination? Further concepts of urban citizenship, governmentality and the role of the penal state are introduced to enhance the conceptual as well as empirical analysis of inequality in cities.

Description: Notes from the Editors Der reiche Fundus der Geographie Geographica Helvetica, 69, 65-65, 2014 Author(s): B. Korf No abstract available.

Description: Geography speaks: performative aspects of geography Geographica Helvetica, 69, 131-133, 2014 Author(s): C. Schurr

Description: Das Ordnen von Räumen. Territorium und Lebensraum im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert Geographica Helvetica, 69, 127-129, 2014 Author(s): H. D. Schultz

Description: Social spatiality: some rudimentary thoughts on the epistemology of Benno Werlen Geographica Helvetica, 69, 139-143, 2014 Author(s): U. Strohmayer

Description: Geographie in Forschung und Gesellschaft: Wege und Wandel – Eine Ideenskizze* Geographica Helvetica, 69, 115-120, 2014 Author(s): H. Leser No abstract available.

Description: Après le diplôme. Les parcours migratoires au sortir des hautesécoles Geographica Helvetica, 69, 125-126, 2014 Author(s): M. Gauthier

Description: Politische Räume. Die diskursive Konstitution eines „geokulturellen Raums“ – die Frankophonie Geographica Helvetica, 69, 135-137, 2014 Author(s): J. Bohle

Description: Science + Space + Society: urbanity and the risk of methodological communalism in social sciences of space* Geographica Helvetica, 69, 99-114, 2014 Author(s): J. Lévy During the last decades, geography has lost its epistemological exceptionality, but is this enough? Social sciences are commonly threatened by methodological nationalism and, more generally, by methodological communalism , that is the corruption of a scientific approach or project by any kind of other social alignment that undermines its capacity to develop a free, autonomous thought. Has geography escaped these pitfalls? In this text, the example of urban studies is taken to try and answer these questions. More specifically, the way the idea of spatial justice has emerged in the last decades is explored through the analysis of five significant books among the academic production on these topics. It is then argued, thanks to a critical review around the iconic notion of 'gentrification', that the corpus at stake is more substantial than the limited, partially arbitrary selection of these five books. The present-day situation of urban geography (and probably of urban sociology, too) shows a serious risk of methodological communalism particularly located in Anglophone, and especially North American, literature. Some hypotheses are proposed to explain this particular geography of the academic episteme of inhabited space. It is argued that the potential single-paradigm hegemony in geography and, more generally, in social sciences might fuel this danger. Finally, a possible antidote to this worrying trend could be the simple, but complex idea of putting science, space and society together in a non-dissociable way. The conclusion stresses the necessity of taking up key challenges that urbanity issues raise and the usefulness of epistemological and theoretical pluralism as a major intellectual resource.

Description: Das Gespenst des Kapitals Geographica Helvetica, 69, 123-124, 2014 Author(s): S. Schipper

Description: Die Gestaltung städtischer Abschließung im 21. Jahrhundert Geographica Helvetica, 69, 89-97, 2014 Author(s): L. Wacquant This paper draws on my books Urban Outcasts and Punishing the Poor , on the transformation of the forms and policy management of marginality in advanced society, to probe the use of space as a medium for social closure and control in the city. This first part sketches a framework for the (comparative) analysis of sociospatial seclusion , the process whereby particular social categories and activities are corralled and isolated in a reserved and restricted quadrant of physical and social space. The second part applies this schema to present a compressed analysis of the divergent trajectories of the black American ghetto and the French working-class borough in the post-Fordist age anchored by the three spatially inflected concepts of ghetto, hyperghetto and anti-ghetto. It concludes by stressing the role of the state in directing processes of seclusion at the top and at the bottom of the urban order, along a gradient from constraint to choice.

Description: The global trope and urban redevelopment: the American experience Geographica Helvetica, 69, 79-88, 2014 Author(s): D. Wilson This paper examines a new "political opportunity structure" in United States Rust Belt cities – globalization – currently being used by redevelopment governances. An investigation of two cities reveals that this discourse ("the global trope") has helped to produce a new socio-spatial polarization in US cities. Globalization here is now not merely a new reality, but also a powerful rhetorical device whose invoking is proving to be a potent political tool for capital in its drive to transform cities. At this rhetoric's core, a supposed new hyper-competitive reality makes Rust Belt cities easily discardable as places of investment. These once-enclosed containers of "the economic", in the rhetoric, have recently become leaky landscapes rife with a potential for economic hemorrhaging. Against this supposed reality, cities are portrayed as beset by a kind of accumulation disorder that now haunts them. Through this, the new governmentality's dominant contours – a proposed shock treatment of re-regulation – is rationalized. This generates a new uneven development across US cities that marginalizes low-income African-American communities.

Description: The persisting problem of poverty in the global south, since the 1990s, has been increasingly analysed and tackled from the perspective of the poor themselves. The shift of view point from a structurally oriented perspective to a more actor-oriented view was closely related to the concept of livelihoods, which put strong emphasis on people-centredness, and examined the coping and survival strategies of people at risk. Livelihoods analysis has been widely applied by research scholars as well as development practitioners since the 1990s, but the drawbacks and pitfalls of the approach have become more and more obvious with its continued application. The approach has been criticised for its imbalanced consideration of the structure–agency relation, narrow focus on the household as a unit of analysis, narrow and non-embedded understanding of assets, and negligence of spatial and temporal dynamics. The livelihoods perspective is at a crossroads. Several scholars have drawn on Bourdieu's theory of practice to overcome the identified challenges. This article seeks to bring together these insights and show how a Bourdieusian perspective can inform and contribute to the advancements in livelihoods research.

Description: This exploratory paper introduces the notion of the "green" prison, uncovering the ways in which environmental sustainability inflects carceral policies and practices. Focusing on the United States, it highlights the construction of an "organizational sustainable development" discourse within the correctional system, and argues that it is the system, rather than the environment, which is being "sustained", through the promulgation of a "green" prison discourse which serves to deflect attention from the mounting human and financial costs of mass incarceration. It examines the ways in which "sustainability" plays out in correctional facilities, narrowly structured around compliance with "green" environmental and energy-related regulations, and the provision of "green-collar" training for inmates. Drawing on architectural geographies and notions of therapeutic landscapes, the paper theorizes an alternative interpretation of the "green" prison as a nurturing environment, but argues that this model functions only in decarcerative settings imbued with a rehabilitative, rather than a retributive, atmosphere.

Description: While a remarkable continuity in smallholder agricultural production has been identified, the shift from subsistence orientation towards more wage dependence appears in a different light when analysed under a gender perspective. "Feminisation" has been a catchphrase to characterise some of these processes; however, the debate has been subject to overgeneralisation, and can only inadequately grasp the gender dynamics in what has been referred to as "new ruralities". Illustrated for high-value crop production as an expression of agricultural transition in the Global South, this contribution offers a critical account of the feminisation thesis. Instead of discarding the notion of feminisation, it advocates a reassessment of its potential as a comprehensive framework against which empirical findings can be reflected. While conventional uses of the feminisation thesis have, in their great majority, come up with the conclusion that for women it can always only get worse, I propose a perspective which reveals gains and risks and how they are shared between men and women as they engage in new agricultural labour markets. This perspective rests on a methodology for case-based, comparative studies developed in this paper as a contribution for assessing the nature of agricultural transition and to investigate the qualitative change associated with new ruralities. A distinctive appreciation of the substance of agricultural change for different members of the rural society – namely men and women, but also different men, and different women – is the premise for overcoming barriers to shared development, and for framing effective governance in the context of global development.

Description: This article examines transnational framings of domestic carceral landscapes to better understand the relationship between offshore and onshore enforcement and detention regimes. US detention on mainland territory and interception and detention in the Caribbean serves as a case study. While the US domestic carceral regime is a subject of intense political debate, research, and activism, it is not often analyzed in relation to the development and expansion of an offshore "buffer zone" to intercept and detain migrants and asylum seekers. Yet the US federal government has also used offshore interception and detention as a way of controlling migration and mobility to its shores. This article traces a Cold War history of offshore US interception and detention of migrants from and in the Caribbean. We discuss how racialized crises related to Cuban and Haitian migrations by sea led to the expansion of an intertwined offshore and onshore carceral regime. Tracing these carceral geographies offers a more transnational understanding of contemporary domestic landscapes of detention of foreign nationals in the United States. It advances the argument that the conditions of remoteness ascribed frequently to US detention sites must be understood in more transnational perspective.

Description: While development practicians tend to celebrate the renaissance of rural development, critical scholars are concerned about the increasing commoditisation of rural resources in the global South coinciding with the end of the peasant mode of production. The new debate on the future of rurality is associated with trends such as price hikes for rural products, climate change, food crisis, institutional change and multi-local livelihood systems. Usually, these trends are analysed from different perspectives. While many geographers look at it from a livelihood systems perspective, political economists focus on global food markets, whereas climate change research considers rural dynamics predominantly as a response to climate. This article argues that the new rural dynamics can only be understood by taking a holistic multi-dimensional approach which puts those different perspectives into context, rather than arguing which is more relevant. Based on a multi-dimensional analytical framework, the article investigates economic, environmental, social and political-institutional dynamics behind the actual trends.

Description: Nature and technology are at the core of many ongoing social transformations and political struggles. While constructivist approaches in general and poststructuralist theories in particular point to the discursive negotiation of materiality, they have so far failed to adequately account for its constitutive role in stabilizing and destabilizing social relations. We argue that theories based on a "flat ontology" offer a way to re-materialize social theory while keeping the sensitivity to power-knowledge relations that poststructuralist theories have developed. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and recent discussions on Assemblage Theory in Human Geography, we sketch out a theoretical framework that conceptualizes the relations between symbolic and material entities in a non-deterministic way. Using the example of recent shifts in forest politics in Thailand under the influence of climate change policies, we discuss some of the empirical aspects that can be analyzed with the help of Assemblage Theory.

Description: Increasingly, governments are adopting alternative strategies to mass incarceration and drawing on the rhetoric of community to create softer and less restrictive sanctions. This paper argues that this transition provides an opportunity for geographers concerned with incarceration to consider a more expansive understanding of the carceral state. To call for a more geographically expansive consideration of incarceration, this paper draws upon a study of one juvenile court that sought to end racialized over-incarceration by promoting a "community orientation". As a consequence, juvenile detention now acts as a single node in a broader process of sorting, placing, and punishing, but the carceral aspects of juvenile court involvement did not lessen. Instead, the community orientation encapsulated a range of practices that are traditionally outside the state, yet extended the power of the state over a broad geography that resulted in the coerced mobility of children and subjection to greater insecurity. By tracing how the carceral apparatus extends into neighborhoods, community programs, probation practices, and residential placement, I argue that paying more attention to variegated carceral practices is necessary to more fully consider how incarceration has permeated places outside the prison.

Description: Securitization of immigration, the rise of interior immigration policing, and forces of carceral privatization have occasioned a remarkable expansion of immigrant detention throughout the United States. Previous studies have drawn attention to the importance of the daily rates paid by the federal government to individual facilities in driving the emphasis on detention. This paper, in contrast, argues that tracing the political and economic geography of money inside detention facilities is also critical for understanding detention expansion and its consequences. We define the processes, mechanisms, and practices of generating profit above and beyond the "per-bed" daily rate as "internal micro-economies" of migrant detention. Drawing on an ongoing examination of migrant detention facilities in the greater New York City metropolitan area, we identify four micro-economies evident in detention facilities: the commissary systems, phone and other forms of communication, detainee labor, and detainee excursions outside detention. These economies show how detained migrants' needs and daily routines are tailored in ways that produce migrants as both captive consumers and laborers. Recognition of multiple micro-economies also highlights the fact that the numbers of individuals and entities invested in the incarceration of immigrants proliferate in tandem with the objectification of detainees. The paper further suggests that attending to relationships embedded in the inner workings of detention exposes economic links across carceral boundaries, rendering visible the porosity between government, private companies, and publics.

Description: The paper discusses street vendors' spatial appropriations and the governance of public space in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The much debated question in social geography how people's position in social space relates to their position in physical space (and vice versa) stands at the centre of the analysis. I use Bourdieu's Theory of Practice to discuss this dialectic relation at two analytical levels. On a micro-political level it is shown that the street vendors' social positions and the informal rules of the street structure their access to public space and thus determine their "spatial profits". At a macro-political level, it is not only the conditions inside the "field of street vending" that matter for the hawkers, but also their relation to the state-controlled "field of power". The paper demonstrates that Bourdieu's key ideas can be linked to current debates about spatial appropriation and informality. Moreover, I argue that Bourdieu's theory builds an appropriate basis for a relational, critical, and reflexive social geography in the Urban South.

Description: Castree argues that, due to implicit and explicit forms of material essentialism within many environmental ethicist arguments, a post-environmental ethics may be inevitable. The purpose of this article was to examine this claim by putting authors Castree and Proctor into a dialogue, situated within the social context of hunting in Switzerland, with the aim of navigating a path beyond the ontological mine field that environmental ethics has recently become. The results show that the critique that Castree offers can be turned into a mode of enquiry that highlights the need for environmental ethics to move beyond normative prescription to normative description. Such a move, as highlighted by the case of the Swiss hunter, allows for enquiry into how environmental ethics are socially discussed and produced, as well as offering avenues in which to interrogate and make sense of the different ways that people understand and interact with the natural world.

Description: Research on urban inequality has a long tradition in human geography as well as sociology. This special issue seeks to amplify the discussion by introducing some new theoretical approaches to the analysis. The first is to open up a research setting for comparative urbanism. By looking at urban life-worlds of marginalized neighbourhoods in the two Americas, the contributors do not want to search for similarities or disparities between different countries, but try to shed light on societal contexts and their spatial settings. The idea is to develop a reconstructive perspective to understand the uneven place-making within cities. With this, a second task is circumscribed: by describing and interpreting every-day life practices in Brazilian favelas and US ghettos, we want to contribute to a better understanding of patterns and spaces of urban inequality. Despite the wide array of (mostly quantitative) studies on urban inequality and segregation we declare a lack of understanding how these marginalized localities are experienced and reproduced. How do unprivileged inhabitants cope with everyday negligence and discrimination? Further concepts of urban citizenship, governmentality and the role of the penal state are introduced to enhance the conceptual as well as empirical analysis of inequality in cities.

Description: Through analysing the correspondence between key refugee camp commanders based at Amsterdam's Lloyd Hotel and different authorities involved in Dutch refugee matters, this paper examines how "the Dutch state" responded to German-Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in the prelude to World War II. Using a largely Foucauldian approach to discipline, power, security and governmentality to examine the bio-, macro- and micro-politics behind the management of these refugees and their lived spaces, we seek to illustrate how the Lloyd Hotel formed part of a quasi-carceral spatial regime implemented to segregate and contain those with an unclear legal status at a time of political confusion. The article also seeks to show how the involvement of different authorities at different scales brought serious implications for the status, spatial regimentation, mobilities and future of the refugees.

Description: This paper reports results from a critical discourse analysis of Annual Reports for Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group, Inc. (formerly Wackenhut), the two largest private prison firms currently operating in the United States. Considerable geographic scholarship has analyzed privatization, on the one hand, and imprisonment, on the other. However, geographers have paid less attention to explicitly for-profit imprisonment. In particular, geographers have overlooked or ignored the emergence of bedspace, a concept that now pervades penal discourse. Rather than continuing conventional public-versus-private prison debates, this paper identifies bedspace as the discursive common ground upon which private prison industrialists and the state actually converge. Applying Henri Lefebvre's theorization of "abstract space" to imprisonment, I argue that the discursive creation of bedspace produces a nondialectical representation of space that is fully commodified and bureaucratized. However, the paper concludes that this nondialectical space problematically severs the immanently human geography of imprisonment, which is a "messy" space that is always lived and experienced in particular ways, from its inanimate architectural infrastructure (i.e., beds). Beyond the potential ethical and empirical challenges raised by the production of such an abstract space, bedspace signals the discursive and material convergence of state punishment with capital flows that build and often move beyond prison boundaries while obscuring violent geographies.

Description: A resurrected interest in agriculture has brought in its wake growing interest in smallholders in the global South by scholars, companies, governments and development agencies alike. While non-governmental organisations and development agencies see the potential to reduce poverty, companies look upon smallholder agriculture as a widely untapped resource for the sourcing of crops and as a sales market for agricultural inputs. While the important role of large corporate buyers of agricultural produce as lead firms in value chains is often discussed and emphasised, the power of providers of technology and agricultural inputs is being rather neglected. In this paper, we analyse two case studies of technology and input providers in agricultural value chains and their role in smallholder inclusion with the aim of finding out how such companies impact the governance of the value chains. To do so we combine insights from the value chain literature with the concept of framing/overflowing.

Description: The long-term solitary confinement of prisoners causes fundamentally debilitative psychological damage. This violence, inherent to the socio-spatial organization of solitary confinement, diminishes prisoners' capacity to function as human beings. Yet while violence might characterize the ends of solitary confinement, individuation defines the means. This paper argues that solitary confinement, while an extreme case, shares crucial characteristics with other spaces, structures, and modes of organization familiar to Western society. The actual experiences of prisoners subjected to conditions of total isolation, moreover, contradict the prevailing ontology of the individuated subject. The irreconcilability of this paradox invites inquiry into the political and material problematic of individualism itself. The violence of solitary confinement's spatial practice therefore holds important implications for a critical reassessment of any or all socially isolating institutions and individuating ideologies within the structural fabric of modern life.

Description: This paper draws on my books Urban Outcasts and Punishing the Poor, on the transformation of the forms and policy management of marginality in advanced society, to probe the use of space as a medium for social closure and control in the city. This first part sketches a framework for the (comparative) analysis of sociospatial seclusion, the process whereby particular social categories and activities are corralled and isolated in a reserved and restricted quadrant of physical and social space. The second part applies this schema to present a compressed analysis of the divergent trajectories of the black American ghetto and the French working-class borough in the post-Fordist age anchored by the three spatially inflected concepts of ghetto, hyperghetto and anti-ghetto. It concludes by stressing the role of the state in directing processes of seclusion at the top and at the bottom of the urban order, along a gradient from constraint to choice.

Description: During the last decades, geography has lost its epistemological exceptionality, but is this enough? Social sciences are commonly threatened by methodological nationalism and, more generally, by methodological communalism, that is the corruption of a scientific approach or project by any kind of other social alignment that undermines its capacity to develop a free, autonomous thought. Has geography escaped these pitfalls? In this text, the example of urban studies is taken to try and answer these questions. More specifically, the way the idea of spatial justice has emerged in the last decades is explored through the analysis of five significant books among the academic production on these topics. It is then argued, thanks to a critical review around the iconic notion of 'gentrification', that the corpus at stake is more substantial than the limited, partially arbitrary selection of these five books. The present-day situation of urban geography (and probably of urban sociology, too) shows a serious risk of methodological communalism particularly located in Anglophone, and especially North American, literature. Some hypotheses are proposed to explain this particular geography of the academic episteme of inhabited space. It is argued that the potential single-paradigm hegemony in geography and, more generally, in social sciences might fuel this danger. Finally, a possible antidote to this worrying trend could be the simple, but complex idea of putting science, space and society together in a non-dissociable way. The conclusion stresses the necessity of taking up key challenges that urbanity issues raise and the usefulness of epistemological and theoretical pluralism as a major intellectual resource.

Description: Within the academic field of Geography, there is an "identity crisis" facing German-language scholarship in Development Studies programs, particularly in terms of disciplinary characteristics, epistemological aims and methodological approaches. This critical self-reflection finds its expression in the use of terms like "mid-range theory" or "global south", and is manifest as well in repeated calls for a re-formulation of the discipline. Simultaneously, an increasing number of empirical studies in this field are informed by readings of Bourdieu, and are relying on praxeological and corresponding relational perspectives. These studies are transcending the prevalent actor-centered paradigms. Against such a background this paper not only shows how Bourdieu's suggestions can contribute to countering conceptual and discursive dichotomies, regionalized exoticism of cultural contexts and a normative bias (especially in applied research), but also indicates directions for a reformulation or alternative interpretation of the discipline. In order to address these issues, we focus on the key concept of relationality, which is epistemologically central to understanding the "social world"; academically central for a praxeological concept of global social research; and methodologically central in terms of self-reflexivity and a heuristic approach to social categories.

Description: This article discusses current transformations from nomadism to labor migration and tourism in the local economy in the Moroccan mountain village Ameskar Fogani. Using the concepts of field, habitus and symbolic capital of Bourdieu's "theory of practice", changes in economic practices are analyzed in relation to changes of (symbolic) meanings and perceptual categories. This perspective sheds light on the close interrelation of economic and cultural aspects of social change.

Description: Pierre Bourdieu conceptualizes social action as "instrumental rational". Disinterestedness is only possible as part of an actor's practical logic when the said actor actively or passively misrecognizes underlying interests. In the "logic of logic", this perceived disinterestedness can and must be scientifically reconstructed as a pure economic exchange. Reason-based morality, such as can be found in Kantian philosophy, becomes impossible, and morality becomes an ignored category in Bourdieu's theoretical endeavour. This article's first goal is to locate Bourdieu's approach within moral philosophy, through parallels to Gauthier's Morals by Agreement. An empirical case on water transfers between neighbours in Khartoum reveals the limits of such an approach. This leads to the second goal. By translating Bourdieu's perfect "economy of symbolic goods" into an imperfect one, reason-based morality is integrated into his project, and the relevance of interest for social interaction is curbed, but not denied.

Description: The people of the Karakoram have broadened the basis of their livelihoods over the last two to three generations by diversifying their income sources and activities along sectoral and spatial lines. Formal education, off-farm income generation and professional employment in the cities complement and partly substitute local agricultural activities. Intensifying processes of mobility and migration have created translocal rural–urban livelihoods, straddling between various and often geographically distant places. Social ties in multilocal configurations of households, families and communities have established highly effective local-to-local connections, which directly interlink processes of change and development in different locations. This article traces in a historical analysis the specific interrelations of mobility dynamics, livelihood change and socio-economic development for the Wakhi community of Gojal in northern Pakistan and discusses the potential of translocal livelihoods to overcome local constraints and facilitate development in structurally disadvantaged regions.

Description: The micro-macro-problem of the social sciences is also present in human geographies' discussions of creativity. Creativity could be conceptualized either as a capability of subjects or as emerging from interaction processes. A direct consequence of this theoretical indecision is an inconsistent notion of creativity in Nigel Thrifts' nonrepresentational theory (NRT) that is originally developed to valuate creative praxis. The paper advances a proposal for conceptualizing creativity in NRT by using the philosophy of symbolic forms established by Ernst Cassirer. First, the paper develops a notion of individual creativity that is implied in Cassirers' work on symbolic pregnance and symbolic forms and via Bourdieus' interpretation of Cassirer also in the French sociologists' theory of incorporation. Second, the paper shows two possibilities to include the outlined notion of individual creativity in NRT. Creativity could be linked with NRT by modifying Bourdieus' concept of incorporation as used to establish a notion of nonrepresentational praxis. The second possibility of including creativity is a connection of affect and experience, which leads directly to the emergence of novelty.

Description: In der Forschung zur Geschichte der Geographie besteht eine auffällige Leerstelle bezüglich antisemitischen Denkens vor 1945. In diesem Beitrag wird versucht die Rolle und Funktion antisemitischer Elemente in der deutschsprachigen Geographie des Landschaftsparadigmas vor 1945 nachzuzeichnen. Es wird die These vertreten, dass die antisemitische Figur des Judentums als einem raum- und bodenlosen Volk, nicht nur tief in das geographische Denken eingelagert ist, sondern mit der seit 1918 stark antimodernen und abstraktionsfeindlichen Ausrichtung der Disziplin das Judentum gerade auch als Personifikation für die verhassten Momente von Modernisierung, Liberalismus und Urbanität fungiert. Wenn antisemitisches Denken im Vergleich zu nationalistischen und eurozentrischen Momenten auf den ersten Blick relativ unsichtbar erscheint, so liegt eine Ursache für diese geringe Sichtbarkeit im geringen Interesse landschaftskundlicher Geographie an Stadtgeographie und Prozessen der gesellschaftlichen Modernisierung.

Description: This paper discusses the increasing interest in the territorial dimension of rural development in the Global South. Adapting the local development approach of the 1970s to the changing context of globalization and to the competitiveness discourse, mainstream development agencies and scholars currently see territorial development (TD) as an attractive model for the integration of rural regions into globalization dynamics. However, territory serves not only conventional mainstream ideologies, but also post-development thinking. It is shown that territory has turned out to be a crucial element for social movements in the defense of alternative visions of modernity and in the constitution of life worlds outside the conventional development path. The analysis of the meaning development actors give the term territory and the focus on the purposes for which it is mobilized allows a variety of possible development paths for the rural South to be identified, thus going beyond the prevailing modernist vision.

Description: The rapidly increasing interest of foreign investors in land in the global South, also termed land grabbing, has been widely discussed as potentially supportive, but often rather harmful for local populations. Combining a critical livelihoods perspective with access theory and a bargaining model, this study scrutinizes local people's perceptions of the land investments, power relations during land negotiations and intra-community differences. By analysing two European forestry companies in Tanzania, we have chosen a sector and a country with presumably more positive outcomes for local populations. The deals resulted in not only labour opportunities and infrastructural improvements, which are mainly perceived as positive, but also cases of violated land rights, inadequate compensation and decreased food security. Hence, even under favourable preconditions, the consequences for local people are ambivalent. With this study, we contribute to a differentiated analysis of the contested role of large-scale land deals in contemporary rural development.

Description: The incorporation of indigenous territories into the Argentine Republic must be considered as a complex process of colonization which encompassed space, the word and the body. It enabled the dominant settler society to establish socioeconomic and sociocultural hegemony. The example of the Toba community in Clorinda elucidates the extent to which hegemonic worldviews have infiltrated their self-perception and produced the barrio (urban district) and the campo (rural area), as two places infiltrated with symbolisms and ideology. Through a postcolonial perspective, this article aims to examine the way the community deals with this "modernization", as the Toba themselves call the process. It is pointed out that, by appropriating the hegemony's logic, the Toba actively create spaces of resistance in order to maintain or regain self-determination. Discussing indigenous alternative concepts of modernity, this article advocates a greater consideration of those diverse social realities in the scope of Western development geography.

Description: Questions about how human-environment-relations can be conceptualized in a non-dualistic way have been intensively discussed throughout the last decades. The majority of the established realist and constructivist perspectives aim at explaining a given situation by analytically dissecting it. Unfortunately, such an interactionist perspective systematically reproduces the dualistic division between humans, environment and nature. In contrast, this paper offers a transactive perspective origin in classical pragmatism and discusses its meta-theoretical consequences for human-environment-research. A transactionist perspective interprets the world as a flow of unique and entangled events. Instead of ontologically separating humans and environment, it advocates to look at their relations as being part of a "connatural world". Such a point of view raises new ethical and political questions for geographical human-environment research, argues for a renaissance of ideographic methodologies and hints to a fruitful unity of geographical inquiry.