By Amy Donovan, University of Cambridge Fire fountain activity from the active fissure at Holuhraun during the early days of the eruption (photograph by Amy Donovan) In December 2018, I published a paper in Geo: Geography and Environment, entitled “Sublime Encounters: Commodifying the experience of the Geos”. The paper engages with theoretical approaches around the materiality and liveliness of the geos, and the ways in which its nonhuman forces have been commodified via volcano tourism. It then discusses the tensions between this view of the earth as something to be experienced, and the view ..read more

Liam Shaw, University of Oxford and Nicola C. Sugden, University of Manchester* A portable DNA sequencer in action. UGA CAES/Extension/Flickr The Democratic Republic of Congo is battling an Ebola outbreak. As is the case with any disease caused by pathogenic viruses – like Zika or influenza – Ebola spreads dangerously and unpredictably. This makes tracking the movement of viruses around the world a major challenge. Researchers have increasingly turned to DNA sequencing to help identify and track these sorts of diseases. They use portable DNA sequencers, which are the size of a USB and ca ..read more

Analysis of human-induced land-use changes, resulting in land cover patterns and understanding of its drivers, is hardly a new field of research, but with Homo sapiens continuously being the most dominating species of the Biosphere, the significance of the theme has not decreased. Humans have transformed more than half of the terrestrial land surface, in large part, for extraction and production of resources, with the claim now being made that we have entered into a new geological epoch, the “Anthropocene”. In our recently published paper in Geo (Site-specific modulators control how geophysica ..read more

By Carmen McLeod, Erika Szymanski, Joshua Evans, Anna Krzywoszynska, and Alexandra Sexton  Click to view slideshow. Microbes are everywhere. Headlines announce that microbes have been found in all sorts of spaces, from NASA’s cleanrooms to the vitreous fluid inside the human eye, in addition to such now-familiar residences as soil, skin, and all around our homes. And beyond simply being found, microbes are increasingly seen as significant and often valuable in virtually every space humans study—leading to more and more calls for research that flows between and beyond t ..read more

I guess I’m not alone in either struggling with GIS (Geographic Information System) technologies, or seeing colleagues struggle to effectively use it. When the GIS does not work, or when learning resources use jargon that the would-be GIS users do not understand, they tend to blame themselves. This should not be the case – though never intentional, badly designed systems, materials or practices should be held accountable and either improved or completely rethought. These problems exist, regardless of discipline, when using GIS. My professional experience includes working in private, public and ..read more

We are happy to announce the publication of a special issue on global environmental images in the Open Collections of Geo: Geography and Environment. Sebastian Grevsmühl directed the special issue with papers by Birgit Schneider, Sabine Höhler, Hervé Regnauld and Patricia Limido, Martin Mahony, and Sebastian Grevsmühl. As the editorial introduction states, this issue was put together in order to stimulate a “sustained interdisciplinary inquiry into global environmental images, paying close attention to the nature of this new type of global knowledge, the imaginaries mobilised, as well as the p ..read more

GEOGRAPHIES OF THE MICROBIOME Call for papers for a special edition of Geo: Geography and the Environment Microbial communities are fundamental components of every ecosystem and every species on the planet. Although recent advances have been made in understanding their interactions with human, animal and environmental well-being, many of the specific geographies and functional roles of microbial life remain uncertain. Answering these questions requires new forms of enquiry which reach across the domains of life, spaces, and disciplinary perspectives. We are seeking high-quality contributions ..read more

There has been significant academic coverage of the inequitable power dynamics of geographic knowledge production (c.f. Simonsen 2004; Ferenčuhová 2016).   By now, we are well-versed in the ways in which some representations and narratives win out over others.  We are attuned to the fact that the production of geographic knowledge is also a story of imperialism replete with racialized and gendered processes.  Emerging from this scholarship is the notion of a lopsided geography (Friedman 2016) characterized by the starkness of divisions between the core and periphery wherein ..read more

Geo: Geography and Environment recently published two papers on data practices in the geography. It is an accident they were published on the same day, but it presents an occasion for us, as editors, to reflect on two related issues in academic writing and publishing: the growing role of the data paper and the spatial (and often unequal) distribution of value between data production and theory generation. It is also good opportunity to remind people we have been promoting debate on open science and data in Geo since our 2015 launch, with the opening commentary from Sabina Leonelli et al and bl ..read more

By Amy Donovan, University of Cambridge Fire fountain activity from the active fissure at Holuhraun during the early days of the eruption (photograph by Amy Donovan) In December 2018, I published a paper in Geo: Geography and Environment, entitled “Sublime Encounters: Commodifying the experience of the Geos”. The paper engages with theoretical approaches around the materiality and liveliness of the geos, and the ways in which its nonhuman forces have been commodified via volcano tourism. It then discusses the tensions between this view of the earth as something to be experienced, and the view ..read more