Every year, the Editors of the RGS-IBG Area journal award the Area Prize for the best paper written by an early-career scholar, in recognition of excellent geographical scholarship.
Our congratulations to the 2025 winner, Madelaine Joyce 👏
Find out more and read the full paper ⬇️
Absolutely agree! There are amazing early career geographers pushing the discipline forward and it is brilliant that they see Area as a place for their work. BIG CONGRATULATIONS to this years winner and those highly commended!
Congratulations Maddie, richly deserved for an innovative and beautifully written paper!
Reading for the Area Prize each spring is a really lovely opportunity to engage with all the amazing early career work being produced across the discipline and that @areajournal.bsky.social is proud to publish. Well done to Maddie, Stefano, and Rosie on their excellent papers! @rgs.org
Screenshot of the 2025 Area Prize-winner announcement: Madelaine Joyce (Royal Holloway University of London, UK) “Sensing the sky’s edge: Atmospheric insights into the Korean demilitarised zone” With this innovative article, Madelaine Joyce pushes cultural and political geographers to attend closely and creatively to both affective and material atmospheres. Taking the anticipation of an encounter with the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea as both prompt and problematic for rethinking borders across fog, radio signals, and no-go zones, Joyce’s article is a deserving Area Prize winner.
🏆Area Prize Announcement!🏆
This year's Area Prize for the best paper written by an ECR has been awarded to 𝐌𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐉𝐨𝐲𝐜𝐞 for her paper 'Sensing the sky's edge: Atmospheric insights into the Korean demilitarised zone' ⬇️
doi.org/10.1111/area...
@maddiejoyce.bsky.social @rhulgeography.bsky.social
Screenshot of a highly commended paper in the 2025 Area Prize: Stefano Pagin (University of Leicester, UK) “Bringing nuance to real estate financialisation: Insights from Brazil” In this carefully argued article, Stefano Pagin and Daniel Sanfelici examine how institutions take shape within, and most importantly give shape to, the financialisation of real estate. The piece shows both the utility of broader political economic thought and cautions against overextending its analytical reach. It convincingly argues that contextualising financialisation in particular places enables it to be seen as one of many logics shaping urban geographies, making a significant contribution to thinking from and with the Global South.
The editors also recognised two highly commended authors:
Stefano Pagin for his co-authored paper with Daniel Sanfelici: 'Bringing nuance to real estate financialisation: Insights from Brazil' ⬇️
doi.org/10.1111/area...
@uniofleicester.bsky.social
Screenshot of a highly commended paper in the 2025 Area Prize: Rosie Knowles (University of Liverpool, UK) “Narrating health and well-being with vulnerable participants: The ethics of composite fiction as a creative method in health geographies” Area, 58(1), e70042 This impactful article by Rosie Knowles pushes health geographers towards a more sustained engagement with how composite fiction can be assembled ethically and rigorously. Reflecting on what it means to tell stories together and to build collective reflection into accounts of health geography, Knowles’ paper offers a creative and insightful methodological contribution.
& Rosie Knowles for her paper 'Narrating health and well-being with vulnerable participants: The ethics of composite fiction as a creative method in health geographies' ⬇️
doi.org/10.1111/area...
@livunigeog.bsky.social
We are looking to appoint an Assistant Professor in Human Geography with expertise in the field of Health Geography that will complement and extend current work in our Geographies of Life research cluster. Application deadline May 10th, further details here: durham.taleo.net/careersectio...
The July 14th publication date of FinTech Capital is fast approaching ...
Great day at the @naccomnetwork.bsky.social annual conference, an important reminder of all the amazing work underway across the UK to end destitution and support migrants' rights
Thanks Phil, that's quite the action shot you've captured there! Great to see you!
Now book-cover-official!
Coming this September:
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
Congratulations Jeremy, looks great!
Our response to the swathe of asylum reforms announced by the government over the past week naccom.org.uk/asylum-refor...
🍂 Our Autumn/Winter Trade Catalogue has arrived!
Discover the new non-fiction we're publishing Sept 2026 - Feb 2027.
New books from @tajali1.bsky.social, @davehaslam.bsky.social, @emilygarside.bsky.social, @jonnydarling.bsky.social & more: manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/catalogues/ #booksky
🚨DISASTER BRITAIN! 🚨
40% off select books on privatisation, securitisation, neoliberalism and decay.
www.plutobooks.com/disaster-bri...
As borders multiply, so too must resistance.
This reading list is an invitation to imagine a world beyond the violence of borders, and organize for a future where people are free to move: www.plutobooks.com/abolish-the-border-regime-a-reading-list/
"The power of the Glasgow welcome has not diminished"
An uplifting piece on hope and community 🧡
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
Thanks to everyone who has helped make this a great year for @areajournal.bsky.social! Authors, reviewers, and our intrepid managing editor!
Cc
@jonnydarling.bsky.social
A graphic showing the title page of Area on a black background with a large 'A' on the right hand page. On the left hand page are seven tiles with the names of papers in a Special Section titled 'Gender and Rewilding'. The papers are: 1) Gender and Rewilding: Introduction to the Special Section Nadia Bartolini 2) Rewilding: An emotional nature Sophie Wynne-Jones 3) Gendered, embodied knowledge within a Welsh agricultural context and the importance of listening to farmers in the rewilding debate Ffion Jones 4) Rewilding, gender and the transformation of the Côa Valley Nadia Bartolini, Bárbara Carvalho, Sarah May 5) ‘A canary is supposed to sit in a cage and look at someone else's happiness’: Domestic rewilding in fin-de-siècle St Petersburg Olga Petri 6) The politics of rewilding through an ecofeminist lens Sherilyn MacGregor 7) Rewilding Gender: Towards Relational Understandings of ‘the Wild’ Kim Ward
A graphic showing the title page of Area on a black background with a large 'A' on the right hand page. On the left hand page are nine tiles with the names of papers in the issue. The papers are: 1) Unravelling uneven livelihood transformations in China's multi-ethnic Southeast Asian borderland: Perspectives from spatial interactions Xiaobo Hua, Renshan Luo 2) Milk from the farm, the factory and the future: An ecofeminist reflection on Aotearoa New Zealand's dairy sector Milena Bojovic 3) Research methods for legal geography Francesco Chiodelli 4) Changing jobs, changing landscapes: Do land use patterns reflect occupational shifts? Armina Aktara, Manash Jyoti Bhuyan 5) Displaced attention: Bergson, attentive habits and Tony Conrad's drone music George Burdon 6) What does geography look like? Robert Shaw 7) Multispecies placemaking: Tibetan pastoralist perceptions of the COVID-19 pandemic Tsering Bum, Shuling Cheng 8) A mixed-methods approach to researching extreme heat: Insights from urban Ghana Katherine V. Gough, Ben M. Roberts, Ebenezer Forkuo Amankwaa, Karim Abdullah, Samuel Nii Ardey Codjoe, Ronald Reagan Gyimah, Raymond Kasei, Kevin J. Lomas, Frederick Wireko Manu, Peter Mensah, Eftychia Spentzou, Robert L. Wilby 9) Climate change sensing across work and home: A research diary experiment Febe De Geest, Carolina Contreras, Todd Denham, Patrick Bonney, Ashleigh Stokes, Blanche Verlie, Oluwadunsin Ajulo, Lauren Rickards
A graphic showing the title page of Area on a black background with a large 'A' on the right hand page. On the left hand page are eight tiles with the names of papers in a Special Section titled 'Participatory historical geographies'. The papers are: 1) Participatory historical geographies: Introduction Ruth Slatter, Edward Brookes 2) The Victoria County History and participatory historical geography Ruth Slatter 3) Mapping entangled mobilities: Using participatory historical geography to explore the migration of objects and people across (neo)colonial spatialities Sarah Linn, Jina Lee, Mariam Zorba, Caitlin Nunn, Jennifer Cromwell 4) Dancing in the archive: Bodily encounters, memory, and more-than-representational participatory historical geographies Lucy Thompson 5) Youth-led theatre for climate resilience and action at COP26 Kate Smith, Briony McDonagh, Sukhmandeep Dhillon 6) Participatory collaborations between geographers and performance artists: Taking urban renewal histories to the street Aled Singleton, Edward Brookes, Ruth Slatter 7) Watery archives: Reflections on doing participatory archival research for climate action and audience engagement Hannah Worthen, Claire Weatherall 8) ‘A series of abject failures’: Navigating the pitfalls of place-based participatory histories Juliette Desportes
A graphic showing the title page of Area on a black background with a large 'A' on the right hand page. On the left hand page are five tiles with the names three commentaries and two 'Ethics in/or geographical research' papers. The papers are: 1) ‘Good farming’ in a polycrisis: What could arts-led research offer? Agatha Herman, Liz Roberts 2) Reflecting on the restless volumetric place (re)naming race Sergei Basik 3) The architecture of whiteness Rhianna Garrett 4) Ethical mediation: Navigating research ethics and frictions in overseas fieldwork Sandra Hiari, Maiss Razem 5) Questions of power and ethics: Doing feminist research in methodological contexts that let the body lead Gabriel Baker
📢December Issue of Area📢
This issue features Special Sections on 'Gender & Rewilding' and 'Participatory Historical Geographies' alongside papers on topics from Tibetan pastoralist perceptions of the pandemic to research methods for legal geography ⬇️
rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14754762...
Spoke to Greek newspaper @tovimagr.bsky.social about #UK asylum and immigration proposals and how they may impact non-citizens already in the UK
tovima.com/world/reforms-will-make-peoples-lives-miserable-academic-warns-as-uk-moves-toward-new-asylum-model/
Cover of Occupied Refuge: Humanitarian Colonization and the Camp in Kenya by Hanno Brankamp. The cover features a black-and-white photograph of a refugee camp with small structures that have corrugated metal roofs. In the foreground, a dirt ground stretches across the image with people walking, sitting, and standing near a vehicle. A vertical yellow line runs from top to bottom, dividing the composition. The title and subtitle appear in white text on the left side of the cover, with the author's name at the bottom right.
In "Occupied Refuge," @hannobrankamp.bsky.social challenges the view of refugee camps as indispensable safe havens, showing that humanitarian missions often function as militarized occupations that treat camp inhabitants as colonized subjects. Read the intro for free now: buff.ly/IwyWW8p
Commentary on govt proposals to further restrict refugee protection, expand removals, and limit support. Talking tough will not fix govt failures on asylum, but it will hinder integration, cause harm, and further drive resentment towards those seeking protection theconversation.com/uk-to-overha...
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Anna Pearce (2025) entitled: 'Asylum as Artifice: Race, Law and Capital as Regimes of Abstraction in the United Kingdom's Asylum Accommodation System' with a red banner at the top. Taking as its case study the category of the ‘asylum seeker’ in UK law, this paper develops on latent concerns in legal geographies with processes of abstraction. Following Bhandar and Toscano, race, law and capital are here understood as different, co-articulating modalities of abstraction, through which the ‘asylum seeker’ is constituted and reconstituted by spatial practice and law over time. The case study charts the history of the category in UK law with the corresponding developments in the material and spatial infrastructures of asylum accommodation, from the point at which the ‘asylum seeker’ was first codified in UK law in 1993 to the delegitimisation of asylum itself in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and the Illegal Migration Act 2023. As well as providing the application of Bhandar and Toscano's innovative methodology to a new empirical area, I further make the case that, as well as functioning as organisational nodes for race and capital, legal objects may also serve as conduits. In this way, these differing regimes of abstraction are put into mutually influential relationships with one another, with particularly concerning implications for the independence of law from capital. Though the case study and its legislative context are necessarily narrow in order to properly trace the contours of this particular legal object, the potential application of the theoretical arguments developed from this tight focus is broad, contributing to studies of immigration law, asylum reception and processing, as well as legal geographies more widely.
New in TIBG:
'Asylum as artifice: Race, law and capital as regimes of abstractions in the United Kingdom's asylum accommodation system' by Anna Pearce
This paper charts the history of the category of 'asylum seeker' from 1993 to 2023.
doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Timely and critical Home Affairs Committee report on asylum accommodation noting failures over costs, safeguarding, and conditions. Disappointing the report stops short of proposing an overhaul and remains accepting of mass accommodation sites as a feasible model: www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...
This plan for housing is:
- Better for people seeking asylum
- Better for wider communities
- Cheaper for the taxpayer
Let’s use public money to buy quality homes for all people in our communities – not to fill the pockets of the mega wealthy.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdx4rrrvg8do
A graphic showing the title page of Area on a black background with a large 'A' on the right hand page. On the left hand page are seven tiles with the names of papers in a Special Section titled 'Gentle Geographies', and an editorial. The papers are: 1) Areas of opportunity Jeremy J. Schmidt, Mary Lawhon, Jonathan Darling, Eli D. Lazarus 2) Editorial: Towards more gentle geographies: Narrating a virtue turn, and possibilities for multi-tonal politics of activism and academic labour Matt Finn, Jayne M. Jeffries 3) The quiet politics and gentle literary activism behind the battle for Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument Laura Smith 4) Power in numbers/Power and numbers: Gentle data activism as strategic collaboration Jonathan Cinnamon 5) For diffident geographies and modest activisms: Questioning the ANYTHING-BUT-GENTLE academy John Horton 6) Treading carefully through tomatoes: Embodying a gentle methodological approach Laura Pottinger 7) CoPSE: A methodological intervention towards gentle more-than-human relations Suzanne Hocknell
A graphic showing the title page of Area on a black background with a large 'A' on the right hand page. On the left hand page are eight tiles with the names of papers in the issue. The papers are: 1) ‘What is visible… and what isn't’: A public art intervention for re-imagining the food system Ekaterina Gladkova, Naho Matsuda 2) Reimagining the streetscapes of Varanasi city: Public art, urban regeneration and smart city practices Iman Banerjee, Amrita Bajaj, Apala Saha 3) It takes a team to participate – Refining working participant observations through multiple researchers Maria Thulemark, Susanna Heldt-Cassel, Tara Duncan 4) Right-sizing the smart city in Southeast Asia Prerona Das, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong 5) The role of virtual field trips in Geography higher education: A perspective paper Elizabeth R. Hurrell, Simon M. Hutchinson, Lynda Yorke, Lesley C. Batty, M. Jane Bunting, Dan Swanton, Derek A. McDougall, Daniel R. Parsons 6) Is the spatial persistence of deprivation dependent on neighbouring areas? Stephen D. Clark, Fran Pontin, Paul Norman 7) ‘Backward geographies’: Contested lives and livelihoods in the tea plantation enclaves of South Asia Suranjan Majumder 8) On the forms of borderwork in public institutions: Bordering social security through conditions and tests Kathryn Cassidy, Gill Davidson 9) Navigating inequalities and shaping aspirations: The role of supplementary education in low-income immigrant youth's transition to selective secondary school Lara Landolt
A graphic showing the title page of Area on a black background with a large 'A' on the right hand page. On the left hand page are nine tiles with the names of papers in a Special Section titled 'Open Access Book Publishing: A Forum for Debate' and three 'Ethics in/of Geographical Research' papers. The papers are: 1) ‘The city is not for us’: Ethics, everyday sexism, and negotiating unwanted encounters during fieldwork Morag Rose 2) Participation, inclusion and reflexivity in multi-step (focus) group discussions Marina Korzenevica, Engdasew Feleke Lemma, Catherine Fallon Grasham, Khonker Taskin Anmol, Daniel Ekai Esukuku, Fahreen Hossain, Mercy Mbithe Musyoka, Saskia Nowicki, Dalmas Ochieng Omia, Salome A. Bukachi 3) The ‘creative thesis’ in the academic ‘anxiety machine’ Angela Last 4) Against book enclosures: Moving towards more diverse, humane and accessible book publishing Simon P. J. Batterbury, Andrea E. Pia, Gerda Wielander, Nicholas Loubere 5) Uneven geographies of power in UK higher education's conjunctural crisis: A response to Gandy Julie Cupples 6) Beyond open access: Book publishing in a metric culture Clancy Wilmott 7) Gandy & 'Books under threat': A response Frank Houghton 8) Challenges and opportunities for open access book publishing: A perspective from a society publisher in the geosciences Jenny Lunn, Kate Lajtha 9) Ex Libris: Books, creativity and academic freedom Matthew Gandy
📢September Issue of Area📢
Our latest issue features an editorial from our new team, a Special Section on 'Gentle Geographies', and a discussion forum on #OpenAccess book publishing.
Available to read here ⬇️
rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14754762...
Photo of a pile of books. The books are 'Debt Trap Nation' by Katherine Brickell and Mel Nowicki. Cover image features a woman and small child in a deep concrete basin or pit with no way of climbing out as the ladder is too short.
Just arrived:
Debt Trap Nation
by @kbrickell.bsky.social & Mel Nowicki
“A compelling call to action... shows how reimagining policy could deliver economic justice.” - @nicolajanesharp.bsky.social
Author royalties will be donated to @seacharity.bsky.social
www.agendapub.com/page/detail/...
