Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Sergei Shubin & Diana Beljaars (2026) entitled: 'Organising Inequality: Viral Contamination of Healthcare Policies During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Wales' with a red banner at the top.
New in TIBG!
'Organising inequality: Viral contamination of healthcare policies during the COVID-19 pandemic in Wales' by Sergei Shubin & Diana Beljaars
doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
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Welcome to our research and higher education Bluesky! 👋
Follow us to stay up to date with our work in geographical research, including events, funding opportunities, new publications and more.
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A new paper by @marcoantonsich.bsky.social, our Reader in Political Geography, has been published open access in @tibg.bsky.social ⬇️
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Marco Antonisch (2026) entitled: 'Rethinking the Race–Nation Nexus: Spatial Narratives of Racialised Italians in the United Kingdom' with a red banner at the top. Nation and race are often theorised as closely intertwined, with nationalism frequently positioned as a driving force behind racism. The article advances an empirically grounded argument that challenges this assumed relationship. In particular, it explores how space, understood as a socially constructed category, is discursively mobilised in everyday conversations and interactions to articulate notions of nation and national belonging beyond race. Drawing on 32 individual interviews with racialised Italians living in the United Kingdom, the article shows how, outside Italy—a space regarded as saturated with whiteness—participants feel empowered to reclaim the nation from which they were excluded and to embrace alternative readings of nation which de-centre whiteness. These narratives reconfigure nation and national belonging not through opposition to racialised bodies (‘who’), but through proximity to or distance from particular practices, objects and im/material spaces (‘what’). The findings demonstrate that the race–nation nexus should not be conceptualised as an inevitable or intrinsic condition, but as a historical configuration rooted in a white fantasy of spatial hegemony which, while still powerful, is increasingly unsettled by the lived realities of growing racial diversity.
New in TIBG:
'Rethinking the race-nation nexus: Spatial narratives of racialised Italians in the United Kingdom' by Marco Antonisch
doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Neha Arora & Debbie Hopkins (2026) entitled: 'Truck dogs: Advancing a mobile geography of multispecies relations of care' with a red banner at the top. This paper demonstrates how multispecies relations co-constitute mobile work in road haulage under supply chain capitalism. Bringing labour and animal geographies into dialogue, we extend the concepts of carescapes and caringscapes to theorise the truck cab, route and logistical infrastructures as multispecies sites of care beyond the ‘static’ workplace. We use multiple methods to create multispecies narrative portraits, through which we reveal how caring labour—training and socialisation, embodied attunement, walking and the management of hygiene, risk and routine—enables truck dogs to travel and reshapes drivers' sensory orientations, working rhythms and well-being. We also show how organisational policies, regulatory regimes and infrastructural constraints render some forms of care legible as security, cleanliness, compliance and asset protection, whilst limiting or displacing others. At the same time, truck dogs offer companionship, routine and vigilance that can ease isolation and insecurity without resolving the structural harms of mobile work. We argue that supply chain capitalism is sustained through a mobile carescape in which care is continually negotiated across schedules, routes and institutional thresholds. By foregrounding these multispecies arrangements, the paper unsettles dominant accounts of where and how care is organised and advances a mobile geography of care attentive to the logistical conditions through which care is made possible, valued and constrained.
Photograph of a female truck driver in a high-vis jacket, jeans and baseball cap helping a large dog climb up into the cab of a truck in a car park.
New in TIBG:
'Truck dogs: Advancing a mobile geography of multispecies relations of care' by Neha Arora & @debbiehopkins.bsky.social
This paper explores relations between UK truckers & their companion dogs, examining the logistical conditions through which care takes place
doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Yafa El Masri (2026) entitled: 'When ‘Yes’ Means No: Understanding Infiltration as Refusal of Cultural Heritage Research in Palestine' with a red banner at the top.
New in TIBG:
'When "yes" means no: Understanding infiltration as refusal of cultural heritage research in Palestine' by Yafa El Masri
This paper reconceptualises Palestinian infiltration as a contemporary mode of research refusal under settler-colonial conditions.
doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Yafa El Masri (2026) entitled: 'When ‘Yes’ Means No: Understanding Infiltration as Refusal of Cultural Heritage Research in Palestine' with a red banner at the top.
New in TIBG:
'When "yes" means no: Understanding infiltration as refusal of cultural heritage research in Palestine' by Yafa El Masri
This paper reconceptualises Palestinian infiltration as a contemporary mode of research refusal under settler-colonial conditions.
doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
Check out OII DPhil alumna and St Anne's College Junior Research Fellow Yung Au's paper, which argues that worker movements in the data science community can help us rethink relationships of care and violence on Earth and beyond.
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers by William Monteith (2026) entitled: 'Green Refrontierisation: Critical Cartographies of the Hydrogen Rush in Africa' with a red banner at the top. Land is a critical requirement of low-carbon energy transitions, driving global land acquisitions on an unprecedented scale. Under pressure to diversify and decarbonise their energy mix, European states and investors have begun to map the ‘green hydrogen potential’ of territories on the African continent, producing powerful new visualisations of energy space. This article provides a critical cartographic analysis of the green hydrogen (GH2) maps present within the reports of European states, lobby groups and investment bodies to examine the role of geographical knowledge in the production of low-carbon energy frontiers. It identifies three spatio-political strategies present within these maps: spatialising hydrogen potential, territorialising hydrogen space and (re)mobilising fossil fuel infrastructure. Together, these strategies form part of a broader process that I term ‘green refrontierisation’: the assembling of low-carbon energy frontiers atop the remnants of colonial and carbon frontiers. Through a particular focus on the Namibian case, the article's findings advance debates at the intersection of energy geographies and critical cartography by demonstrating how low-carbon energy frontiers (re)spatialise land around a series of dynamic environmental processes rather than the subterranean resources that have historically guided geographical thinking.
New in TIBG:
'Green refrontierisation: Critical cartographies of the hydrogen rush in Africa' by William Monteith
This paper provides a critical cartographic analysis of the green hydrogen maps within the reports of European states, lobby groups & investment bodies.
doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geo
New in TIBG:
'Pandemic geographies of home: Domestic thresholding in response to COVID-19' by Alison Blunt et al.
This paper introduces the concept of 'thresholding' to explore how internal & external thresholds are materialised through embodied practice.
doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Emma McRae (2026) entitled: 'Visualising the Urban Imaginary: Failure and Irresolution in an Urban Digital Twin' with a red banner at the top.
New in TIBG:
'Visualising the urban imaginary: Failure and irresolution in an urban digital twin' by Emma McRae
doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
A promotional tile for the new collection in Transactions on Geographies of Responsibility, Care and Repair in Digital Worlds of AI. The graphic shows three images of the globe: a satellite image, an image with cities lit up, and a black outlined globe evocative of the world wide web symbol. This collection was organised by Jessica McLean with Louise Read, Karen Lai, Markus Breines and Sneha Krishnan, with contributions from Margath Walker, Jamie Winders, Yung Au, Katarzyna Cieslik, Nikko Stevens and Jack Jen Gieseking. The image has the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers logo and the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) logo at the top.
New in TIBG:
'Geographies of Responsibility, Care and Repair in Digital Worlds of AI' guest edited by Jess McLean et al.
This collection features four short pieces reflecting on questions of governance of and accountability for AI.
rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1...
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Nikko Stevens and Jack Jen Gieseking (2025) entitled: 'A Reply on Responsibility and Repair in AI: Lessons From Outer Space, Agriculture and Gay Hookup Apps' with a red banner at the top. This afterword examines artificial intelligence (AI) as the latest iteration of digital capitalism's utopian promises and resultant violences, while situating AI within broader conversations on responsibility and repair in digital geographies. Building from what Lucy Suchman describes as its ‘strategic vagueness’, and much like ‘big data’ in the 2010s, AI is promoted through power and manipulation: supposedly able to solve social, political and environmental crises, while obscuring its colonial and racist infrastructures. Responding to interventions by Katarzyna Cieslik, Yung Au and Margath Walker with Jamie Winders, we trace the ways AI's supply chains span from agricultural megafarms to outer space, and we bring in another intimate geography of AI: the work of Trust & Safety professionals, particularly those working in dating and hookup apps. We argue that AI itself cannot serve as an agent of repair in the harms it causes. Instead, repair emerges through human networks of accountability and care, informed by feminist, Black, queer, trans and decolonial frameworks.
In the collection's afterword, @drnikko.bsky.social & Jack Jen Gieseking examine AI as the latest iteration of digital capitalism's utopian promises & resultant violences:
'A reply on responsibility and repair in AI: Lessons from outer space, agriculture and gay hookup apps'
doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Katarzyna Cieslik (2025) entitled: 'The Dismal Harvest: The Uneven Landscapes of AI in Agriculture' with a red banner at the top. In this intervention, I examine artificial intelligence (AI) in agriculture through a political ecology lens, analysing how promises of productivity, efficiency, and sustainability take shape across uneven postcolonial landscapes. Building on feminist and critical agrarian perspectives, I focus on the material relations of farming to show that AI in agriculture, often portrayed as immaterial, relies on deeply material infrastructures—sensors, data centres, energy systems, and extractive supply chains. Tracing how AI-driven digital agriculture and smart agriculture reconfigure relations between farmers, land, and technology, I argue that care for agroecosystems is increasingly displaced by care for digital infrastructures, with dire consequences for the social and ecological relations that sustain rural labour, land, and livelihoods. Focusing on emergent applications of AI in agriculture in the Global South, I show how these technologies consolidate corporate power, erode agrarian knowledges, and reproduce postcolonial inequalities under neoliberal capitalism. I conceptualise AI as a socioecological fix, stressing the need to re-spatialise and historicise technological change in the context of agrarian change, by attending to its infrastructural and ecological entanglements. I situate this analysis within debates on economies of repair, arguing that understanding AI in agriculture requires attention not only to breakdown and failure but also to the everyday practices of repair—technical, ecological, and social—that sustain digital infrastructures and reveal the uneven burdens of maintaining them across agrarian worlds. This intervention contributes to the Themed Intervention, 'Geographies of Responsibility, Care and Repair in Digital Worlds of AI'.
In the third piece, Katarzyna Cieslik examines AI through a political ecology lens, focusing on farming and digital agriculture.
'The dismal harvest: The uneven landscapes of AI in agriculture'
doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Yung Au (2025) entitled: 'Computers in Our Cosmos: Intersections in Geographies of Care, Abolition Geographies and Worker Movements' with a red banner at the top.
In the second piece, Yung Au considers technological expansion into outer space through a lens of care and governance.
'Computers in our cosmos: Intersections in geographies of care, abolition geographies and worker movements'
doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Margath Walker & Jamie Winders (2025) entitled: 'Artificial Intelligence and the Temporalities of Responsibility and Risk' with a red banner at the top. As creators of artificial intelligence (AI) begin to express regret over their role in its development, some are suggesting the need to take responsibility for the technology‘s effects. As part of the TIBG Themed Intervention which asks, ‘What does it mean to take responsibility and enact care and repair in the realm of AI?’, we consider how responsibility is being mobilised in and through AI. We first track the spatio-temporal dimensions of responsibility in AI and, second, chart the connections and gaps between a language of responsibility and a language of risk in recent AI developments. Thinking through where, and when, responsibility surfaces in the genealogy of AI and how responsibility does, and does not, feed into conversations around AI, we suggest, is essential to better understanding the complicated spatio-temporalities of responsibility to, within, and of AI systems.
In the first piece of the collection, Margath Walker & Jamie Winders think through where & when 'responsibility' surfaces in conversations around AI.
doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Screenshot of a paper abstract in TIBG by Jessica McLean, Louise Reid, Karen P. Y. Lai, Markus Roos Breines & Sneha Krishnan (2026) entitled: 'Geographies of Responsibility, Care and Repair in Digital Worlds of AI: Introduction to the Themed Intervention' with a red banner at the top. The presence of AI in everyday life has dramatically increased and intensified in the last few years. From playing a role in teaching and research activities within educational institutions, to becoming a ubiquitous feature in search engines and in all manner of apps, AI is now omnipresent. While geographers have long examined the role of AI in various ways, in this Themed Intervention we highlight often overlooked dimensions of responsibility, care and repair in the mobilisation and impacts of AI. This Themed Intervention questions the genealogy of AI and its creators' duty of care towards the real-life impacts of its operationalisation, how AI might be (responsibly) governed to reduce these impacts and how responsibility is or should be devolved across different actors (e.g., individualistic or collective responsibilities). We acknowledge that despite its potential for positive ends, AI has already caused damage to people, societies, environments and therefore question whether repair (of the people–AI relation, of AI consequences) is possible, what form this can or should take as well as how the faults of AI can be corrected. By exploring care, the contributors share concern with caring for and of AI, including its current impacts and futures, with each contribution ruminating on how caring relations are configured. We argue that if we focus on dimensions of care and repair when critically evaluating the discursive and material realities of AI, issues relating to responsibility are impossible to ignore.
In their introduction to the collection, Jess McLean, Louise Reid, @karenpylai.bsky.social, Markus Breines & @snehakrishnan.bsky.social reflect on the increasing presence of AI in everyday life.
rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
A promotional tile for the new collection in Transactions on Geographies of Responsibility, Care and Repair in Digital Worlds of AI. The graphic shows three images of the globe: a satellite image, an image with cities lit up, and a black outlined globe evocative of the world wide web symbol. This collection was organised by Jessica McLean with Louise Read, Karen Lai, Markus Breines and Sneha Krishnan, with contributions from Margath Walker, Jamie Winders, Yung Au, Katarzyna Cieslik, Nikko Stevens and Jack Jen Gieseking. The image has the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers logo and the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) logo at the top.
New in TIBG:
'Geographies of Responsibility, Care and Repair in Digital Worlds of AI' guest edited by Jess McLean et al.
This collection features four short pieces reflecting on questions of governance of and accountability for AI.
rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1...
We would love for @jaytoddgla.bsky.social’s and my critical response to be read widely, given the Sullivan Review’s potential for far-reaching implications across the social and health sciences — and indeed well beyond the academy
This piece has been covered in the Times Higher Education - read more here below ⬇️
www.timeshighereducation.com/news/trans-r...
Screenshot of an intervention abstract in Transactions by Jay JD Todd & Felicity Callard (2026) entitled: 'A Critical Response to the UK's ‘Sullivan Review’ Into Sex and Gender in Research and Data' with a red banner at the top. This intervention argues that the UK Government-commissioned independent review of data, statistics and research on sex and gender (the ‘Sullivan Review’) implicitly promotes the erasure of trans and gender diverse people from research and data collection protocols and carries worrying implications for the inclusion of trans people within UK institutions and for critical social science research. Set in a context where trans and gender diverse people's rights are being rolled back in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, the Review attempts to install a singular model of binary, immutable, ‘biological’ sex as incontrovertible across data gathering on sex and gender across public bodies including government, universities, the health service and research organisations. It does so via appeals to science and to ‘clarity’, and by proposing to limit or even in certain cases remove default ethical review processes. The intervention argues that the Review can be situated within broader attempts to erase critical inquiry into the complex, intersectional production of social categories including sex, gender and sexuality, as well as inquiries that extend what ethical principles and governance involve. In sum, we contend that the Review carries deleterious consequences for geography and other social scientific disciplines and call upon scholars to refuse its vision and implications.
New Intervention in TIBG:
'A critical response to the UK's "Sullivan Review" into sex and gender in research and data' by @jaytoddgla.bsky.social & @felicitycallard.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1111/tran...
Jay Todd @jaytoddgla.bsky.social and I have published today in @tibg.bsky.social a critical response to the UK Government-commissioned "Sullivan Review" of sex and gender in data and research collection
rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Published today in TIBG ⬇️
New in TIBG:
'Digital disease ecologies: Encounter, datafication and the digital geographies of One Health' by @kirkham.bsky.social
This paper examines the use of the Snake Awareness Rescue Protection App in Kerala, India, through the lens of 'digital disease ecologies'.
doi.org/10.1111/tran...
New article for @tibg.bsky.social. Through the case of digital snake rescue, I merge @digicologies.bsky.social and disease ecology work to develop the lens of 'digital disease ecologies' - a way to analyse how digital encounter and datafication configure disease emergence and multispecies health.
New papers - on events, with some wonderful collaborators!
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Hector Becerril, Ben Anderson & Alejandro de Coss Corzo (2026) entitled: 'The Life of Events: Exception and Everyday Life in Acapulco, Mexico' with a red banner at the top. The paper focuses on the event of ‘Ingrid-and-Manuel’—a Hurricane and Tropical Storm that hit Acapulco, Mexico in 2013. It traces what this event was and how it remains for people in and beyond Acapulco. It does so in the context of a place where the lines between events and everyday life are often blurred, and yet the event was still named and felt as an exception to ordinary life. By focusing on how exceptionality was and is produced, the paper supplements how human geography understands and relates to events, arguing for an approach that focuses on the ‘life of events’: following how events begin, happen, change, end and live on. This approach sits between social constructivist and realist approaches to events, orientating inquiry to the ongoing mediation of impactive experience, via Lauren Berlant's work. Through this approach, the paper tracks the affective-material variations through which Ingrid-and-Manuel became and remains an exception: excess, (dis)connection, loss and damage, recovery.
New in TIBG:
'The life of events: Exception and everyday life in Acapulco, Mexico' by Hector Becerril, @benandersongeog.bsky.social & @alejandrodecoss.bsky.social
This paper draws on Berlant to consider how certain events, such as storms, become exceptions to ordinary life.
doi.org/10.1111/tran...
🚨*New publication alert*🚨
My new article is a true labour of love that grapples with the fugitive mobilities of migrants in Kenya. Through their stories, I think about escape, im/mobility, life-seeking, freedom and border abolitionism at the margins.
rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Hanno Brankamp (2025) entitled: 'Fugitive Junctures: Life-Seeking, Route-Finding and the Mobile Ensemble at Kenya's Borders' with a red banner at the top. Fugitivity has become an important conceptual frame to understand the illegalised mobilities of contemporary migrants. Their furtive movements in the shadows of modern border regimes echo enslaved people's historical lines of flight and enact similar spatial praxes through which they aim to seize their own freedom. Thinking from Kenya, and drawing on qualitative research with migrants, border officials, activists, police and smugglers, this article critically intervenes in these debates by offering an analysis of ‘fugitive junctures’: decisional moments in time when individual flightpaths conjoin, are renegotiated and reworked by migrants on the run. Drawing on recent debates in Black geographies, critical migration studies and abolitionist scholarship, the article develops a detailed understanding of these junctures to give more texture to the notion of ‘fugitivity’ whose relative mutability has often limited its analytical value in migration research. While their locus may be shifting depending on context, fugitive junctures are nonetheless recognisable by the three existential pursuits that they mediate during migrant journeys: life-seeking, route-finding and the mobile ensemble. In examining what structures different stages of escape mobilities, this article ultimately sheds light on the building blocks of a living counter-cartography of freedom which lays bare the difficult and circuitous road to abolition.
New in TIBG:
'Fugitive junctures: Life-seeking, route-finding and the mobile ensemble at Kenya's borders' by @hannobrankamp.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky
Final issue of the year - and so much great work! More next year : )