Neoliberalising Education: New Geographies of Private Tuition,Class Privilege,and Minority Ethnic Advancement

Geographic research on neoliberalism has explored the restructuring of educational landscapes wrought through marketisation of preschool, school and higher-education provision and considered the responsibilisation of parents and children for educational outcomes. This study develops understanding of the contingent emergence of neoliberal educational reform, and its progressive and regressive impacts, through an examination of the burgeoning private tuition market in England and Wales. The paper outlines the contours of the previously hidden supplementary education industry, demonstrating that it reinforces regional and classed inequalities, while opening possibilities for ethnic minority advancement. Conceptually, the paper advances debate about socio-spatial specificity in neoliberal change, showing that the intersection of policy, free markets and consumer behaviour reshapes the educational landscape in ways that extend beyond state intention and control. Through these processes, contingent market forms are produced that offer social mobility for some, but ensure the social reproduction of enduring regimes of power.     

SPACES OF ENCOUNTER–DISPLACEMENT: CONTEMPORARY LABOUR MIGRANTS' RETURN VISITS TO LATVIA

The context of this paper is return visits to the homeland of labour migrants in Europe. The paper draws on data from the author's ethnographic fieldwork on the island of Guernsey and in Latvia during 2010–2012. By theorizing the relevance which the research participants attached to the phenomenon of corporeal co‐presence in relation to these visits, the paper bridges a timegeographic perspective with phenomenological interpretations. It explains how actual experience during the return path is influenced by both past trajectories and future anticipation. Return visits are conceptualized as spaces of encounter‐displacement and illustrated through examples of sensory and emotional experiences of anticipating for the return, the actual travel, time spent in the home area, and departure. The paper suggests that a focus on the body scale can help researchers to gain important insights into how the path is shaped through the corporeal experiences and how it shapes interpretations about home and possible future orientations.     

Using the Internet to Support International Collaborations for Global Geography Education

This paper reports the results of a pilot study that evaluated a prototype instructional module designed to support international collaborative learning in the World Wide Web. The module, Migration, was tested at four higher education institu tions in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Students valued the opportunity to learn global geography by collaborating electronically in multinational teams, yet many students complained about confusing instructional procedures and uncooperative team members. The results of the module evaluation provide useful suggestions for managing pedagogical issues related to the process of online international collaborative learning.     

Community resistance and the role of justice in shale gas development in the United Kingdom

Global energy policies embracing a transition to unconventional oil and gas development are hallmarks of many developed nations. Among these, the United Kingdom has framed the development of shale gas as one means to transition from high-carbon fossil-fuel consumption to low-carbon alternatives. Yet the introduction of this industry and recent legislation associated with it have not been without controversy. Communities throughout the United Kingdom are engaged in sustained debates concerning climate change, health, the scale of extraction footprints, securitisation, and governance. Places such as Kirby Misperton, the focus of this article, are representative of many villages where questions abound about the role of justice at all stages and scales of governmental decision-making. Using a legal geographic lens, this article examines narratives among local residents who are actively resisting the arrival of unconventional gas. I consider how the relationships between and among energy transition, policy, and justice have been interpreted by communities and argue for inequity and risk to be addressed in more transparent ways. I contend that highlighting counter-narratives remains essential if powerful arguments by governments and others are to be negated. Fundamentally, true justice can only prevail when all stakeholders are considered legitimate and their opinions valid.     

我们说什么?我们对谁去说?——在美国地理学家协会1987年年会上的讲话

地理学家的演讲与他们运用文字、图象所作的交流同样值得重视.美国的地理学可以通过下述途径得到加强,即围绕地点、地区和全球联系发展实质性演讲,促进自然地理的发展,恢复地理生态的传统.地理信息系统(geographic information systems)对于完成上述任务,对于改进地理学科以满足不断出现的需要,将是一个非常有用的工具.如果我们能够避免自己拆自己的台,避免不现实的空想,避免玩弄语言技巧,而是坚持在大学里进行高质量的教学,并在教师和从事地理实践工作的人员之间开展学术交流,那么地理学将会变得更加有效.我们有一个前所未有的机会来帮助改进美国的中小学地理教育.     

On Abolition Ecologies and Making “Freedom as a Place”

This introduction calls for political ecology to systematically engage with the ways that white supremacy shapes human relationships with land through entangled processes of settler colonialism, empire and racial capitalism. To develop the analytic of abolition ecology, we begin with the articulation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ abolition democracy together with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s spatially attuned analytic of abolition geography. Rather than define communities by the violence they suffer, abolition ecologies call for attention to radical place‐making and the land, air and water based environments within which places are made. To that end, we suggest that an abolition ecology demands attention to the ways that coalitional land‐based politics dismantle oppressive institutions and to the promise of abolition, which Gilmore describes as making “freedom as a place”.     

Practicing decolonial political geography: Island perspectives on neocolonialism and the China threat discourse

Island peoples around the world remain entangled in colonial processes. Western and metropolitan powers are increasingly deploying discourse of a ‘China threat’ to justify neocolonial entrenchment in the form of greater Western militarisation and economic dominance. In this paper, we investigate how Western and metropolitan powers use the China threat and warnings of economic, environmental, demographic, and military disaster to maintain and deepen colonial influence in former colonies, with special focus on four island states and territories: Guåhan/Guam in Oceania, Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland in the Arctic, Okinawa in East Asia, and Jamaica in the Caribbean. We undertake this investigation as a means of practicing decolonial political geography, collaborating as a group of scholars from around the world and drawing upon diverse epistemologies and experiences to inform collaborative research and writing. Due to the complexities we have confronted in our efforts to think outside coloniality, this paper foregrounds our decolonial methodology and process, even as we respect our empirical findings.     

Limits to climate action - Narratives of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage

In recent years, bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has been awarded a key role in climate mitigation scenarios explored by integrated assessment models and referenced in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Because a majority of scenarios limiting global warming to 2 °C or 1,5 °C include vast deployment of BECCS, a critical discussion has emerged among experts about the moral implications of thus introducing an unproven technology into the policy realm.In this paper, we analyse this discussion as it has played out between 2013 and 2019, with a focus on how expert narratives are constructed in the mass media about the possibilities for decarbonisation within the current political-economic order. We find there are almost no narratives that support massive deployment of BECCS, and that all narratives presuppose limits to decarbonisation imposed by the current political-economic system. The perception of such limits lead some to argue, through deterministic and apolitical narratives, for the necessity of negative emissions technologies, while others argue instead that “degrowth” is the only solution. Thus, there is a distinct lack of positive narratives about how capitalism can bring about decarbonisation.