Wir untersuchen wie BürgerInneninitiativen im Kontext emotionalisierter Umweltwahrnehmungen Rhetoriken von Nähe nutzen, um sichere Fahrradinfrastruktur einzufordern. Wir zeigen durch Bild- und Sprachanalysen wie Anliegen von Sicherheit und Lebensqualität in einer Sprache der Nähe artikuliert werden. Nahes wird so zum Eigenen und Selbstbestimmten. Diese Raumaneignungen markieren Fahrraddemonstrationen als relevante Protestform, die Emotionen transformieren und Umweltwahrnehmungen intensivieren.

This article examines a collaborative theatre project on the climate crisis from an autoethnographic perspective. The collaboration of scientists and artists created affective atmospheres that opened up spaces for reflection on scientific practice in the context of posthumanist theories: To what extend do we perceive our material environment as powerful? How are bodies and affects entangled in knowledge production? In what ways we still reproduce dualisms and fixed identities?

The relevance of the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars to the posthumous reception of Ratzel's work cannot be overestimated; Kjellen in particular was one of the main protagonists of Ratzel's revival. Kjellen and Schmitt appropriated and transformed Ratzel's concepts for their research aims, in order to highlight a new turning point in the political and juridical sciences and in politics. As a consequence, their Ratzel was oriented toward militant aims.

The paper examines the contribution of Italian academic geography to the processes of nation-building between ca. 1880–1920, especially in defining the national space and its boundaries. Italian geographers were particularly influenced by new approaches introduced by German scholars such as Friedrich Ratzel. Scientific theories and representations proved highly significant in influencing the political debate.

The text explains the main topics and conceptual arguments of the theme issue on the diverse reception of Ratzel's spatial theories in Italy, France, Germany and the USA. The focus is both on the different national academic traditions and on an interdisciplinary approach. The work and impact of Friedrich Ratzel between 1880 and 1945 are examined in the perspective of a history of transformation based on the history of knowledge.

The French geographers of the inter-war period considered the figure of Ratzel with admiration and criticism and tried to go beyond his work, and even to use it against his heirs, in particular the supporters of Geopolitik. Throughout the crises and world wars that gave him a persistent relevance, his image oscillated between that of a precursor scholar and a bad teacher of geography, largely responsible for Germany's excesses and territorial ambitions.

This article analyses the transformation of geographic, international legal and racial-biological relations within large-scale theories. The change in discourse implies the question of the extent to which geographical knowledge was relevant for the Nazi extermination policy; at the same time, the focus is on the shift from a description of human communities based on natural laws to an action-based programme of racial-biological homogenization.

Drawing on qualitative research on the production and use of weather information for small-scale farmers in western Kenya in the context of a changing climate, this paper shows how navigating the uncertainties of the weather is enabled by a combination of scientific and experiential knowledge. Inspired by work in science and technology studies, I argue that these different forms of knowing should not be treated in opposition but as connected resources through which farmers relate to their world.

Policymakers and academics primarily discuss the use of data from Earth observation (EO) satellites by developing countries, to promote development, at a theoretical level. Accordingly, based on interviews and other methods, this paper looks at practices and experiences of researchers, who use such data in southwest Nigeria, arguing that we need to develop more collaborative and appreciative perspectives on science in developing countries to address our global challenges.

The cultural memory of Aleida and Jan Assmann has received little recognition in international geography. However, by focusing on the concerns of a geographical study of places of memory, it is possible to develop a spatially oriented conception of cultural memory spaces based on the assumption that places of memory cannot be a storage, but only an anchor for memories.

At the end of XIXth century, French authors shared a posture that mixed admiration and criticism toward German science. Reference to Ratzel was used both for structuring human geography and feeding a struggle between geographers and other social scientists. Divergences with Ratzel’s work deepened during the war and lead geographers to revisit his key notion, Raum, by giving it a pragmatic sense in the light of pangermanism and interpreting it not as mere expanse but as a process of enlargement.

Scientific freedom involves three aspects: Freedom as power and privilege, freedom as a right of defence, and freedom as autonomy for self-regulation. But how to decide in science when science itself has marked all scientific criteria as contingent? At this point, the article proposes to acknowledge the decision-making challenges in science, to engage in theory-theoretical dialogues and thus to preserve autonomy.

Halford J. Mackinder's heartland theory became one of the most popular and cited geopolitical concepts in the 20th century. Through a complex process of trans- and international reception and adaption, the theory lost its attachment to its original geographical and historical parameters. Its translation from text into a simplified representation in maps accompanied the process of popularization and made the theory an instrument of legitimizing political actions in the public sphere.

The authors of this editorial call for a more consistent opening of population geography in epistemological, methodological and theoretical respects. They want to point out possibilities of connection to debates that have already found a firm place in other fields of human geography. At the same time, it is a concern to emphasize the necessity of continuously subjecting the discussion of the phenomenon of population to critical scrutiny, both within (human) geography and outside of it.