Theme issue  

The paper discusses how virtual reality (VR) could make a difference to geographic education. A key argument is that virtual immersive environments were acquired affectively and emotionally by users. This should be considered for the processes of consuming, producing, and mediating geographic knowledge via and with VR. To discuss this a teaching and research project is presented in which students produced VR field trips based on empiric research in the cities of Vienna and Berlin.

Part of a 20-year engagement with descendants of those displaced during the colonial era trying to reclaim land now occupied by a British-owned sisal plantation in Kenya, this research aims to contribute to efforts to make use of nonrepresentational theory in geography to advance sustainable development. It does so in the context of China's Belt and Road Initiative dreamscape of megaproject infrastructure investment.

Visions for the future drive current practices and shape daily lives. This is also true for different groups of actors involved in the Bagré Growth Pole Project in Burkina Faso, an initiative to promote agricultural development in one of the poorest countries in the world. Based on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how ideas of the future are used to explain and legitimize how the project proceeds and how lingering conflicts remain unsolved as the future is prioritized.

To understand farmers and beekeepers' perceptions of future waterscapes in the Swiss Jura, we applied the novel technique of speculative photo-response fabulation. In the fields, farmers and beekeepers photographed landscapes depicting their relationships to water. Many imagined the probable futures of the picture-framed waterscapes to be like southern regions nowadays. In reaction to their degradation, participants envision plural desired pathways expressing engaged geographies of futures.

This paper looks at the possibilities and difficulties of producing short comic stories with interviewees in order to find out about the way in which they remember that past and anticipate the future. The study this paper is based on was conducted by three artists and one geographer with people who live close to a planned development corridor in Kenya. The results suggest that the presented method can offer unique insights by making abstract ideas of the future more concrete.