Promotional videos are a key site through which cellular agriculture (CellAg) companies present cultured meat as a response to food system and environmental crises. Yet research on promissory narratives around alternative proteins has focused mainly on textual and news media, leaving the audio-visual organization of these promises underexplored. This paper analyses 41 promotional videos produced by CellAg companies and asks how they translate cellular-level bio-technological processes and planetary-scale crises into persuasive narratives of sustainable protein futures. Using qualitative multi-modal coding, we identify six recurring narrative patterns through which videos link laboratory scenes, crisis imagery, consumer spaces, and ethical appeals. Interpreting these patterns through Latour's concept of translation, we show that the videos do more than describe a technology: they align scientific expertise, future-oriented promises, and affective attachments in ways that render CellAg intelligible and desirable to non-expert publics. We argue that these promotional videos function as translational infrastructures that help companies frame cultured meat as a credible, investable, and morally desirable component of future protein production. In doing so, this paper contributes to research on promissory narratives, multi-modal communication, and the politics of emerging food technologies.
The Songon sub-prefecture is now being overtaken by the urbanisation of the city of Abidjan. It is against this backdrop that the Ivorian government has entered into commitments with the customary landowners of the village of Songon-Kassemblé to transfer 439 ha of land. However, irregularities in the payment of compensation have led customary landowners to challenge the authority of the State through popular protests, giving them a leading role in negotiations related to land appropriation issues. One of the specificities of this case study lies in the modification of the interplay of actors during the development process of this urban fringe.
The interplay between regional disparities and electoral outcomes is central to understanding political dynamics in Europe. In debates on the “geography of discontent”, radical-right party support is often linked to so-called left-behind regions. This study broadens that perspective by examining the electoral support of multiple party families across different region types in 22 European countries. The analysis combines regional socio-demographic indicators with the most recent national election results available up to March 2025. First, a k-means cluster analysis identifies six region types by grouping regions according to socioeconomic profiles. Second, comparisons of weighted vote shares across these region types provide insights into the main strongholds of each party family. The findings show systematic electoral differences across region types. Green and radical-left parties receive the strongest support in urban clusters. Social-democratic parties are strongest in rural, disadvantaged regions and weakest in industrial ones, while conservative parties peak in industrial regions and underperform in deindustrialized metropolises. Radical-right parties are most successful in structurally disadvantaged regions and in growing industrial regions. Overall, the study highlights the value of regional typologies for understanding electoral patterns, offering a broader perspective on how regional development shapes party competition across Europe.
In current debates about socio-ecological transformations in Germany, local resistance to transformation projects is frequently interpreted as a problem of acceptance or as an expression of “transformation fatigue”. Such framings treat resistance primarily as an attitudinal or communicative deficit. This intervention offers a different reading by illustrating how socio-ecological transformation is contested within the administrative practices of local governance. Drawing on selective ethnographic insights from the East German town of Zeitz, we examine local conflicts around a federally funded municipal sustainability programme implemented in the context of the coal phase-out and structural change policies. Rather than appearing as open ideological rejection, resistance emerges through procedural interventions framed in terms of administrative responsibility, feasibility, and fiscal constraints. We conceptualize these dynamics as anti-transformation: a mode of contestation that emerges when current socio-ecological transformation agendas become subject to municipal democratic decision-making. In this context, legitimate concerns acquire political force through their articulation at decisive institutional moments. Rather than treating such interventions as examples of post-political or anti-political governance, we argue that they reveal how politics is enacted through administrative procedures themselves. Transformation is therefore not simply implemented or resisted at the municipal level; it is negotiated, redirected, delayed, and sometimes undone through the ordinary practices of local governance. Our intervention concludes by proposing anti-transformation as an analytical perspective and a research agenda for political geography, calling for closer empirical attention to the procedural organization of decision-making in socio-ecological transformation projects.
Attacks on academic freedom target mainly critical scholarship: academics who challenge, criticize and debate power relations and inequality lack confidence, not only in authoritarian countries but also in democracies such as Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Critical research in the fields of climate change, postcolonial studies and gender equality is increasingly under fire in public debates. These are the scientific fields in which many geographers do research and teach. With the authoritarian turnaround in many countries, neoliberal trends in research funding and the rising influence of online media activists on political decisions, attacks on researchers and research areas have taken on a new quality. In order to fight for academic freedom, it is important to understand the principles of and threats against freedom of expression, freedom of speech, university autonomy and academic freedom clearly. Restrictions of these freedoms have different consequences in the areas of teaching, university self-administration, research acknowledgement and the acquisition of third-party funding. This paper highlights the challenges and proposes measures to safeguard academic freedom for critical geography.
library etiquette.
Public libraries in cities offer a variety of uses. They are places where people with different interests must explore and negotiate their being together. Although these encounters have the potential to be conflictual, visitors, librarians and external representations of many libraries describe these places as urban spaces characterised by low conflict and smooth interaction. They associate this public infrastructure with idealised notions of togetherness, where acceptance of different behaviours, self-control, and a sense of obligation to maintain and shape these shared urban spaces are interwoven, enabling a sense of togetherness. This paper focuses on the specific nature of this sociality. Based on two independent library research projects conducted in Bremen, Germany, and Vienna, Austria, we demonstrate how community emerges as an idea and a sense of togetherness from distributed care practices that revolve around following, transgressing and enforcing rules and thus around a „library etiquette“.
The literature on ontological security has considerably improved our understanding of how crises, disruptions, and their perceptions lead to subjective insecurities or anxieties. In particular, it has illuminated how individuals cope with the insecurities of late modernity by searching for stabilizing anchors, such as routines and biographical continuity. While existing research on ontological security has largely examined narrative strategies and identity constructions, this article shifts the focus onto active, embodied, and situated practice. Based on a qualitative case study of the Schäferlauf – a biannual traditional festival in Bad Urach, Germany – we show how heritage practices can function as stabilizing anchors in times of crisis. Through qualitative fieldwork including interviews and photograph elicitation, we analyse how the festival enables individuals to anchor their identities through embodied and place-based practices, such as wearing traditional costumes and participating in preparations. These practices generate a sense of continuity in personal biographies, and reinforce social ties and place identity. This study provides new directions for research on festivals as sites of social and cultural stability and continuity, while also laying the groundwork for further research into ontological security as an embodied and situated practice.
Blaha Lujza tér, one of Budapest's central public squares, has undergone repeated transformations, from socialist modernisation to its renewal in 2022. This paper explores urban loss not as disappearance, but as a process that reorganises material space, social rhythms, and everyday relations. Using archival photographs, contemporary fieldwork, oral histories, and analysis of online sentiment, the study traces how the square's dense and improvised sociability has thinned into more fleeting forms of public life. The redesign introduced open paving, reduced shade, and automated infrastructures, producing what urban scholars describe as aesthetic and moral ordering. These material configurations intersect with platform-based mobility, as delivery riders and transient users increasingly shape the square's social life. Sociability persists, but as fleeting encounters, regulated by circulation rather than lingering. This paper argues that loss in Blaha is processual and relational and felt through changes in how people wait, gather, and recognise one another. Rather than a nostalgic account, the study shows how publicness is being redefined through design, visibility, and algorithmic governance, revealing the everyday textures of loss in a contemporary post-socialist city.
This article underlines how cemeteries, despite being designed and managed as silent spaces, have recently started to see their soundscapes become increasingly entangled with the surrounding urban noise. I propose an analysis of the soundscape produced by local cemetery rules and regulations from the Lyon metropolitan area (France) through the lenses of legal geography before contrasting their normative ambitions with observed noise data. I then discuss those results' meaning through reference to H. Lefebvre's Right to the city
This article introduces the deactivation network approach (DNA) to analyse conflicts in fossil fuel infrastructures as relational struggles between practices of continuity/legitimation and practices of destabilisation/disruption. The DNA is applied to Enel's power plants in Civitavecchia (Italy) across two contentious conversion cycles: an oil-to-coal project (2000–2010, realised) and a proposed coal-to-gas project (2018–2023, halted). Using an intentionally asymmetrical design, the study maps only the deactivation network and treats the fossil-support network as a structuring context shaping political opportunity structures. Event-based social network analysis, triangulated with interviews, documentary sources, and digital ethnography, compares changes in network composition, connectivity, and tie intensity across the two periods. Results show that mobilisation and activist cohesion alone did not produce disruption. Deactivation became effective when activists' destabilisation was brokered into institutional and labour arenas, enabling administrative and political interference with infrastructural continuity.
This article focuses on the experience of loss in urban spaces in late modernity, taking as a graphic example the construction of an urban highway and its consequences in a densely populated and geographically challenging area in western Germany. This article argues that the shift in social narratives during the transition from modern to late-modern society had a direct impact on the perception of loss caused by previously autocratic urban planning and, thus, also had a direct influence on urban construction projects in times “after the boom” of the 1960s and the early 1970s.
This article presents an edited transcript of a roundtable discussion originally held at the conference Feminist Perspectives on the Platformisation of Care Work in European Cities
In the wake of increasing geopolitical tensions and the disruption of supply chains, the EU has asked member states to develop a National Protein Strategy (NPS). This paper investigates the National Protein Strategy of the Netherlands, an important producer and global exporter of meat and dairy products that largely relies on the import of plant-based proteins from across the globe. The paper analyses the promissory narratives of protein futures as outlined in the NPS. It shows that the strategy is riddled with techno-optimist narratives that are promising to resolve the strategic deficit of proteins through a combination of increased legume production, innovative novel proteins, a scale leap in insect farming, and the optimization of waste flows. Only a surprisingly small role is reserved for a protein transition towards more plant-based consumption. A reduction in the production of meat and dairy for export is completely ignored. The paper concludes that the NPS primarily sustains and stabilizes the existing intensive livestock regime rather than transforming it.
In this academic conversation we reflect on authoritarianism and its implications for research and researchers. Framed within the global authoritarian turn, the conversation explores a variety of practical, methodological, and ethical challenges of researching authoritarian politics, practices, and spaces.Specifically, we discuss losing field access due to repression or violence, followed by a reliance on secondary materials; the censorship or closure of media and the challenges of working with ephemeral digital material; and the declining reliability of sources due to manipulation, silencing, and displacement. These conditions force researchers to consider when data become too compromised to continue inquiry while simultaneously highlighting ethical dilemmas about protecting vulnerable contacts – including from repressive state practices that shift over time and create new vulnerabilities. The conversation contributes to the burgeoning literature on research in authoritarian contexts and argues that audiences from the broader West have much to learn from those in the post-socialist East.
The article explores the reproductive experiences in Swiss federal asylum camps, arguing that these camps function as carceral spaces that severely impact women's reproductive lives through logics of fragmentation. Combining insights from carceral geography and studies on reproductive health, the authors argue for the abolition of asylum camps and the creation of alternative housing and care models that centre women's needs.
This article examines the experiences of pregnant asylum seekers and mothers with newborn babies living in federal asylum camps in Switzerland. We argue that the carceral nature of these camps affects women's reproductive lives through logics of fragmentation: a fragmented institutional system, insufficient spatial infrastructures within the camps, and a spatio-temporal fragmentation through constant transfers. However, some asylum-seeking women and their “allies” actively navigate and resist this fragmentation by seeking spaces of relief, thereby challenging the carceral nature of the asylum system. By combining carceral geographies with interdisciplinary studies of refugees' reproductive health, we provide a more nuanced understanding of the impact of the carceral system on reproductive lives.
Cellular agriculture (CellAg) emerges as a technology aiming to address critical issues within the food system by offering an alternative to conventional meat. The dissemination of information about it to non-scientific communities faces challenges regarding the translation of complex technical developments, with the public reliant on the coverage from media outlets. We developed a collaborative approach to contribute to this discussion, focusing on four cases: Brazil, India, Australia, and Germany. Newspapers from these countries were analyzed using a qualitative content analysis and a subsequent joint interpretation. A major finding was the striking similarity in the main topics covered by the media in the studied countries. In addition, a large proportion of newspaper articles adopted a positive and market-oriented perspective. Germany stands out for its emphasis on research and development news. Australia is characterized by its focus on market and consumption elements. India is notable for its prioritization of food security. Brazil highlights market factors and brings to light concerns about market barriers. The results deserve further studies as they reveal that societies across geographical areas are receiving mostly superficial positive news instead of perspectives with higher-quality analyses of all impacts that may occur.
This study retraces the production, loss, and defence of a self-built urban settlement in the ecological peripheries of São Paulo. This study explores how such self-built marginalized communities build and defend their territory in the face of environmental laws and urban expansion. It shows how everyday relations with land and the ecologies – what the work calls grounded relationalities
This paper explores how marginal urbanities are produced, contested, and dismantled through grounded processes of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. While Latin American urban studies have extensively analysed structural territorial struggles, the lived everyday processes through which low-income individuals are (re)appropriating, defending, and losing territory remain poorly understood.Retracing the history of Terra de Deus, a self-built marginal urban settlement located within São Paulo's ecological peripheries, this study draws on Latin American traditions of situated oral history to re-centre residents' testimonies and expose what is at stake under lived (de/re)territorialization struggles.Based on 3 years of fieldwork (2022–2024) – including community workshops, in-depth interviews, and participatory cartography – this paper introduces the concept of grounded relationalities