Geography and the present conjuncture

Abstract

Anthropogenic global heating is accelerating, with dramatic implications for the long-term prospects of humans and many other species, underwritten by the logics of Euro-centric capitalism compounded by the colonialism, racism, patriarchy, and commodification of nature that has accompanied it. Nationalism is re-emerging, as are socio-cultural divisions within national societal assemblages. Global capitalism faces a series of crises stemming from the consequences of these relations. Critics are quick to argue that non-capitalist alternatives can advance socio-ecological justice, but how? Geography is ideally suited to making sense of this conjuncture, critiquing the processes facilitating its emergence, and realizing alternatives. Yet we are far from achieving our potential, caught up in our own philosophical, ideological, and substantive silos. I argue that five priorities must be taken up if geographical thinking is to be suited for the present moment. We must be more historical in our thinking (integrating the temporal with the spatial). We must pay more attention to the macro-scale: to how local events are complexly bound-up in spatially differentiated planetary processes? We must be socio-ecological: incentivizing productive collaboration across earth science, social science, and humanities sub-fields. We must deconstruct our disabling quantitative–qualitative methodological divide, incentivizing training in multi-methods. We must work harder to diversify the perspectives and socio-spatial positionalities incorporated into geographical thinking to decenter White male, Anglophone, and settler geographies. Excitingly, the potential for all this exists within Geography today.

Keywords

Global capitalism Anthropocene engaged pluralism macro-geographies

As our increasingly commodified planet heats up, with implications for humanity that are compounded by racialized and gendered socio-spatial inequality, thinking geographically about this conjuncture would seem central to making sense of why this is happening and its socio-ecological impacts, and to imagining and practicing more socially and environmentally just trajectories (Sheppard, 2015). Yet Geography’s internal divisions stand in the way. Our scholarly community remains riven epistemologically, methodologically (quantitative vs qualitative), substantively (human vs physical), in terms of identity (race, gender, disability, etc.), and geographically (Anglophone dominance). I remain optimistic, however, that we can move closer to realizing our collective potential.¹

Why this optimism? For 45 years, I have taught an introductory graduate seminar to diverse cohorts of first-year Geography MA and PhD students (and undergraduates). As my thinking matured, this diversified from a course on “geographical analysis” (named by John Adams after the eponymous journal) to one on the history of geographical thought. Meeting the challenge of crafting relevant content for those self-identifying as both human and physical geographers became increasingly important after moving to University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where physical geography is stronger than at Minnesota. Yet I have been gratified to observe the common ground that incoming students create for themselves as we work through the course, enacting a collective discipline-wide intellectual identity— albeit, one that dissipates once students separate into their individualized research programs. Students entering our discipline remain ready to transcend barriers we have created, seeking boundary objects that enable this and the legitimation that such boundary-crossing scholarship is valued. The geographic information system (GIS)/critical geography debates of the 1990s created such objects, transforming GIS-informed research (Cope and Elwood, 2009; Elwood and Leszczynski, 2018; Kwan, 2002; Leszczynski, 2020; Wilson, 2017). Taking up such epistemological influences as engaged pluralism (Barnes and Sheppard, 2010), we can do this again, and again. Indeed, we must.

In this article, I identify core challenges we face if we are to bring contemporary geographical thinking to bear on the present global conjuncture and the opportunities that could be created by transcending these. I begin by detailing what I see as the nature of this conjuncture (expanding conjunctural reasoning to embrace the geographical). I then discuss five priority areas for change: historicizing geography, advancing macro-geographies, transcending intra-disciplinary substantive divides, transcending intra-disciplinary methodological divides, and expanding the voices influencing geographical thinking (socially and geographically).

The present global conjuncture

The term conjuncture, from the 17th century, references the present state of events: here, the present state of Earth. It has become common to describe this conjuncture as an unprecedented crisis. Our restless Earth has faced much more severe crises in the past (e.g. Axelrod and Bailey, 1968), and humans have experienced sharper disruptions, such as that following the 1815 Mount Tambora eruption (Behringer, 2019). Humans also long have had a measurable impact on climatic and ecological processes (Ruddiman, 2003). But the present conjuncture feels more existential, at least for humans.

Existing conceptualizations of conjuncture, initiated by Antonio Gramsci and elaborated on by the Stuart Hall school of cultural theory (Gramsci, 1971; Hall et al., 2013; Koivisto and Lahtinen, 2012), cannot capture the complexity of what we face. These conceptualizations highlight unexpected emergent political–cultural conjunctures at the nation-state scale (e.g. Fascism in 1930s Italy, Thatcherism in the 1980s United Kingdom), but their scope falls short of what is necessary to make sense of the present global conjuncture. With Helga Leitner, I have explored what it would mean to think geographically about conjunctures (Leitner and Sheppard, 2020). This requires two moves. First, a primarily historical conceptualization must be spatialized: examining how a particular territorial conjuncture is shaped also by events elsewhere, how conjunctures concatenate across different geographical scales, and the variegated nature of conjunctural moments across space.² Second, biophysical processes and the more-than-human world must be integrated into our conjunctural analysis.

The present global conjuncture reflects intersecting climatic, ecological, economic, political, and cultural processes. Humans’ interactions with and impact on the more-than-human world are ever more intense. First and foremost, at least in global discourses, is global heating. The COVID pandemic is a further aspect: the most recent in a long sequence of moments when our relations with the more-than-human world released pandemic-causing viruses, each with a particular geography of origins and diffusion. This nature–society conjuncture has been dubbed the Anthropocene, highlighting the driving force of human actions and the blow-back consequences for human livelihood possibilities and the more-than-human world.

These relations are compounded by the logics dominating human interaction with the more-than-human world. Since at least the 16th century, these logics have been dominated by those of globalizing capitalism, once capitalism coagulated in a particular nation-state organized form in Europe (Blaut, 1976; Sheppard, 2019a). The more-than-human world is valued for its profitability not its inherent value, entailing an ever-expanding assetization and commodification of the lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and, now, stratosphere as the logics of economic growth endemic to capitalism rub up against biophysical processes (the second crisis of capitalism: O’Connor, 1991). Examining these processes at length, Jason Moore proposes that we should retire Anthropocene in favor of Capitalocene in order to highlight the logics through which humans interact with the more-than-human world: “understood as a system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life” (Moore, 2015, 2017: 594). Not only are the long-standing logics of capitalist political economy ever more globally hegemonic, but after 1980 neoliberal political governance, launched from the United States and United Kingdom, unleashed a relentlessly pro-market variant of capitalism (Harvey, 2005; Peck, 2010). This is catalyzing socio-spatial inequalities the like of which have not been seen in the global North since the end of the long 19th-century colonial-era phase of UK-centered globalization some 100 years ago (Arrighi, 2010; O’Rourke and Williamson, 2000; Piketty, 2014 [2013]). The recent post-Trump and pro-Brexit (re)turn to state intervention (cf. Polanyi, 2001 [1944]) has been more business friendly than Keynesianism and even more nationalist. With the rise of China as an alternative—much more state-driven—global hegemon, we may be entering an authoritarian and xenophobic era of political governance for globalizing capitalism, with endless geopolitical wars also reaching Europe (Sheppard, 2020).³

A further compounding factor is how the class inequalities emphasized in Western economic thought complexly intersect with socio-culturally constructed hierarchies of race, gender, and other social positionalities (ability, sexuality, age, etc.). We now have a deeper appreciation not only of the masculinist norms driving how capitalism works (phallocentrism; Gibson-Graham, 1996), but also the role of slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism in shaping globalizing capitalism (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Federici, 2018; Mies, 1986; Robinson, 1983). This has been deeply geographically uneven: racialized and masculinist discourses underwrote a capitalism centered on wealth-creation in Western Europe and its White-settler colonies, accelerated by commodifying and exploiting majority world bodies and nature—uneven development geographies that persist long after de-colonization. Building on the work of others, Wolford (2021: 1622) proposes Plantationocene to draw attention beyond capitalism, to how “large-scale, export-oriented agriculture dependent on forced labor has played a dominant role in structuring modern life since the insertion of European power in the Americas, Asia, and Africa.” The geography of global heating catalyzed by these processes further disadvantages marginalized bodies, now facing the prospect of bearing the human brunt of socio-ecological changes that they bear little responsibility for. As became clear at the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, those causing this socio-ecological breakdowns have little appetite for redressing this contradiction. Calls for social, environmental, and racial justice seek to resist the terms of this crisis, and varied livelihood practices contest its norms from capitalism’s raggedy fringes (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013; Sheppard, 2019b). Yet the predominant way proposed to escape this conjunctural crisis is to green capitalism—which feels like a contradiction in terms.

We need to restructure geographical thinking, if is to better realize its potential for making sense of, and offering alternatives to, the present global conjuncture. I suggest five priorities.

Priority 1: Taking an historical turn

Whether we consider millennia-long biophysical processes or centuries-long socio-ecological processes, it should be clear that the present global conjuncture cannot be adequately understood, or redressed, without geographical thinking paying more attention to the evolutionary trajectory that has brought Earth to this point (and to paths not taken to unrealized alternatives). This means extending our focus on multi-faceted spatialities to emphasize spatio-temporality. Historical geography has come to be seen as something of a side-branch of the discipline, receiving little attention even when its practitioners ask questions of interest to other human geographers. This must change: questions of history and evolution must be made central to geographical research, cutting across the human and physical domains. Some have identified the importance of time/space (e.g. May and Thrift, 2001), but centralizing this into disciplinary practice is another matter.

This does not mean simply tracing events through calendar time. It requires engaging with the philosophical and epistemological questions raised by temporality (Bergson, 1911 [1907]), how attention to the past affects our understanding of the present (Bloch, 1986 [1959]), the path-branching nature of evolutionary change, and the constitution of spatio-temporality itself. With respect to at least the last two, complex dynamical systems theory is a boundary object that intrigues scholars from across the domain of geographical thinking (indeed, across the physical and human sciences). Complex dynamical systems capture the uncertainty and contingency of temporal change, embrace out-of-equilibrium dynamics, bifurcations, and paths not taken (and forgotten), and the enduring effect of minor events (e.g. the well-known “butterfly effect”: Lorenz, 1969). They are consistent with dialectical ways of making sense of the world (focusing on relations shaping entities, rather than entities as stable categories; Harvey, 1996), they are amenable to mathematical modeling, and they align with the assemblage-theoretical approach recently popular among cultural geographers exploring the new materialism (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011; DeLanda, 2006; Sheppard, 2008). Furthermore, replicating a core principle of spatial theory, complex dynamical systems are co-constitutive of the spatio-temporal domains structuring their operation (Prigogine, 1996)—a spatio-temporal dialectic (cf. Soja, 1980).⁴

Priority 2: Advancing macro-geographies

Peck (2016) has called for more attention to macroeconomic geographies within geographical political economy. Grasping the present global conjuncture requires extending this to the entire scope of thinking geographically. Such global research already exists, of course, in both human and physical geography. Furthermore, there has been substantial multi-scalar scholarship connecting the global with the local across the discipline. There is greater appreciation for how geographical scales are not a priori categories, but (like spatio-temporality) are regularly (re)constituted through the socio-ecological processes operating within and across them. It is also increasingly appreciated that scale is relational: processes operating at different scales shape one another, with finer scale processes affecting broader scales as well as being shaped by them (Leitner and Miller, 2007; Sheppard and McMaster, 2004).

Yet there is a tendency to treat these constituted scales as homogeneous units of analysis (e.g. the global), with causal analysis emphasizing vertical rather than horizontal causality. For example, much case study research in critical human geography has adopted what Burawoy (1998) dubbed the extended case method: locally examined events are contextualized by paying attention to the broader arena structuring them. For example, what happens in a city is best understood by incorporating the influence of such broader scale processes as neoliberalism—often represented as an undifferentiated global phenomenon.

The macro-geographic analysis I have in mind would be much more nuanced. For example, our global conjuncture is spatially heterogeneous and multi-scalar. Locally differentiated manifestations of global processes create distinct localized conjunctures that also shape global-scale processes. Second, what happens locally is shaped by its horizontal connections with other places, not just inter-scalar relations. Methodologically, Peck and Theodore (2012) gloss this as distended case analysis. Third, as discussed above, what happens now is also shaped by long-standing processes connecting the present with events long ago and far away.

Some physical geographers are part of an earth science community that devotes much effort to macro-geographies, such as computer-generated models of the historical geographic evolution of climate change. Human geographers tend to prioritize more local scales, but can learn from a long and distinguished tradition of macro-scale analysis in History and Sociology, ranging from the dependency theoretic and world-systems scholarship of historical sociology (e.g. Amin, 1974; Arrighi, 2010; Frank, 1978; Timberlake, 1987; Wallerstein, 1979) to the recent explosion of research on the history of capitalism—emphasizing both political economy and race (e.g. Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, 2018; Beckert, 2014; Bose, 2009; Johnson, 2013). Human geographers are eminently capable of contributing to such analysis but have had remarkably little to say. Yet they can bring a geographical sensitivity to such scholarship, extending it to incorporate nature–society relations (Moore, 2015), bringing spatial theory to bear on understanding the uneven geographies of these processes, and avoiding the top-down structural tendency in some of this scholarship by teasing out how local events have global ramifications. Physical geographers undertaking macro-geographical research are positioned to incorporate human actions and their geographically differentiated impacts on the more-than-human world into what remain largely earth science models (at times leavened by problematically reductionist economic models of behavior).

Priority 3: Transcending the human–physical divide

There has been much bemoaning over the past three decades about a persistent physical/human divide in geographical thinking. These complaints emphasize what are presented as fundamentally different philosophical (positivist vs post-positivist), methodological (quantitative vs qualitative), and substantive (biophysical vs societal) inclinations. This is supplemented by the observation that many physical geographers see little merit in publishing in Geography journals, attending Geography conferences, or even working in Geography departments. Significant scholarship seeks to bridge this artificial divide, of course: the human–environment (aka nature–society) tradition has always been central to geographical thinking (Turner, 2003), including a new peer review journal Progress in Environmental Geography. Yet even scholarship engaging with this boundary object tends to divide along the above lines. Political ecology and nature–society scholarship exemplifies critical human geographic approaches, emphasizing post-positivist and qualitative research that prioritizes political, cultural, and economic questions. Human–environment research tends toward physical geographic inclinations: more quantitative and empiricist, often prioritizing biophysical processes.

Geography as a discipline has little original to offer if we cannot engage constructively across this apparent divide. But we can (Massey, 1999): it reflects disciplinary cultural divides produced by the particular trajectory of Anglophone Geography as a discipline, not some immutable binary. We know that the logical empiricist claim that objective knowledge through value-free empirical observation is a chimera (Sheppard, 2014). It is all too evident that “science,” even as narrowly conceived in Anglophone scholarship, is shaped by societal forces ranging from the macro to the micro (Hacking, 1999; Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1991; Kuhn, 1962; Latour, 1987; Livingstone, 2000; Pickering, 1995). It suffices to reflect on controversies characterizing the present conjuncture that surround climate science and epidemiology. We are now beyond the science wars. Political ecologists and cultural geographers increasingly acknowledge the importance of biophysical processes, aka materiality (Braun, 2009; Robbins, 2004; Whatmore, 2006). Within the physical geography community, there is some active engagement (particularly by geomorphologists) with epistemological questions also of interest to human geographers (Carey et al., 2016; Harrison and Dunham, 1998; Inkpen and Wilson, 2013, see also Sharp et al., 2022). A new subfield of geographical scholarship also is crystallizing, critical physical geography, that brings human geographic epistemological inclinations to bear on biophysical processes (Lave et al., 2018, but see Rhoads, 2022).

Our challenge is creating engaged pluralist spaces where mutual learning is prioritized across this cultural divide. For geographical thinking to approach its potential, those from the human side need to familiarize themselves with the role of biophysical processes, whereas those from the physical side need to familiarize themselves with how societal processes (both political-economic and cultural-representational-performative) are integral to the biophysical phenomena they study. Imagine a team of quantitative-physical and qualitative-human and nature–society geographers working together on a substantive boundary object of common interest, enriching individual and collective understanding as they learn from one another. There are examples of such collaboration, but they remain too rare.

Priority 4: Transcending the quantitative–qualitative divide

This methodological divide is another disciplinary cultural construct that reflects particularities in the evolution of Anglophone geography. In the 1970s, human geographers—increasingly critical of the capitalist status quo—came to reject quantitative methodologies that they equated with pro-capitalist neoclassical economics and location theory in economic geography (Massey, 1973; Sayer, 1976; Sheppard, 1995). Harvey’s (1969, 1982) Damascene epistemological and methodological conversion is Exhibit A. Physical geographers—seeing their methodological preferences rejected by human colleagues—moved in the opposite direction to equate quantification with value-free science. The GIS version of the science wars that roiled 1990s Anglophone Geography relitigated this divide: quantitative researchers alleged that GIS could solve all manner of social problems (Dobson, 1983; Openshaw, 1991), whereas qualitatively inclined critical human geographers feared GIS as the Dracula-like return of a naïve spatial science (Pickles, 1995; Smith, 1992; Taylor, 1990).

This conflict was the context for a 3-day meeting convened between GIS researchers and critical human geographers in Friday Harbor, Washington (USA), in 1995, during which initial suspicious and defensive confrontation matured into cautious collaboration (Schuurman, 2000). Such collaboration, initially under the GIS and Society label (Poiker and Sheppard, 1995), reframed as critical GIS (Thatcher et al., 2016; Wilson, 2017), provides as strong evidence as any I know of in our discipline that our methodological divides are as artificial as they are counterproductive. Friday Harbor knocked down some panels in the Berlin Wall that had been constructed between qualitative and quantitative geographers, and a new generation of scholars poured through to transcend the scholarly limits that this had imposed. An emergent generation of digital geographers, equally adept in coding, post-structuralism, and feminism, is obliterating this divide at least within the GIS community (Ash et al., 2018; Bergmann and Holmberg, 2016; Bergmann and Lally, 2020; Schwanen, 2018; Thatcher et al., 2016). Considering the qualitative turn that has dominated critical economic geography, it is simply erroneous to equate quantitative methods with naïve empiricism (Sheppard, 2001). William Bunge, pioneer of quantitative geography, was the most radical practitioner of first-generation radical geography (Bunge, 1966, 1971). Marx was fascinated by mathematics, and there is a strong tradition of mathematical Marxism—tellingly, largely outside geography (but see Sheppard and Barnes, 1990; Webber and Rigby, 1996). Quantitative modeling of complex dynamical systems is consistent with both dialectical thinking and assemblage theory (Sheppard, 2008), and spatial analysis can be feminist (Elwood and Leszczynski, 2018; Kwan, 2002).

Realizing the potential of geographical thinking will mean training coming generations to appreciate and perform quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. Some of this cross-training can now be found in “land change science,” which is expanding beyond its analytical, quantitative, and science-led roots (e.g. Kinnebrew et al., 2021; Turner and Robbins, 2008).

Priority 5: Multiplying geographical voices

Feminist philosopher Longino (2002), considering empirical scholarship, makes a powerful case that the proliferation of voices must be central to reliable knowledge production (science, but in the sense of Wissenschaften rather than its narrow Anglophone meaning). Priorities 3 and 4 exemplify the importance and benefits of such engaged pluralism, but proliferation is also about inclusion across diverse socio-spatial positionalities. Anglophone human geography has begun to take more seriously the importance to geographical thinking of creating more space for, and appreciation of, differently positioned voices and their expertise. The emergence of feminist geography provides strong evidence of how including other social positionalities strengthen geographical thinking and scholarship (Mohammad, 2017; Nelson and Seager, 2005). Finally, we also are now seeing substantial bodies of recognized Anglophone scholarship in Black, Latinx, and indigenous geographies (Howitt, 2022) and geographies of sexuality and disability, also exploring their complex intersectionalities (Oswin, 2020). Yet there remains much to be done to dismantle existing gender and racial hierarchies in Anglophone geographical thinking.

As geographers, we should be particularly attentive to spatial exclusions: the danger of marginalizing southern and non-Anglophone scholarship and non-academic expertise even as we work to diversify Anglophone geography’s internal makeup. Putting it bluntly, decolonizing geographical thinking means challenging the presumption that Anglophone scholarship is the go-to place for cutting-edge thought. Even Black geographies can inadvertently contribute to this if North American experiences of race are universalized. One important aspect—explicitly spatial—is the emergence of scholarship that takes seriously the perspectives of those located in the global south, and east (Connell, 2007; Müller, 2020). Second, it is vital to transcend the spatial divide between gown and town: breaking down barriers that confine expertise to those trained in and certified by academic institutions. There is now considerable scholarship, ranging from human (particularly feminist) to physical geography and GIS, demonstrating that the inclusion of expertise from beyond the academy produces less hierarchical and more reliable knowledge (Sharp et al., 2022; Heiman, 1997; Kindon et al., 2007; Sui et al., 2012; Whitman et al., 2015). It is becoming particularly important to integrate the knowledge and expertise of those located outside the academy, with universities across the world now playing a diminished role as spaces for counter-hegemonic thinking.

A third, implicitly spatial exclusion is the narrowness that ensues from pragmatically resorting to English as the lingua franca for global scholarship. We need to pay more attention to how different languages reflect different understandings of the world (Nettle and Romaine, 2002), whose even unwitting exclusion from geographic scholarship narrows our understandings to those propagated through Anglophone global dominance. I do not deny the legitimacy of Anglophone expertise (without denying my own), but it impoverishes us all to presume that this should be the monist source of expertise (Longino, 2002).

Shifting geographical practice

It is one thing to talk this talk, but quite another to walk the walk: how can such shifts be realized in an academic environment that prioritizes specialization and competition over innovative collaboration, short-term publication, and funding metrics over long-term experimentation, ivory tower scholarship over community engagement (Waterstone, 2022), income generation over ideas, and research over teaching? Concluding, I suggest some possible strategies.

First, reconsider teaching practice as a space for such experimentation. Courses that are co-taught by scholars from very different intellectual and personal backgrounds and philosophical and methodological inclinations could produce less narrow and specialized knowledge, arguably more relevant for students struggling with the current conjuncture. This would not work if these instructors practice a division of labor that divides the course into their individual sub-modules. They should be co-present in the classroom, actively debating with one another and thereby exposing students to knowledge production as a work in progress rather than settled findings to be rehearsed in examinations. While an anathema to administrators seeking to maximize revenue generation, it would incentivize colleagues to engage with one another across our self-constructed boundaries. It would also position students, including future generations of scholars, to think more eclectically—preparing them to push back against our taken-for-granted nostrums and blockages.

Second, substantial inter-scalar institutional effort—across research groups, departments, and academic associations—should be devoted to bringing diverse voices, open to learning from one another, around the same table to engage across their diverse perspectives on and knowledge about a particular boundary object. Perhaps this sounds too utopian. How do you persuade people to participate in intellectual exchanges that do not serve to advance their immediate agendas and interests? How do you manage pre-existing power differences between participants that enable the more powerful to deploy coercion and consent that enforces a monist consensus? With respect to the former, the key is restricting the exchange to participants who actively want to learn from one another (Longino, 2002). With respect to the latter, it is vital that such engaged pluralism explicitly empowers marginalized positionalities and makes space for agonistic pluralism (Barnes and Sheppard, 2010; Mouffe, 1999; Young, 1990). Geographical, financial, and other constraints undermining the ability of marginalized voices to participate also would need to be redressed. Such exchanges should actively include graduate and undergraduate students: the next generation. The lesson from Friday Harbor was that graduate students interested in GIS were feeling blocked by the boundary their elders had created between GIS and critical geography. Elders’ collaboration across this boundary legitimated research combining geospatial technologies and critical approaches, releasing this next generation to pursue the exciting scholarship culminating in digital geographies.

Third, we must pro-actively push back against university institutional structures that undermine the conditions of possibility for counter-hegemonic practices and policies (Liu et al., 2022). Across the globe, the freedom to think differently is being constrained by a combination of the neoliberalization of university governance, right-wing critiques, and state-led expectations that the societal role of universities is to produce employable students. University academics complain daily about these developments, but grumbling makes no difference. If universities are to retain or regain their reputation as spaces where counter-hegemonic thinking can flourish, their employees (importantly including those who have successfully gamed the current incentive structure) must be proactive. We must exert collective pressure to decenter neoliberal performance metrics, support slow and experimental scholarship, value community-engaged scholarship as highly as policy-oriented scholarship, further diversify voices that are valued in the academy, and promote north–south reciprocal collaboration. Failing this, we should be willing to abandon the ivory tower as a space of privilege, relocating elsewhere the research and teaching needed to pull Earth out of this current dangerous conjuncture, in the name of empowering those people, ecosystems, and places most at risk.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Eric Sheppard

Notes

Eric Sheppard is the Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Geography at The University of California, Los Angeles. His scholarship embraces geographical political economy and socio-spatial theory, currently focusing on uneven geographies of capitalist globalization, more-than-capitalist practices, southern urban theory, urban social movements and urban land transformations.

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