Progress in Human Geography

The demand for “experts” and “expertise” has never been higher than in the present time, characterized by complexities, uncertainties and (digital) disruptions. At the same time, expertise has never been more contested and attacked, particularly due to social media. In this paper, we delve into the social-scientific literature on expert(ise) and argue for a strong differentiation between knowledge and expertise. We outline a geography of expertise, to be developed at the intersection of the three relational categories “authority,” “trust,” and “coalitions” and pay particular attention to digital media as the key driver for the re-configuration of expertise and expert roles.

Despite longstanding calls for more inclusive geographical research and the increasing adoption of participatory research designs, our non-academic research partners ‘from the field’ continue to be excluded from a central aspect of knowledge production: academic writing and publishing. This exclusion is not only an epistemological issue of limited knowledge perspectives but also an ethical problem of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007). While participatory research has fostered collaboration in data collection and analysis, academic writing remains largely restricted to scholars, perpetuating traditional power asymmetries in knowledge dissemination. Drawing from an interdisciplinary literature review and personal experience with collaborative writing, I argue that co-authoring with non-academic research partners can enrich academic knowledge production by incorporating plural knowledges while simultaneously challenging academic gatekeeping. However, writing with non-academic partners is not a straightforward process; it necessitates transforming the ineluctable position of the academic as a gatekeeper into that of a mediator in the co-production of knowledge. Based on leading examples, I outline a structured approach to developing meaningful writing partnerships, focusing on three key strategies: (1) creating a writing relationship and negotiating positionality; (2) investing time, respecting different urgencies, and sharing resources; and (3) finding a common language, breaking conventions, and challenging academic standards. By embracing these strategies, we can take steps towards a more inclusive and multi-voiced geography that actively redistributes epistemic authority.

Geographical perspectives can make distinctive contributions to how we understand, explain and investigate loneliness, and what we do about it. Conversely, loneliness can also open new windows on a range of geographical questions and concerns. This paper frames geographical perspectives on loneliness, reviewing and advancing upon conceptual and methodological first steps that focus upon tangible geographies and statistical measurement and mapping. It directs attention to less tangible geographies (such as feelings of belonging and localised relationship norms) and innovative qualitative methods, exemplified by storying. Stories – elicited, collected and interpreted – illuminate geographical experiences, qualities, causes and consequences of loneliness.

Contemporary struggles for reproductive rights across the globe once more show how politics shape intimate reproductive experiences. The intersectional feminist concept of reproductive justice has become an important political and theoretical agenda to address power relations in the realm of reproductive rights. We argue that the justice-based approach of the concept can serve as an umbrella for debates taking place in diverse subdisciplinary fields such as feminist, Black, biopolitical, health, environmental, and abolition geographies. The concept of reproductive justice further allows to develop a multiscalar and activist spatial approach to questions of necro- and biopolitics. We hence call for and develop in this paper a reproductive justice research agenda for geography.

Historical geography’s core concern with connections between the past and present is currently expressed in an age marked by a desperate search for connections. The report considers how historical geography is linked to this scene through various ‘return of history’ ripostes and via the travails of what is described as its ‘pluriverse’. Three problematics are then identified: ‘the mendacious’ (about the truth of history); ‘the micrological’ (concern with biography and ‘small things’); and ‘the mercurial’ (regarding structural problems of violence and hope). Much for the subdiscipline now hinges on how the words freedom, truth, violence, and hope are treated.