A vital account of the state of the Arctic today--emphasising the twin dangers of climate change and geopolitical competition Nowhere is the dual threat of climate change and geopolitical contest felt more strongly than in the Arctic. Sea ice is declining rapidly, wildfires are burning, and permafrost is thawing. All the while, global interest is gathering apace as the region transforms from being a frozen desert into an international waterway. Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds examine the state of th...
Oct 13, 2025•37 min•Ep. 230
Ice animates the look and feel of climate change. It is melting faster than ever before, causing social upheaval among northern coastal communities and disrupting a more southern, temperate world as sea levels rise. Economic, academic, and activist stakeholders are increasingly focused on the unsettling potential of ice as they plan for a future shaped by rapid transformation. Yet, in Ice Geographies : The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic (Duke UP, 2025), Jen Rose Smith de...
Sep 30, 2025•1 hr 1 min
Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 2025) is an in-depth analysis into the growing industry of green technologies and the environmental, social, and political consequences of the mining it requires. In the fight against climate change, lithium's role in reducing emissions by powering green economies is a mixed blessing. Drawing on groundbreaking fieldwork in Chile, Nevada, and Portugal, Riofrancos explores the environmental and social costs of the global race to expand li...
Sep 26, 2025•1 hr 26 min
In this eye-opening investigation into the most remarkable points on the map, a single boundary might, upon closer inspection, reveal eons of history—from epic tales of conquest, treaties, and alliances to intimate, all-too-human stories of love, greed, and folly. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, none of the lines we know today were inevitable, and all might have looked quite different if not for the intricate interplay of chance and ambition. By listening to...
Sep 25, 2025•57 min
Offering Southern feminist assessments of detailed case studies from 12 countries, this open access book Pandemic Policies and Resistance: Southern Feminist Critiques in Times of Covid-19 (Bloomsbury, 2025) provides crucial insights into the gendered repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic on macroeconomics, labour, migration and human mobilities, and care and social protection throughout the Global South. Using DAWN's interlinkages approach, the chapters provide a comprehensive and intersectiona...
Sep 20, 2025•44 min
Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda (U of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Shakirah Hudani examines a “material politics of repair” in post-genocide Rwanda, where in a country saturated with deep historical memory, spatial master planning aims to drastically redesign urban spaces. How is the post-conflict city reconstituted through the work of such planning, and with what effects for material repair and social conciliation? Through extended ethnographic and qualita...
Sep 18, 2025•39 min
Environmental politics has traditionally been a peripheral concern for international relations theory, but increasing alarm over global environmental challenges has elevated international society's relationship with the natural world into the theoretical limelight. IR theory's engagement with environmental politics, however, has largely focused on interstate cooperation in the late twentieth century, with less attention paid to how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century quest to tame nature came...
Sep 08, 2025•39 min•Ep. 81
Geospatial Data Science Essentials is your hands-on guide to mastering the science of geospatial analytics using Python. Designed for practitioners and enthusiasts alike, this book distills years of experience by wrapping up 101 key concepts from theory to implementation, ensuring you gain a practical understanding of the tools and methods that define the geospatial data science landscape today. Whether you are a seasoned data scientist, a GIS professional, a newcomer to spatial data, or simply ...
Sep 06, 2025•36 min
Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East (University Press of Colorado, 2025) by Dr. Tiffany Earley-Spadoni offers an in-depth exploration of the Urartian empire, which occupied the highlands of present-day Turkey, Armenia, and Iran in the early first millennium BCE. Lesser known than its rival, the Neo-Assyrian empire, Urartu presents a unique case of imperial power distributed among mountain fortresses rather than centralized in cities. Through spatial analysis, the...
Sep 04, 2025•59 min
In The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds across Landscapes and Imagination (Reaktion, 2025), nature writers Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen set out in search of sounds beautiful and loathsome, melodious and disturbing, healing, strange and intimate. The phenomena of sound may be fleeting and evanescent, but the memory of it can open a window into the soul, deepening our connections with time, the environment and each other. From the edge of the solar system to the crackle of arctic sea ice, ...
Sep 02, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 15
Mountains, meridians, rivers, and borders--these are some of the features that divide the world on our maps and in our minds. But geography is far less set in stone than we might believe, and, as Maxim Samson's Earth Shapers contends, in our relatively short time on this planet, humans have become experts at fundamentally reshaping our surroundings. From the Qhapaq Ñan, the Inca's "great road," and Mozambique's colonial railways to a Saudi Arabian smart city, and from Korea's sacred Baekdu-daega...
Aug 07, 2025•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 127
In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border (Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the Strait of Gibraltar as an untamed in-between space—from “shatter zone” to borderland. Far from the centers of authority of contending empires, the North African and Southern Iberian coast was a place where imperial, colonial, private, and piratical agents competed for local advantage. Sometimes they outmaneuvered each other; sometimes they cooper...
Aug 01, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 537
The term “Heimat,” referring to a local sense of home and belonging, has been the subject of much scholarly and popular debate following the fall of the Third Reich. Countering the persistent myth that Heimat was a taboo and unusable term immediately after 1945, Geographies of Renewal uncovers overlooked efforts in the aftermath of the Second World War to conceive of Heimat in more democratic, inclusive, and pro-European modes. It revises persistent misconceptions of Heimat as either tainted or ...
Jul 30, 2025•48 min
In The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia (Cornell UP, 2020), Teo Ballvé challenges the notion that in Urabá, Colombia, the cause of the region's violent history and unruly contemporary condition is the absence of the state. Although he takes this locally oft-repeated claim seriously, he demonstrates that Urabá is more than a case of Hobbesian political disorder. Through his insightful exploration of war, paramilitary organizations, grassroots support and resistance, and d...
Jul 26, 2025•42 min•Ep. 36
Global Asias: Tactics & Theories is the inaugural volume in an exciting new series that explores critical concerns animating Global Asias scholarship. It challenges the silos of academic knowledge formation that currently make legible and organize the study of Asia and its multiple diasporas. Transits, Indigeneity, Epistemology, Language, and A/Geography: These keywords highlight potential overlaps and points of disagreement between area studies, ethnic studies, and diaspora studies. Through...
Jul 11, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 572
This book provides insight into the impact of climate change on human mobility - including both migration and displacement - by synthesizing key concepts, research, methodology, policy, and emerging issues surrounding the topic. It illuminates the connections between climate change and its implications for voluntary migration, involuntary displacement, and immobility by providing examples from around the world. The chapters use the latest findings from the natural and social sciences to identify...
Jul 06, 2025•44 min
The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores the under-appreciated division in the South between the oligarchic rule of plantation owners and industrialists on the one hand, and the more democratic mindset of the mountain-dwelling small farmers on the other. These two mindsets were in continual tension from the 1800s to the 1960s, when the adherents of the more democratic side of the struggle capitulated to the oligarch...
Jun 27, 2025•57 min
Conceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world had ever seen, New York's Blackwell's Island, site of a lunatic asylum, two prisons, an almshouse, and a number of hospitals, quickly became, in the words of a visiting Charles Dickens, "a lounging, listless madhouse." Digging through city records, newspaper articles, and archival reports, Stacy Horn tells a gripping narrative through the voices of the island's inhabitants. We also hear from the era's officials, reformers, and...
Jun 27, 2025•32 min
In The Banality of Good: The UN’s Global Fight against Human Trafficking (Duke University Press, 2024), Dr. Lieba Faier examines why contemporary efforts to curb human trafficking have fallen so spectacularly short of their stated goals despite well-funded campaigns by the United Nations and its member-state governments. Focusing on Japan’s efforts to enact the UN’s counter-trafficking protocol and assist Filipina migrants working in Japan’s sex industry, Dr. Faier draws from interviews with NGO...
Jun 22, 2025•56 min
In this episode, we sit down with Shaina Potts, author of Judicial Territory: Law, Capital, and the Expansion of American Empire (Duke University Press, 2024)—a groundbreaking book that reveals how U.S. courts have quietly become instruments of global economic governance. Drawing on legal geography and a sharp understanding of finance and political economy, Shaina uncovers how American judicial authority has extended beyond borders to discipline postcolonial states, enforce the primacy of privat...
Jun 20, 2025•45 min
When did the West lose its way? In 1889, when the US government carved five states out of the spawling Dakota Territory, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and North and South Dakota, all created state constitutions that enshrined certain progressive values into their structre of government. These included the right for women to vote, the power to curtail monopolies, and the ban on child labor. They also maintained a community ethos, as represented by the state ownership of running water and state-owned b...
May 27, 2025•44 min
Dr Billy Haworth is a geographer interested in human-environment interactions, with expertise positioned at the intersection of human geography, critical GIS (geographic information systems), and international disaster studies. Billy’s work tries to better-understand experiences of, and adaptation to, environmental change and disruption, and often includes highlighting inequalities, widening research participation, and knowledge exchange beyond academia, involving community, government and non-g...
May 24, 2025•26 min•Ep. 107
The first book to combine exquisite cartographical charts of the Moon with a thorough exploration of the Moon’s role in popular culture, science, and myth. President John F. Kennedy’s rousing “We will go to the Moon” speech in 1961 before the US Congress catalyzed the celebrated Apollo program, spurring the US Geological Survey’s scientists to map the Moon. Over the next eleven years a team of twenty-two, including a dozen illustrator-cartographers, created forty-four charts that forever changed...
May 22, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 36
Gazi Mizanur Rahman’s In the Malay World: A Spatial History of a Bengali Transnational Community (Cambridge University Press, 2024) offers the first sustained historical study of Bengali migration to British Malaya from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth. Drawing on archival research in South and Southeast Asia, as well as oral histories and travel accounts, Rahman reconstructs the formation of a transnational Bengali presence that has been largely overlooked in the broader literat...
May 20, 2025•49 min•Ep. 280
Join me for a fascinating conversation with one of today’s leading voices in environmental studies, Daniel Macfarlane, as we explore his new book The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024). Please see the description of the book below, then tune in to hear Dr. Macfarlane share the insights, research, and stories that shaped this important work. Lake Ontario has profoundly influenced the historical evolution of North America. For centuries it has e...
May 10, 2025•54 min
In this episode, Maliha Safri, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Stephen Healy, and Craig Borowiak talk about their new co-authored book Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). This volume is part of the Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds series . Solidarity economies, characterized by diverse practices of cooperation and mutual support, have long played pivotal but largely invisible roles in fostering shared survival and envisioning ...
Apr 29, 2025•1 hr 3 min
In Somatic States: On Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity (Duke UP, 2025), Franck Billé examines the conceptual link between the nation-state and the body, particularly the visceral and affective attachment to the state and the symbolic significance of its borders. Billé argues that corporeal analogies to the nation-state are not simply poetic or allegorical but reflect a genuine association of the individual body with the national outline—an identification greatly facilitated by the emerge...
Apr 27, 2025•49 min•Ep. 126
From the battles over Jerusalem to the emergence of the “Holy Land,” from legally mandated ghettos to the Edict of Expulsion, geography has long been a component of Christian-Jewish relations. Attending to world maps drawn by medieval Christian mapmakers, Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England (Penn State University Press, 2024) by Dr. Asa Simon Mittman brings us to the literal drawing board of “Christendom” and shows the creation, in real time, of a mythic state in...
Apr 24, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 95
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Lauren Bridges , Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, about her work on the political, economic, and environmental politics of big data infrastructures. They focus on some of Bridges’ work on the disconnect between the promises made to localities around digital transformation and the realities of data center power demands and other material factors. They also discuss Bridges’ other projects, including “Geographies o...
Apr 22, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 95
In late nineteenth-century Latin America, governments used new scientific, technological, and geographical knowledge not only to consolidate power and protect borders but also to define the physical contours of their respective nations. Chilean and Argentine authorities in particular attempted to transform northern Patagonia, a space they perceived as "desert," through a myriad of nationalizing policies, from military campaigns to hotels. But beyond the urban governing halls of Chile and Argenti...
Apr 16, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 232
