Abstract There is something particularly depressing about the current moment—when the possibility of thriving as a geography academic in British academia seems incompatible with anything else, be that a life outside work, a family, activism, or even sleep. What connects these multiple intensifications of demands on academics, and many of the external crises we are living through (the climate emergency, wage deflation, cost of living, the COVID pandemic etc.) is how we value, use and understand time. The non‐linearity of time is a useful way to understand how we work in academia. In this paper, I explore how can we change how we use our time. I propose three responses, which each play with time as non‐linear, multiple rhythms, and as having a lack of balance or stability. First, the possibility of working with the delight of shifting pace in helping us to enjoy our working time more. Second, in acting in collaboration, solidarity, and being alongside each other in ways where shared time is more expansive than individual time. Finally, in how we can collectively and structurally re‐order our time together.

Abstract How do we make sense of our place in the field as researchers and as sexual, spiritual beings? Ethnographic fieldwork is central to several disciplines, including geography. It involves the researcher encountering and gathering stories and meanings through interaction with people's lived experiences in settings that are often not the researcher's own. Although rarely strain‐free, fieldwork is seen as a transformative experience, both from the personal and the academic point of view. This paper, situated at the intersection of geography, queer/ing practices, and ethnographic methodology, explores poetry as a form of self‐care in the field. In recent years, poetry has emerged as a creative and productive mode of representation and (co‐)interpretation of qualitative data. Based on my own spiritual experience(s) while conducting fieldwork in Spain, I consider prayer cards as a poetic form and a means through which issues of self‐care and spiritual self‐preservation are made visible, particularly when experienced within a social environment that is hostile to LGBTQ+ lived experiences of faith.

Abstract This article introduces a special section comprising papers examining the evolution, current state and potential futures of the subdiscipline of health geography. Geographers’ engagement with ‘health’ has transformed from a strict rooting in the ‘(bio)medical’, coinciding with, and contributing to, a paradigm shift emphasising a recognition of health as multifaceted and shaped by everyday experiential spatial practices, rhythms and identities. The development of this area of geographic scholarship, we argue, has been inextricably linked to the simultaneous growth of the Geographies of Health and Wellbeing Research Group (GHWRG) of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), founded in 1972. Celebrating this golden jubilee, the Research Group initiated a project reflecting on how geographical knowledge on health has been produced and the networks that have influenced thinking. This coincided with an additional anniversary, the twentieth iteration of the ‘Emerging and New Researchers in the Geographies of Health & Impairment’, a conference developed to support new conversations relating to geographical scholarship around ‘health’, playing an important role in the development of ideas, scholarship and community since its inception in 1994. In introducing this special section, we underscore the importance of geographic interrogations of health for addressing contemporary challenges and providing interdisciplinary contributions. The articles in the collection delve into conceptual, theoretical and methodological developments that have shaped health geography, featuring work showcasing the breadth and depth of research within the subdiscipline. Complementing these empirical pieces, the special section traces the history of the GHWRG and its contributions, alongside interviews and conversations with scholars who have played pivotal roles in shaping the evolution of the subdiscipline. Overall, we are keen to celebrate health geography scholarship, question how academic networks shape thinking about interrelationships between health and place, and reflect on potential future directions for geographical scholarship on health and wellbeing.

Abstract This article explores the ways in which physical scientists, especially in the geosciences, are responding to calls to decolonise university curricula in current conjunctural conditions. It asserts that it is crucial not to strip decolonisation of its radical political potential and reduce it to an instrumental Equity, Diversion and Inclusion (EDI) initiative. Geoscientists in higher education who wish to decolonise their curricula must also pay attention to epistemological pluralism, politics, and colonial violence and free themselves from Eurocentric legacies of positivism, universality and objectivity. They must also make the turn to social theory, in ways that address the politics of geologic matter and the modes of violence that geoscientific practice and knowledge reproduce. Engaging with curricular decolonisation has potential not only to arrest the decline being experienced by the geosciences, but to make the forced neoliberal mergers between geography and geology less painful and more intellectually productive.

Abstract Matthew Gandy's Commentary in Area (2023) criticised the decision of the national funder UKRI to mandate that all books resulting from the research that it funds must be published open access (OA) from 2024. This raises many issues of importance to geographers. We argue that scholars in the discipline need to fight for affordable and ethically produced OA books, not ‘legacy’ modes of publishing. In particular, books produced by scholar‐led OA presses will not harm the reputation of departments or individual scholars, and they also have the potential to reduce significant financial barriers to accessing books across the globe. A more powerful critique must be to challenge the continued ‘enclosure’ of books, and the denial of OA by academic publishers and university presses.

Abstract As researchers, we are trained to publish the most polished versions of our core findings. Yet, what is hidden away when we do so are the raw and sometimes messy accounts of what we see, feel, hear, and experience during fieldwork. Integrating fieldwork challenges into research outputs is still uncommon in human geography. In this paper, I present an excerpt of field notes from research that examined the (re)creations of home by Sri Lankan refugees resettling in Sydney, Australia that were made using the ‘Voice Memos’ application on a smartphone. I reflect on the process of capturing voice field notes using a smartphone, the emotional aspects of fieldwork, and the benefits of documenting fieldwork experiences and challenges at different times and places. This paper champions digital technologies as useful tools to capture immediate emotions felt during fieldwork.

Abstract My research is situated within the literature looking at the processes of deinstitutionalisation of the mental health system through the lived geographies placed in between the walls of the asylum. It addresses mental health geographers' call for a situated knowledge about mental health and, by using the Italian psychiatric experience of the 1960s and 1970s as an example, stresses the importance of looking at care in both spatial and relational terms. Through a geographical understanding of the Italian psychiatric reform, that goes from Franco Basaglia's renowned work to the underrepresented experience of Turin, in northwest Italy, I will examine how space is intertwined with processes of mental health care. Additionally, I assess the role played by the interaction between spatial and relational elements in potentially enabling patients' self‐determination, empowerment and inclusion. The case of Turin—the story of which will be told through the analysis of archival material from a grassroots association called Associazione per la Lotta contro le Malattie Mentali—will serve to expand the common narrative around the Italian lesson and to give resonance to the instrumental role played at the time by both patients and civil society. By looking at the key events that led to the gradual dismantlement of the traditional psychiatric institutions in the metropolitan area of Turin, this paper contributes to the spatial turn in mental health studies, calling upon researchers to look at past achievements as something we still need to learn from and safeguard.

Abstract The violence of precarious labour migration is often represented in popular and policy accounts through episodic frames that emphasise particular—often sensationalised and extreme—aspects and moments of more complex and mundane experiences. These depictions commonly appear under the labels of ‘modern‐day slavery’ and ‘labour trafficking’. This paper advances a participatory methodology aimed at elucidating more complex temporalities experienced by precarious migrant labourers, drawing on a project with male migrant workers in Singapore. The methodology developed for this project centres on written diaries/narratives authored by the participants over periods ranging from one to three months. These detailed narratives document struggles—physically, relationally, financially and emotionally—in the context of post‐labour destitution. These struggles appear as both ‘everyday’ difficulties and longer‐term problems, with both temporalities rendered visible as a form of slow violence. This methodology fuses key principles of qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) methods with participatory action research (PAR) to develop a methodological orientation to temporally extenuative experiences of violence that are visible through processes that draw on participants as key producers of knowledge and advocates for change. As a way of engaging migrants' mundane post‐labour struggles, this methodology allows for tracing of the longer‐term and cumulative impacts of precarious migrant labour through participants' own frames of reference.

Abstract This paper considers the kitchen and the phenomenological values that emerge from it. In this text the kitchen is seen as a space of possibility within the context of the Capitalocene, from which new values and imaginations for a more sustainable future may emerge. Drawing upon ecofeminist critiques and feminist food studies, and building upon the phenomenologies of space of Gaston Bachelard and Yi‐Fu Tuan, this exploration surveys how intimacy, memory, care, and relation emerge from kitchen endeavours and what these notions mean for a Capitalocenic world. These theoretics are intertwined with ethnographic materials on foodscapes and foodways gathered in Xochimilco, Mexico City. From this, radical conceptualisations of the kitchen emerge and everyday phenomenologies spread into new spaces, while bringing together these subjects with environmental issues. I propose the notion of the antiromantic as an approach emerging from the kitchen's history as a gendered and contested space, and as a way to approach the kitchen and its labours in the midst of our current ecological crises; in this way the kitchen can be understood and inhabited as a political space of possibility for sustainable transformations.