Recent studies on urban street (re)naming practices have highlighted the importance of political power when changes occur from one political regime to another. However, longitudinal studies on different political power changes and their relationship to spatial ethnolinguistic contacts that are unfolding in the urban landscape have been little researched. By using a novel geohumanities methodology based on GIS mapping of all major maps published from the 1900s to the present time, in this study, we are interested in understanding how the changes of street naming have been reflected in the city of Timișoara, Romania in the last century and where and why some spatial ethnolinguistic contacts are visible in the public space. The findings indicate that street renaming and the long-time maintenance of some street names depend not only on the political power but also on preserving memories for certain local ethnic names. Findings also highlight that spatial ethnolinguistic contacts of street names are mainly preserved in central areas of the city. Therefore, political memory of past ethnic leaders is still inscribed in the city-text of Timișoara. Our results are important as Timișoara’s street renaming in the last century could stand as a model of multiethnic survival names (i.e., names of German origin) as well as a dense spatial ethnolinguistic contact of some street names, given that some ethnic minorities are not so well reflected today in the ethnic structure of the city.

Between 1967 and 1996 Yi-Fu Tuan wrote letters to his sister Sze-Fu in Taipei. Sze-Fu kept these letters and on her death in 2003, the letters were returned. He included these letters in his self-published booklet Who Am I? A Sequel (2020). Together they reveal something of what it was like to be Yi-Fu Tuan in the years he became one of geography’s best-known scholars. Here, I use fragments of these letters to create poetic renditions of Tuan’s professional and personal preoccupations in these important years of his career. The fragments are themed around aphoristic wisdom, thoughts of home and travel, and the processes of aging and mortality. The poems contribute to the literature on biography and geographic thought as well as the creative turn within the geohumanities—both literatures that Tuan had an important role in inspiring.

Archival methods have become commonplace in geography over the past several decades, enabling geographers to explore past phenomena, conceptions of space, and the impacts of geographic thought. Geographers have brought the reliability of the archive into question and opened new modes of inquiry into archival materials and their interpretation. Despite these new articulations, understandings of archival processing and its impacts on research is limited and generally archival methodology in geography does not consider the theories and practices of the archivists who process collections. This article utilizes an autoethnographic case study to illustrate how archival processing limits researchers’ abilities to understand historical subjects, specifically highlighting the material and contextual leakages that occur while processing a collection. Specifically, I examine this through the processing of the papers of geographer Pradyumna “Paul” Prasad Karan (1930–2018). By exploring the archival concepts of provenance/context, appraisal, and original order/arrangement, along with the management idea of “more product, less process,” I highlight how the processing of archival collections often results in material and contextual leakages that meaningfully shape the historical record. For geographers engaging in archival methods, the article highlights the importance of understanding how archival organization limits the utility of the archive and how understanding these limits can contribute to more nuanced geographical scholarship.

This research examines how white hereditary organizations use historical markers in the Midwest—specifically Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri—to shape cultural memory and assert territorial control. Since the early 1900s, lineage organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution have influenced public memory by promoting the Lost Cause narrative and Manifest Destiny in historical markers. Their impact extends beyond commemoration into citizenship, immigration, and public education, embedding white supremacist and colonial ideologies into broader public discourse. The Midwest offers valuable insights into the intersections of racial cultural memory and territory, as the U.S. government acquired the region for the expansion of chattel slavery and settler colonialism. By inscribing settler trails, glorifying white settlers, extending the Lost Cause beyond the South, and defending racist iconography, these hereditary organizations actively construct and maintain a vision of a white nation through cultural memory.

A decade-long experimental program at UC Berkeley linking the humanities and environmental design explored the potential of “urban humanities” as an emergent subfield focused on urban form, social dynamics, and subjective experience. This article describes the program’s novel pedagogy, which brought together faculty from divergent fields, creating a rich environment for mutual learning. The pedagogy encompassed transdisciplinary teaching teams; “research studios”; domestic and international place-based projects; and community partners as teachers and research collaborators. We also distill lessons learned with respect to teaching, learning, and intellectual pathways of participants.

Following an Indigenous community-engaged research workshop, we reflect on the efforts of graduate students to conduct, change, and create partnerships with Indigenous communities. We speak to the ways Indigenous voices must be represented in the future of university-community partnerships and how building longstanding relationships is key to rigorous research practice. Research involving Indigenous communities requires a rigorous process to ensure Indigenous voices are centered. However, prioritizing processes that ensure that Indigenous life is seen, heard, and portrayed properly is challenging for graduate students within current academic training environments. There is a critical need to address the multifaceted challenges that impact the trajectory of Indigenous research particularly in relation to the historic trauma of unethical research, and the work required by academics to (re)concile this today. We address these challenges by discussing community-engaged research approaches in university-community research partnerships, and the benefits of longstanding relationships between PIs and community partners.

In recent years, commemorative naming has been discussed and called into question in the U.S. military, and with the establishment of the Confederate Naming Commission by Congress in 2021, representatives for branches of the US military and Department of Defense were tasked with evaluating commemorative practices associated with valorizing Confederate history. In this paper, we focus specifically on place naming patterns on US Marine Corps bases through an engagement with military archives. These archives are part of a hegemonic control of memory that sits uncomfortably at the intersection of the racialized history of the Armed Forces and its growing reliance on a multi-cultural America. We argue and find early evidence that the archives constitute contested terrain and the commemorative audits conducted by military institutions are a potentially fraught practice given possible self-interest and potential lack of a critical perspective on the past and place. We encountered many of the difficulties that complicate name reform and the commemorative audits, such as negotiated access to the physical archives and data, inconsistent practices and documentation which contributed to an incomplete audit, and conflicts with institutional interest. Even with the Confederate Naming Commission’s recent reports and recommendations for renaming some military bases and structures, there remains a demand for greater attention to the audits of commemorative place names utilized to make such recommendations. This demand necessitates a recognition that the legacy of racism and racial violence goes far beyond the years of the Confederacy, particularly regarding the landscapes of the United States military.

Although classical physics states that the void lacks matter or energy, the misunderstanding of emptiness as a spatial concept extends far beyond the sciences. The essay explores the concept of empty space, debunking classical physics’ notion of voidness by delving into quantum mechanics, where energy and particles continually manifest through a site investigation of the Salmon & Sterling Nuclear Test Site (located in Lumberton, MS, USA). This revelation challenges colonial ideologies, exemplified by terra nullius, which justified empire-building by claiming certain lands devoid of inhabitants. Operating through a political-geological exploration of repetitive cycles of extraction, speculation, and vacancy at the Salmon & Sterling Site spanning from the Mesozoic Era to the present day, I scrutinize spatial constructions and their reinforcement of prevailing socio-political systems. Juxtaposed against Faulkner’s Southern Gothic literature and Sartre’s existentialism, this essay underscores a modern dialectic between spatial arrangements and anticipations of cataclysmic endings. Through a passenger-traveler account of void-encounter, I propose a reconsideration of “emptiness” through examining its broader spatio-temporal origins and implications in relation to the nuclear detonations. This perspective allows for the synthesis of the inherent paradox of this site: initially conceived from Cold War anxieties to solidify social structures, yet also harboring unpredictable and potentially mutant futures.

Women constitute most volunteer water stewards in West Virginia. After having conducted participatory research on the motivations behind women’s engagement with water preservation and restoration work we carried out two participatory art-based activities. In this Practices and Curations, we reflect on these two art-based activities to facilitate networking between researchers and participants and to communicate to the wider public the role of women water stewards. Together with community partners we first organized an icebreaker for women to share a boundary object that signified their connection with water. These boundary objects were subsequently displayed in an art exhibit highlighting women’s connection to water, their reasons for care work and the consistent role they had played in environmental preservation in West Virginia. We conclude by providing incitements to our fellow academics to engage with art in participatory geographical research as a learning experience that can overturn the common researcher-researched power dynamics.

For cultural geographers, weather is primarily known through the body. Cultural geographers employ sensual ethnographies, diaries, interviews and visual methods to understand how weather is differentially felt. Somewhat lacking are cultural geographical accounts of weather as data: how weather is mapped, indexed and modelled with consequences not only for science but also for vernacular weather-worlds. In contrast, a growing set of artistic projects are experimenting with scientific practices that measure, modify, and produce our weather. Taking inspiration from these creative practices, this paper explores the intersection of weather as body, and weather as machine, as part of a current of transdisciplinary work I call the elemental geohumanities. Drawing from international cultural programmes such as the World Weather Network and employing vignettes from the open-weather archive, I advance a critical framework for thinking at the interface of embodied weather and “weather engines” for cultural geography and the geohumanities.