ABSTRACT From February 2010 to June 2022, Henan Province gradually constructed the first radial high-speed rail (HSR) network in China, significantly advancing the development of tourism in the province. The HSR network has increased the number of tourists and also diversified their origins within China. High-speed rail has changed the past tourism mode of ‘travel slow, explore fast’ in Henan Province, making ‘travel fast, explore slow’ possible. However, in some cases, HSR has increased inequalities between settlements in the province, undermining smaller, local tourist sites.

ABSTRACT Global disparities in COVID-19 vaccination and health outcomes underscore substantial inequalities in protection and disease burden. Using World Health Organization (WHO) data, this study employs continuous area cartograms to visualise cross-national differences in vaccination coverage, infection rates, mortality rates and case fatality rates. Countries with limited vaccine access – particularly in Africa – faced disproportionately severe outcomes, not because infection levels were higher but due to systemic vulnerabilities in healthcare capacity, surveillance infrastructure and reporting systems. By rescaling national boundaries according to epidemiological burden rather than territorial area, the cartograms expose inequalities that conventional choropleth maps often obscure. This study demonstrates how alternative geovisualisation techniques can challenge intuitive readings of global health statistics and sharpen geographical understanding of uneven protection and unequal burdens during the COVID-19 pandemic.

ABSTRACT Railway stations have long been a fixture in urban landscapes, but they are more than just transport infrastructure. Here, I make the case for a critical geographical exploration of these seemingly mundane yet multifaceted and exciting spaces. Combining historical accounts, literary representations and perspectives from urban research, I will explore how stations act as borders, fostering a sense of mobility and connection. Yet, these same spaces can also be sites of struggle and conflict, reflecting social hierarchies and urban inequalities – for example, when studied through a postcolonial lens, or when exploring issues related to homelessness. Using different interdisciplinary perspectives on stations, this article is a resource for those interested in critical perspectives on urban spaces and transit locations. It highlights the importance of ordinary spaces ‘under our noses’, with the intention of widening participation and interest in urban and cultural geography generally.

ABSTRACT This study addresses the issue of underutilised visuals in geography textbooks, which are crucial for enhancing school students’ geographic literacy. The research focuses on Finnish trainee teachers’ perspectives on improving the visual and textual elements of geography textbooks. The dataset includes 11 textbook spreads selected by 26 trainee teachers during a geography education course in 2024 and 2025. Thematic analysis was conducted to identify key themes in the trainee teachers’ feedback. The findings indicate that trainee teachers prefer simple, clear visuals over complex ones, recommending relevant photographs instead of decorative images and ensuring all visuals have informative captions. They also noted mismatches between the text and visuals, suggesting that a more coherent structure, with text and related visuals on the same page, would improve readability and comprehension. The study concludes that better-integrated visual and textual elements can enhance school student engagement and comprehension. The task of improving textbook content was beneficial for the trainee teachers, encouraging critical evaluation and consideration of essential learning aspects.

ABSTRACT This article discusses the geography curriculum in response to the current epoch. Epoch-typical issues include economic and environmental justice associated with climate change. The circumstances we describe are exacerbated, we suggest, by the broader social, cultural and political contexts and divisions stoked by post-truth politics and social media. We argue that this age of crisis calls for a positive, coherent and principled educational response such as that exemplified by the capabilities approach to school geography. In recent years, conceptual and practical work emerging from GeoCapabilities has strengthened our conviction that ‘Future 3’ curriculum making has the potential to empower students through its engagement with geography. Teachers should be supported to acquire agency in the knowledge work necessary to achieve the full educational value of geography in education.

It is estimated that Indigenous peoples total 476 million, belong to over five thousand ethnocultural groups across up to ninety countries, and speak around four thousand languages. Yet these figures are contested and disputed by self-identified Indigenous peoples, scholars, nation-states, and international agencies. The reason is that the term “Indigenous” (which is capitalized to indicate an equivalence with continental and national designations) has been utilized under colonialism and imperialism and today’s nation-state and geopolitical power relations to identify and “fix” certain populations. States play a key role in defining Indigenous peoples, or indeed intentionally not defining them, and vary in their criteria, categories, and purposes. For this reason, the United Nations definition of Indigenous peoples is not universally adopted. For this reason, geographers utilize the concept of indigeneity alongside that of Indigenous peoples to signal that “being Indigenous”—or being seen to be Indigenous—is always a contextual, power-laden, and contested positionality. The discipline of geography has been the handmaiden of empire and colonialism, with the result that its understandings of and engagement with diverse Indigenous groups has been patchy, drenched in problematic power relations, and founded on profound misunderstandings. Nevertheless, over recent decades, the influence of postcolonial and decolonial geographies, slowly but significantly increased numbers of Indigenous Aboriginal First Nation–Adivasi and other geographers, and a discipline-wide effort to de-essentialize, historicize, and re-frame Indigenous knowledges have shifted our understanding. Nevertheless, geographical discussions and publications on indigeneity capture only a partial sense of Indigenous peoples’ diversity, heterogeneity, and dynamics especially in the English language. Although some 80 percent of Indigenous peoples are in Asia according to some counts, geographical work is primarily focused on Anglophone settler states (North America, Southern Africa, Australia), Latin America, and to some extent in the Arctic north. The term “indio” was first used by Christopher Columbus on arrival in the Americas, and the term (together with terms such as tribe, Aboriginal) traveled worldwide with British, Portuguese, French, American, and other colonial-imperial and neocolonial projects. In addition to being a tax or labor category, indigeneity under colonial-imperial rule was often associated with racial difference, being less than fully human (or adult), and in need of education and civilization. As the works discussed below make clear however, indigeneity shifts its meanings and associations over time and space, but as geographers and Indigenous scholars stress the connection to unequal power, discrimination and profound gulfs in subjectivity characterize Indigenous peoples’ situation. This entry draws on decades of collaborative work with Latin American Indigenous interlocutors. Bibliographic entries below use Indigenous names and, where appropriate, authors’ self-identification, and indigenous/native/aboriginal placenames including Aotearoa New Zealand.

In 1947, United States President Harry Truman pronounced that “nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life.” Known as the Truman Doctrine, Truman’s words were part of a wider initiative designed to counter the growth of the Soviet Union. While never naming the USSR directly, historians often date the beginnings of the Cold War to this speech, which drew rhetorical and ideological lines between the two postwar superpowers. For many commentators and scholars, the likelihood of some sort of superpower conflict was extremely high after the devastation of the Second World War, yet few at the time would have predicted the scope and duration of what was to follow. Indeed, the Cold War, as it is traditionally understood, marked a period of over forty years of tension and competition between the United States and USSR, other states enrolled into this binary logic, and those actively seeking to resist it. While all-out war between the United States and USSR never materialized, the tensions manifested in other ways. Examples include the race for nuclear weapons; so called “proxy wars” such as the Vietnam War; unprecedented investments into geophysical sciences; popular culture and the “battle for hearts and minds”; and the space race. The spatial contexts for these iterations of the Cold War were far-reaching, from the Arctic to the deep sea. At the same time, organizations of states, such as the Nonaligned Movement, sought to offer a “third way” outside of the reach of superpower politics. Yet the reality is far more complex that traditional understandings suggest. Geographers trying to analyze and understand the Cold War thus have a difficult task—the scale and scope extending from the everyday to the highest political circles, from the nuclear bunker to the spacecraft, from the popular magazine to world-changing policies and political doctrines. The spaces and places of the Cold War are disparate, extending across the world, and are difficult to capture in both time and space. A range of geographers have taken to this challenge, exploring the complexities that came to characterize the time, but it is also important to turn to allied disciplines too. The resources below thus include interventions from historians, science and technology studies, and other work within the social sciences and humanities, to grapple with the multifaceted geographies of the Cold War, and the long-lasting imperial legacies of this era.

ABSTRACT This article spotlights the Geographical Association’s publication Geography for all our futures (GA, 2024). The article examines the assumptions about a changing economy that underpin the document and the vision of geography it offers. The article suggests that a wider framework that draws upon different forms of geographical knowledge can offer a more critically engaged and relevant school geography in the present conjuncture.

ABSTRACT Getting to know a place, one often learns about its geographical location and composition as well as its history and representation. Through vlogs (video blogs), we can learn about a place in a dynamic format. In this instance, place is both the site of interest and a setting for vloggers to express a personal opinion. In addition, how the place is featured and used in the video adds to the visual complexity. By focusing on the case of Singapore and its mandatory Stay-at-Home Notice (SHN) that required quarantined hotel stays during the COVID-19 pandemic, we indicate how contemporary circumstances can give rise to new issues for information sharing about a country. While the intention was to share information about a place, the vlogs became informational sources about Singapore and how it dealt with visitors, as well as how vloggers use place (in this case their hotel room) to reveal spaces of confinement and isolation.

ABSTRACT National borders act as barriers that constrain interaction and movement between neighbouring countries and depress demand for travel. There has been little research on the impacts of significant international changes and events on cross-border interaction. This research addresses that gap by measuring the impacts of several major changes and events on the volume of cross-border movement between Denmark and Sweden, using evidence from passenger and car traffic data, and isolating these impacts by comparing them against an equivalent (Danish) national control case. Although Denmark and Sweden are similar countries with a long history of open borders and common labour markets, and have many cross-border opportunities that can boost interaction, some economic and cultural barriers depress interaction. Between 1990 and 2022 numerous important international events affected interaction across the Øresund Strait border between the Copenhagen area of Denmark and the Malmö area of Sweden. The positive and negative impacts of these events are measured using Øresund Strait passenger and car traffic data. Denmark’s Great Belt is used as a national control case to isolate underlying trends in interaction and travel that are unconnected with the effects of the international border between Denmark and Sweden. The Øresund road and rail bridge has removed the physical obstacle of the Øresund Strait and transformed the Øresund Region into an imagined space, helping to create a bi-national functional region with urban identity.