The broad field of geographies of security and securitization offers an umbrella for many different themes, aspects, and perspectives. While long solely connected to the field of conflicts, terrorism, or dealing with counteraggressive means and objectives enacted by the state, the field has broadened to include a huge variety of new and extremely urgent but multilayered threats to the (welfare) state, incorporating perspectives and events of securitization from the Global North, South, and East, and also highlighting much often marginalized voices and other types of violence which lead to civilian (in)securities from within. This bibliography entry aims to highlight both directions— the long-standing, well established specific sense of securitization theory, departing from IR and security approaches, as well as more recent accounts, trends, and new perspectives in the field of human geography and conflict studies—as a general take on what can be considered as ‘security problems.’ In doing so, it starts with some initial suggestions, which entail a general overview to some of the earlier work done by geographers and their long-standing, but still much fruitful takes within and from the field of geographies of security and securitization. This is followed by a short introduction to the most important (geographical) journals for the subject area, and subsequently specific aspects of studies on security and securitization, especially from feminist, postcolonial, and critical perspectives, will be presented. These sections are subdivided into 1) Geographies of Securitization & Crime Prevention, 2) On the Securitization of Borders & Migration, 3) (En)Gendering Geographies of Conflict & Civilian (In)Security, and 4) Domestic Violence, Trauma & Alter-Geopolitics. What follows then leaves the narrower field of security studies and throws a few selected spotlights on 5) emerging trends and challenges for the field of (planetary) security. Politically, institutionally rendered, economics-driven, and pandemic-shaped fields of geographies of securities are presented, the issues of which are increasingly threatening to and contested by societies in times of current planetary and urban polycrises—including geopolitical issues, state security, and questions of the securitization of basic goods for human life, such as the supply and provision of energy, housing, and food.

ABSTRACT This article presents a new model of curriculum making on geography teaching at the higher education level. It shows how what we term the ‘three golden principles’ – valuing theory, matching cases and reflecting on self – can be used to inspire and contribute to geographic thought and theory teaching. The article discusses the role of geographic theories in teaching and learning in higher education with reference to Tim Cresswell’s book Geographic Thought. It then describes a teaching experiment carried out with postgraduate students in a Chinese university that sought to establish the effectiveness of the three golden principles in practice. The article demonstrates how, under the guidance of the principles, students can develop their critical and creative thinking skills. It shows that these principles can enhance the integration of students’ scientific knowledge with everyday knowledge of geography and discusses the implications of this approach for geography teaching in China and elsewhere.

An ambitious, comprehensive theory of social and spatial evolution that achieved hegemony—and then notoriety—in sociology, geography, urban studies, and other social sciences in the twentieth century, the University of Chicago was established in 1890. The Department of Sociology, founded two years later, was the first large and lasting institutional center of the new discipline in the United States and, indeed, the world. In sociology, the Chicago School became most closely associated with an approach known as symbolic interactionism, which focuses on micro-level processes of social interaction and the ways individuals and groups construct distinct, contextual meanings from events and behavior. Geography and urban studies were more deeply influenced by a series of spatial metaphors developed by Chicago sociologists as well as by a theory of “human ecology” emphasizing the interdependencies among people and the fast-changing environments produced by industrialization and urbanization. Generations of undergraduate and graduate students used the city of Chicago as a living laboratory for field research, building a methodological and empirical infrastructure that was widely admired, emulated, and eventually challenged. Reputation, perception, and myth associated with the Chicago School became so dominant that as early as the late 1950s, one prominent sociologist referred to the tradition as “Urbanism, Incorporated”—a nod to press portrayals of Prohibition-era organized crime as “Murder, Incorporated.” Ever since the 1960s, successive generations have used “Chicago School” as a floating signifier, either as nostalgia for a legendary lost tradition to be restored or as an epithet for obsolete, conservative modes of research that legitimate status quo inequalities of urban society. Both admiration and attack, however, are based on selective interpretations of a body of work that was simultaneously vast, intergenerationally dynamic, and marginalized within the wider hierarchical structures of academic knowledge production and policy influence. Far more powerful than sociology or geography, for example, has been a separate Chicago School of neoclassical and neoliberal economic theory and political economy. Latter-day critiques, therefore, are more relevant to the philosophical antecedents of the Chicago School that are being revived today in distinct, interdisciplinary currents of social physics, sociobiology, cybernetics, information theory, and performative computational cultures of media and representation.

Lagoons are found at low-lying coastlines around the globe (Figure 1) and their associated wetlands are important dynamic environments. Ensuring the sustainability of the world’s lagoons is vital for communities, ecosystems and economies. Lagoons support highly productive ecosystems and provide critical ecosystem services, societal benefits and myriad fundamental and valuable resources that are vital for the wellbeing and livelihoods of coastal communities. Yet, the sustainability of lagoons and the communities who rely on them are under increasing pressure from a complex set of interconnected issues, including climate change, sea-level rise, pollution, poor waste management, population growth and policy approaches that favour top-down governance to the exclusion of local knowledges and priorities (Convention on Wetlands, 2021). This article summarises the latest research on lagoons using the examples of Muni Lagoon in Ghana and Lagos Lagoon in Nigeria (Figure 1). It also draws from the interdisciplinary dialogues emerging through the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF)-funded Resilient Lagoon Network (see website), which seeks to challenge top-down management approaches and instead prioritise participatory approaches that value local knowledges and in which coastal communities are central to resilient lagoon governance.

Extreme heat events (EHEs) are periods of high temperatures and humidity that are considered to be unusual for a specific geographic location. For example, in 1995 an extended heat wave in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States was blamed for the deaths of 550 citizens. Most of the dead were elderly, poor individuals who may not have realized that heat could kill, or who had no means of mitigating the rising temperatures in their homes or any way to escape to a cooler environment. In 2003, Europe was subjected to an EHE that is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of 70,000, with 15,000 of those deaths in Paris, France. “Extreme heat” is a relative term. Individuals adapt to their local climate, so it is difficult to use an absolute number to describe the conditions meteorologists consider a relative change from past conditions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines extreme heat as “summertime temperatures that are substantially hotter and/or more humid than average for location at that time of year.” According to the Public Health Institute’s Center for Climate Change, the state of California defines extreme heat days as those days above the 98th percentile of maximum temperatures based on 1961–1990 data for a specific location. Crucial to understanding extreme heat events is the collection of data about temperature and humidity. The US Global Change Research Program provides heat wave data spanning 1961 to 2018. The site links to a variety of programs related to global climate modeling. The National Resources Defense Council is a nongovernmental organization that has excellent maps which show change over time in the frequency of extreme heat events that overlay the human impact of these events. The National Centers for Environmental Information provides graphic data of current weather conditions along with lists of significant climate anomalies. The site has links to weather records and tools. All of these sites rely on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for their data. There are equivalent agencies all over the world. The World Meteorological Organization, part of the United Nations, is also a valuable resource for data.

ABSTRACT Drawing on a presentation given at the Geographical Association’s Annual Conference in April 2021 (Williams, 2021a), this article investigates the way that depictions of planet Earth are often simplified to green continents on blue oceans, accidentally universalising a white and western perspective of the Earth. The article demonstrates how this effect is evident in language too, where commentators or campaigns often use ‘we’ to create a sense of a common human experience. This universalising tendency reinforces existing Eurocentric geographies, obscuring the inequalities of climate change and the fact that some areas of the world are much more vulnerable to it than others. These inequalities fall along racial lines, with people of colour much more likely to be adversely affected by climate change, while majority white countries bear the greatest responsibility for historical emissions. To make the racial dimension of climate change visible, this article argues for a greater focus on the perspectives of people of colour in climate discourse.

For many of us, when we think about glaciers, we might imagine cold, icy polar environments such\nas the Arctic or Antarctica and their associated characteristic fauna. However, the existence of\nglaciers is not limited to high latitudes, with numerous glaciers also found close to, or even within,\nthe Tropics, where elevation is high enough for snow and ice to persist year-round. Indeed, high\nmountain regions at lower latitudes, such as the South American Andes and the Asian Himalayas, are\nhome to many hundreds of glaciers and these glaciers provide important water resources for local\npopulations. These mountain glaciers act as “water towers” (Immerzeel et al., 2020), supplying both\nthe environment and millions of people downstream with freshwater. This freshwater supply\nbecomes especially important during the driest times of year when contribution from precipitation is\nlow, yet water demand is high.\nAs well as being an important water source, glaciers are a key indicator of environmental change,\nparticularly in this new Anthropocene era (Lewis and Maslin, 2015). It is now widely understood that\nglaciers in all of Earth’s currently-glaciated regions are undergoing widespread retreat in response to\nclimate change, including both increasing air temperatures and changing spatio-temporal patterns of\nprecipitation. The tropical glaciers of the Peruvian Andes are no exception, and glacier retreat in this\nregion is posing a threat to the resource security of millions of people (Painter, 2007; Rasul and\nModlen, 2019). Tropical glaciers in the Andes are actually retreating quicker than many glaciers\nelsewhere due to their sensitivity to changes in climate (Bradley et al., 2006; Rangecroft et al., 2013).

ABSTRACT Despite concerns during the 1990s and 2000s to the contrary, the nation-state remains at the core of the world’s political system. Recent popular geography texts have connected the longevity of states to physical geography (that we are Prisoners of Geography (Marshall, 2015)) and to inherent divisions shaping conflict politics at all levels (that we are Divided (Marshall, 2018)). This article takes a different position, cautioning that such starting points risk reifying nations, states and landscapes as natural or innate, thereby overlooking how these entities are continually reimagined, recreated and given meaning through political practice. Instead of viewing conflict and division as apolitical, we turn our gaze to the inherently political nature of territory, borders and nation-building. In so doing, we highlight how political geography processes are continual and ongoing, deployed to give meaning to national borders and landscapes, as well as (re)imagining and narrating ideals of national identity and who does – and does not – belong in profoundly and inherently political ways.

ABSTRACT In the context of increasing disciplinary interest in ‘geographies of education’, this article looks at the particular phenomenon of cross-border schooling (CBS), wherein children are involved in daily boundary crossing for education and engage in a (usually) arduous commute. Here, we draw upon a recent research project involving CBS at the Shenzhen–Hong Kong border. We consider three aspects of this border crossing that were significant in the project’s findings: the materialities of the border; the importance of routine (and rhythm); and the daily experience of tiredness and relentless exhaustion for the children and parents involved. The article also highlights the themes of ‘Changing Places’ (especially how they are known and experienced) and ‘Globalisation’.

ABSTRACT Soils have many functions including flood alleviation and carbon storage, and act as repositories of micro-organisms and archaeological artefacts. To the farmer and to society, soils are the principal means of producing food. However, soil erosion impacts on these functions over both short and long timescales. These impacts give rise to costs to the farmer and to others away from the farm. Estimates show that off-farm costs are far greater than on-farm ones. Muddy flooding of properties, sedimentation and the pollution of watercourses and reservoirs are among the highest costs. Yet, monetary values for some impacts of soil erosion are not available. In the future, climate and land use changes are likely to increase costs unless mitigation measures are put in place. Limited evidence suggests that well-designed mitigation schemes cost far less than repairing the damage caused by soil erosion.