In recent decades, the number of women and underrepresented graduate students and faculty in the discipline of geography has increased, although gender and racial disparities among faculty at higher ranks persist. This article examines barriers to the advancement of women and underrepresented groups in geography that stem from challenges in the workplace and in the domestic sphere. The research uses the hostile obstacle course as a conceptual framework and mixed methods with secondary data on faculty status in the United States and a national survey of 424 U.S.-based faculty members of the American Association of Geographers. Results indicate that perceptions of and experiences with challenges to professional advancement include work-related barriers and domestic caregiving responsibilities that vary by gender and race. Additionally, women are 66 percent more likely than men to consider leaving their institutions, whereas faculty of color are 3.2 times more likely than their white counterparts to contemplate departure. In sum, although all faculty are affected by work and home factors, women and underrepresented groups tend to face additional and different challenges. The discussion concludes with recommendations that lead to more inclusive workplace climates and diversified institutional expectations.

Spatial habits of mind refer to individuals’ habitual use of spatial thinking to understand patterns, relations, and structures in the environment. Habits, some of which are revered and others that are not, can be evaluated as high or low level. This study provides the first large-scale quantification of the general public’s spatial habits of mind. It contributes to filling the research gap in regional quantitative benchmarks for spatial habits of mind, a key cognitive trait in geography. Using stratified random sampling methods, a questionnaire survey was conducted to investigate the spatial habits of mind of 1,158 participants in China’s thirty-one mainland provinces. The study established the average level and identified regional variations in the public’s spatial habits of mind within the Chinese mainland. The results reveal that gross domestic product per capita explains regional differences in spatial habits of mind, whereas factors such as spatial updating, traveling with family, exposure to directional vocabulary, traveling alone, seeing sunrise and sunset, directional metacognition, and landmark universality influence spatial habits of mind at the individual level. This study enriches the theoretical research on spatial habits of mind in geography and provides empirical evidence for improving public spatial habits of mind in the field of geography education.

This article introduces the “Uneven Geographies of Social Infrastructure in Times of Crisis” Focus section of The Professional Geographer, which rethinks social infrastructure as relational, reproductive, and political. Building on and extending Klinenberg’s influential work, the articles highlight how social infrastructure not only connects people and supports community life but also organizes care, power, and inequality. The collection uses crisis as an analytical lens to explore how social infrastructure takes shape through both acute disruptions and the ongoing conditions that organize everyday life. Across cases from mutual aid networks in Brooklyn and community kitchens in Argentina to urban farms in Puerto Rico, schools across the United States, everyday aging routines, and teacher unionism in Chicago, the articles trace how infrastructures are built, sustained, and contested in uneven ways. Together they foreground the gendered and racialized labors that reproduce collective life and show how infrastructures can both carry forward and transform the effects of crisis. In reframing social infrastructure as a terrain of struggle and world building, the collection emphasizes justice rather than resilience as the measure of collective capacity and as the foundation for more equitable futures.

In this era of profound environmental change and destructive environmental hazards, much of the media and academic discussion focuses on where water “should not be”—referring to extreme flood events and their implications for social-ecological systems. Challenging normative framings, in this article I focus on culturally and contextually specific human–environment relations to alternatively consider where water “should be” and “should sometimes be.” Specifically, I build on feminist political ecology debates on the everyday dimensions of nature–society relations to uncover individual expectations of natural resources. First, I examine the highlands of northern Thailand, where ethnic Hmong are struggling to maintain viable agricultural production with growing concerns of water scarcity. I draw on contested environmental histories to question where water “should be” in abundance—but is not. Second, I consider Amazonian Peru, where long-standing floodplain settlements rely on the annual flood cycle to sustain livelihoods and riverine lifeways. The increased prevalence of irregularities in the flood pulse, however, are generating new questions for human–environment relations in this setting where water “should sometimes be.” Advancing a lived feminist political ecology approach, I argue that beyond the materialities of water presence (or absence), environmental change is also shaping intimate expectations in human–water relations.

Continuing from a well-received The Professional Geographer Focus section on hidden geographies published in 2023, this sequel invites authors to contribute further to the theme, focusing on hidden geographies in cities. This opening article begins by laying out the context, including recent theoretical turns, a call to shift attention to what makes a just city, contestations of the concept of (social) justice, and calls for inclusive theorization and attention to intersectionality. A search in The Professional Geographer since 1949 generates a lineage of powerful scholarship on social justice and the city, with ethical calls and interventions from marginalized geographers and those from outside the North American centers of the profession. This essay also introduces four articles by geographers and urban scholars based on their field work across five continents (on urban ableism in U.S. and European cities, caring for indebted migrant workers in Dubai, infrastructural violence and oppression of low-income fathers in greater Johannesburg, and LGBTQ refugees and queer transnational communities in Buenos Aires). The articles enable a praxis of mainstreaming the “lived, possible, and imaginative geographies” and of what justice, for whom, and where.

Across the Cascadia bioregion, salmon and steelhead are ecological and cultural keystone species that contribute to and illustrate riverine health. Due to complex social, economic, and ecological relations over the past 150 years, many Columbia River Basin salmon and steelhead populations are now listed as threatened or endangered in the United States. This research uses the 2017–2020 Columbia Basin Partnership Task Force as a case study to understand how this collaborative governance effort of sovereign entities and nonsovereign stakeholders navigated competing water claims to reach consensus on aspirational qualitative and quantitative goals for salmon and steelhead restoration. Using semistructured interviews and a review of meeting minutes, reports, and other documents produced by the group, we found that parts of the collaborative process, in particular the pairing of Indigenous knowledge and science with Western science for decision-making, unsettled long-standing territorial claims and changed the span and durability of hydrosocial networks in the Columbia River Basin.

Puerto Rico imports most of its food. In 2017, it was estimated the archipelago imported 90 to 95 percent of its food (Carro-Figueroa 2002; Robles and Ferré-Sadurní 2017). As a result, the few urban farms (huertos urbanos) provide some of the only locally produced fresh produce for Puerto Ricans. In 2017, Hurricane Maria struck the island of Puerto Rico and devastated agricultural production, including urban farms. In this article, urban farms are conceptualized as social infrastructure to analyze their significance in communities. This research, conducted in July 2019, investigates how women experienced the impacts of Hurricane Maria on their urban farms. Social infrastructure theory influenced the way we analyzed data and feminist standpoint theory informed the methodology used in our research. The findings demonstrate that many women enjoy urban farming and that it provides fresh and healthy produce for their families and communities. Almost all the women farmers experienced a decline in participation of volunteers a few years after the establishment of the huertos urbanos and even more after Hurricane Maria. Many women, however, described the huertos urbanos as very important for the community—as a space for food cultivation and production as well as community gathering.

Public schools are often overlooked in disaster resilience frameworks. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the crucial role of schools as critical social infrastructure (CSI), extending beyond their primary mission of education to address acute community needs during crises including providing essential services such as food distribution, childcare, and access to technology. This article advances a convergence research agenda to understand how schools act as place-based CSI, with a focus on school districts in North America. We emphasize the unique ability of schools to support vulnerable populations through deep community ties, localized knowledge, and institutional networks that are features with relevance across international contexts. This approach underscores the multiscalar role of schools in mitigating vulnerabilities and promoting equity during disruptions. We argue for policies that prioritize schools as critical hubs for disaster preparedness and long-term sustainability, emphasizing equitable resource allocation to enhance their capacity to serve as vital community infrastructure that has the potential to foster long-term community resilience.

Long-term care facilities (LTCFs) provide institutional care for older adults, which improves their overall quality of life. Hong Kong, with a 20.5 percent aging rate in 2021, is now one of the world’s most rapidly aging cities. Few studies have systematically examined disparities in spatial accessibility between public and private LTCFs, particularly in high-density aging societies. This study addresses this research gap by evaluating spatial accessibility to LTCFs at the large subunit group level in Hong Kong and comparing service capacity across facility types. We applied spatial analysis and local regression methods to examine how accessibility correlates with socioeconomic characteristics. Our findings reveal that both public and private LTCFs cluster in traditionally developed urban areas, with private institutions dominating service provision. Regions with a higher concentration of low-income groups had lower access to LTCF resources, whereas regions with a higher concentration of single households had greater accessibility to LTCFs. Based on these findings, we recommend continued public LTCF subsidies and incentives for private-sector expansion into suburban areas. In conclusion, this research contributes to urban, human, and health geography by revealing the degree to which spatial inequality in LCTF access reflects broader patterns of social vulnerability and urban service provision.

This article proposes a new method for analyzing the collocation of spatial objects represented as points. We consider the methodological aspect of point collocation. Our focus is on the collocation of more than two types of points, such as the collocation of clothing, accessory, and shoe stores, as well as that of hamburger, sandwich, and pizza stores. Although such collocations are often discussed in geography, analytical methods have not yet been fully developed. To fill the research gap, we develop a new statistical method for detecting the collocations of more than two types of points. We tested the validity of the method through computational experiments and applications to the collocation analysis of restaurants in the Tokyo metropolitan area. The former supported the statistical power of the proposed method, whereas the latter showed its efficiency in detecting strong collocations and provided interesting empirical findings.