Geography and the lived environment texts

• Author: Tim Cresswell
• Wiley (2024)

In the newly expanded Second Edition of Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction, renowned scholar Tim Cresswell delivers a thoroughly up-to-date and accessible examination of the major thinkers and key theoretical developments in the field. Coverage of the complete range of the development of theoretical knowledge—from ancient geography to contemporary theory—appears alongside treatments of the influence of Darwin and Marx, the emergence of anarchist geographies, the impact of feminism, and myriad other central bodies of thought. This latest edition also includes new chapters on physical geography and theory, postcolonialism and decoloniality, and black geographies.

Perfect for students of undergraduate and graduate courses in geographic thought, Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction will also earn a place in the libraries of students and scholars researching the history and philosophy of geography, as well as practicing geographers.

Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction

• Editors include: Jamie Pearce
• Springer (2021)

This volume provides a critical response to the COVID-19 pandemic showcasing the full range of issues and perspectives that the discipline of geography can expose and bring to the table, not only to this specific event, but to others like it that might occur in future. Comprised of almost 60 short (2500 word) easy to read chapters, the collection provides numerous theoretical, empirical and methodological entry points to understanding the ways in which space, place and other geographical phenomenon are implicated in the crisis.

The intended audience ranges from senior undergraduate students and graduate students to professional academics in geography and a host of related disciplines. The book will also be helpful to policy-makers at various levels in formulating responses, and to general readers interested in learning about the COVID-19 crisis.

COVID-19 and Similar Futures

• Editors: Simon Shackley, Greet Ruysschaert, Kor Zwart, Bruno Glaser
• Routledge (2020)

This user-friendly book introduces biochar to potential users in the professional sphere. It de-mystifies the scientific, engineering and managerial issues surrounding biochar for the benefit of audiences including policy makers, landowners and farmers, land use, agricultural and environmental managers and consultants, industry and lobby groups and NGOs.

The book reviews state-of-the-art knowledge in an approachable way for the non-scientist, covering all aspects of biochar production, soil science, agriculture, environmental impacts, economics, law and regulation and climate change policy. 

Biochar in European Soils and Agriculture

• Edited by Julie Cupples, Marcela Palomino-Schalscha, Manuel Prieto
• Routledge (2020)

The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Development seeks to engage with comprehensive, contemporary, and critical theoretical debates on Latin American development. The volume draws on contributions from across the humanities and social sciences and, unlike earlier volumes of this kind, explicitly highlights the disruptions to the field being brought by a range of anti-capitalist, decolonial, feminist, and ontological intellectual contributions.

With contributions from authors working in Latin America, the US and Canada, Europe, and New Zealand at a range of universities and other organizations, the handbook is an invaluable resource for students and teachers in development studies, Latin American studies, cultural studies, human geography, anthropology, sociology, political science, and economics, as well as for activists and development practitioners.

The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Development

• Edited by Valorie Crooks, Gavin Andrews, Jamie Pearce
• Routledge (2020)

The places of our daily life affect our health, well-being, and receipt of health care in complex ways.The Routledge Handbook of Health Geography features 52 chapters from leading international thinkers that collectively characterize the breadth and depth of current thinking on the health–place connection. It will be of interest to students seeking an introduction to health geography as well as multidisciplinary health scholars looking to explore the intersection between health and place. This book provides a coherent synthesis of scholarship in health geography as well as multidisciplinary insights into cutting-edge research. 

Routledge Handbook of Health Geography

• Author: Laura Watts
• MIT Press (2019)

In this book, Dr Laura Watts tells a story of making energy futures at the edge of the world.  The islanders on the Scottish Orkney Islands turned to energy innovation when forced to contend with an energy infrastructure they had outgrown. Today, Orkney is home to the European Marine Energy Centre. There are about forty open-sea marine energy test facilities globally, many of which draw on Orkney expertise. 

Mixing storytelling and ethnography, empiricism and lyricism, Laura tells an Orkney energy saga—an account of how the islands are creating their own low-carbon future in the face of the seemingly impossible. The Orkney Islands, Laura shows, are playing a long game, making energy futures for another six thousand years.

Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga

• Edited by Julie Cupples and Tom Slater
• Rowman and Littlefield Publishers (2019)

In Mexico City, as in many other large cities worldwide, contemporary modes of urban governance have overwhelmingly benefited affluent populations and widened social inequalities. The urban poor have however negotiated and resisted these developments in a range of ways. This text explores these urban dynamics in Mexico City and beyond, looking at the material and symbolic mechanisms through which urban marginality is produced and contested. It seeks to understand how things might be otherwise, how the city might be geared towards more inclusive forms of belonging and citizenship. 

Producing and Contesting Urban Marginality: Interdisciplinary and Comparative Dialogues

• Author: Tim Cresswell
• University of Chicago Press (2019)

What is the nature of place, and how does one undertake to write about it? To answer these questions, geographer and poet Tim Cresswell looks to Chicago’s iconic Maxwell Street Market area.Brilliantly interweaving words and images, 'Maxwell Street' sheds light on a historic Chicago neighborhood and offers a new model for how to write about place that will interest anyone in the fields of geography, urban studies, or cultural history.

• "Erudite. . . The rewards are plentiful as Cresswell goes about answering what appears a simple question, 'How to write about a place?', in 200-some provocative pages." (Chicago Tribune)
• “Cresswell offers kaleidoscopes for understanding what ‘place’ can mean. With its richly archived and colorful past, Maxwell Street is the perfect choice for wandering with this geographer, poet, and philosopher." (Gary T. Johnson, president, Chicago History Museum)
• "Cresswell’s wide-ranging, Benjamin-esque discussion of Maxwell Street, its history, its sights, sounds and smells, and of our discipline’s approach to writing and thinking about the concept and the reality of place is fascinating to read. (Cultural Geographies)

Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place

• Author: Fraser MacDonald
• Profile Books (2019)

'Escape from Earth' is the untold story of the engineers, dreamers and rebels who started the American space programme. In particular, it is the story of Frank Malina, founder of what became NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the scientist who cracked the, as he called it, 'problem of escape from the Earth by rocket'.Armed with hitherto unpublished letters, journals, and documents from the Malina family archives, Dr Fraser MacDonald reveals what we didn't know.  This is a story of soaring ideals entangled in the most human of complications: infidelity and divorce, betrayal and treason.

Escape from Earth: A Secret History of the Space Rocket

• Editors: Mark Rounsevell, Markus Fischer,  Amor Torre-Marin Rando, André Mader
• Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, IPBES (2018)

As information for policymakers , the Regional Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services for Europe and Central Asia produced by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) provides a critical analysis of the state of knowledge regarding the importance, status, and trends of biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people.

The assessment analyses the direct and underlying causes for the observed changes in biodiversity and in nature’s contributions to people, and the impact that these changes have on the quality of life of people. The assessment, finally, identifies a mix of governance options, policies and management practices that are currently available to reduce the loss of biodiversity and of nature’s contributions to people in that region. The assessment addresses terrestrial, freshwater, and coastal biodiversity and covers current status and trends, going back in time several decades, and future projections, with a focus on the 2020-2050 period.

Regional Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services for Europe and Central Asia

• Edited by Imogen Tyler and Tom Slater
• Sage, Sociological Review Monograph Series (2018)

Stigma is not a self-evident phenomenon but like all concepts has a history. We argue that in order to grasp the role and function of stigma in society, scholarship must develop a richer and fuller understanding of stigma as a cultural and political economy.  This collection has been specifically motivated by: (1) how reconceptualising stigma might assist in developing better understandings of pressing contemporary problems of social decomposition, inequality and injustice; (2) a concern to decolonise the discipline of sociology by interrogating its major theorists and concepts; and (3) a desire to put class struggle and racism at the centre of understandings of stigma as a classificatory form of power.

The Sociology of Stigma

• Edited by Julie Cupples, Ramón Grosfoguel
• Routledge (2018)

The westernized university is a site where the production of knowledge is embedded in Eurocentric epistemologies that are posited as objective, disembodied and universal and in which non-Eurocentric knowledges, such as black and indigenous ones, are largely marginalized or dismissed.

This book represents a highly timely contribution from both early career and established thinkers in the field. Its themes will be of interest to student activists and to academics and scholars who are seeking to decolonise their research and teaching.

Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University

• Authors: Julie Cupples, Kevin Glynn 
• Springer (2018)

This book explores the mediated struggles for autonomy, land rights and social justice in a context of growing authoritarianism and persistent coloniality in Nicaragua. To do so, it draws on in-depth fieldwork, analysis of media texts, and decolonial and other cultural theories. 

Shifting Nicaraguan Mediascapes: Authoritarianism and the Struggle for Social Justice

• Author: Charles Withers
• Harvard University Press (2017)

Space and time on earth are regulated by the prime meridian, 0, which is, by convention, based at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. But the meridian s location in southeast London is not a simple legacy of Britain's imperial past. Before the nineteenth century, more than twenty-five different prime meridians were in use around the world.

Charles Withers explains how the choice of Greenwich to mark 0 longitude solved complex problems of global measurement that had engaged geographers, astronomers, and mariners since ancient times.  Withers guides readers through the navigation and astronomy associated with diverse meridians and explains the problems that these cartographic lines both solved and created. He shows that as science and commerce became more global and as railway and telegraph networks tied the world closer together, the multiplicity of prime meridians led to ever greater confusion in the coordination of time and the geographical division of space. 

As Zero Degrees shows, geographies of the prime meridian are a testament to the power of maps, the challenges of accurate measurement on a global scale, and the role of scientific authority in creating the modern world.

• “This is a rich and valuable book about an important narrative in the history of science and geography, one that presents a longer and deeper historical context for the choice of Greenwich than any other accounts.”—(Richard Dunn, Senior Curator and Head of Science and Technology, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)
• “[A] compelling book… Withers manages to turn what might have been an obscure, rather technical topic into a fascinating account of international rivalry and a meditation on what the whole business of measuring the world around us can reveal about broader cultural patterns.”—(Jon Wright, Geographical)

Zero Degrees

• Editors: Nils Markusson, Simon Shackley, Benjamin Evar
• Routledge (2012)

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has emerged rapidly as a crucial technological option for decarbonising electricity supply and mitigating climate change. This book is the first to bring together the full range of social and policy issues surrounding CCS shedding new light on this potentially vital technology and its future.  It tackles the many issues in a way that speaks to those concerned not only to understand these developments, but to those who are involved in the scientific and technological work itself, as well as those charged with evaluating and making decisions relevant to the future of the technology.

The Social Dynamics of Carbon Capture and Storage

• Edited by Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, Elvin Wyly
• Routledge (2010)

Gentrification remains a subject of heated debate in the public realm as well as scholarly and policy circles. This Reader brings together the classic writings and contemporary literature that has helped to define the field, changed the direction of how it is studied and illustrated the points of conflict and consensus that are distinctive of gentrification research.With insightful commentary from the editors, who are themselves internationally renowned experts in the field, this is essential reading for students of urban planning, geography, urban studies, sociology and housing studies.

The Gentrification Reader

• Authors: Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, Elvin Wyly
• Routledge (2008)

This first textbook on the topic of gentrification is written for upper-level undergraduates in geography, sociology, and planning. The gentrification of urban areas has accelerated across the globe to become a central engine of urban development, and it is a topic that has attracted a great deal of interest in both academia and the popular press. Gentrification presents major theoretical ideas and concepts with case studies, and summaries of the ideas in the book as well as offering ideas for future research.

Gentrification