Human Geography

Human Geography 18.3 has been published. Please share it in your networks. Follow the link to access the issue. Table of contents available in the images: journals.sagepub.com/toc/HUG/current

Online first and open access: Does solar energy get recycled? Exploring the political ecology and toxic geographies of solar panel disposal - Alexander A. Dunlap, Benjamin K. Sovacool, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11… “This article explores the practices of solar panel recycling in the southwest United States at a facility claiming to process solar panels from all 50 states, offering an exemplary site to explore the dilemmas and experiences of solar panel reuse or disposal. Finding that recycling is often conflated with disposal, leading to partially or fully landfilling solar panels, the article argues for the urgent advancement, incentivization and regulation of solar panel recycling.”

Online first: The political ecology of money: Uneven development, materiality, and unequal exchange - Alf Hornborg, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “The critiques of environmental injustices and uneven development tend to target an abstract capitalist ‘system’ rather than the peculiar and historically recent artefact of money through which it operates. A rethinking of the role of money in the modern world economy can unravel ambiguities in Marxian concepts of value, unequal exchange, and exploitation. In remaining confined to the hegemonic worldview, monetary framings of inequalities miss the mark of exposing the veiled material asymmetries in social metabolism. It is argued that the concept of value refers to money, rather than vice versa, while unequal exchange should be understood as asymmetric transfers of material resources, rather than values. Monetary and biophysical flows must be approached as analytically distinct phenomena, where the latter are mystified by the former.”

Online first: Racialized agrarian labour regimes in Canada: Punjabi farmworkers’ struggles in the 1980s - Paramjit Singh, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… "Focusing on the systemic challenges faced by these workers, the analysis underscores how exploitative practices perpetuated through the capitalist–contractor–corporate food regime shaped the economic and social realities of Punjabi farmworkers. The article also explores the pivotal role of the Canadian Farmworkers Union in mobilizing grassroots action, advocating for workers’ rights, and addressing systemic inequalities."

Online first and open access: Sabotaging hunting, prefiguring anti-speciesist futures - Andrea Brock, Nathan Stephens-Griffin, Tracey Davanna, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “Nonhuman animals are regularly killed for pleasure / ‘bloodsport’ in England, both legally and illegally. This illustrates the deeply entrenched political acceptability of harming nonhuman animals for human enjoyment. Those who seek to destroy the physical infrastructures that uphold this harm, sabotaging the enactment of the killing are often physically assaulted by hunters and police officers, and frequently also face prosecution and criminalisation for their actions. Hunting and trapping themselves are hugely destructive and deadly enactments of the (classed, racialised and gendered) human supremacy that underpins the contemporary ecological social order.”

Online first: Domination and sabotage: Oil, indigenous anarchism, and eco-territorial defense in Amazonia - David E Gilbert, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “This article examines one stream of political response to state-capitalist domination in the West Amazonian forests of Yasuní: direct-action movements that bring together Indigenous and anarchist politics through expression of sabotage. Grounded in Indigenous and anarchist theories, ethnographic research, and a novel spatial history of oil infrastructure sabotage,”

Online first: Health in the circuit of capital: Vaccine economies and the geographies of accumulation - Swati Birla, Kuver Sinha, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “Drawing on Marx's theory of the circuit of capital, it examines how financialization, intellectual property regimes, institutional procurement arrangements, and segmented production networks collectively structured the flow and obstruction of vaccines during the pandemic.”

Online first and open access: Quiet sabotage: Resisting climate adaptation by dispossession and its laws - Ana Maria Vargas, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “we examine how climate adaptation policies can operate as mechanisms of dispossession, displacing marginalized communities under the guise of environmental protection. We introduce the concept of ‘adaptation by dispossession’ to describe how interventions framed as responses to climate-related hazards justify forced removal, exclusion and the reallocation of land and resources.”

New publication alert! Go to @HGjournal for the paper "Then they came for the cities: Radical geography's puzzling silence in the summer of fascism" by @UCIrvine Professor and @UciUrban Chair @wjnicholls03 and doctoral candidate Ian Baran. ow.ly/wGPr50Y7PWH

Online first and open access: Then they came for the cities: Radical geography's puzzling silence in the summer of fascism - Walter J Nicholls, Ian R Baran, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “This paper examines the silence of critical and radical geographers during the Trump administration's 2025 federal occupations of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., Despite decades of theoretical development around urban sovereignty and spatial resistance, scholars remained largely absent from public discourse during unprecedented military interventions. Analysis of academic responses reveals California universities dominated engagement while Northeastern institutions stayed silent, and legal scholars far outnumbered geographers in commentary.”

We are delighted to welcome Dr. Kohei Saito of the University of Tokyo as our new editorial board member. Please join us in welcoming Dr. Saito.

Online first: Technological transformations and the city: Emerging research themes towards a socially just smart metropolis from a Marxist perspective - Nikos Kapitsinis, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “Literature in smart cities has been growing, although it has adopted a-political, a-spatial and a-critical approaches, neglecting crucial issues and thus leaving room for improvement and further need for studies highlighting and addressing them and particularly the socio-spatially uneven effects of smart city deployment. This intervention adopts a Marxist perspective and seeks to highlight important research themes, related to these neglected issues, whose exploration could provide socially useful insights and increase the chances for a socially just smart metropolis in the 2030s.”

Trending in #InternationalRelations: ooir.org/index.php?fiel… 1) Anti-racist struggle & Lenin (@HGJournal) 2) Oligarchic sovereignty (@risjnl) 3) Race & subprime (@ripejournal) 4) Bombing Hospitals: Rebel Responses in Syria 5) When Health is the Target (@currenthistory1)

Online first and open access: Contemporary anti-racist struggle and Lenin’s thought: The enduring bond between racism and imperialism - Chris Little, Tamanisha J. John, 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… "utilize the theoretical tools provided to us by Lenin in our contemporary struggles – updating them for our contextual realities which differ from Lenin's time, despite the enduring power of Lenin's work."

online first: An exceptional island: The Jeju Massacre and the abuses of sovereignty – An analysis of South Korea's bloodiest civilian massacre through the lens of Giorgio Agamben's state of exception - Darren Southcott, 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19…. "Through a martial law declaration in 1948, the newly independent ROK proclaimed Jeju's uplands hostile and an ideological threat to the fledgling anti-communist state. As villagers were condemned by their geography, the landscape was confronted as an ideological threat and subjected to a scorched-earth campaign to cleanse impure elements from sovereign territory. Driven to cave and woodland refugia, villagers sheltered from state forces, paramilitaries, and armed rebels as the landscape was razed during a state of exception that led to an estimated 30,000 deaths. Despite almost eight decades since the tragedy, the Jeju Massacre continues to shape ROK politics and shed light on the human and non-human impacts of states of exception during geopolitical conflict."

Online first: Jerusalem, rescripted: Retheorizing embodiment in the production of place - Anna E Kensicki, 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117… "This paper examines Palestinians’ production of place in Jerusalem through participatory mapping and narrative analysis, based on survey data collected between 2019 and 2020. It draws on the voices of Palestinians from Gaza, the occupied Palestinian territories, within 1948 borders, and Jerusalem itself. Together, these accounts show how narrative place-making sustains place under siege, displacement, and occupation."

Online first: The rise of economic warfare in a multipolar world: Strategic competition beyond the battlefield - Ankita Thakur, 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… "This paper examines the development, mechanisms, and implications of economic warfare in the twenty-first century, with an emphasis on its strategic application by both established and emerging powers."

Online first: From hydro-hegemony to hydro-coercion: Politics of precarity in India–Bangladesh transboundary water conflicts - Farhana Sultana, 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… @Prof_FSultana “This article advances the concept of hydro-coercion to analyze how asymmetric power relations shape transboundary water governance between India and Bangladesh, with broader implications for political geography, environmental justice, and the geographies of state power. Focusing on the Ganges, Teesta, and Brahmaputra rivers, the article argues that India's upstream dominance enables it to exercise coercive control over shared water resources through material infrastructure, institutional stalling, and ideational narratives of water nationalism.”

Online first: New municipalism and the right to the city: A Lefebvrean re-examination and lessons from Barcelona - Xabier Gangoiti, Xabier Najarro Echaniz, 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “through a critical engagement with recent scholarship linking Lefebvre's right to the city and new municipalism, this piece critically examines to what extent do municipalist theory and practice fit with Lefebvre's understanding of politics and the right to the city. Accordingly, a characterisation of new municipalism is presented first, followed by a review of the multiple meanings that the right to the city has acquired within this trend. Subsequently, the right to the city is contextualised within Lefebvre's work. Then, Lefebvre's theoretical-political position is confronted with the municipalist ones, followed by a critical assessment of some policies and programmes under the government of Barcelona en Comúbetween 2015 and 2023, finally culminating in a synthesis of key reflections.”

Online first and open access: Interspecies relations in Johannesburg's outdoors ecologies - Relebogile Rasodi, Hugo ka Canham, Daniel Radebe, Sherwyn Naidoo, 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11… “Informed by methods in Black and Indigenous studies, this article attends to interspecies relations in the Black outdoors of informal settlements in the south of Johannesburg, South Africa. We decentre anthropocentric perspectives and lean into planetary understandings of the interactions between humans, plants, animals, and the cosmos as forms of relation in interspecies life. We suggest that like humans, the natural elements within these contexts express agency, survival, and resistance in ruderal ecologies.”

Online first and open access: Digital activism in housing struggles: Countering algorithmic violence with algorithmic care - Sophia Maalsen, 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11… “This review focuses on the role of digital technologies in housing activism. Housing is chosen as a site in which to highlight the activist applications of the digital for three reasons: the global housing crisis and housing's role as a key driver of inequality, housing's increasing digital mediation and the reinvigoration of tenant activism in response to the conditions created by the two preceding reasons.”