Focus on environmental risks and migration: causes and consequences

Environmental change poses risks to societies, including disrupting social and economic systems such as migration. At the same time, migration is an effective adaptation to environmental and other risks. We review novel science on interactions between migration, environmental risks and climate change. We highlight emergent findings, including how dominant flows of rural to urban migration mean that populations are exposed to new risks within destination areas and the requirement for urban sustainability. We highlight the issue of lack of mobility as a major issue limiting the effectiveness of migration as an adaptation strategy and leading to potentially trapped populations. The paper presents scenarios of future migration that show both displacement and trapped populations over the incoming decades. Papers in the special issue bring new insights from demography, human geography, political science and environmental science to this emerging field.

The fractured lives of German Bohemian children, born 1933-40 in the area known as Sudetenland: a memory study, Nablonz-Neugablonz

At the Paris Peace Conferences of 1918-1919, new states aspiring to be nation-states were created for 60 million people, but at the same time 25 million people found themselves as ethnic minorities. This change of the old order in Europe had a considerable impact on one such group, more than 3 million Bohemian German-speakers, later referred to as Sudeten Germans. After the demise of the Habsburg Empire In 1918, they became part of the new state of Czechoslovakia. In 1938, the Munich Agreement – prelude to the Second World War – integrated them into Hitler’s Reich; in 1945-1946 they were expelled from the reconstituted state of Czechoslovakia. At the centre of this War Child case study are German children from the Northern Bohemian town and district, formerly known as Gablonz an der Neisse, famous for exquisite glass art, now Jablonec nad Nisou in the Czech Republic. After their expulsion they found new homes in the post-war Federal Republic of Germany. In addition, testimonies have been drawn upon of some Czech eyewitnesses from the same area, who provided their perspective from the other side, as it were. It turned out to be an insightful case study of the fate of these communities, previously studied mainly within the context of the national struggle between Germans and Czechs. The inter-disciplinary research methodology adopted here combines history and sociological research to demonstrate the effect of larger political and social developments on human lives, not shying away from addressing sensitive political and historical issues, as far as these are relevant within the context of the study. The expellees started new lives in what became Neugablonz in post-war Bavaria where they successfully re-established the industries they had had to leave behind in 1945-1946. Part 1 of the study sheds light on the complex Czech-German relationship of this important Central European region, addressing issues of democracy, ethnicity, race, nationalism, geopolitics, economics, human geography and ethnography. It also charts the developments leading to the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia after 1945. What is important in this War Child study is how the expellees remember their history while living as children in Sudetenland and later. The testimony data gained indicate that certain stereotypes often repeated within the context of Sudeten issues such as the confrontational nature of inter-ethnic relations are not reflected in the testimonies of the respondents from Gablonz. In Part 2 the War Child Study explores the memories of the former Sudeten war children using sociological research methods. It focuses on how they remember life in their Bohemian homeland and coped with the life-long effects of displacement after their expulsion. The study maps how they turned adversity into success by showing a remarkable degree of resilience and ingenuity in the face of testing circumstances due to the abrupt break in their lives. The thesis examines the reasons for the relatively positive outcome to respondents’ lives and what transferable lessons can be deduced from the results of this study.

Food geographies I: relational foodscapes and the busy-ness of being more-than-food

The study of foodscapes has spread throughout geography at the same time as food scholarship has spearheaded post-disciplinary research. This report argues that geographers have taken to post-disciplinarity to explore the ways that food is ‘more-than-food’ through analyses of the visceral nature of eating and politics and the vital (re)materializations of food’s cultural geographies. Visceral food geographies illuminate what I call the ‘contingent relationalities’ of food in the critical evaluation of the indeterminate, situated politics of ‘feeling food’ and those of the embodied collectivities of obesity. Questions remain, however, about how a visceral framework might be deployed for broader critiques within foodscapes and the study of human geography. The study of food’s vital materialisms opens up investigation into the practices of the ‘makings’ of meat, food waste and eating networks. Analysis of affect, embodiment and cultural practices is central to these theorizations and suggests consideration of the multiple materialisms of food, space and eating. There is, I contend, in the more radical, ‘post-relational’ approaches to food, the need for a note of caution. Exuberant claims for the ontological, vital agency of food should be tempered by, or at least run parallel to, critical questions of the real politik of political and practical agency in light of recent struggles over austerity, food poverty and food justice.

Geographies of food: 'Afters'

This third and final ‘Geographies of food’ review is based on an online blog conversation provoked by the first and second reviews in the series (Cook et al., 2006; 2008a). Authors of the work featured in these reviews – plus others whose work was not but should have been featured – were invited to respond to them, to talk about their own and other people’s work, and to enter into conversations about – and in the process review – other/new work within and beyond what could be called ‘food geographies’. These conversations were coded, edited, arranged, discussed and rearranged to produce a fragmentary, multi-authored text aiming to convey the rich and multi-stranded content, breadth and character of ongoing food studies research within and beyond geography.

The geography of tyranny and despair: development indicators and the hypothesis of genetic inevitability of national inequality

Development geography has long sought to understand why inequalities exist and the best ways to address them. Dependency theory sets out an historical rationale for under development based on colonialism and a legacy of developed core and under-developed periphery. Race is relevant in this theory only insofar that Europeans are white and the places they colonised were occupied by people with darker skin colour. There are no innate biological reasons why it happened in that order. However, a new theory for national inequalities proposed by Lynn and Vanhanen in a series of publications makes the case that poorer countries have that status because of a poorer genetic stock rather than an accident of history. They argue that IQ has a genetic basis and IQ is linked to ability. Thus races with a poorer IQ have less ability, and thus national IQ can be positively correlated with performance as measured by an indicator like GDP/capita. Their thesis is one of despair, as little can be done to improve genetic stock significantly other than a programme of eugenics. This paper summarises and critiques the Lynn and Vanhanen hypothesis and the assumptions upon which it is based, and uses this analysis to show how a human desire to simplify in order to manage can be dangerous in development geography. While the attention may naturally be focused on the 'national IQ' variables as a proxy measure of 'innate ability', the assumption of GDP per capita as an indicator of 'success' and 'achievement' is far more readily accepted without criticism. The paper makes the case that the current vogue for indicators, indices and cause-effect can be tyrannical.

On climate change and cultural geography: farming on the Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall, UK

Climate change as a global problem has moved relatively swiftly into high profile political debates over the last 20 years or so, with a concomitant diffusion from the natural sciences into the social sciences. The study of the human dimensions of climate change has been growing in momentum through research which attempts to describe, evaluate, quantify and model perceptions of climate change, understand more about risk and assess the construction of policy. Cultural geographers’ concerns with the construction of knowledge, the workings of social relations in space and the politics and poetics of place-based identities provide a lens through which personal, collective and institutional responses to climate change can be evaluated using critical and interpretative methodologies. Adopting a cultural geography approach, this paper examines how climate change as a particular environmental discourse is constructed through memory, observation and conversation, as well as materialised in farming practices on the Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall, UK

Geography, skills and careers patterns at the boundary of creativity & innovation: digital technology and creative arts graduates in the UK

In the last decades, research on knowledge economies has taken central stage. Within this broader research field, research on the role of digital technologies and the creative industries has become increasingly important for researchers, academics and policy makers with particular focus on their development, supply-chains and models of production. Furthermore, many have recognised that, despite the important role played by digital technologies and innovation in the development of the creative industries, these dynamics are hard to capture and quantify. Digital technologies are embedded in the production and market structures of the creative industries and are also partially distinct and discernible from it. They also seem to play a key role in innovation of access and delivery of creative content. This chapter tries to assess the role played by digital technologies focusing on a key element of their implementation and application: human capital. Using student micro-data collected by the Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA) in the United Kingdom, we explore the characteristics and location patterns of graduates who entered the creative industries, specifically comparing graduates in the creative arts and graduates from digital technology subjects. We highlight patterns of geographical specialisation but also how different context are able to better integrate creativity and innovation in their workforce. The chapter deals specifically with understanding whether these skills are uniformly embedded across the creative sector or are concentrated in specific sub-sectors of the creative industries. Furthermore, it explores the role that these graduates play in different sub-sector of the creative economy, their economic rewards and their geographical determinants.