Publications

The Handbook of Education in China provides both a comprehensive overview and an original interpretation of key aspects of education in the People’s Republic of China. It has four parts: The Historical Background; The Contemporary Chinese System; Problems and Policies; The Special Administrative Regions: Macau and Hong Kong. The Handbook is an essential reference for…

This chapter explores the work on language, ideology, and politics of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser. While only the first two explicitly considered language, all three adopted a totalising approach, forcefully critiqued ideologies and domination, and stressed the unity of social theory and political practice. The chapter addresses Marx’s ideas on language and…

In parliamentary democracies, a key question for citizens and social scientists alike is, “who speaks on behalf of different social groups and on different policy topics?” This informs not only an understanding of how democracy works but also the workings of the formative phase of public policy-making. This allows us to understand a range of…

Book chapter in Reanimating Regions, Riding, J. and Jones, M. (eds). This chapter looks at the ‘new new localism’ and suggests the need to now think about the dawn of a ‘new regional geography’. City-region-based agglomerations are currently riding high on the political and policy agenda across the world. Their emergence is not accidental; they are…

Writing regions, undertaking a regional study, was once a standard form of geographic communication and critique. This was until the quantitative revolution in the middle of the previous century and more definitively the critical turn in human geography towards the end of the twentieth century. From then on writing regions as they were experienced phenomenologically,…

Socially motivated divestment from the fossil fuel industry is occurring at a rapid rate. Banks, pension funds, universities, and philanthropic organizations around the world are divesting vast amounts of capital. Based on empirical data from face-to-face interviews with key divestment actors in the UK and Australia, this chapter explores the entanglements between the divestment and…

In ‘Seeing the Need: Urban Outreach as Sensory Walking’, Tom Hall and Robin Smith team up to lead us on an urban patrol in Cardiff. Their chapter reports on the work of outreach and street care in the city, showing how a small team of council workers, whose job it is to make repeated tours…

This chapter revisits claims in the light of the growing financialisation of social relations and the rise of neo-liberalisation as an economic and political project. It introduces two working definitions and then modifies them to reflect further theoretical arguments and recent empirical trends. The chapter then explores the implications of economic and political changes in…

Globalization is a major driver of change in contemporary rural areas, involving the multiplication, stretching, and intensification of social, economic, political, and cultural relations over space. Processes such as the integration of the global economy, increased flows of international migration, and a growing global consciousness and standardization of values impact on rural areas affected by…

Regulation, the process of regulating or being regulated, is a geographical concern. Contra the thought processes of neoclassical economics and the assumptions of equilibrium and optimality, everything else is neither equal nor without hands. The economy, for instance, is not an unmediated outcome of universal and transhistorical processes operating across a featureless and stateless isotropic…