Cultural Geographies

With 78 specially commissioned entries written by a diverse range of contributors, this essential reference book covers the breadth and depth of human geography to provide a lively and accessible state of the art of the discipline for ..

A ‘Post-Work’ World:Geographical Engagements with the Future of Work

This article reviews geographical research on labour market changes that pose a challenge to ‘work’ as a compelling category of analysis. Drawing inspiration from feminist scholarship that has sought to develop a frame for thinking about the concept of work so that other activities outside employment are recognised, it considers what everyday practices of work, including domestic and reproductive labour, can teach us about the realities and futures of contemporary capitalism. While ‘work’ has long served as a presumed norm or telos of ‘development’, this article considers the prospect of the ‘end of work’ and of a specific type of accompanying capitalist society. It outlines the challenges for policy making in bringing forth a ‘post-work’ world without cementing social and economic inequality

Theorizing Bioart Encounters after Gilbert Simondon

In recent years ‘bioart’ has been lauded in the social sciences for its creative engagements with the ontological stakes of new forms of biotechnical life in-the-making. In this paper I push further to explore the ontogenetic potentials of bioart-encounters to generate new capacities for thinking and perceiving the nonhuman agencies imbricated in the becoming of subjects. To explore this potential I stage an encounter with Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, highlighting three implications for theorizations of the constitution and transformation of subjects. First, Simondon forces us to rethink the subject in terms of its transductive emergence from pre-individual processes, and its metastable susceptibility to ongoing transformations. Second, he substitutes voluntarist conceptions of thought with an involuntarist primacy of material encounters as the conditions for novel individuations. Finally, I argue that Simondon enables a thinking of the politics of the (bio)art-encounter in terms of its ontogenetic capacity to materially produce, rather than merely represent, new subjects and worlds.</jats:p

Elevated uranium in drinking water sources in basement aquifers of southern India

Groundwater resources in the crystalline basement complex of India are crucial for supplying drinking water in both rural and urban settings. Groundwater depletion is recognised as a challenge across parts of India due to over-abstraction, but groundwater quality constraints are perhaps even more widespread and often overlooked at the local scale. Uranium contamination in basement aquifers has been reported in many parts of India, locally exceeding WHO drinking water guideline values of 30 μg/L and posing a potential health risk. In this study 130 water samples were collected across three crystalline basement catchments to assess hydrochemical, geological and anthropogenic controls on uranium mobility and occurrence in drinking water sources. Groundwaters with uranium concentrations exceeding 30 μg/L were found in all three study catchments (30% of samples overall), with concentrations up to 589 μg/L detected. There appears to be a geological control on the occurrence of uranium in groundwater with the granitic gneiss of the Halli and Bengaluru study areas having higher mean uranium concentrations (51 and 68 μg/L respectively) compared to the sheared gneiss of the Berambadi catchment (6.4 μg/L). Uranium – nitrate relationships indicate that fertiliser sources are not a major control on uranium occurrence in these case studies which include two catchments with a long legacy of intense agricultural land use. Geochemical modelling confirmed uranium speciation was dominated by uranyl carbonate species, particularly ternary complexes with calcium, consistent with uranium mobility being affected by redox controls and the presence of carbonates. Urban leakage in Bengaluru led to low pH and low bicarbonate groundwater hydrochemistry, reducing uranium mobility and altering uranium speciation. Since the majority of inhabitants in Karnataka depend on groundwater abstraction from basement aquifers for drinking water and domestic use, exposure to elevated uranium is a public health concern. Improved monitoring, understanding and treatment of high uranium drinking water sources in this region is essential to safeguard public health

Assessing the role of groundwater recharge from tanks in crystalline bedrock aquifers in Karnataka, India, using hydrochemical tracers

The majority of India’s rural drinking water supply is sourced from groundwater, which also plays a critical role in irrigated agriculture, supporting the livelihoods of millions of users. However, recent high abstractions are threatening the sustainable use of groundwater, and action is needed to ensure continued supply. Increased managed aquifer recharge (MAR) using the > 200,000 existing tanks (artificially created surface water bodies) is one of the Indian government’s key initiatives to combat declining groundwater levels. However, few studies have directly examined the effectiveness of tank recharge, particularly in the complex fractured hydrogeology of Peninsular India. To address this gap, this study examined the impact of tanks in three crystalline bedrock catchments in Karnataka, southern India, by analysing the isotopic and hydrochemical composition of surface waters and groundwaters, combined with groundwater level observations. The results indicate that tanks have limited impact on regional groundwater recharge and quality in rural areas, where recharge from precipitation and groundwater recycling from irrigation dominate the recharge signal. In the urban setting (Bengaluru), impermeable surfaces increased the relative effect of recharge from point sources such as tanks and rivers, but where present, pipe leakage from public-water-supply accounted for the majority of recharge. Shallow groundwater levels in the inner parts of the city may lead to groundwater discharge to tanks, particularly in the dry season. We conclude that the importance of aquifer recharge from tanks is limited compared to other recharge sources and highly dependent on the specific setting. Additional studies to quantify tank recharge and revisions to the current guidelines for national groundwater recharge estimations, using a less generalised approach, are recommended to avoid over-estimating the role tanks play in groundwater recharge

Possible futures for rural East Africa under a changing climate: HyCRISTAL climate narrative rural infographic and Brief

The stories on the infographic and detailed in the accompanying brief describe three possible futures for rural East Africa in 2050. How the climate will change in the coming decades is uncertain, so three different plausible futures are included to demonstrate this range. These futures do not cover every possible outcome projected by climate models. The stories also describe some of the resulting impacts that could be experienced in rural areas. However, these impacts will vary across the region due to a range of local factors

Influence of land-use on the dynamics, quantity and composition of the organic matter transported across estuaries

The flux of terrigenous organic carbon across estuaries is an important and changing component of the global carbon cycle, but it is poorly understood. It has been proposed that estuaries can act either as a transporter of terrestrial dissolved organic carbon (DOC) to the ocean or as a reactor system in which DOC can be buried or transformed into carbon dioxide and released to the atmosphere. However, there is no clear understanding of the factors that drive estuaries to behave in one way or the other. Here we present the results from a study conducted in thirteen British estuaries which drain catchments of diverse land-uses under different hydrological conditions. Our data show that land-use influences the composition of the dissolved organic matter (DOM), the mixing dynamics of DOC and the quantity of DOC exported off the estuaries. Estuaries, whose catchments are less intensively managed and represent more natural ecosystems (average proportion of arable and (sub)-urban land-use ~12 %), contain a higher proportion of biologically-refractory “humic-like” DOM, which is transported conservatively across the salinity gradient. In contrast, estuaries whose catchments are more intensively managed (average proportion of arable and (sub)-urban land-use ~32 %) contain a high fraction of “protein-like” DOM which is transported non-conservatively, and thus suggest the existence of additions and removal processes across the salinity gradient. Furthermore, estuaries with more intensively managed catchments tend to export more DOC to coastal areas than they receive from rivers. Our results indicate that future changes in land-use have the potential to alter aquatic fluxes of terrigenous DOM and the fate of the constituent carbon