Volume 25, numéro 2, 2026 Special Issue: What Is Critical Geography, What Can, and What Must It Be?

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We return to the question “What is critical geography, what can, and what must it be?” as an ongoing and collective problem and provocation. Taking the ACME Editorial Collective’s “Unpause-ish Statement” as a starting point, we situate this conversation within a conjuncture of overlapping crises that are reshaping both the worlds we study and the conditions under which we produce knowledge. Bringing together five contributions from the 2025 RGS–IBG panel, we trace how critical geography is being reworked across struggles over labour, care, method, and political responsibility. These interventions confront the co-optation of social justice, the urgency of responding to anti-trans violence, the possibilities of speculative and reparative approaches, and the importance of centring situated, embodied, and everyday practices of resistance and survival. Across all five, critical geography emerges as a contested praxis that must continually turn critique inward as well as outwards. We argue that critical geography must make its own conditions of labour visible, remain accountable to those most affected by injustice, and expand what counts as scholarship, method, and intervention. This is not a call to define the field, but to keep it open: to unpause without rushing, to refuse without withdrawing, and to insist on forms of critique that are inseparable from care, responsibility, and collective world-making.

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This commentary offers a personal reflection on what Critical Geography is, what it can be, and what it must be. Rather than defining the field in prescriptive terms, I reflect on how Critical Geography functions as a praxis and orientation, one that can be dangerous and must have consequences. I explore the risks and responsibilities of critical work in an era of performative allyship and institutional co-optation. The piece ends by calling for continued inward critique, arguing that Critical Geography must challenge the discipline itself if it is to avoid reproducing the very structures of power and exclusion it seeks to contest.

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We stand at a perilous juncture wherein trans and gender diverse people in the UK and beyond are increasingly subject to authoritarian and eliminationist political forces. Following the UK Supreme Court judgement of April 2025 and amid the continual emergence of political and policy apparatuses that increasingly call for heightened control, surveillance, and restriction of the scope of trans people’s lives, including the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission’s Code of Practice, and the ‘Cass’ and ‘Sullivan’ Reviews, in this piece I ask: are critical scholars failing to act with urgency to protect trans people when most needed? I argue that critical scholars should resist the installation of logics that enforce rigid, hygienically-policed sex/gender binaries, question individuals’ selfhoods and autonomy, and undermine ethical standards, recognising in turn the consequences these hold for all marginalised groups and for conducting critical social science research. Moments of solidarity demonstrate the influence that critical scholars can wield to address the emergency nature of this moment, and to ensure that trans people and trans research can be valued and maintained within the academy. Failing to do so risks the loss of trans scholars and trans scholarship, one that critical scholars would carry as their failure and burden.

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As capitalocentric, fascist, genocidal and techno-managerial visions of future space proliferate and coalesce, what is the role of critical geography? How can critical geographers foster the creative imaginaries needed to organise for alternative futures? Contemplating the possible future directions of critical geography, here I consider the function of speculation – both in terms of the critical geographies of speculation and the possibilities of speculative critical geographies. In a brief reflection on recent work, I think about the ways that critical geography allows for intervention in and cultivation of speculative futures.

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This paper reflects on what it means to do critical geography today by tracing its complex history and situating it within my own positionality as a feminist political geographer inspired by post/de/anti-colonial perspectives. While critical geography is often located in the radical movements of the 1960s-1970s in North America and Europe, these accounts overlook wider and earlier histories of critique, and the contributions of non-white, non-male, and non-Anglophone thinkers. I argue that critical geography has always been plural, shaped by feminist, anti-racist, postcolonial, and Global South perspectives that have since become central to the discipline. Writing from a standpoint shaped by my own history of migration, displacement, and simultaneous privilege within academia, I emphasise that our positions influence the forms of critique we produce. I describe this approach as the production of knowledge from within out: a way of engaging with the world that acknowledges how embodied, emotional, and experiential ways of knowing can generate critical insight. From this perspective, I outline my two key commitments in doing critical geography today based on my own work. The first is a Politics of Visibilisation – making visible the systemic, intimate, and embodied violences of extraction, displacement, and exhaustion. The second is a Reparative Praxis, which asks how we might move beyond critique toward responsibility, creativity, and care. Drawing on feminist and art-based methodologies, I suggest that critical geography can be a reparative and participatory practice, one that not only exposes injustice but also nurtures resilience, connection, and the possibility of repair.

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In this piece, I suggest that a critical geography must be curious about how we can do geography differently in order to collectively work towards a more inclusive and just discipline. I build on geographers’ critique of the discipline, including its ties to colonialism and imperialism, its role in producing and maintaining racialized hierarchies, and the continued sidelining of particular critical approaches, theories, and epistemologies. More specifically, I return to the concept of a feminist geopolitics of living as well as work by abolitionist scholars and activists as I explore how critical geography needs to be a geography that is driven by a critical imperative, yet attentive the ways in which how people make lives, assert rights, and build alternative futures collectively in order to make different geographies visible. In conclusion, I argue that a critical geography must include an experimental expansion of our political imagination and praxis.