Institute of Human Geography Research Grants, 2025

The IHG is now accepting grant applications for 2025. The deadline to submit the application is September 15. See details here.

Human Geography Publication Awards, 2025

The Institute of Human Geography confers the 2025 Human Geography Publication Awards to the following scholars for their publications in the Human Geography journal:

• Best paper: Poor miners and empty e-wallets: Latin American experiences with cryptocurrencies in crisis - Antulio Rosales, Eva van Roekel, Peter Howson, Coco Kanters

• Best Contention: Alienation flows through the barrel of a gun: Despair, mass shootings, and suicide in an American settler colony - Levi Gahman

• Best Review: Geographies of artificial intelligence: Labor, surveillance, and activism - Margath Walker, Jamie L Winders

• Best Visual Intervention: From Jamestown to Bethlehem: Local connections of geopolitical violence - Christabel Devadoss

The Institute of Human Geography confers the Human Geography Publication Awards for articles, reviews and contention pieces published in the journal Human Geography.

Awards are given for:

• Best Paper (substantive article, $500 plus citation)

• Best paper by Early Career Academic (graduate students or Assistant Professor, $300 plus citation)

• Best Contention ($300 plus citation)

• Best Review ($300 plus citation) 

• Best Visual Intervention ($300 plus citation)

The winning authors would be announced around April each year. The awards are announced in April based on the pieces published in Human Geography during the previous year. Editors and editorial board members are not eligible for these awards.

Human Geography - Current Issue 

The second issue of 2025 (18:2, July) of Human Geography is out! This is a special issue on The Pluriverse of Transitions: Towards Anti-colonial and Insurrectional Energy Transformations guest-edited by Carlos Tornel and Alexander Dunlap.

Enjoy reading the Editorial and Substantive Articles by Carlos Tornel, Alexander Dunlap, Daniela Soto-Hernández, Diego Andreucci, Gustavo García López, Jaume Franquesa, Larissa González Nieves, Erik Post, Marisol Rosas Pérez, Bardomiano Sánchez Martínez, María Edith Mora Báez, Eugenia González García, Luis Mario Crisóstomo Salgado, Lázaro Hernández Pérez, Gerardo A Torres Contreras, Rosa Marina Flores Cruz, Rebeca Roysen, Guilherme Moura Fagundes, Lasse Kos, Nadine Bruehwiler, and Jens Koehrsen. Contentions are written by Bárbara López-González, Neelakshi Joshi, and Ashish Kothari. Review is contributed by Matthew J Burke. Visual Intervention is provided by Bárbara López-González.

Check out the detailed ToC of the Current Issue and also those of Past Issues.

We look forward to your submissions for the journal. Contact any of our editors to get started! 

Conference - The Power of Marxist Thought

The Institute of Human Geography is co-sponsoring the The Power of Marxist Thought Conference at York University to be held on September 26 & 27, 2025.

Claims about the importance of Marxism typically and understandably focus on its historic role in analyzing political, social and economic life. This conference will assess the impact and importance of Marxism in the context of the wider intellectual realm, and how central theory is to its very existence. We seek papers by scholars from across disciplines, including but not limited to anthropology, economics, human geography, political science, social psychology, sociology and others, including Area studies and interdisciplinary fields. Their papers should demonstrate the intellectual power of Marxist thought, especially in relation to the serious problems and issues facing humanity.

The collection of the conference papers will offer a chance for interdisciplinary analyses with the goal of strengthening Marxist thought. We believe that Marxism cannot be an intellectual island and that it must be in a critical and productive dialogue with non-Marxist bodies of work. We invite participants to compare Marxist and non-Marxist approaches to a wide range of issues, and to articulate how being informed by a Marxist approach can produce a unique, important, and essential analysis of pressing political, economic, social-cultural and ecological issues that are generally missing outside of Marxism. We believe that this will serve to help clarify the power of a Marxist analytical frame.

The conference will be an in-person, two-day event. In a comradely spirit, presenters should participate in the entirety of the conference. We especially encourage young, working class, and marginalized scholars to present their research at the conference. We expect to publish many of the papers presented at the conference in the form of one or two edited books and/or special issues organized for Left journals.

Radical Geography Book Series - Geohistory, Capitalist Development, and South Africa 

We are pleased to announce the publication of Kevin Cox's book Geohistory, Capitalist Development, and South Africa as part of the Radical Geography Book Series launched last year by the Institute of Human Geography in collaboration with Brill and Haymarket Books.

2024 IHG Research Grants

Congratulations to all the recipients of the 2024 IHG Research Grants - Saad Ismail Amira, Hannah Boast, Samer Raddad,  Maria Villalpando Páez, Juneseo Hwang Tony Hyunduck Cho, Carolyn Swope, Francisco Fernández Romero, Pato Laterra, Isaac Rivera, Drew Heiderscheidt, Theryn Arnold, and Peerzada Raouf Ahmad! The recipients represent institutions in Argentina, Canada, Germany, India, Palestine, UK and the USA.

First Marxist Geography Workshop, 11-12 October 2024, The People’s Forum, Manhattan, New York, USA

The Institute of Human Geography (IHG) are soliciting applications to participate in the first Marxist Geography Workshop, to be held at The People’s Forum in Manhattan, New York (US), 11-12 October. IHG is extremely grateful the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism for sharing  the financial/material burden of organizing this Workshop. The objective of the workshop is to facilitate the process of developing Marxist Geography, but all Marxists (or those aspiring to become Marxists), in any field of knowledge, are welcome. A corollary main aim is to help interested people become mutually acquainted and finding ways to help each other in activities like teaching, research, and direct political action. The workshop is to further mutual education and not for critical appraisals of participants’ work.

More ambitiously, the workshop would lead to the formation of a collaborative group dedicated to building institutional capacities alternative to the academic mainstream, establish networks useful towards sharing resources to build for the long term and helping each other find permanent or secure posts, and run future workshops in such a way as to help prepare the next generation of especially (but not only) Marxist geographers gather, share ideas in mutually nurturing ways, and educate each other.

Several reasons animate the organization of this workshop. In North American Geography, interest in Marxism grew by the late 1960s and eventually became influential enough even to land, though not always explicitly, in introductory textbooks. This was thanks to much effort external to and within academic institutions, as well as major publications that shaped the intellect of many geographers. Continuing efforts and the acclaim gained by a few Marxist geographers, has enabled Marxism to persist, even if often just conceptually, within academic Geography. Progressive marginalization and much distortion since especially the 1990s, however, have stunted the development of Marxist Geography and its potentials for wider social relevance. The absence of academic Geography institutions dedicated to the study of Marxism has also impeded systematic training in even the most elementary aspects of Marxism. The workshop is an attempt to contribute to reversing the trend and to build institutional capacity (informal and formal). This is not only to further Marxist Geography, but to help in the development of the theoretical tools to meet the challenges of steadily worsening working conditions, including within universities, and to prepare more geographers in teaching Marxism, especially given a recently rising interest in socialism. Though principally concerned with Marxist Geography in North America, participants are welcome from other regions of the world as well.

There are no set themes to the workshop. Instead, participants are to bring and present summaries and thoughts about:

• The theoretical work of Marx or Engels or a Marxist thinker, especially one who was or is involved in party work; this can be a specific book, article, pamphlet, etc.

• How that Marxist thinker helps develop Marxist Geography (in terms of specific theories, methodology, paradigmatic or theoretical development, etc.); this could be about commodification processes in relation to basic needs (housing, food, healthcare, etc.), dialectical and historical materialism, imperialism, decolonization struggle, political economy of resource extraction, multiple-scale processes behind soil degradation, etc.

• How Marxist Geography that can be developed out of that theoretical framework helps with a specific form of social struggle (relevant to, e.g., activism, social movements, etc.) or with the development of a party’s political platform or policy (please limit to one concrete, detailed example).

As time is never enough, these must brief overviews, presented within not more than 15 minutes. This is also to allow for discussion for the purpose of clarification, further description of concepts/theories and their applications, and other matters pertaining to further exploration and learning, rather than critique. Please prepare such overviews in ways that presume no prior knowledge. What is presented at the workshop will be considered for publication in the journal Human Geography, in the Reviews section.

It is highly recommended that prior to the workshop each participant will have read (or re-read), at a minimum, Capital Volume 1 and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. This is helpful in having a grounding on Marxist method and a shared background among all participants.

The structure of the workshop is to have two concomitant discussion groups (with facilitators) sharing ideas and then reporting the results of the discussion to all in a sharing session. 

REGISTRATION FEE: USD 20-100 (sliding scale) for those who can avail themselves of reimbursement from their institution or want to contribute more. No one who is accepted to the workshop will be turned away for lack of funds to pay for the registration fee. Once accepted, information will be provided about how to make the payment.

An official invitation letter can be made available, and it can include a description of a presentation, if such is necessary.

Deadline for the application: 31 August 2024

To apply, please email the following to ihumangeography@gmail.com:

• A letter describing who you are, why you wish to participate, a description of your background in Marxism (if any), what you would like to get out of the workshop, how you will further the aims of the workshop after its conclusion

• An abstract of no more than 300 words delineating the ideas to be shared at the workshop (see above); if possible, submit a manuscript for the same of no more than 5000 words for the body of the text

• Current CV or similar, highlighting any activities most pertinent to Marxist Geography

Global Finance Capital - Richard Peet

IHG is proud to present Dick's latest publication. Get your digital copy here.

Online Presentation - Politics and Environmental Policies: The Case of Koshi Floods in Bihar 

The Institute of Human Geography, Prof. Aijazuddin Ahmad Memorial Fund for Social Geography, and the Patliputra Intelligentsia Forum (PIF) cordially invite you to an online presentation by Rahul Yaduka, a doctoral researcher at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University (Delhi). The talk would be chaired by Dr. Dinesh K. Mishra (Jamshedpur), and the discussants include Dr. Ajay Dixit (Institute for Social and Environmental Transition - Nepal, Lalitpur), Prof. Arupjyoti Saikia (Indian Institute for Technology, Guwahati), and Prof. Manindra N. Thakur (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi).

The presentation is scheduled for March 22, 2024, 3:00 PM IST on Zoom.

Abstract: The lower Koshi region in northern Bihar of India, adjacent to the Indo-Nepal border, suffers the perpetual agony of floods, land erosion, displacement, and out-migration. Despite these becoming a permanent feature of the ecological scape, primarily due to ill-thought flood control interventions, the annual floods evoke a false sense of shock and surprise. Mounting scholarly critique has yet to affect any reconsideration of the dominant flood management paradigm in the region.

The research is a product of a three-year-long immersion, almost akin to ethnography, in multiple flood-prone and allegedly flood-protected villages in the Supaul district of the Koshi diyara (the fluvial land-waterscape). It has attempted to understand the gradual process through which the Koshi diyara has been transformed, primarily through flood-control interventions and development infrastructure, and these have had a definite impact on the region’s ecology, society and polity.

The research attempts to address three major questions: How have the flood control and development infrastructures transformed the ecological backdrop of the region? How does the community perceive the structural interventions? How does the community resist the structural intervention? The answers to these questions illuminate the politics of disaster management policies and the politics of knowledge-making in the region and the globe in general.