Department of Geography

Book Review

Margins are central rather then peripheral to defining political identities. Italian national identity, though often seen as a fragile construct, is by no means unique in this regard. National identities must be constantly in question in order to thrive. Three geopolitical moments or forces are identified as having contributed at different times and in distinctive ways to the spatial construction of Italian identity: the border question, the immigrant/emigrant experience, and the North-South regional division.

Since the collapse of the postwar Italian party system in 1992-3, Italian politics has been dominated by the figure of Silvio Berlusconi, undoubtedly the major politician on the political center-right and elected as prime minister successively in 1994, 2001, and 2008. The image of Berlusconi as Italy’s political leader is often seen by commentators as much more positive at home than it has been abroad. Some well known foreign media, for example, have been much more consistently negative about Berlusconi’s dual role as media baron and political leader than have domestic media (and considerable public opinion) in Italy. If so, then Berlusconi’s exit from a central position in Italian politics may create external relief that he is gone and improved regard for Italy as a whole but at the expense of a huge “hole” that his absence may create domestically. On close analysis, however, The presumed gap between views of Berlusconi at “home” and “abroad” looks smaller, however, than conventional wisdom would suggest. At least over the recent course of his political career, he has stimulated a similar range of increasingly attitudinal negative responses both in Italy and elsewhere, although with variations over time everywhere and from place to place outside of Italy. These responses are increasingly negative, both at home and abroad. Berlusconi’s reputation is very much related to popular perceptions of his practical successes and failures as a leader and to what sort of leader he has actually been. It is not simply the result of a “battle” of media images without substantive content. This is encouraging news for those looking towards a future in which Italian politics will be less dominated by popular media such as television and its presumed manipulation of a totally pliant electorate. The exit of the “big seducer” will leave a troubling legacy of unresolved problems while also creating openings for a political future in which Italians may be more collectively invested.

"Sovranismo" has become the “go-to” word to use in contrasting those advocating “take back control” and nationalism against the “globalists” who are the bête noire of populism. This paper discusses the recent provenance of the word and the impluses that underlie it. It then considers the various arguments for sovranismo more broadly. The final section discusses the actual history of state sovereignty and suggests that current usage lacks much understanding of its complexities.

Abstract This article, co‐authored by encampment and university scholars, is concerned with how homeless persons challenge rightlessness. We do so by advancing a conceptual framework of common sense law, arguing that such contestations take place not only in courtrooms but also in the lived spaces of homelessness. Drawing on five years of ethnography, we foreground how homeless persons become proficient in the law as well as in self‐advocacy, navigating and resisting state power, be it the edicts of criminalization or the labyrinth of bureaucratization. In doing so, we seek to understand housing justice as rights from below as well as a process of making right, a form of redress for perceived injuries. Our conceptual framework of common sense law derives from the specificity of the North American context where homeless personhood is constituted both within and against liberal arrangements of property. Often deployed in spaces such as the street, where property arrangements are contested by those consigned to spatial precarity, common sense law is a re‐formation of liberalism and its constitutionally protected rights.

Thinking from Los Angeles, amid the expanding criminalization of homelessness, we advance a conceptual framework of encampment geographies. We argue that the homeless encampment must be understood in relation to state power, specifically the state as landlord. As residents of state spaces—sidewalks, shelters, interim housing—encampment dwellers are institutionalized. This includes interpellation in humanitarian exchange, notably through forms of mutual aid that emerge in the interstices of state violence. Drawing on ethnographic research and movement histories at Aetna Street, we present three encampment geographies: return, refuge, and refusal. We conceptualize the encampment as a site of enforced return and a space of refuge whose residents are akin to refugees. In doing so, we situate the homeless encampment in a global geography of camps, drawing on literatures that are attentive to expulsion, containment, and asylum. Yet encampment residents refuse enclosure, in particular, exploitation and its articulation in wage–rent relations. In keeping with Aetna's history as a node of Black life in Los Angeles, we study these geographies of struggle guided by Black feminist theory, notably the Practicing Refusal Collective. In doing so, we conceptualize the encampment as a form of living within and beyond racial capitalism.

Rapid increases in wildfire area burned across North American forests pose novel challenges for managers and society. Increasing area burned raises questions about whether, and to what degree, contemporary fire regimes (1984–2022) are still departed from historical fire regimes (pre-1880). We use the North American tree-ring fire-scar network (NAFSN), a multi-century record comprising >1800 fire-scar sites spanning diverse forest types, and contemporary fire perimeters to ask whether there is a contemporary fire surplus or fire deficit, and whether recent fire years are unprecedented relative to historical fire regimes. Our results indicate, despite increasing area burned in recent decades, that a widespread fire deficit persists across a range of forest types and recent years with exceptionally high area burned are not unprecedented when considering the multi-century perspective offered by fire-scarred trees. For example, ‘record’ contemporary fire years such as 2020 burned 6% of NAFSN sites—the historical average—well below the historical maximum of 29% sites that burned in 1748. Although contemporary fire extent is not unprecedented across many North American forests, there is abundant evidence that unprecedented contemporary fire severity is driving forest loss in many ecosystems and adversely impacting human lives, infrastructure, and water supplies.

Abstract: From 1979 to 2016, total Antarctic sea ice extent experienced a positive trend with record winter maxima in 2012 and 2014. Record summer minima followed within the period 2017-2024, raising the possibility that the Antarctic sea ice system might be changing state. Here we use a Bayesian reconstruction of Antarctic sea ice extent which extends the record back to 1899, to show that the sequence of extreme minima in summer Antarctic sea ice extent is unlikely to have happened in the 20th century. We show that they represent a structural change in the sea ice system, manifest by increased persistence in the sea ice extent anomalies and a strongly reduced tendency to return to the mean state. Further, our analysis suggests that we may no longer rely on the past, long-term, behavior of the sea ice system to predict its future state. Extreme conditions may characterize the future state of Antarctic sea ice.

Summer temperature extremes can have large impacts on humans and the biosphere, and an increase in heat extremes is one of the most visible symptoms of climate change. Multiple mechanisms have been proposed that would predict faster warming of heat extremes than typical summer days, but it is unclear whether this is occurring. Here, we show that, in both observations and historical climate model simulations, the hottest summer days have warmed at the same pace as the median globally, in each hemisphere, and in the tropics from 1959 to 2023. In contrast, the coldest summer days have warmed more slowly than the median in the global average, a signal that is not simulated in any of 262 simulations across 28 CMIP6 models. The observed stretching of the cold tail indicates that observed summertime temperatures have become more variable despite the lack of hot day amplification. The interannual variability and trend in the warming of both hot and cold extremes compared to the median can be explained from a surface energy balance perspective based on changes in net surface radiation and evaporative fraction. Tropical hot day amplification is projected to emerge in the future (2024-2099, SSP3-7.0 scenario), while Northern Hemisphere heat extremes are expected to continue to follow the median.