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Dixon DP, Straughan ER.(2010). Geographies of Touch/Touched by Geography. Geography Compass, 4(5),449-459.Considerable attention within geography has been paid to the physiologies, knowledges and practices that give substance and import to the senses ? sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch ? and the manner in which these work alone, or in concert, to facilitate particular forms of relations between and amongst people, other life forms and objects. This article takes stock of the manner in which touch has entered into these debates and in particular of recent efforts to place touch, touching and being touched within non-essentialist, human geographic analyses. In doing so it draws attention, first, to studies that have used ?non? or ?more than? representational theory to emphasise the role of pathic, or precognitive, experiences of place in the production of proximal forms of knowledge and second, to work that explores the inter-play between the ?interior? psychologies of intimacy and indifference, acceptance and alienation (i.e. feelings of being in/losing/being out of touch) and the ?exterior,? corporeal work of texture and friction, push and feel. We conclude by calling for more critical attention to the work of touch in constructing scaled geographies and the recognition of legal and jurisdictional geographies in determining where, when and how touching takes place, the designation of touching as ?good? or ?bad? and the imposition of penalties in response to touch.Peer reviewe

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Geographers have long pondered post-human worlds. And yet, whilst such analyses have explored the natural and physical sciences as a means of articulating the relationalities and commonalities that span species and kingdoms, an explicit consideration of the aesthetic has been largely absent. To a degree, this is because the aesthetic has been understood as a `humanist remain'. Here, we want to make a stronger claim for the value of the aesthetic as a stepping off point for thinking through post-human geographies. We begin by acknowledging a productive tension within Kantian and post-Kantian accounts of sense-making: that is, a series of questions that speak directly to the post-human have been raised by dwelling upon how the aesthetic can be related to bodily needs and desires, as well as a feeling that emerges from the exercise of judgement. Then, we make the argument that, as a means of developing our aesthetic sensibility, geography can usefully further its engagement with art theory and practice. This leads us to ground our own exploration of the post-human in a discussion of two projects created by artist Perdita Phillips. Moving from a consideration of bowerbirds in the savanna to thrombolites in a saline lake, and from evolutionary biology to a Deleuzo -Guattarian geophilosophy, we ask, where is the artistry?