Histories of geography are, by their very nature, selective enterprises. The apparent tendency of geographers to disparage particular periods of the discipline’s history, at the same time as exalting others, is characteristic of the way in which progress has been measured, relevance defined, and novelty identified. Yet, whilst other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences actively engage with their textual canons and founding figures, geographers have notoriously avoided doing so. In this paper, we consider why this has been the case and how different conceptions of canonicity have mattered to the ways in which the history of geography and its intellectual foundations have been narrated. In thinking through the significance of geography’s texts to the ways we imagine the discipline – its past, present, and future – we consider how processes of remembering and forgetting have been employed to serve certain intellectual and ideological agendas. We conclude by advocating a more serious engagement with geography’s textual legacy: one which might benefit not only disciplinary historiography but also disciplinary consciousness, and thus the future of geography itself.

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This paper examines the role of surfaces in pilgrimage practices and experiences in two denominational and cultural contexts and landscape settings for Christian pilgrimage: a week of Ecumenical pilgrimage walks in the Isle of Man and Orthodox pilgrimage to the monasteries of Meteora in Greece. Surfaces are examined as dynamic textured platforms for journeying and stages for the performance of ritual; as part of visual aesthetic and multisensory embodied experiences; as hermeneutical texts; as perceived liminal thresholds through which the divine might be experienced; and as tangible material fragments encapsulating and facilitating the 'taking home' of the pilgrim experience.Surfaces are found to be significant for pilgrims in a variety of shared ways, but also ways which are inflected by different theological and cultural contexts. Through its analysis of faith adherents and practices, this study offers (i) a spiritually informed perspective on both perceptions and experiences of surfaces, and (ii) understanding of faith-inflected mobilities and 'more-than-representational' meanings and practices.

This paper explores a new phenomenon which is assuming global proportions: the planning and construction of artificial islands. Varying in size, shape, and purpose, man-made islands are looming on the horizons of an increasing number of aspiring global cities and regions at the margins of global capitalism. From the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea, from the Caribbean to the North Sea, artificial islands are increasingly embraced as spectacular, technical signifiers of global participation and urban economic progress: as the ‘new cultural icons’. Appropriated in different contexts, island projects, however, can be (and are) also resignified. They thus change in form, meaning, and use. While islands have been objects of renewed interest in cultural and historical geography, surprisingly, these new man-made landforms seem to have gone largely unnoticed. This paper suggests a research agenda to engage with artificial islands as a new ‘metageographical’ category of emergent, yet historically resonant, social space.

Over the past few years the notion of `landscape as a text' has been increasingly problematized. A number of experiments have been attempted to approach landscape via a revisited phenomenology. Landscape in the sense of graphic pictorial representation, however, has largely remained out of such debates. Reviewing and synthesizing work on landscape, materiality and performance, this article suggests some new directions for study. In particular, it calls for a reconceptualization of visual landscape representations as `travelling landscape-objects': graphic representations embedded in different material supports which physically move through space and time, and thus operate as active media for the circulation of place.