F Ginn
Biographic Data
| ID | 66035 |
|---|---|
| NAME | F Ginn |
| GIVEN NAMES | F |
| FAMILY NAME | Ginn |
| SIGNATURE | GINN F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bristol |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1506-8345 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 376 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Where next for external examining? A view from UK higher education
Amid the usual deluge of updates at the start of an academic year – new guidance on student support, new tutoring policies, new online systems for recording feedback and so on – a small detail in t
The toil for soil
This article theorises toil as the embodied, temporally extended labour through which soil is made durable, compromised and sometimes abandoned in the Western Himalaya. Responding to crisis framings that universalise soil degradation without engaging questions of embodiment or labour we ask: when, and for whom, does care become worth the toil of making and repairing degraded soils? How are these valuations negotiated across bodies organised accor…
Pious natures
Conversations in geography
This article offers a critical appraisal of institutionalised knowledge production and exchange on the history and philosophy of geography in the United Kingdom. We examine broad epistemic trends over 41 years (1981–2021) through an analysis of annual conference sessions and special events convened by the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG…
Learning to live with synanthropic bats
As bats adapt to anthropogenic environmental change they increasingly interact with humans and inhabit human infrastructure. This article addresses the challenge of learning to live with synanthropic bats. Building on ideas from multispecies studies, we explore the practices and accommodations that coproduce meaningful human-bat cohabitation in domestic space. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in the Netherlands, we find that domestic spa…
Plants for a Cold Cosmos
What does it mean that plants—soy, coffee, wheat, cotton, lettuce and more—are growing in Near-Earth orbit? What histories account for their presence beyond the terrestrial, and what futures might they be incubating? In this paper, to address these questions, I describe four very different planetary vegetal thresholds, which I understand as geohistoric events thick with potentials for realigning worlds. First, technoscientific cultures of space s…
Decolonizing Environmental Humanities
Dooren, that in Australia studying nature and environment was impossible without a reckoning with coloniality.Nature and environment were-scientifically, ideologically, materially-colonial creations, and this marks a point of departure for the environmental humanities."Black and brown death is the precondition of every Anthropocene origin story," as Kathryn Yusoff puts it. 2This fact implies that more just, sustainable, and flourishing forms of h…
Vegetal HydroPoetics
In this paper we outline an arts-based practice of experimenting with plant growth. Working with hydroponic systems, we describe a means to interact with plants beyond instrumentalism and beyond appreciation at a distance. We present several opening glimpses into a distinctly plant subjectivity that are afforded by technological mediation. This method informs ongoing research into growing liveable worlds with plants and is offered as a novel prac…
Geophilosophy
Geophilosophy employs a range of concepts to reimagine the discipline of philosophy. Invented by Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992), the field has grown and been elaborated by many thinkers. After reviewing the genesis of geophilosophy and its uptake in human geography through the 1990s, several key aspects are described: becoming rather than being; affect, virtuality, and the nonrepresentational; space; and minor theory. F…
Planetary vegetal thought
Governing the soil
This article examines India's response to the global soil health crisis. A longstanding centre of agricultural production and innovation, India has recently launched an ambitious soil health programme. The country's Soil Health Card (SHC) Scheme intervenes in farm-scale decisions about efficient fertiliser use, envisioning farmers as managers and soil as a substrate for production. India is also home to one of the world's largest alternative agri…
Environmental Humanities
The Arts, Environmental Justice, and the Ecological Crisis
Christian climate care
This qualitative study draws on in‐depth interviews and documentary analysis conducted between 2014 and 2016 to investigate the nature of pro‐environmental behaviour of members within the Eco‐Congregation Scotland network. We argue for an integrative analytical frame, that we call “eco‐theo‐citizenship,” which synthesises strengths of values‐, practice‐ and citizenship‐based approaches to the study of pro‐environmental behaviour within the specif…
Autonomy, Erasure, and Persistence in the Urban Gardening Commons
Collective gardening spaces have existed across Lisbon, Portugal for decades. This article attends to the makeshift natures made by black migrants from Portugal's former colonies, and the racial urban geography thrown into relief by the differing fortunes of white Portuguese community gardening spaces. Conceptualising urban gardens as commons‐in‐the‐making, we explore subaltern urbanism and the emergence of autonomous gardening commons on the one…
Posthumanism
Posthumanism is a mode of analysis highly skeptical of the centrality afforded the human in Western philosophical and political thought. Where humanism holds that the human is defined by unique properties such as language or culture, posthumanism emphasizes that, just like other beings and objects, humans are continually and differentially produced through biological, technological, and other more‐than‐human forces. Posthumanism can be approached…
In the Absence of Sparrows
This chapter asks what happens to place in the absence of birds. Specifically, it examines the case of house sparrow (Passer domesticus) decline in London, UK. While the house sparrow may be rapidly disappearing across Britain, it is nevertheless not at risk of global extinction. Loss in this context is not absolute, but is about the irretrievability of the past, of the former ways birds and humans were bound together, and of the textures and sou…
Domestic Garden Landscapes of Memory, Mortality and Beyond
Teaching the history of geography
Drawing upon the personal reflections of geographical educators in Brazil, Canada, the UK, and the US, this Forum provides a state-of-the-discipline review of teaching in the history of geography; identifies the practical and pedagogical challenges associated with that teaching; and offers suggestions and provocations as to future innovation. The Forum shows how teaching in the history of geography is valued – as a tool of identity making, as a d…
Jakob von Uexküll Beyond Bubbles
Who cares about other species? How can we know other creatures, their worlds, their wants or even desires? And what is the relationship between knowing and caring? Such questions have been animatin
Flourishing with Awkward Creatures
Giant isopods are one of the star attractions in the Toba Aquarium, Japan.Under normal circumstances these crustaceans live at depth on the cold, dark ocean floor, scavenging flesh from dead fish and whales.Their alien appearance, as well as the strangeness of their lives, instills a combination of fascination, fear, and disgust in the aquarium visitor.In 2007, one specimen-29 centimetres long and weighing just over a kilogram-was plucked from wa…
The Smell of Selfless Love
The sudden decline of bee pollinator populations worldwide has caused significant alarm, not least because Apis mellifera, the European honeybee, is thought to be responsible for pollination of 71 of the 100 crop species which provide 90% of the world's food supply. Here we investigate the response to colony collapse disorder of a committed group of beekeepers who live in southern England, UK. These beekeepers are inspired by the writings of Rudo…
Death, absence and afterlife in the garden
This article considers what we might learn about landscape from how certain gardeners respond to death, absence and afterlife. After situating the domestic garden amid recent work on landscapes of memory and absence in geography, the article presents a circuit of the garden in four movements: passing, touching, weeding and sitting. Each draws on encounters with experienced gardeners living in British suburbs. In particular, these movements focus …
Being like a researcher”
The neoliberalization of universities is creating an increasingly instrumental, market-focused approach to higher education. This paper focuses on Masters dissertation supervision in the UK, which to date has been understudied and which recent changes to higher education have left in a precarious position. It presents a collaborative reflection on the supervision process conducted by students and the author at the University of Edinburgh. Expandi…
Sticky lives
In response to the pressing need to re‐constitute the ways we live with non‐humans, more‐than‐human geography's distinctive contribution has been to describe an ethics based not on ‘certain subjects’ but on the relational entanglement of life: to show that ‘we’ are connected and thus invited to care. This paper aims to suggest, however, that this relational diagnostic obscures as much as it reveals and that detachment, as much as relation, provid…
Sticky lives
In response to the pressing need to re‐constitute the ways we live with non‐humans, more‐than‐human geography's distinctive contribution has been to describe an ethics based not on ‘certain subjects’ but on the relational entanglement of life: to show that ‘we’ are connected and thus invited to care. This paper aims to suggest, however, that this relational diagnostic obscures as much as it reveals and that detachment, as much as relation, provid…
Flourishing with Awkward Creatures
Giant isopods are one of the star attractions in the Toba Aquarium, Japan.Under normal circumstances these crustaceans live at depth on the cold, dark ocean floor, scavenging flesh from dead fish and whales.Their alien appearance, as well as the strangeness of their lives, instills a combination of fascination, fear, and disgust in the aquarium visitor.In 2007, one specimen-29 centimetres long and weighing just over a kilogram-was plucked from wa…
Extension, subversion, containment
National identity in many post‐colonial states is predicated on nature being outside and antecedent to culture and the colonial project. This paper questions the historical and essentialist assumptions underpinning this vision using New Zealand as a case study, and in particular the Christchurch Botanic Gardens in the nineteenth century. I argue that the Gardens were a site in the multi‐species extension of colonial space, but that far from being…
Death, absence and afterlife in the garden
This article considers what we might learn about landscape from how certain gardeners respond to death, absence and afterlife. After situating the domestic garden amid recent work on landscapes of memory and absence in geography, the article presents a circuit of the garden in four movements: passing, touching, weeding and sitting. Each draws on encounters with experienced gardeners living in British suburbs. In particular, these movements focus …
Dig for Victory! New histories of wartime gardening in Britain
Autonomy, Erasure, and Persistence in the Urban Gardening Commons
Collective gardening spaces have existed across Lisbon, Portugal for decades. This article attends to the makeshift natures made by black migrants from Portugal's former colonies, and the racial urban geography thrown into relief by the differing fortunes of white Portuguese community gardening spaces. Conceptualising urban gardens as commons‐in‐the‐making, we explore subaltern urbanism and the emergence of autonomous gardening commons on the one…
The Smell of Selfless Love
The sudden decline of bee pollinator populations worldwide has caused significant alarm, not least because Apis mellifera, the European honeybee, is thought to be responsible for pollination of 71 of the 100 crop species which provide 90% of the world's food supply. Here we investigate the response to colony collapse disorder of a committed group of beekeepers who live in southern England, UK. These beekeepers are inspired by the writings of Rudo…
Teaching the history of geography
Drawing upon the personal reflections of geographical educators in Brazil, Canada, the UK, and the US, this Forum provides a state-of-the-discipline review of teaching in the history of geography; identifies the practical and pedagogical challenges associated with that teaching; and offers suggestions and provocations as to future innovation. The Forum shows how teaching in the history of geography is valued – as a tool of identity making, as a d…
Xeriscape People and the Cultural Politics of Turfgrass Transformation
Turfgrass yards dominate the residential landscapes of St Petersburg, Florida, and much of the rest of the urban and suburban United States. Increasingly, alternatives to the resource-intensive turfgrass lawn are the focus of interest among environmentalists, state and county governments, and growing numbers of residents in cities in the water-scarce Southeast and Southwest. Drawing on ethnographic and survey field research on everyday yard pract…
Being like a researcher”
The neoliberalization of universities is creating an increasingly instrumental, market-focused approach to higher education. This paper focuses on Masters dissertation supervision in the UK, which to date has been understudied and which recent changes to higher education have left in a precarious position. It presents a collaborative reflection on the supervision process conducted by students and the author at the University of Edinburgh. Expandi…
Jakob von Uexküll Beyond Bubbles
Who cares about other species? How can we know other creatures, their worlds, their wants or even desires? And what is the relationship between knowing and caring? Such questions have been animatin
Pious natures
Learning to live with synanthropic bats
As bats adapt to anthropogenic environmental change they increasingly interact with humans and inhabit human infrastructure. This article addresses the challenge of learning to live with synanthropic bats. Building on ideas from multispecies studies, we explore the practices and accommodations that coproduce meaningful human-bat cohabitation in domestic space. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in the Netherlands, we find that domestic spa…
Vegetal HydroPoetics
In this paper we outline an arts-based practice of experimenting with plant growth. Working with hydroponic systems, we describe a means to interact with plants beyond instrumentalism and beyond appreciation at a distance. We present several opening glimpses into a distinctly plant subjectivity that are afforded by technological mediation. This method informs ongoing research into growing liveable worlds with plants and is offered as a novel prac…
Governing the soil
This article examines India's response to the global soil health crisis. A longstanding centre of agricultural production and innovation, India has recently launched an ambitious soil health programme. The country's Soil Health Card (SHC) Scheme intervenes in farm-scale decisions about efficient fertiliser use, envisioning farmers as managers and soil as a substrate for production. India is also home to one of the world's largest alternative agri…
Christian climate care
This qualitative study draws on in‐depth interviews and documentary analysis conducted between 2014 and 2016 to investigate the nature of pro‐environmental behaviour of members within the Eco‐Congregation Scotland network. We argue for an integrative analytical frame, that we call “eco‐theo‐citizenship,” which synthesises strengths of values‐, practice‐ and citizenship‐based approaches to the study of pro‐environmental behaviour within the specif…
Plants for a Cold Cosmos
What does it mean that plants—soy, coffee, wheat, cotton, lettuce and more—are growing in Near-Earth orbit? What histories account for their presence beyond the terrestrial, and what futures might they be incubating? In this paper, to address these questions, I describe four very different planetary vegetal thresholds, which I understand as geohistoric events thick with potentials for realigning worlds. First, technoscientific cultures of space s…
Decolonizing Environmental Humanities
Dooren, that in Australia studying nature and environment was impossible without a reckoning with coloniality.Nature and environment were-scientifically, ideologically, materially-colonial creations, and this marks a point of departure for the environmental humanities."Black and brown death is the precondition of every Anthropocene origin story," as Kathryn Yusoff puts it. 2This fact implies that more just, sustainable, and flourishing forms of h…
Extension, subversion, containment
National identity in many post‐colonial states is predicated on nature being outside and antecedent to culture and the colonial project. This paper questions the historical and essentialist assumptions underpinning this vision using New Zealand as a case study, and in particular the Christchurch Botanic Gardens in the nineteenth century. I argue that the Gardens were a site in the multi‐species extension of colonial space, but that far from being…
Spaces of colonialism
Xeriscape People and the Cultural Politics of Turfgrass Transformation
Turfgrass yards dominate the residential landscapes of St Petersburg, Florida, and much of the rest of the urban and suburban United States. Increasingly, alternatives to the resource-intensive turfgrass lawn are the focus of interest among environmentalists, state and county governments, and growing numbers of residents in cities in the water-scarce Southeast and Southwest. Drawing on ethnographic and survey field research on everyday yard pract…
Light or dark political ecologies
Dig for Victory! New histories of wartime gardening in Britain
Being like a researcher”
The neoliberalization of universities is creating an increasingly instrumental, market-focused approach to higher education. This paper focuses on Masters dissertation supervision in the UK, which to date has been understudied and which recent changes to higher education have left in a precarious position. It presents a collaborative reflection on the supervision process conducted by students and the author at the University of Edinburgh. Expandi…
Sticky lives
In response to the pressing need to re‐constitute the ways we live with non‐humans, more‐than‐human geography's distinctive contribution has been to describe an ethics based not on ‘certain subjects’ but on the relational entanglement of life: to show that ‘we’ are connected and thus invited to care. This paper aims to suggest, however, that this relational diagnostic obscures as much as it reveals and that detachment, as much as relation, provid…
Nature Displaced, Nature Displayed
Nature Displaced, Nature Displayed: Order and Beauty in Botanical Gardens." Social & Cultural Geography, 15(5), pp. 587–588
Jakob von Uexküll Beyond Bubbles
Who cares about other species? How can we know other creatures, their worlds, their wants or even desires? And what is the relationship between knowing and caring? Such questions have been animatin
Flourishing with Awkward Creatures
Giant isopods are one of the star attractions in the Toba Aquarium, Japan.Under normal circumstances these crustaceans live at depth on the cold, dark ocean floor, scavenging flesh from dead fish and whales.Their alien appearance, as well as the strangeness of their lives, instills a combination of fascination, fear, and disgust in the aquarium visitor.In 2007, one specimen-29 centimetres long and weighing just over a kilogram-was plucked from wa…
The Smell of Selfless Love
The sudden decline of bee pollinator populations worldwide has caused significant alarm, not least because Apis mellifera, the European honeybee, is thought to be responsible for pollination of 71 of the 100 crop species which provide 90% of the world's food supply. Here we investigate the response to colony collapse disorder of a committed group of beekeepers who live in southern England, UK. These beekeepers are inspired by the writings of Rudo…
Death, absence and afterlife in the garden
This article considers what we might learn about landscape from how certain gardeners respond to death, absence and afterlife. After situating the domestic garden amid recent work on landscapes of memory and absence in geography, the article presents a circuit of the garden in four movements: passing, touching, weeding and sitting. Each draws on encounters with experienced gardeners living in British suburbs. In particular, these movements focus …
Teaching the history of geography
Drawing upon the personal reflections of geographical educators in Brazil, Canada, the UK, and the US, this Forum provides a state-of-the-discipline review of teaching in the history of geography; identifies the practical and pedagogical challenges associated with that teaching; and offers suggestions and provocations as to future innovation. The Forum shows how teaching in the history of geography is valued – as a tool of identity making, as a d…
Domestic Garden Landscapes of Memory, Mortality and Beyond
Posthumanism
Posthumanism is a mode of analysis highly skeptical of the centrality afforded the human in Western philosophical and political thought. Where humanism holds that the human is defined by unique properties such as language or culture, posthumanism emphasizes that, just like other beings and objects, humans are continually and differentially produced through biological, technological, and other more‐than‐human forces. Posthumanism can be approached…
In the Absence of Sparrows
This chapter asks what happens to place in the absence of birds. Specifically, it examines the case of house sparrow (Passer domesticus) decline in London, UK. While the house sparrow may be rapidly disappearing across Britain, it is nevertheless not at risk of global extinction. Loss in this context is not absolute, but is about the irretrievability of the past, of the former ways birds and humans were bound together, and of the textures and sou…
Christian climate care
This qualitative study draws on in‐depth interviews and documentary analysis conducted between 2014 and 2016 to investigate the nature of pro‐environmental behaviour of members within the Eco‐Congregation Scotland network. We argue for an integrative analytical frame, that we call “eco‐theo‐citizenship,” which synthesises strengths of values‐, practice‐ and citizenship‐based approaches to the study of pro‐environmental behaviour within the specif…
Autonomy, Erasure, and Persistence in the Urban Gardening Commons
Collective gardening spaces have existed across Lisbon, Portugal for decades. This article attends to the makeshift natures made by black migrants from Portugal's former colonies, and the racial urban geography thrown into relief by the differing fortunes of white Portuguese community gardening spaces. Conceptualising urban gardens as commons‐in‐the‐making, we explore subaltern urbanism and the emergence of autonomous gardening commons on the one…
Environmental Humanities
The Arts, Environmental Justice, and the Ecological Crisis
Geophilosophy
Geophilosophy employs a range of concepts to reimagine the discipline of philosophy. Invented by Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992), the field has grown and been elaborated by many thinkers. After reviewing the genesis of geophilosophy and its uptake in human geography through the 1990s, several key aspects are described: becoming rather than being; affect, virtuality, and the nonrepresentational; space; and minor theory. F…
Planetary vegetal thought
Governing the soil
This article examines India's response to the global soil health crisis. A longstanding centre of agricultural production and innovation, India has recently launched an ambitious soil health programme. The country's Soil Health Card (SHC) Scheme intervenes in farm-scale decisions about efficient fertiliser use, envisioning farmers as managers and soil as a substrate for production. India is also home to one of the world's largest alternative agri…
Plants for a Cold Cosmos
What does it mean that plants—soy, coffee, wheat, cotton, lettuce and more—are growing in Near-Earth orbit? What histories account for their presence beyond the terrestrial, and what futures might they be incubating? In this paper, to address these questions, I describe four very different planetary vegetal thresholds, which I understand as geohistoric events thick with potentials for realigning worlds. First, technoscientific cultures of space s…
Decolonizing Environmental Humanities
Dooren, that in Australia studying nature and environment was impossible without a reckoning with coloniality.Nature and environment were-scientifically, ideologically, materially-colonial creations, and this marks a point of departure for the environmental humanities."Black and brown death is the precondition of every Anthropocene origin story," as Kathryn Yusoff puts it. 2This fact implies that more just, sustainable, and flourishing forms of h…
Sociology (18 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (16 works) · Geography (14 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · History (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Environmental ethics (8 works) · History (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works)