J J Schmidt
Biographic Data
| ID | 48497 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J J Schmidt |
| GIVEN NAMES | J J |
| FAMILY NAME | Schmidt |
| SIGNATURE | SCHMIDT J J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9155-1777 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 144 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Rivers without rhythm? intermittent geographies and non-perennial rivers
Non-perennial rivers run dry part of the year. By length, they are the most common type of river on Earth, yet they receive comparably little attention in social science and humanities research. This article advances the idea of ‘intermittent geographies’ as a tool for conceptualising, researching, and increasing the attention paid to non-perennial rivers. It considers how increased scientific attention to non-perennial rivers over the past two d…
Ambient water weaponisation: The permeation of violence in the hydrosphere
Water weaponisation is proliferating in ways standard accounts do not adequately identify or explain. This article offers a novel conceptualisation of water weaponisation that reflects how both water's life-giving affordances and limits are prefigured as weapons across an increasingly expansive range of interventions. We anchor a new account of weaponisation in water's non-essential nature, and its dynamism as an object, a co-constituent of life,…
Melody Jue, ‘Coralations’
Melody Jue, Coralations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025), 88 pp., $10 (pbk), ISBN: 9781517918125
Before the Boundary Waters Treaty: Irrigation Experts and International Controversy
Since 1909, the International Joint Commission has administered the Boundary Waters Treaty between Canada and the United States. Successful cooperation was not guaranteed, however. This article examines how efforts to establish a commission for international waters rose and fell between 1894 and 1900. Initial concerns centered on shared rivers in Montana and Alberta. Although Canada raised the prospect of an international commission in 1896 it di…
Minecraft's territory: Alberta's oil sands, settler knowledge infrastructure and digital geographies
In 2017, the Alberta Geological Survey published an extension to the game Minecraft that allows players to virtually mine bitumen in Peace River, one of the three bitumen deposits in Alberta that together form the fourth largest oil reserve on Earth. This article uses the Minecraft extension to advance a novel synthesis of environmental and digital geographies, and to understand how they combine in settler knowledge infrastructures—the networks, …
Areas of opportunity
Short Abstract This editorial introduces Area 's new editorial team and offers a collective sense of why Area continues to be an important outlet for geographical scholarship
Geography and ethics III: Description as a matter of moral concern
This report focuses on moral description. It considers how comparative practices often entangle moral geography in philosophical dilemmas, such as debates over moral relativism. Using examples from geographic work on language, algorithms, the appropriation of anti-colonial critique, and Indigenous data sovereignty, the report shows how and why descriptive praxis matters to accounts of moral geography. As the final installation of a three-part ser…
Live archives: Freedom of information requests as political methodology
Freedom of information requests are an important research tool yet receive comparably little methodological scrutiny relative to other methods commonly used by geographers. This article considers two methodological aspects to freedom of information requests. The first is how they operate as “live archives” that take shape as batches of files are compiled in ways that reflect search terms, negotiations over the scope of requests, bureaucratic proc…
Multispecies thought from the shadows: The Associated Worlds of Dog-Walking
This paper develops the concept of multispecies thought through a study of dog-walking in a public park in Lancaster, England. It draws on cybernetic ideas from Bateson, Peircean semiotics and von Uexküll's umwelten to explore how multispecies worlds come into being in the spaces of the park, and amongst humans, dogs, leads, toys and other things. It focuses on how an understanding of multispecies thought can be discerned that is not only specifi…
Race, Ethnicity, and the Case for Intersectional Water Security
This Forum article reports on a meta-review of more than 19,000 published works on water security, of which less than 1 percent explicitly focus on race or ethnicity. This is deeply concerning, because it indicates that race and ethnicity—crucial factors that affect the provision of safe, reliable water—continue to be ignored in academic and policy literatures. In response to this finding the Forum calls for building intersectional water security…
Geography and ethics II: Justification and the ethics of anti-oppression
This report on geography and ethics focusses on the justification of normative evaluations. Justifying why actions are right or wrong often relies on appeals to high-order principles, such as the common good. But this is not always the case, as this report shows by identifying an ethics of anti-oppression that relies instead on struggles against individual and social harms and the conditions that generate them. Through resistance, ethics of anti-…
Hydrosocial geographies: Cycles, spaces and spheres of concern
Over recent decades, hydrosocial scholarship focusing on the plural, often contested relations of waters and societies has advanced significantly. This article reviews hydrosocial scholarship in three steps that are contextualized by geography's long-standing efforts to use water to 'think geography'. The article begins by revisiting critiques of the hydrological cycle as circulating free of anthropogenic forces and wholly on the 'nature' side of…
Decision-Making in the Pediatric Emergency Department—A Survey of Guidance Strategies among Residents
(1) Introduction: Working in an emergency department requires fast and straightforward decisions. Therefore, decision guidance represents an essential tool for successful patient-centered care. Beyond the residents' own knowledge and experience, printed books have been the primary source of information in the past. The aim of this study was to discover which strategies current residents use the most and to identify alternative quick reference str…
Dispossession by municipalization: Property, pipelines, and divisions of power in settler colonial Canada
In Canada, Indigenous activists and scholars critique municipalization as a threefold process that subverts Indigenous authority to the state, then delegates forms of state authority to Indigenous peoples, and concludes by asserting that delegated authority satisfies the terms of Indigenous self-determination. This article centers municipalization in two steps that connect it to how Canada divides power regarding foreign and domestic affairs. The…
Of kin and system: Rights of nature and the UN search for Earth jurisprudence
Since 2009, the United Nations programme on Harmony with Nature has sought a new philosophy of global environmental governance known as Earth jurisprudence. This paper examines how Harmony with Nature has advanced Earth jurisprudence to unite Indigenous legal traditions, rights of nature, and mounting evidence from Earth system science regarding anthropogenic forcing on the planet. It does so through a policy analysis of annual UN reports, resolu…
Geography and ethics I: Placing injustice in the Anthropocene
This report on geography and ethics focuses on the conditions of ethics. It identifies the ethical stakes of how accounts of unequal anthropogenic impacts on the Earth are specified with respect to both injustice and to what are deemed viable futures. It centres arguments of Indigenous and Black scholars regarding kinship and intersectionality, and respective ethical practices of struggle, resurgence and rebellion against the mutual oppression of…
Glacial Deaths, Geologic Extinction
In 2019 several funerals were held for glaciers. If enough glaciers die, could they go extinct? Is there geologic extinction? Yes. This article develops three arguments to support this claim. The first revisits Georges Cuvier’s original argument for extinction and its reliance on geology, especially glaciers. Retracing connections to glaciers and the narrowing of extinction to biological species in the nineteenth century, the author argues that a…
Being earthbound: Arendt, process and alienation in the Anthropocene
Hannah Arendt developed a twofold account of 'being earthbound' directly relevant to Anthropocene debates regarding the political. For Arendt, both senses of 'being earthbound' arose as humans began to act into nature, not merely upon it. The first sense is oriented to a political ontology of process, which arose as human actions - political, technological, scientific - nullified modernist conceits separating humans from nature. The second sense …
Settler geology: Earth's deep history and the governance of in situ oil spills in Alberta
The moral geography of the Earth system
Human impacts on the Earth system have profound moral consequences. The uneven generation and distribution of harms, and the acceleration of human forces now altering how the Earth system functions, also trouble moral accounts of belonging. This article shows how moral geography can be renewed in this context. It begins by identifying how human impacts on the Earth system are shifting global norms of sustainability, such as in calls to enhance pl…
From state to system: Financialization and the water-energy-food-climate nexus
Bureaucratic Territory: First Nations, Private Property, and "Turn-Key" Colonialism in Canada
Since 2006, successive Canadian governments have worked to create private property regimes on lands reserved for First Nations. This article examines how the state framed the theory and history of Aboriginal property rights to achieve this goal. It then shows how, under the pretense of restoration, bureaucrats developed legislation that would create novel political spaces where, once converted to private property, reserved lands would function as…
Global Challenges in Water Governance
This book presents a historically situated explanation of the rise of global water governance and the contemporary challenges that global water governance seeks to address. It is particularly concerned with connecting what are often technical issues in water management with the social and political structures that affect how technical and scientific advice affects decisions. Schmidt and Matthews are careful to avoid the pitfalls of setting up opp…
Ethics in the Anthropocene: A research agenda
The quantitative evidence of human impacts on the Earth System has produced new calls for planetary stewardship. At the same time, numerous scholars reject modern social sciences by claiming that the Anthropocene fundamentally changes the human condition. However, we cannot simply dismiss all previous forms of cultural learning or transmission. Instead, this paper examines ethics in the Anthropocene, and specifically what it implies for: (1) reas…
The retreating state: Political geographies of the object and the proliferation of space
Ethics in the Anthropocene: A research agenda
The quantitative evidence of human impacts on the Earth System has produced new calls for planetary stewardship. At the same time, numerous scholars reject modern social sciences by claiming that the Anthropocene fundamentally changes the human condition. However, we cannot simply dismiss all previous forms of cultural learning or transmission. Instead, this paper examines ethics in the Anthropocene, and specifically what it implies for: (1) reas…
From state to system: Financialization and the water-energy-food-climate nexus
Bureaucratic Territory: First Nations, Private Property, and "Turn-Key" Colonialism in Canada
Since 2006, successive Canadian governments have worked to create private property regimes on lands reserved for First Nations. This article examines how the state framed the theory and history of Aboriginal property rights to achieve this goal. It then shows how, under the pretense of restoration, bureaucrats developed legislation that would create novel political spaces where, once converted to private property, reserved lands would function as…
The moral geography of the Earth system
Human impacts on the Earth system have profound moral consequences. The uneven generation and distribution of harms, and the acceleration of human forces now altering how the Earth system functions, also trouble moral accounts of belonging. This article shows how moral geography can be renewed in this context. It begins by identifying how human impacts on the Earth system are shifting global norms of sustainability, such as in calls to enhance pl…
Hydrosocial geographies: Cycles, spaces and spheres of concern
Over recent decades, hydrosocial scholarship focusing on the plural, often contested relations of waters and societies has advanced significantly. This article reviews hydrosocial scholarship in three steps that are contextualized by geography's long-standing efforts to use water to 'think geography'. The article begins by revisiting critiques of the hydrological cycle as circulating free of anthropogenic forces and wholly on the 'nature' side of…
Geography and ethics I: Placing injustice in the Anthropocene
This report on geography and ethics focuses on the conditions of ethics. It identifies the ethical stakes of how accounts of unequal anthropogenic impacts on the Earth are specified with respect to both injustice and to what are deemed viable futures. It centres arguments of Indigenous and Black scholars regarding kinship and intersectionality, and respective ethical practices of struggle, resurgence and rebellion against the mutual oppression of…
Hunting with Polar Bears: Problems with the Passive Properties of the Commons
Inuit in Canada’s Arctic conceptualize both human hunters and their polar bear prey as active participants in the hunt and as part of a larger socio-economic system requiring the involvement of both humans and animals. Although often treated through the lens of common-pool resource theory, the Inuit viewpoint conflicts with Western wildlife management systems that typically treat animals, and nature in general, as passive. When polar bears are un…
Of kin and system: Rights of nature and the UN search for Earth jurisprudence
Since 2009, the United Nations programme on Harmony with Nature has sought a new philosophy of global environmental governance known as Earth jurisprudence. This paper examines how Harmony with Nature has advanced Earth jurisprudence to unite Indigenous legal traditions, rights of nature, and mounting evidence from Earth system science regarding anthropogenic forcing on the planet. It does so through a policy analysis of annual UN reports, resolu…
Being earthbound: Arendt, process and alienation in the Anthropocene
Hannah Arendt developed a twofold account of 'being earthbound' directly relevant to Anthropocene debates regarding the political. For Arendt, both senses of 'being earthbound' arose as humans began to act into nature, not merely upon it. The first sense is oriented to a political ontology of process, which arose as human actions - political, technological, scientific - nullified modernist conceits separating humans from nature. The second sense …
Ethics and Water Governance
Ethics and values are important dimensions of water governance. We show how a "values approach" contributes to an understanding of global water governance, and how it complements other perspectives on governance, namely management, institutional capacity, and social-ecological systems. We connect these other approaches to their own value systems and the ethical attitudes they engender. We then offer a way to explicitly incorporate, and where nece…
Geography and ethics II: Justification and the ethics of anti-oppression
This report on geography and ethics focusses on the justification of normative evaluations. Justifying why actions are right or wrong often relies on appeals to high-order principles, such as the common good. But this is not always the case, as this report shows by identifying an ethics of anti-oppression that relies instead on struggles against individual and social harms and the conditions that generate them. Through resistance, ethics of anti-…
Dispossession by municipalization: Property, pipelines, and divisions of power in settler colonial Canada
In Canada, Indigenous activists and scholars critique municipalization as a threefold process that subverts Indigenous authority to the state, then delegates forms of state authority to Indigenous peoples, and concludes by asserting that delegated authority satisfies the terms of Indigenous self-determination. This article centers municipalization in two steps that connect it to how Canada divides power regarding foreign and domestic affairs. The…
Settler geology: Earth's deep history and the governance of in situ oil spills in Alberta
Charity and the Government of the Poor in the English Charity-School Movement, circa 1700–1730
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Live archives: Freedom of information requests as political methodology
Freedom of information requests are an important research tool yet receive comparably little methodological scrutiny relative to other methods commonly used by geographers. This article considers two methodological aspects to freedom of information requests. The first is how they operate as “live archives” that take shape as batches of files are compiled in ways that reflect search terms, negotiations over the scope of requests, bureaucratic proc…
Race, Ethnicity, and the Case for Intersectional Water Security
This Forum article reports on a meta-review of more than 19,000 published works on water security, of which less than 1 percent explicitly focus on race or ethnicity. This is deeply concerning, because it indicates that race and ethnicity—crucial factors that affect the provision of safe, reliable water—continue to be ignored in academic and policy literatures. In response to this finding the Forum calls for building intersectional water security…
Integrating Water Management in the Anthropocene
Integrated water resources management (IWRM) has been the dominant discursive frame for global water governance since the 1992 Rio Declaration. Yet it is increasingly criticized as inadequately incorporating ethical or political contexts in governance coordination. This policy review considers the two main iterations of IWRM: rational planning and economic decentralization. It recasts the claimed “failings” of IWRM with respect to each by arguing…
Melancholy and the Therapeutic Language of Moral Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Thought
Melancholy and the Therapeutic Language of Moral Philosophy in Seventeenth-Century Thought Jeremy Schmidt The concept of melancholy comprehended a wide range of characteristics and conditions in seventeenth-century European culture, from the brooding introspection of the genius and the scholar to a condition of delirious and delusory madness.1 Its central and most immediately identifiable characteristic, however, was the excessive and unreasonabl…
An Order of Philosophers? Samuel Clarke’s Moral Theory and the Problem of Sacerdos in Enlightenment England 1
In a commonplace book entry on ‘Sacerdos’, John Locke noted that the ancients had two types of teacher: ‘Those who professed to teach them the arts of propitiation & atonement’, who ‘made themselve
Books Reviewed
Water ethics: Foundational readings for students and professionals
The world's emerging water crisis has ignited efforts to reconnect policy to human values. According to the book, all approaches to managing water, no matter how grounded in empirical data, involve moral judgments and cultural assumptions. Each of the book's six sections discuses a different approach to thinking about the relationship between water and humanity, from utilitarianism to eco-feminism to religious beliefs. Contributors range from Bar…
Charity and the Government of the Poor in the English Charity-School Movement, circa 1700–1730
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Hunting with Polar Bears: Problems with the Passive Properties of the Commons
Inuit in Canada’s Arctic conceptualize both human hunters and their polar bear prey as active participants in the hunt and as part of a larger socio-economic system requiring the involvement of both humans and animals. Although often treated through the lens of common-pool resource theory, the Inuit viewpoint conflicts with Western wildlife management systems that typically treat animals, and nature in general, as passive. When polar bears are un…
Becoming a behavioral science researcher. A guide to producing research that matters
by Rex B. Kline, New York, The Guilford Press, 2009, 367 pp., £24.00 (paperback), ISBN 9781593858377, £37.50 (hardback), ISBN10: 1593858388, ISBN13: 9781593858384 Although the subtitle ‘A guide to
The De-symbolized World
Environmental social science: Human–environment interactions and sustainability
by Emilio F. Moran, Malden, MA, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, 232 pp., US$37.95 (paperback), ISBN 9781405105743 Studies that address the human dimensions of global environmental change face the stark real
Integrating Water Management in the Anthropocene
Integrated water resources management (IWRM) has been the dominant discursive frame for global water governance since the 1992 Rio Declaration. Yet it is increasingly criticized as inadequately incorporating ethical or political contexts in governance coordination. This policy review considers the two main iterations of IWRM: rational planning and economic decentralization. It recasts the claimed “failings” of IWRM with respect to each by arguing…
Hasok Chang: Is water H2O? Evidence, realism and pluralism
Ethics and Water Governance
Ethics and values are important dimensions of water governance. We show how a "values approach" contributes to an understanding of global water governance, and how it complements other perspectives on governance, namely management, institutional capacity, and social-ecological systems. We connect these other approaches to their own value systems and the ethical attitudes they engender. We then offer a way to explicitly incorporate, and where nece…
The retreating state: Political geographies of the object and the proliferation of space
Ethics in the Anthropocene: A research agenda
The quantitative evidence of human impacts on the Earth System has produced new calls for planetary stewardship. At the same time, numerous scholars reject modern social sciences by claiming that the Anthropocene fundamentally changes the human condition. However, we cannot simply dismiss all previous forms of cultural learning or transmission. Instead, this paper examines ethics in the Anthropocene, and specifically what it implies for: (1) reas…
Global Challenges in Water Governance
This book presents a historically situated explanation of the rise of global water governance and the contemporary challenges that global water governance seeks to address. It is particularly concerned with connecting what are often technical issues in water management with the social and political structures that affect how technical and scientific advice affects decisions. Schmidt and Matthews are careful to avoid the pitfalls of setting up opp…
From state to system: Financialization and the water-energy-food-climate nexus
Bureaucratic Territory: First Nations, Private Property, and "Turn-Key" Colonialism in Canada
Since 2006, successive Canadian governments have worked to create private property regimes on lands reserved for First Nations. This article examines how the state framed the theory and history of Aboriginal property rights to achieve this goal. It then shows how, under the pretense of restoration, bureaucrats developed legislation that would create novel political spaces where, once converted to private property, reserved lands would function as…
The moral geography of the Earth system
Human impacts on the Earth system have profound moral consequences. The uneven generation and distribution of harms, and the acceleration of human forces now altering how the Earth system functions, also trouble moral accounts of belonging. This article shows how moral geography can be renewed in this context. It begins by identifying how human impacts on the Earth system are shifting global norms of sustainability, such as in calls to enhance pl…
Settler geology: Earth's deep history and the governance of in situ oil spills in Alberta
Glacial Deaths, Geologic Extinction
In 2019 several funerals were held for glaciers. If enough glaciers die, could they go extinct? Is there geologic extinction? Yes. This article develops three arguments to support this claim. The first revisits Georges Cuvier’s original argument for extinction and its reliance on geology, especially glaciers. Retracing connections to glaciers and the narrowing of extinction to biological species in the nineteenth century, the author argues that a…
Being earthbound: Arendt, process and alienation in the Anthropocene
Hannah Arendt developed a twofold account of 'being earthbound' directly relevant to Anthropocene debates regarding the political. For Arendt, both senses of 'being earthbound' arose as humans began to act into nature, not merely upon it. The first sense is oriented to a political ontology of process, which arose as human actions - political, technological, scientific - nullified modernist conceits separating humans from nature. The second sense …
Decision-Making in the Pediatric Emergency Department—A Survey of Guidance Strategies among Residents
(1) Introduction: Working in an emergency department requires fast and straightforward decisions. Therefore, decision guidance represents an essential tool for successful patient-centered care. Beyond the residents' own knowledge and experience, printed books have been the primary source of information in the past. The aim of this study was to discover which strategies current residents use the most and to identify alternative quick reference str…
Dispossession by municipalization: Property, pipelines, and divisions of power in settler colonial Canada
In Canada, Indigenous activists and scholars critique municipalization as a threefold process that subverts Indigenous authority to the state, then delegates forms of state authority to Indigenous peoples, and concludes by asserting that delegated authority satisfies the terms of Indigenous self-determination. This article centers municipalization in two steps that connect it to how Canada divides power regarding foreign and domestic affairs. The…
Of kin and system: Rights of nature and the UN search for Earth jurisprudence
Since 2009, the United Nations programme on Harmony with Nature has sought a new philosophy of global environmental governance known as Earth jurisprudence. This paper examines how Harmony with Nature has advanced Earth jurisprudence to unite Indigenous legal traditions, rights of nature, and mounting evidence from Earth system science regarding anthropogenic forcing on the planet. It does so through a policy analysis of annual UN reports, resolu…
Geography and ethics I: Placing injustice in the Anthropocene
This report on geography and ethics focuses on the conditions of ethics. It identifies the ethical stakes of how accounts of unequal anthropogenic impacts on the Earth are specified with respect to both injustice and to what are deemed viable futures. It centres arguments of Indigenous and Black scholars regarding kinship and intersectionality, and respective ethical practices of struggle, resurgence and rebellion against the mutual oppression of…
Political science (20 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Law (15 works) · Environmental ethics (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Geography (12 works) · Ecology (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (10 works)