Good winds are expected!

Probably by cultural and historical reasons, Western Europe occupied the center of homeopathy research stage. It was in Western Europe that Hahnemann initially established the grounds of homeopathy, and also were Western European the researchers who have been trying to characterize the scientific bases behind high dilutions biological action ever since. Europe witnessed all phases of homeopathy development, its growth and also its decline, its time of glory as well as its many crises. Ideological divergences – sometimes grounded on irresponsible attitudes by homeopaths themselves, sometimes arising from skeptics pride and prejudice – gave rise to political and social movements against homeopathy. In spite of this, clinical and experimental evidences kept homeopathy alive as an important therapeutic option able to reunite low cost and efficacy provided its conceptual basis and limitations are observed. ... More than ever, HD research appears as an emergent and highly active field! And much work still needs to be done. The academic geography of HD research is changing. It is not a matter of replacing old by new research centers. As a fact, HD research is expanding its boundaries, its scientific community has started sharing responsibility and joining efforts. As any other scientific field, also HD research is building a critical mass, which is a sine qua non requirement for research to attain the quality demanded by contemporary science. New winds are blowing and they will surprise those little prepared or unexpecting.

Psychogeography: Walking through strategy, nature and narrative

Proposed as an urban pedestrian practice in French texts of the 1950s, the current vogue for English-language references to psychogeography dates from the 1990s. Sampling this corpus, much of it outside academic geography, this article examines some of psychogeography’s trajectories, connections and affinities, notably with nature writing. In minding gaps, the article considers gendered, decolonial and Muslim registers that extend the range of sites and protagonists, heralding other priorities and opportunities both within and beyond the North Atlantic. Finally, reflecting on what lessons lie in psychogeography and its margins for human geography, the article reconsiders questions of narrative and scale.

A marginal man and his central contributions: The creative spaces of William (‘Wild Bill’) Bunge and American geography

The aim of the paper is to develop a geographical account of creativity by drawing on Arthur Koestler’s work. For Koestler creativity is sparked by the clash of two incompatible frames of meaning, and resolved by a new act of creation. Missing from Koestler’s account is geography, however. To show how geography might be brought into Koestler’s scheme the paper works through a detailed case study within the recent history of geography: the writing and publication of two very different but equally creative books by the well-known American geographer, William Bunge (1928–2013). In the late 1950s at the University of Washington, Seattle, Bunge wrote Theoretical Geography (1962), a meticulously executed hymn to the mathematics of abstract space, and which helped transform the discipline of geography into spatial science. Then during the late 1960s in inner-city Detroit Bunge wrote Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution (1971), and quite a different hymn. It was a paean to urban rebellion, to grassroots neighbourhood insurrection. It focussed not on abstract space, but a very concrete place: the one mile square that formed the Detroit inner city neighbourhood of Fitzgerald. In this case, Bunge’s book was a forerunner to radical geography. Catalytic to both of Bunge’s acts of creation, the paper argues, were the marginal spaces in which he wrote, marginal in the sense that they were distant from mainstream American academic geography. Incorporating them provides not only an explanation creativity within geography, but also geography’s own geography.