Brett Story’s Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America is a brilliant and timely study on prison geographies. Story, who is from Canada, arrives to the U.S. prison through her personal experiences of eviction, first as a child and then as a young student fighting against gentrification and documenting it as an amateur filmmaker.

Javiera Barandiarán is an interdisciplinary scholar who specializes in the study of environmental politics and policy in Latin America. Her primary interests are focused on exploring how governments engage environmental challenges through regulation and she brings a particular emphasis and expertise on the nation of Chile. In her groundbreaking book, one of the questions she grapples with is: what are the criteria that a state should use to decide in favor of or against proposed natural resources infrastructure projects?

Manu Karuka’s Empire’s Tracks, a re-telling of the history of the intercontinental railroad, was published only months before the 150th anniversary of the railroad’s completion. The celebrations of the railroad as a symbol of national unity and progress are a reminder of its continued power in writing the myth of the nation, and of the importance of challenging such nation-valorizing narratives.

For urban geographers and those in allied disciplines, particularly urban planners, Manuel Castells occupies a crucial position in the canon. The trajectory of his work allows a unique bridge between explicitly spatial questions like urban social movements and the otherwise despatialized dynamics of cyberspace, or the network society of global information communication technology.

‍The first great disruption in subsistence communities happened 12 000 years ago with the emergence of agriculture. Before that, roaming bands of hunter-gatherers were bound to the whims of scarce nature and its bounty. This all changed with the technology of crop cultivation and the new abilities of transforming the soil for food production.