In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua offers an important intervention into the vague sense of dread, discomfort, and culpability that thinking about palm oil may evoke. Here, palm oil is situated, and its impacts on a specific group of people in a specific place are drawn out. The effect is powerful; a precise story of grief, loss, and endurance in a world fractured by colonialism and untrammelled agribusiness expansion, beautifully realised in Chao’s poetic voice.

What happens at the UN climate negotiations? In her new book, In Quest of a Shared Planet, Dr. Naveeda Khan examines the multi-dimensional and chaotic space of these meetings. She demonstrates how diverse Global South actors, from negotiators to activists to experts, influence global climate policy, and why countries like Bangladesh keep taking an active seat at the table after decades of limited action.

Tubb clarifies how excavator gold mining roots itself in Black Communities’ collective territories through productive transformations on the landscape, wages to workers, land rent to Black families, revenue dividends to local community councils, and security “taxes” to illegal armed groups. Tubb’s ethnography opens the door for a deep and wide examination of racial capitalism, even if he never defines value.

Daniel Agbiboa's 'They Eat Our Sweat' is a vivid ethnographic portrait of informal transport in Lagos, providing us with a vantage point to understand the experiences of corruption and informality in everyday urban life.

In Cartographic Memory, Juan Herrera carefully and elegantly examines Chicano movement activism and its legacies in Oakland, California’s Fruitvale neighborhood, and argues for measuring social movements’ impact in a manner that foregrounds the production the brick-and-mortar achievements of community organizations, as well as the networks of support, solidarity and care that those sites and landscapes continue to facilitate.

Miraftab invites planning scholars to rethink the field’s futures, rejecting the currently dominant bully urbanism centered on profit, for a humane urbanism centered on life.