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AbstractThis short essay takes stock of where the field of 'labour geography' has got to and where it might productively go. The first part identifies labour geography's signature characteristics as they have emerged over the last 15–20 years. These are its insistence that geography is constitutive of employment issues, its emphasis on worker agency, its analytical promiscuousness, its acute awareness of power and inequality, and its Left sensibility politically speaking. The second part of the essay is programmatic and looks to the future. It is argued that labour geographers ought to more carefully conceptualize and study worker agency; to connect labour migration more organically with existing research on place‐based workers; to develop a more substantive understanding of how states regulate employment and workers' lives; to look to synthesize different geographical dimensions of worker existence and strategy; to aim to examine working peoples' lives holistically; and to be more explicit about the normative basis of their 'pro‐labour' stance and its implications for worker strategy.Résumé Ce texte court examine ce qui a été réalisé dans le domaine de la 'géographie du travail' et les orientations fructueuses qui pourraient être suivies. La première partie détermine les traits identitaires de la géographie du travail qui ont vu le jour au cours des 15 à 20 dernières années: son insistance pour que la géographie soit partie prenante dans les questions d'emploi, son accent sur l'agence des travailleurs, sa promiscuité analytique, sa conscience aiguë du pouvoir et de l'inégalité, et sa sensibilité de gauche au plan politique. La seconde partie, programmatique, s'intéresse à l'avenir et à ce que les géographes du travail devraient faire: conceptualiser et étudier l'agence des travailleurs avec davantage de rigueur; relier de façon plus organique la migration du travail et les recherches existantes sur la main‐d'œuvre locale; offrir une compréhension concrète de la manière dont les Etats régulent l'emploi et la vie des actifs; veiller à synthétiser les différentes dimensions géographiques dans l'existence et la stratégie des salariés; chercher à analyser globalement la vie des populations actives; être plus explicite sur le fond normatif de leur attitude 'pro‐travail' et sur ses implications pour la stratégie des salariés.

This short essay takes stock of where the field of 'labour geography' has got to and where it might productively go. The first part identifies labour geography's signature characteristics as they have emerged over the last 15-20 years. These are its insistence that geography is constitutive of employment issues, its emphasis on worker agency, its analytical promiscuousness, its acute awareness of power and inequality, and its Left sensibility politically speaking. The second part of the essay is programmatic and looks to the future. It is argued that labour geographers ought to more carefully conceptualize and study worker agency; to connect labour migration more organically with existing research on place-based workers; to develop a more substantive understanding of how states regulate employment and workers' lives; to look to synthesize different geographical dimensions of worker existence and strategy; to aim to examine working peoples' lives holistically; and to be more explicit about the normative basis of their 'pro-labour' stance and its implications for worker strategy. © 2007 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2007 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

A contribution to a symposium on David Harvey's New Imperialism (2003) approaches the book symptomatically as a text that sheds light on the modalities of Marxism fostered in academia. The book's argument is briefly considered & situated in the larger body of Harvey's work. Harvey is positioned in the context of postwar academic Marxists & the problems of being a Marxist public intellectual. It is contended that The New Imperialism is characterized by a critical break whereby Harvey refuses to problematize his institutional location, deemed here a silence that speaks to the limits of academic Marxism removed from the real world. A pessimistic assessment of Marxism's future is offered. References. D. Edelman

Over the last decade a number of human geographers have advocated relational perspectives on place. These perspectives are currently influential within and beyond geography. In this essay they are subjected to a constructive critique. Three shibboleths of place are identified and scrutinised. Taking the writings of Michael Watts, Doreen Massey and David Harvey as a focus, it is argued that these shibboleths possess important but nonetheless limited value as explanatory and normative tools. Working within the broad parameters of a relational worldview, the essay proposes a more nuanced approach to place than that offered by Watts, Massey and Harvey. The second half of the essay explores this approach in relation to debates about the global indigenous peoples movement. For some indigenous groups, the right to 'differential geographies' is synonymous with the right to erect new border controls around places. This is controversial, not least because non-indigenous groups-locally and translocally-can lay equal claim to occupancy of, or at least a stake in, those places. Rather than criticising such arguments for the geographical apartheid that seemingly underpins them, I argue for a more subtle reading of 'strong' indigenous claims to territory, cultural artefacts and informational resources. The result is a plea for left-leaning critics to deploy more supple understandings of place that can accommodate the complexities of variegated real world place-projects. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.