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Reflecting on Ihnji Jon's contention that urban conflicts emerge from the 'different conceptualisations of temporality' that groups of residents hold, this paper considers how urban practitioners might productively engage with time as a situated experience. Specifically, it considers the methodological techniques, forms of collaboration and modes of engagement that enable a focus on the entanglements of past, present and future times which underpin different ways of thinking about urban issues and generate new possibilities for building solidarity in the process. Orientating research enquiries towards non-linear and relational conceptions of time unsettles traditional forms of problem-solving in which historically set goals are prioritised over the exploration of different ideas and trajectories as a means of enacting new urban realities. This requires a commitment to a distinctive way of working in which new ideas, meanings and effects are seen to emerge slowly from a creative and collaborative process of academic engagement, which runs counter to expectations of quick and time-limited interventions in both academia and urban policy and politics.

Covid‐19 has created a challenge and opportunity to change collective economic and care systems. While the care deficit that confronts the UK pre‐dates the pandemic, contemporary events have made it clear that care is a foundational element of a safe, functioning society. Building on research that shows new technologies are being used to augment the work of paid carers in nations facing labour shortages, funding constraints, and hostility to immigration, this paper considers the potential for technological developments to change care practices, including during this unprecedented crisis. Using a qualitative research approach, the paper opens up new questions about established systems of paid and unpaid care and evaluates the potential for technological investments to remedy the weakened care infrastructure in a post‐Covid‐19 environment. In doing so, it emphasises the sensory dimensions of care, which will need to be addressed in how governments in the UK and beyond respond to technological developments.

This commentary responds to Henry Wai-chung Yeung's call to develop clearer causal explanations in geography through mechanism-based thinking. His suggested use of a critical realist framework to ground geographical research on economies is, on one level, appealing and may help to counteract taken-for-granted assumptions about socio-spatial conditions and the significance of economic structures for everyday lived experiences. However, the general lack of applied critical realist research means the distinction between 'mechanism' and 'process' is often difficult to define in analyses of specific empirical events or geographical episodes. Not only is there a need for methodological development but, I suggest, also for greater recognition of critical realism as a reflective practice. We need to consider the means by which scholars distinguish between contingent and necessary relations, identify structures and counterfactuals and infer how mechanisms work out in particular places. The critical realist goal of advancing transformative change through the provision of causal explanation relies upon inferences made on the basis of researcher experience. Hence, we need to recognise that research is always a political practice and be careful not to discount knowledge borne from other analytical approaches.

This paper uses a feminist state-theoretical approach to explore the development of Brexit and argues that the UK's EU referendum and its aftermath reflect a gendered politics embedded within the ongoing neoliberal restructuring of the state. Directing attention to the struggle to protect women's interests, maintain equality strategies, and more generally infuse a gender dimension in political discussions, the paper emphasises the risks of Brexit for women and gender equality. It concludes by asking how at the current conjecture – when European regulation on gender equality is being framed as 'stifling' economic growth – we can build up a fairer and more equal United Kingdom.

This paper focuses on the implementation of workfare in the US, with the aim of understanding the passive response of the unions and other progressive groups to the restructuring and retrenchment of the American welfare system. In particular, it considers the disparate efforts to organise welfare recipients and low-wage workers around the restructuring of social benefits towards work in the District of Columbia. Although the convergence of welfare recipients and low-wage workers through 'work-first' initiatives has the potential to spur political mobilisation and protest against the reform of welfare, it is found that at the local level campaigns against workfare are diverse and changeable, producing very little – it could be argued – in terms of long-term resistance. Identifying forms of dissidence in Washington D.C. as constitutive of the broader liberal regime of governance and re-regulation, this paper probes the forms, possibilities and problems of organising workfare subjects. This allows for consideration of the extent to which workfare programmes are being re-inscribed within emerging patterns of political-economic development and the potential for future action.

AbstractThis article revisits Andrew Gamble's book, Britain in Decline, and also revisits the geographies of state crisis. Drawing on the substantial archives of state theory, the article explores how Brexit emerged as a moment of crisis following the relative decline of the economy and the reshaping of the welfare state. Discussions of Brexit and the uneven geographies of advanced capitalism inevitably raise questions about the central tension between the free market and strong state within both political discourse and political activity. In considering these, the article extends Gamble's writing on the social, economic and political struggles within the Thatcherite project and explores the role of uneven development in perpetuating and transforming the contradictions of advanced capitalism. This allows for a more geographical reading of contradictions inside the state‐territory, which augments Gamble's understanding of the external challenges to Britain's postwar settlement.

AbstractThis article reviews geographical research on labour market changes that pose a challenge to 'work' as a compelling category of analysis. Drawing inspiration from feminist scholarship that has sought to develop a frame for thinking about the concept of work so that other activities outside employment are recognised, it considers what everyday practices of work, including domestic and reproductive labour, can teach us about the realities and futures of contemporary capitalism. While 'work' has long served as a presumed norm or telos of 'development', this article considers the prospect of the 'end of work' and of a specific type of accompanying capitalist society. It outlines the challenges for policy making in bringing forth a 'post‐work' world without cementing social and economic inequality.

The past 18 months have delivered a series of "surprising" electoral outcomes. In the USA, the election of Donald Trump confounded expectations. In the UK, the leave result from the EU referendum and the subsequent snap General Election which saw the Conservative Party lose their majority have been heralded as knife-edge moments and a new period in politics. This paper makes an alternative contention. It posits that the electoral outcomes of 2016 and 2017 were not arbitrary or new occurrences, but instead represent the latest expressions of long-standing historical trends towards increased inequality across the West. Recognising that the impacts of economic and political restructuring have been unevenly distributed between different groups and geographical areas, the paper makes the case that these electoral outcomes must be seen in the light of policy moves creating a more polarised social and spatial structure. Using the UK as an illustrative case, the paper explores the developments that have reinforced spatial opportunity structures and the reproduction of disadvantage over time. In doing so, the paper contextualises the revanchism resultant from processes of social residualisation and articulates the need to focus on the long-run effects of rising inequality now being seen to shape voters' choices.