Fowler-Watt develops ‘auto/biographical journalism’ to describe a position in which narrating the lives of others cannot be cleanly separated from the narrator’s own accumulated experience. Her study of experienced broadcast journalists moving into education shows how professional identity is reconstructed through remembered episodes, retrospective interpretation and biographical interviews. Storytelling gives scattered experience coherence, but that coherence is produced rather than discovered: present circumstances reorganise the significance of past events. The author’s own history as a BBC journalist is therefore not hidden outside the research frame; it becomes part of the reflexive conditions under which questions are formulated and accounts understood. The article links life writing, journalism studies and career-construction theory, but its broader methodological importance lies in making first-person proximity explicit without collapsing subject and observer. The chronicle of another life can contain the chronicler’s trajectory as a visible coordinate, turning positionality into a recordable condition of interpretation.
Eng, J. and McCormack, G.R. (2025) ‘Place attachment and walkability and their associations with walking in urban neighbourhoods’, Scientific Reports, 15, 35474. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-19319-6.
Eng and McCormack investigate whether neighbourhood walkability and place attachment operate independently or interactively in shaping walking behaviour. Their study separates place identity from place dependence and distinguishes recreational from transportation walking, resisting the common assumption that objectively walkable street patterns generate uniform behavioural outcomes. The conceptual contribution is conditionality: attachment, urban form and movement relate differently depending on the type of walking and the form of attachment under consideration. Methodologically, the paper combines spatial measures of neighbourhood form with survey-based psychological constructs, allowing physical configuration and experiential relation to be analysed within the same model without collapsing one into the other. The study bridges active-transport research, environmental psychology and urban design. Its wider intellectual value lies in showing that accessibility is not merely a geometric property of streets; it becomes socially and behaviourally consequential through residents’ identification with, dependence on and repeated use of the neighbourhood environments through which they move.
Robinson, J. (2016) ‘Comparative Urbanism: New Geographies and Cultures of Theorizing the Urban’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(1), pp. 187–199. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12273.
Robinson proposes a reformatted comparative urbanism centred on theoretical revisability and the possibility of beginning conceptualisation from any city. Her critique targets inherited methods that control difference through narrowly selected comparable cases and, in doing so, restrict the geographical range from which urban concepts can emerge. The paper’s iconic move is to place the “comparative gesture” at the heart of urban theory: comparison need not be a large formal design but can be the act of putting one case, process or insight into conversation with another in order to test and modify concepts. Theoretical propositions become provisional instruments whose limits are discovered through new urban encounters. Methodologically, Robinson expands comparison beyond variation-finding toward repetitions, interconnections and experimental juxtapositions. The paper bridges postcolonial critique and comparative methodology while redistributing epistemic authority across the urban world. Its significance lies in converting geographical diversity from a problem to be controlled into the very resource through which stronger, more mobile and more accountable theory is made.
MacMillan, G., Conway, T. and Mahon, M. (2026) ‘Night Vision: Navigating Walking Interviews in the Dark’, Area. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.70116.
MacMillan, Conway and Mahon introduce darkness as an active methodological condition rather than an inconvenient absence of daylight. The article challenges the temporal norm embedded in mobile research, where walking interviews are overwhelmingly conducted during the day, and asks what kinds of knowledge become available when fieldwork enters the “every night”. Darkness changes visibility, sensory attention, risk, orientation and the therapeutic or affective register of landscape; it therefore changes both the object of inquiry and the research encounter itself. The method’s conceptual significance lies in treating environmental conditions as epistemically productive. Night is not simply another time slot in a sampling schedule but a different field of perception and relation. This extends mobile methods toward sensory geography and temporal urbanism, while exposing how apparently neutral protocols quietly standardise daylight, safety and visibility. The wider bridge is to environmental epistemology: research conditions are themselves material forces that select what can be perceived, narrated and known.
Sharif, A.A. (2023) ‘A relational perspective on the walking activity in urban spaces: Shaping, transformation, and interrelations’, Frontiers of Architectural Research, 12, pp. 496–508. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foar.2023.02.002.
Sharif reconceives walking through actor-network theory as a mutable network of human and non-human relations rather than a unitary behaviour. The paper’s central device is stabilization: recurring relational patterns allow walking practices to become temporarily identifiable while remaining capable of shaping, transformation and interrelation with other activities. This shifts urban analysis away from pedestrian movement as a measurable transport category toward walking as an emergent socio-material practice. Methodologically, the study combines desk research, sixty short go-along interviews, follow-up in-depth interviews and repeated site observations, using each method to compensate for the others’ blind spots. Participants can demonstrate spatial habits in action, later explain them, while observation follows practices without direct intervention. The theoretical bridge to ANT is explicit, but the larger contribution is to relational urbanism: bodies, routes, park features, purposes, temporal conditions and encounters form provisional networks. Urban activity becomes legible through recurrence without being reduced to fixed typologies.
Learning is produced by environments that organise attention, participation and authority before any individual act of understanding occurs.
A classroom, an educational commons, a language model and a body of Indigenous ecological knowledge differ radically in form, yet all demonstrate that cognition is relational. What can be learned depends upon who may contribute, what resources are shared, which distinctions are valued and which infrastructures remain visible enough to be questioned. Educational commons establish the political ground of this relation. Knowledge becomes common not because it is merely accessible but because participants acquire some capacity to shape the process through which it is produced and maintained. Redistribution, recognition and participation define a governance structure for learning. The commons therefore opposes both privatisation and passive consumption by treating educational environments as collective institutions. Thinking infrastructures complicate this picture because participation can occur inside systems whose internal operations remain opaque. GenAI distributes cognition across human and computational actors, but it also introduces valuations that may quietly reorganise what counts as good writing, legitimate knowledge or efficient thought. Infrastructure literacy is therefore not supplementary digital competence. It is the capacity to perceive how technical arrangements participate in the production of judgement. Indigenous Knowledge extends infrastructural learning beyond formal institutions and technological systems. Knowledge may reside in recurrent observation, land relations, collective memory, seasonal practice and intergenerational transmission. Its durability depends on social and ecological continuity. Extracting information while severing those relations can preserve statements while destroying the knowledge infrastructure that gave them meaning. Socioplastics can treat learning as a property of the corpus itself. A field learns when new sources do more than accumulate: they alter relations, expose blind spots, generate new paths and force existing categories to become revisable. Readers, indexes and cross-field essays can create temporary common spaces where different regimes of knowledge meet without being subordinated to a single method. The infrastructure should make its own acts of valuation visible enough to be contested. Infrastructural learning adds a recursive capacity to Socioplastics. The field does not merely store knowledge about infrastructures; its own classifications, interfaces and generative tools become objects of education and revision. Learning occurs when users can understand how routes were produced, how sources were selected and how alternative relations might be constructed. The concept adds an epistemic commons in which knowledge remains productive because the conditions of its production are themselves open to study.
Dorji, T., Rinchen, K., Morrison-Saunders, A., Blake, D., Banham, V. and Pelden, S. (2024) ‘Understanding How Indigenous Knowledge Contributes to Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience: A Systematic Literature Review’, Environmental Management, 74, pp. 1101–1123. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-024-02032-x.
Dorji and colleagues synthesise seventy-one studies to examine how Indigenous Knowledge contributes to climate adaptation and resilience. Their central intervention is to treat Indigenous Knowledge as an embedded system of practices, beliefs, observations and intergenerational transmission tied to particular lands and social relations, rather than as a collection of detachable local facts. The review identifies practical roles in predicting extreme conditions, preparing for climatic change and sustaining adaptive strategies, while also stressing the need for more careful relations between Indigenous and scientific knowledge. Methodologically, the PRISMA-based systematic review creates comparability across heterogeneous cases without erasing the contextual specificity repeatedly emphasised by the literature. Its wider contribution is epistemological: resilience depends not only on technical innovation but on the capacity of institutions to recognise different knowledge regimes. The bridge reaches decolonial research, environmental governance and knowledge co-production, where integration must avoid converting situated authority into decontextualised data.
Tierens, T., Decuypere, M., Hartong, S. and Alirezabeigi, S. (2025) ‘Schooling the (Artificially) Intelligent Writer: GenAI Technologies as Thinking Infrastructures in School Education’, Postdigital Science and Education, 7, pp. 1250–1269. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-025-00585-6.
Tierens and colleagues refuse the instrumental question of whether ChatGPT is simply useful or harmful to education. They conceptualise GenAI as a thinking infrastructure: a sociomaterial arrangement that structures attention, decision-making, valuation and cognition while becoming embedded in mundane practice. Their empirical work in schools in Belgium and Germany identifies four mechanisms through which ChatGPT affects student writing—generating habits, valuating knowledge, cultivating affinity and prompting thought. Methodologically, this shifts analysis from abstract discourse about AI to situated observation of how an infrastructural technology enters everyday writing. The theoretical contribution is substantial because agency and cognition are no longer located exclusively in the student; they are distributed across users, prompts, interfaces, models, institutional rules and educational expectations. The wider bridge reaches STS, infrastructure studies and postdigital pedagogy, culminating in the proposal for infrastructure literacy: education must teach students to recognise and critically interrogate the systems that participate in producing thought.
Infrastructure is sustainable only under conditions that must be specified. The category “clean energy” becomes analytically weak when it hides the territorial, social and temporal arrangements through which energy is produced, transmitted and governed. A grid can decarbonise while intensifying spatial inequality; a biofuel can lower direct emissions while shifting pressure onto land, water or labour; an institution can endorse justice while routinely subordinating it to other public values. Sustainability therefore names a configuration, not an intrinsic property. Its epistemic requirement is multidimensional accounting. Carbon is indispensable but insufficient. Grid justice requires demographic, spatial, temporal and interspecies analysis; bioenergy requires life-cycle, social, economic, technological and governance assessment; public decision-making requires explicit mapping of competing values. These frameworks resist the simplification by which one successful indicator legitimates an entire system. A transition is credible only when the relations among indicators remain visible.
Politically, conditional infrastructure relocates justice inside technical choice. The location of a transmission corridor, the frequency of outages, the designation of an acceptable land-use change or the weighting of affordability against reliability are all acts of distribution. Technical systems continuously allocate burdens, benefits and uncertainties. Justice enters not after infrastructure is built but at the point where parameters, priorities and acceptable trade-offs are defined. This also changes the status of metrics. Quantification does not merely describe transition; it governs what becomes countable as success. Life-cycle boundaries determine which emissions enter a calculation. Cost models determine which technologies appear viable. Reliability metrics distribute urgency. Public-value frameworks decide which considerations remain commensurable and which resist reduction. The architecture of evaluation is therefore itself infrastructural. Socioplastics can use conditional infrastructure as a model for transdisciplinary comparison. A corpus should not collapse heterogeneous evidence into a universal measure of relevance. Instead, it can preserve the conditions under which claims hold: scale, method, geography, timeframe, population, material boundary and institutional context. Bibliographic relations become stronger when they expose differences among regimes of evidence rather than smoothing them into thematic similarity. Conditional infrastructure adds to Socioplastics a discipline of qualified comparison. A claim becomes operational when its enabling conditions, externalities and limits remain attached to it as it circulates. This protects the field from both universalism and fragmentation: sources can enter relation without becoming equivalent. The concept contributes an epistemic architecture in which every transition, classification and synthesis remains accountable to the conditions that make its consequences possible.
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