The question of how space matters to the mobilisation, practices and trajectories of contentious politics has frequently been represented as a politics of scale. Others have focused on place and networks as key spatialities of contentious politics. Yet there are multiple spatialities – scale, place, networks, positionality and mobility – that are implicated in and shape contentious politics. No one of these should be privileged: in practice, participants in contentious politics frequently draw on several at once. It is thus important to consider all of them and the complex ways in which they are co‐implicated with one another, with unexpected consequences for contentious politics. This co‐implication in practice, and its impact on social movements, is illustrated with the Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride in the United States.

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Economic geography has become increasingly fragmented into a series of intellectual solitudes that has created isolation, producing monologues rather than conversation, and raising the question of how knowledge production should proceed. Inspired by science studies and feminism, we argue for an engaged pluralist approach to economic geography based on dialogue, translation, and the creation of ‘trading zones’. We envision a determinedly anti-monist and anti-reductionist discipline that recognizes and connects a diverse range of circulating local epistemologies: a politics of difference rather than of consensus or popularity. Our model is GIS that underwent significant shifts during the last decade by practicing engaged pluralism, and creating new forms of knowledge. Similar possibilities we suggest exist for economic geography.

Representations of quantitative geography, both by practitioners and by others, have tended to associate quantification with empiricism, positivism, and the social and academic status quo. Qualitative geography, by contrast is represented as nonempiricist or postempiricist, sensitive to complexity, contextual, and capable of empowering nonmainstream academic approaches and social groups. Attempts to engage in debate between these positions rarely challenge this dualism, reproducing the representation of quantitative geography as logical positivism, and a dualism separating quantitative and qualitative geography. I argue that this dualism can be broken down, by deconstructing the underlying representation. I discuss why this representation came into existence and how it was stabilized; how close attention to the practices of quantitative geographers, and particularly to the evolution of these practices, reveals its inadequacies; and what new possibilities for quantitative practices emerge from this deconstruction. GIS, one of the recent manifestations around which representations of quantitative geography polarize, is used as a case study to illustrate these arguments. I pay particular attention to the question of the relevance of quantitative practices for an emancipatory human geography.

Over the last decade, a new research program has emerged at the interface between geographic information science and geographical social theory, now called critical GIS. I analyze the emergence of critical GIS as an example of knowledge production in Geography. I examine its genealogy, highlighting the key debates, events and individuals instrumental in facilitating a rapprochement between two initially opposed scholarly communities, and tracing the directions that this has since taken. Addressing its current incarnation as critical GIS, I relate it to the critical theory tradition in the social sciences, and assess the pertinence of the term 'critical' for describing the epistemology and philosophy of critical GIS. I examine how technology, the geography of GIS research, and politics are shaping the future trajectory of critical GIS. Drawing on Helen Longino's vision for strong knowledge production, I argue that the future of critical GIS will depend on the ability of its practitioners to remain conscious and reflexively critical of their own emergent presuppositions.

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Advocating a provincialization of critical urban theory, we seek to move beyond current polarizations and disputes over the basis of urban theory, creating space to take seriously the possibility that no single theory suffices to account for the variegated nature of urbanization and cities across the world. Such provincialization requires a serious engagement with both mainstream and critical Anglophone urban theory, challenging the seeming naturalness of knowledge claims through rigorous theoretical and empirical scrutiny from the standpoint of peripheral perspectives located outside the core. This entails recognizing the existence of a shifting ecosystem of critical urban theories, putting these into even-handed critical conversation with one another. The collective resilience of urban theory will be dependent upon ongoing engagement across such diversity. At the heart of such an ecosystem are shifts in practice, seeking a new comparative analytic that destabilizes the universalism of the dominant norm, against which all other exemplars are to be compared, with the imperative of taking the field seriously.

Across cities of the global South, major initiatives are underway to assemble land from informal settlements in order to make it available for large-scale infrastructure and commercial real estate projects. Driven by global city aspirations, profit-seeking developers, demands from emergent middle classes for modern residential, consumption and recreational spaces, and, last but not least, the availability of finance, these land transformations seek to commodify and enclose residential urban commons and involve the displacement of thousands of urban residents. Through an examination of two field sites, a ‘legal’ kampung where land is being acquired through negotiations between kampung residents with land rights and developers’ land brokers, and two ‘illegal’ kampungs whose residents were evicted in the name of flood mitigation, we conclude that the default theory for explaining these processes—accumulation by dispossession—is inadequate for capturing the variegated and complex nature of such processes. By thinking through Jakarta, we seek to provincialize the dominant concept of accumulation by dispossession, proposing an extension that we suggest is better attuned to capture the distinct features of Southern cities: Contested accumulations through displacement.