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Friendships are an important part of what makes us, and our geographies of various kinds, human. We consider how geographers can contribute to efforts to afford friendship greater prominence in the social sciences. The main part of the article considers three strands of work on friendship that push the boundaries of research in human geography: (1) geographies of affect/emotion and the ontological construction of the human; (2) children’s and young people’s geographies and the (re)production of social ordering; and (3) geographies of mobility and transnationalism in a world of increased human spatial movement and social relations at a distance.

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In our engagement with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s thesis on planetary urbanization we argue that, while they have successfully marked some important limits of mainstream thinking on the urban, their privileging of epistemology cannot produce an urban theory for our time. Engaging in a symptomatic reading of their work, and with a focus on the implications of their limited mobilization of social ontology—or Lefebvre’s ontology of the everyday—we ask what is occluded in planetary urbanization. In particular, we explore three areas of concern: the urban as the grounds for difference, centrality and the everyday; the omission of subjects of and occlusion of subjectivity; and the occlusion of a constitutive outside and its political capacities to remake the urban.

As we enter the new millennium, geographers have a momentous opportunity to reflect upon the historical development of our discipline and the academic culture within which it thrives, with the aim of setting out an antiracist agenda. We advocate a fundamental refashioning of the discipline, not simply an extension of its research agenda; for racism, like gender, is not just another item in the lexicon of geographical subjects. The agenda includes, but is not limited to: clarifying relations between racism and law; racism and immigration policy; racism and poverty; and mobilizing racialized groups around policy issues. These items need to be addressed both through scholarship and through activism, as centering geographical practices in the streets rather than in the academy impels not only more effective social change, but also new theoretical understanding of geographies of engagement. Our agenda for antiracist geography also involves three aspects of institutional change: to build up on and extend traditional geographical scholarship; to change the basis of the discipline by extending the principles of antiracism throughout our institutional practices, particularly in the classroom; and to change the face of the discipline by increasing the participation and contributions of geographers of color.