Jessica McLean

Geography education seeks to encourage an appreciation of the diverse ways people relate to, value and understand place. Indigenous-led geography education offers multiple ways of relating to and learning about place that centres care and repair. Storytelling, in its diverse narrative and creative forms, is a core element of Indigenous ways of knowing and a powerful mode of learning. This commentary introduces, and offers reflections on, an ongoing project aiming to develop Country-led pedagogy in a highly valued water place within settler colonial Australia. Country-led pedagogy is a form of Indigenous-led geography education which invites people, in this case high school classes and a youth group, to learn from being on Country. While curriculum objectives are accommodated in the process, learning from Country is the priority, via storying and approaching repair in water places. As a collaboration between Country, local Aboriginal people, young people, natural resource managers, educators and researchers, we document how Indigenous-led geography education can contribute to transitions to more sustainable futures.

Thinking about digital lives involves grappling with every-where and every-when entangled lived experiences and relations, as humans and more-than-humans morph in relation to the digital, in a mixture of mundane and spectacular ways. While some theorists have extended the term ‘more-than-human’ to include digital entities such as data, this chapter takes a different stance to recentre how particular humans, and human institutions, are highly agential with respect to the digital, and that responsibility for their impacts, both negative and positive, cannot be eschewed. Diminishing of institutional and corporate responsibility for digital lives tends to be growing, as captured in recent declarations of pending human extinction from/by AI. Rather than perpetuating obfuscation of such responsibility and agency with respect to the digital, there are valuable opportunities to reset our digital lives, to take better care of human and more-than-human presences and futures that centre equity and sustainability. Drawing on the work of Tomás Saraceno's Web(s) of Life, an eco-social energy transition project that foregrounds extractive digital lives of the Global North and the impact of these on the Global South, this chapter offers a way to think about refusal of digital damages and instead resituates multi-scale responsibility for different futures.

The presence of AI in everyday life has dramatically increased and intensified in the last few years. From playing a role in teaching and research activities within educational institutions, to becoming a ubiquitous feature in search engines and in all manner of apps, AI is now omnipresent. While geographers have long examined the role of AI in various ways, in this Themed Intervention we highlight often overlooked dimensions of responsibility, care and repair in the mobilisation and impacts of AI. This Themed Intervention questions the genealogy of AI and its creators' duty of care towards the real‐life impacts of its operationalisation, how AI might be (responsibly) governed to reduce these impacts and how responsibility is or should be devolved across different actors (e.g., individualistic or collective responsibilities). We acknowledge that despite its potential for positive ends, AI has already caused damage to people, societies, environments and therefore question whether repair (of the people–AI relation, of AI consequences) is possible, what form this can or should take as well as how the faults of AI can be corrected. By exploring care, the contributors share concern with caring for and of AI, including its current impacts and futures, with each contribution ruminating on how caring relations are configured. We argue that if we focus on dimensions of care and repair when critically evaluating the discursive and material realities of AI, issues relating to responsibility are impossible to ignore.

Sensing and knowing Country in deeply colonised southeastern Australia is affected by persistent undermining, in both physical and metaphorical forms, by individuals, organisations and structures. Physical undermining occurs when extractive regimes, such as mining, damage Country while metaphorical undermining can play out when Indigenous knowledges are not centred when engaging with Country. Ngayirr Ngurambang: Sacred Country near Mudgee, Wiradjuri Country, an art exhibition led by Wiradjuri curator Aleshia Lonsdale, aimed to invite people to experience, engage with and awaken to these challenges. The exhibition brought together Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists from regional places, to reflect on, and build, sensibilities and knowledges of one part of this Country: The Drip, Goulburn River National Park. The physical undermining of this treasured women's water place comes from encroaching coal mines in the region while a form of metaphorical undermining arises in persistent settler colonial structures and processes. By drawing together insights from the curator, artists and participants of the exhibition, through interviews and qualitative surveys, this paper argues that artmaking and receiving can push against colonial hegemonic structures and enable different sensing and relational onto-epistemologies that are based in respect.

The recent statement of future (human) extinction by Artificial Intelligence (AI), made by the Center for AI Safety, crystallises techno-capitalists’ lack of care and responsibility for environmental and social harms that digital technologies already produce. Rather than identifying their collective roles and responsibilities in addressing these harms, the Center’s statement highlights future risks, and ties these to global extinction threats. There are, however, alternatives to such an approach, as articulated in research at the intersection of geographies of care and digital geographies, including that which is bringing together more-than-human and more-than-real approaches. While the software and hardware of AI continues to present amorphous challenges to the same techno-capitalists who benefit from them, we could instead prioritise care, repair and responsibility in/of AI to address current problems in this area.

This is the first in a series of occasional editorials in which we guide our readers through groups of papers that we consider to be ‘way‐finding’ contributions to geographical debates. Our emphasis on ‘way‐finding’ and navigating through scholarly work engages a tension we identified around Transactions' remit of publishing so‐called ‘landmark’ papers which are likely to stimulate and shape research agendas in Geography. We use this editorial as an opportunity to refocus attention away from the landmark paper as a static object of high repute that people come to visit, and towards the active role of landmarks as way‐finders used to navigate and engage with a landscape. The papers spotlighted in the editorial provide noteworthy examples of recent efforts to understand non‐human lifeworlds and the legitimisation of concepts and experiences constructed in/by Majority World scholarship. The papers are also notable for their careful approach to shaping agendas, marked by an awareness of past and present geographical scholarship, while also envisioning the discipline's future.

In this editorial we ask key questions about what it means to publish ‘a journal’ in a world of publishing which is driven by individual article metrics and online access. Seeing the value of journals as venues for intellectual debate, we therefore set out a renewed vision as to how the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers can provide space for more collective and collaborative approaches to geographical debate. This approach revolves around the idea of ‘transactions’ itself and creating spaces in the journal for more commentary, debate and dialogue, alongside continuing to publish landmark papers.