Cultural Geographies of Love and Catastrophe

Edited by Paul Harrison, Anna J. Secor, Mikko Joronen

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Offers a new cultural geographical theorisation of love

Suggests new ways to think about love in relation to world-ending catastrophes of various kinds (from the personal to the ecological)
Showcases an exciting range of theoretical and creative approaches to cultural geographies of love and catastrophe

Across thirteen chapters, this collection examines how love takes place. Ranging from the classical to the contemporary, the artistic to the political, the human to the ecological, the contributors consider how love makes, unmakes, and remakes selves, communities and worlds. Resisting the urge to purify love, alive to love’s turbulence, they address the strange new attachments and alliances love makes possible and those it blights and prohibits. To love, to be loved, to speak of love, is a threat as much as it is a promise: the promise and threat of being undone by love. Love and catastrophe are not opposed but entwined.

At the heart of the collection is a surprising thesis: that love is always an experiment with distances, with intervals, with spacing. An education in love, an education by love, is a geography lesson.

Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Love’s ruins
Anna Secor, Paul Harrison, Mikko Joronen

PART ONE: Love’s distance
1. Juliet’s analysis: On love amiss
Paul Harrison
2. After love: On love and finitude
Anna J. Secor
3. Enduring love: Three meditations on wounding
Raine Aiava, Noora Pyyry, Mikko Joronen,
4. I die you: Impersonal love and the annihilation of the subject
Thomas Dekeyser

PART TWO: Love’s im/possible futures
5. The revolutionary love plot: On love, im/possibility and the common
Eleanor Wilkinson
6. A coal miner’s apprenticeship: transforming industrial identity and rebuilding postindustrial worlds with love
Vickie Zhang
7. Love in times of impossibilization: making space for Alain Badiou
Arun Saldanha
8. ‘In politics, love is a stranger’: Baldwin, Arendt, and the geographies of liberation
Derek Ruez

PART THREE: Geophilia
9. The Iconographic landscape and the materiality of love
Mitch Rose
10. Letters to a glacier
LuLing Osofsky,
11. Eating (each other’s) (hearts) out: mycelial love and the forest as queer con/figuration
Sage Brice. Kate Marston, Richard Wright, and Scarlet Hall,
12. Eros, orgasms, eco/geopoetics, and geophilosophy: Some creative reflections on loving and the climate catastrophe
Sarah de Leeuw
13. Lithic ‘I love yous’
Harriet Hawkins, Long Ly Vouch, and Flora Parrott

Coda: Heart-breaking
Paul Harrison, Anna Secor, Mikko Joronen

Reviews

This timely and intellectually daring collection rethinks love in all its ambivalence—at once destructive and redemptive, intimate and world-making. Refusing easy definitions, it traces love through catastrophe, vulnerability, and political possibility, offering urgent and provocative insights into the affective, political, and planetary conditions of the present.
– Alenka Zupančič, The Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

What a theme - and what a collection. Cultural Geographies of Love and Catastrophe offers its readers stories of love in many forms, and never wavers from its conviction and purpose in exploring how love and catastrophe are always intertwined. And always geographical too, as we learn how love and catastrophe stitch and unravel spaces, temporalities and subjectivities. This will be essential reading for researchers and students in cultural geography and well beyond.
– John Wylie, University of Bristol

If love is a problem of knowledge, a frantic confusion of language, this volume is about the stranger pleasures of addressing love yet never being able to. It is a love letter to the demands of incompletion, allowing us the fascination of what is unsatisfying, unsupportable.
– Jessica Dubow, Lancaster University

About the Author

Paul Harrison is Associate Professor of Human Geography at Durham University. His work concerns negative things and processes, phenomenologies of lessening, and deconstruction. He is the co-editor, with David Bissell and Mitch Rose, of Negative Geographies: Exploring the Politics of Limits (2021, University of Nebraska Press) and with Ben Anderson, of Taking-Place: Geography and Non-Representational Theories (2010, Routledge).

Anna J. Secor is Professor of Human Geography at Durham University. As a cultural, political and feminist geographer, she has written on questions of space, difference, affect, religion and ideology. She is co-author, with Ben Anderson, of The Politics of Feeling: Populism, Progressivism, Liberalism (2025, Goldsmiths University Press), and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Geography (2026), A Place More Void (2021, University of Nebraska Press) and The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography (2015).

Mikko Joronen is Associate Professor of Regional Studies at Tampere University, Finland. His research focuses widely on political geography and geographical theory, particularly at the intersection of ontology, politics, and space. His publications explore various entanglements of power, colonialism, and the materiality of violence, especially in the context of Palestine, with a particular focus on atmospheric violence, bodily vulnerability, and the tempos and temporalities of (de)colonial politics.

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