Cultural Geographies of Love and Catastrophe

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.

• AcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsNotes on ContributorsIntroduction: Love’s ruinsAnna Secor, Paul Harrison, Mikko JoronenPART ONE: Love’s distance1. Juliet’s analysis: On love amissPaul Harrison2. After love: On love and finitudeAnna J. Secor3. Enduring love: Three meditations on woundingRaine Aiava, Noora Pyyry, Mikko Joronen, 4. I die you: Impersonal love and the annihilation of the subjectThomas DekeyserPART TWO: Love’s im/possible futures5. The revolutionary love plot: On love, im/possibility and the commonEleanor Wilkinson6. A coal miner’s apprenticeship: transforming industrial identity and rebuilding postindustrial worlds with loveVickie Zhang7. Love in times of impossibilization: making space for Alain BadiouArun Saldanha8. ‘In politics, love is a stranger’: Baldwin, Arendt, and the geographies of liberationDerek RuezPART THREE: Geophilia9. The Iconographic landscape and the materiality of loveMitch Rose10. Letters to a glacierLuLing Osofsky, 11. Eating (each other’s) (hearts) out: mycelial love and the forest as queer con/figurationSage Brice. Kate Marston, Richard Wright, and Scarlet Hall, 12. Eros, orgasms, eco/geopoetics, and geophilosophy: Some creative reflections on loving and the climate catastropheSarah de Leeuw13. Lithic ‘I love yous’Harriet Hawkins, Long Ly Vouch, and Flora ParrottCoda: Heart-breakingPaul Harrison, Anna Secor, Mikko Joronen

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.