Dr Meg Sherval

This paper introduces the concept of the minescape as a conceptual and imaginative tool through which to integrate and represent growing shifts in the way natural resource extraction is understood. In recent years, traditional perceptions of extractive processes as 'natural' and purely economic in nature have been increasingly challenged by new developments within the fields of human geography and anthropology. Likewise, growing insights into the multifaceted socio-cultural terrain of extractive operations, and burgeoning work on the interplay of materiality and discourse within the extractive sector, have also transformed the way that extractive processes (and their potentialities) are being conceptualised. The concept of the minescape aims to draw together significant insights concerning the extractive sector, which are increasingly being deployed when representing extractive spaces. Appropriating the term from its current use in fine art, the minescape joins a number of recent appropriations of the 'scapes' suffix to capture the expanding analytical scope of extractive sector inquiry. In essence, the minescape stands as a representational tool that underscores the intricate ways in which extractive processes are imbued with complex socio-cultural dynamics, and powerful material and discursive elements.

For decades, Arctic Alaska has provided US mainland states with plentiful oil supplies. As reserves in the Prudhoe Bay fields decrease, however, the USA has been forced to consider new options to guarantee the nation's energy security. While debates continue to rage about its reliance on foreign oil, increased prices, consumption levels, and climate change, the USA is now contemplating whether predicted new discoveries might actually allow it to become an exporter rather than importer of oil and gas in the near future. This paper considers the role Arctic Alaska might play in helping secure future US energy security and independence. It also considers what other options exist for securing the State of Alaska's own future post-Prudhoe Bay. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

Law is a powerful influence on people and place. Law both creates and is created by the relationship between people and place, although it rarely acknowledges this. Law frequently operates as if space does not matter. Law and legal processes, therefore, deserve greater attention from geographers. Legal geography is an emerging field of inquiry that facilitates much-needed attention to the interrelationships among the environment, people and social institutions, including formal laws but also informal rules, norms and lore. Legal geographers seek to make the invisible visible: to bring the law into the frame of geography, and space and place into focus for the law. Both critical and applied in approach, legal geography offers descriptive, analytical and normative insight into economics, justice, property, power, geopolitics, governance and scale. As such it can enrich most areas of geographic inquiry as well as contribute to current policy debates about the regulation of space and place. Legal geography is a way for enlarged appreciations of relationality, materiality, multiscalarity and agency to be used to interrogate and reform the law. This introduction to a special 'themed paper' section of Geographical Research provides a window on legal geography scholarship, including its history, contribution and ambition. The papers in the collection explore issues grounded in the legal geographies paradigm, variously analysing matters empirically detailed while engaging in broader, theoretical debates and using both Australian and international case studies. © 2013 Institute of Australian Geographers.

For decades Western companies desired access to China's lucrative markets and its expansive resource base, imagining the large profits to be made and the increased international reputations that could be established. More recently, through a series of economic liberalisation moves, China itself has sought to open its doors and to engage more fully with the globalising economy. One industry where this has been most apparent is the fledgling gold mining industry which over the past decade has grown from strength to strength.