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AbstractThis article develops how urban encounters have been theorized and mobilized across the social sciences to emphasize the ordinary and unspectacular ways in which people live together in cities in response to widespread talk of a crisis of multiculturalism. Situated in the contact zone between social science disciplines and arts practice, the article argues for performative and more political theorizations of spaces of encounter. Focusing on photographer Mahtab Hussain’s project You Get Me? (2017), the article examines how photographic portraits offer one example of a performative encounter that takes up as a position in the politics of lived experience by carving out spaces where difference might be encountered in new ways, and by challenging viewers to imagine and enact new ways of being-in-common.

In response to the commentaries on Anderson et al. (2012), the authors’ short response raises questions about, first, the status of materialism and realism in current debates around relations and relationality and, second, the implications of understanding assemblage as a particular kind of ethos for the politics of assemblage-based thinking.

In this paper we explore what assemblage thinking offers social-spatial theory by asking what questions or problems assemblage responds to or opens up. Used variously as a concept, ethos and descriptor, assemblage thinking can be placed within the context of the recent ‘relational turn’ in human geography. In this context, we argue that assemblage thinking offers four things to contemporary social-spatial theory that, when taken together, provide an alternative response to the problematic of ‘relational’ thought: an experimental realism orientated to processes of composition; a theorization of a world of relations andthat which exceeds a present set of relations; a rethinking of agency in distributed terms and causality in non-linear, immanent, terms; and an orientation to the expressive capacity of assembled orders as they are stabilized and change. In conclusion, we reflect on some further questions of politics and ethics that follow from our account of the difference assemblage thinking makes to relational thought.