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Kynren is an outdoor spectacular pageantry performance which tells a tale of England, drawing on myth and history, to make several claims about Englishness and Britishness. It does so in the political wake, first, of constitutional crises in the UK centred around Brexit; and second, of debates around heritage, empire, race and nation which have been driven by responses to the Black Lives Matter movement. These themselves are manifestations of broader, global trends in which populist movements have attempted to reassert state-legitimacy through nationalism, heritage and culture. This paper explores, how Kynren affectively presents and discursively performs a narrative which puts place and landscape, and specifically the place and landscape of the peripheral region of County Durham in which it is located, at the heart of nation. We argue that the ways in which this narrative is authenticated performatively through the spectacular affective atmosphere of Kynren show how and which nationalist narratives resonate most readily in popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My aim in this paper is to develop the concept of moral economy by exploring how moral principles intertwine and interact with forms of economic organisation. Through applying a holistic moral-economy framework, this paper explores institutional variations in the moral economies of recycling, paying attention to those lay normativities that shape consumers' everyday interactions with their waste. The starting point for this paper comes from the observation that moral messages used to promote recycling differ between Sweden and England. In Sweden the protection and stewardship of the natural environment are key tropes, whereas in England recycling is promoted as an action that saves the environment and public money. I show that the content of these moral messages is closely related to the system of recycling provision within a country, together shaping nationally distinct moral economies of recycling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hope is not singular or fixed; instead hopes take multiple forms that constitute precarity. Drawing on interviews with white women 'on benefits' in the North East of England, in a period before Brexit, I explore different kinds of hope that surfaced in relation with neoliberal forces of, and beyond, austerity. (1) Multiplied hopes, hedging bets and holding several possibilities together; (2) Conflicted hopes, pulls towards paradoxical attachments; (3) Suspended hopes, framed by the limits of the now; (4) Negative hopes, invested in promises that despair could be pushed onto others; (5) Hopes for the absence of optimism, a mode of being present in the present, staying with mutual contingency and withdrawing from the cruelty of unknown futures, a strategy increasingly denied to women who were more than 'left-behind'. By exploring the different forms that hopes take, we can better understand what hopes do. I argue that hopes in decline were not lost, nor orientated towards upward progress, but invested instead in maintaining a position. They were both sustaining and debilitating through situations of loss and uncertainty, and as such constituted a stretched-out present, tensed with decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how recreational anglers make sense of, and engage with, fish behaviour over space and time. Drawing on fieldwork conducted around rivers in Yorkshire, UK, it explores how anglers differently categorise and differentiate between fish through their fishing practices. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's notion of becoming-animal, and attentive to Haraway's concerns for "beings-in-encounter' the paper examines angling as a transformative practice whereby anglers and fish adapt through their coconstitutive encounters. While anglers often attempt to `think like a fish' when deciding on their tactics, we demonstrate their ambiguous classification of `fish' on the basis of species, size, and rhythm. Their attempts to become-fish are not always, therefore, with Haraway's "actual animals" but with complex groupings. The paper argues that studies should be more attentive to the heterogeneity of the categories of human and nonhuman. It is also critical of assumptions that certain animals, such as fish, are alien to humans and calls for greater attention to be paid to these and to the nonairy spaces in which they dwell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Haptic devices for computers and video-game consoles aim to reproduce touch and to engage the user with ‘force feedback’. Although physical touch is often associated with proximity and intimacy, technologies of touch can reproduce such sensations over a distance, allowing intricate and detailed operations to be conducted through a network such as the Internet. The ‘virtual handshake’ between Boston and London in 2002 is given as an example. This paper is therefore a critical investigation into some technologies of touch, leading to observations about the sociospatial framework in which this technological touching takes place. Haptic devices have now become routinely included with video- game consoles, and have started to be used in computer-aided design and manufacture, medical simulation, and even the cybersex industry. The implications of these new technologies are enormous, as they remould the human—computer interface from being primarily audiovisual to being more truly multisensory, and thereby enhance the sense of ‘presence’ or immersion. But the main thrust of this paper is the development of ideas of presence over a large distance, and how this is enhanced by the sense of touch. By using the results of empirical research, including interviews with key figures in haptics research and engineering and personal experience of some of the haptic technologies available, I build up a picture of how ‘presence’, ‘copresence’, and ‘immersion’, themselves paradoxically intangible properties, are guiding the design, marketing, and application of haptic devices, and the engendering and engineering of a set of feelings of interacting with virtual objects, across a range of distances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the atmospheric qualities of illuminated space, grounding notions of affect in investigating the longstanding autumnal event of Blackpool Illuminations. I consider the affective qualities of lighting before discussing the 'atmosphere' of the Illuminations. I critically explore the division between affect and emotion, the insistence on affect's precognitive qualities, and the notion that affective atmospheres produce a 'mute attunement' to place. In foregrounding the dense social production of atmosphere at Blackpool Illuminations, I highlight the flow of affect and emotion in place, show how lighting is ideally constituted to blur divisions between the representational and nonrepresentational, identify the anticipation of affect, and demonstrate that affective atmospheres are coproduced by visitors as part of a reiterative, festive, convivial, and playful social practice in familiar space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines some of the emotions highlighted by interactions between British migrants and Gulf nationals in the emerging global city of Dubai. Tracing the emotions that emerge in 'expatriate' handbooks, field notes, and interview narratives, I contribute to an emerging body of work that focuses on the embodied migrant and troubles the notion of privileged migrants as being detached from place. 1 demonstrate that attention to the emotions framing such interactions, in both geographical and temporal terms, can help us to better understand migrant encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walking has moved into increasing visibility in social, cultural, and geographical studies as well as art and cultural practice in recent times. Walking practices are often mobitised as a means for sensing and learning about spaces, for enabling reflection on the mutual constitution of bodies and landscapes, and for finding meaning within and potentially re-enchanting environments. Through the influence of Michel de Certeau in particular, the idea that walking 'encunciates' spaces and is a creative, elusive, and resistive everyday practice, counterpoised to the 'solar eye', has become com- monplace. This paper focuses on projects by the artist Francis Alys that are based on walking in London and other cities, to consider their engagements with the politics of urban space. Attention is paid to walking as his method of unfolding stories, and to its potential to unsettle and bring into question current realities, especially in the context of the regulated, fortified, and surveilled zones of London. Addressing the poetics and politics of his spatial practices, however, reveals the inadequacy of undifferentiated models of creative resistance, nomadism, and subversion beloved of much recent theory, and often endorsed through a partial reading of Certeau. Instead, the openness and ambivalence of these practices suggest a need for a more nuanced approach to the multiple rhythms, trajectories, and narratives that constitute urban spaces as well as to their contested (in)visibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relevance of Bourdieu's 1980 spatial theorisation in Le Sens Pratique (The Logic of Practice 1990, Polity Press, Cambridge) for understanding intercity relations in contemporary globalisation—specifically, interdependencies between Castells's 'space of flows' and 'places' in advanced business services. Bourdieu's relational concepts are reviewed with reference to evidence from in-depth interviews with business actors in London and Frankfurt at the time of European Economic Monetary Union. The intention is to deepen understanding of emergent relations between the cities and, in so doing, to contribute to the reinterpretation of Bourdieu's input to geographical thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we discuss some of the 'strange maps' of city life performed by homeless people. Current models of urban homelessness emphasise both the strategies by which spaces of homelessness are disciplined and contained, and the tactics deployed by homeless people to negotiate this containment. Whilst recognising the value of such work, we argue that there is a need to move beyond this 'rationalist' reading of the homeless city to recognise the importance of emotion and affect in the lives of homeless people, and the traces such emotions leave on the homeless city. Drawing on in-depth interviews, we chart the journeys and pauses made by homeless people in the city of Bristol, UK. We show how the geography of homelessness thus described moves beyond current accounts of the homeless city rooted in an understanding of the strategic or tactical use of space and allows for a more nuanced reading of urban space able to take proper account of the less visible, more 'transient' reinscriptions of place that mark the presence of homeless people in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speakers' Corner in London is perceived as a space in which people speak freely without state interference; it is also popularly known as a place in which eccentrics and others, without access to mainstream media, orate. In this paper I explore Speakers' Corner as a discursive space, seeking to find a way through its polarised representations as a free space of serious and important deliberation and as a degraded trivial public sphere. I do so through the concept of the comedic public, which loosely draws upon Bakhtin's work on the carnival but also differs in significant ways. At the same time I argue that Speakers' Corner should not just be read or evaluated in terms of the public speech generated; the Corner is also a place in which communities form and strangers interact with others in counternormative ways. I argue that these social dimensions, often neglected, constitute an important aspect of the Corner's practice; they are also dimensions generated and incited by the Corner's discursive qualities. To illustrate this further I consider the expression of emotion, engagement in combative debate, and heckling as junctures through which social interactions arise. Finally, I suggest the social dimension to the Corner might productively be understood through the concept of the commons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]