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Geographic literature on diplomatic spatiality has largely focused on the official sites of diplomacy, while neglecting the importance of the diplomatic home in everyday working life. Considering this gap in the literature, the present article extends the recent interest in critical geographies of home and considers its potential in furthering our understanding of interstate diplomacy. The paper assembles the affective atmospheres of the diplomatic home through a bottom-up perspective that combines the author's personal experiences as a Finnish career diplomat inhabiting a middle-class Turkish apartment with the oral accounts of his houseguests. Attention is given to the creation of images of national culture and design through micro-scale country-branding efforts. The analysis shows that while home atmospheres can be manipulated for diplomatic ends, there are also disjunctures between idealised designs and the embodied experiences of diplomatic houseguests. The article ends by discussing the implications of the present study for the literature on critical geographies of diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orchard wassailing practices, along with other folk traditions have been overlooked by geographers. This paper considers how such practices can engineer spaces of enchantment in otherwise 'disenchanted' spaces. Furthermore, how this form of enchantment is never fixed but relational, unstable and contingent, or 'borrowed'. Having nearly disappeared in the mid-20th century, wassailing has been 're-wakened' for the contemporary world. A surprising feature of these contemporary wassails is that they are often performed in recently planted or restored orchards in suburban areas with little heritage of producing fruit. Spaces usually considered absent of 'enchantment'. Drawing on interviews with organisers of contemporary and 'reinvented' wassails in the south and south-west of England, this research investigates contemporary wassailing practices in such otherwise 'disenchanted' spaces. In doing so it draws attention to the construction of 'magical' atmospheres that combine elements of the religious-spiritual, heritage and fiction enabling a temporary suspension of disbelief. The paper develops upon previous understandings of 'enchantment' in geography and introduces the notion of 'borrowed enchantment' that draws attention to forms of enchantment which are relational, emergent, unstable and contingent to locality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everyday experiences of movement have become a central concern for social and cultural geography in recent years. Work here has begun to unpack the specific meanings, imaginaries and experiences that come to be bound up with mobile bodies and their practices. However, it has been suggested that more could be done to examine the material, elementary, molecular and physical aspects of movement which are significant to the experience of being on the move. Therefore, this paper explores the experience of cycling amid such turbulent 'elemental' materialities. Such 'matters' matter to cycling in the way that they (re)make both mobile environments and mobile subjectivities. Cyclists come to have quite immediate and intimate relationships with the material and 'elementary' aspects of the environments they move through given their relatively unmediated encounters with them. This paper draws on video-interview based research with 24 commuter cyclists in Plymouth, UK to consider cyclists' experience of atmospheric conditions in terms of air's force and air quality. From this, the paper reflects on how the experience of such 'elemental' matters might be significant to future research on and planning for cycling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]