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This paper unravels the intimate and irritant more-than-human encounters in hostel accommodation used by migrant farm workers in regional Australia. These are communal places of inhabitancy that draw attention to the intersecting concerns of highly mobile populations, seasonal labour, migration politics, and the socio-material relationships that flourish within such spaces. I examine the presence of bed bugs and other nonhumans through interviews with farm workers, hostel operators and managers, and ethnographic observations, to highlight broader implications of such 'communal' forms of living. The communal nature of living alongside others is challenging, especially when the arrangement is for work and migration, rather than leisure, and due to a lack of affordable housing options. The paper uses a more-than-human lens to bring into dialogue the mobilities of these workers with notions of communal living, which are intrinsically tied to visa conditions and labour migration. In doing so, the paper contributes to broadening the understandings of how and where mobilities take shape, and the impacts that more-than-human agencies have on day-to-day life in communal living situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative practices have made a standing contribution to mobilities research. We write this article as a collective of 25 scholars and practitioners to make a provocation: to further position creative mobilities research as a fundamental contribution and component in this field. The article explores how creative forms of research—whether in the form of artworks, exhibitions, performances, collaborations, and more—has been a foundational part of shaping the new mobilities paradigm, and continues to influence its methodological, epistemological, and ontological concerns. We tour through the interwoven history of art and mobilities research, outlining five central contributions that creativity brings. Through short vignettes of each author's creative practice, we discuss how creativity has been key to the evolution and emergence of how mobilities research has expanded to global audiences of scholars, practitioners, and communities. The article concludes by highlighting the potency of the arts for lively and transdisciplinary pathways for future mobilities research in the uncertainties that lay ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Airports and seaports inhabit multiple geographies that dictate global mobility across political, economic, social, and environmental borders. In Australia and across the Asia-Pacific, large-scale mobility developments are being undertaken to connect local businesses and industries with global markets. However, these projects are proceeding without regard for the impacts that these mobility hubs will have on local and global ecologies. This is certainly the case across the Asia-Pacific region, where industry is impacting on the routes of migratory shorebirds along the 'East Asian-Australasian Flyway', which spans 18 countries and carries over 50 million migratory birds each year. Key sites that make up the Flyway are established and prolific hubs for these nonhuman mobilities, yet encroaching land reclamation practices are resulting in considerable avian population declines. This paper explores how more-than-human conceptualisation of the EAA Flyway and the "borders" it instigates through global conservation and nation-state governance are inadequately protecting the migratory shorebirds. We examine the recent and contested developments in Moreton Bay, in Brisbane, Australia, and the many bordering practices that take shape in this local place along the EAA Flyway. We argue that the multi-sited path that compose these global Flyways challenge our all-too-human-centric conceptions of space, borders, and movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Art' and 'memory' are prominent areas of inquiry in geographical research. Artistic and memory work often overlap in our studies through practices and processes aimed at bringing people together in experimental, affective, and collective ways. In this introduction to the special issue, we write collectively as 12 authors to reflect on the histories, inspirations, and future trajectories of these intersecting concerns in geographical research. Our reflections stem from our collective participation and discussions of issues at the intersections of art, memory and geographical research, during an online workshop and our individual-and-collective reflections later through the process of writing this piece. We hope our discussions further interest on the possibilities for creative, collaborative, and decolonial interventions to memory in geography. And, incidentally, we hope that our editorial may be of interest for future research into the value and practices of collective geographic scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the 'frictions' felt by international backpackers who have been stuck and locked-down while they were living and working in regional Australian hostels. Backpackers play a central role as both tourists and migrant workers in Australia, where they undertake significant periods of required farm work in order to extend their visas. They are a highly visible and long-standing mobile population in Australia and are relatively under-studied given their significance to tourism cultures and economies. Based on forty semi-structured interviews with backpackers living and working in Bundaberg, Australia, we explore how experiences of immobilities prior to and during the pandemic restrictions manifest as experiences of escalating and alleviating frictions. Friction is understood as an embodied and relational feeling of tension produced by a shortage of space. Friction has always been a feature of hostel living but prolonged lockdowns and inconsistent health messaging escalated frictions into open conflict. We propose that the concept of friction sits between mobilities and immobilities, and that particular mobility contexts exacerbate such frictions. The article contributes to ongoing discussions on pandemic immobilities and the interwoven concerns of tourism, migration, and labour mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biosecurity restrictions regulate the types of materials that international travellers can bring into certain countries. Australia is well known in international travel cultures for stringent customs regulations and checks on all incoming passengers. This blanket approach to biosecurity governance implies that all materials, even banal personal possessions or luggage, pose a potential threat to the nation's biosecurity. This article explores how individuals prepare for and experience declaring personal belongings while migrating to and entering Australia. Drawing from interviews with recently arrived migrants on temporary visas, analysis of the required customs declaration card and government information, I highlight the inconsistencies of how materials, and the people who carry them, come under close scrutiny at the border. The findings show that the stringent surveillance of biosecurity perpetuates perceived risks and threats, relying on stereotypes of certain migrant and traveller profiles in the way biosecurity is promoted, monitored and enforced. Biosecurity manifests social, spatial, and material concerns in how it is performed and regulated, thereby transforming passive materials in a person's luggage into active threats to national security, further complicating the rigid governance of international mobility and migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper stems from cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration between community music and human geography which sought to interrogate and understand claims of social sustainability and social change often cited in evaluation reports of community music projects. The lead authors (Parks and Cassidy) took this dialogue forward by organising a geography conference session which incorporated an instant choir workshop to test how we might 'do' social sustainability through practice. Drawing upon ideas from both disciplines, the paper synthesises the reflections of nine participants in the session to explore the capacity of creative, embodied, geographical practice to transform hegemonic experiences of academic conferences, and to create a sustainable and inclusive community of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large public inner-city events require a significant amount of temporary security infrastructures and altered mobility designs to safely facilitate the movement of the public throughout already highly mobile spaces. Recent security risks from vehicle attacks have resulted in increased security in order to mitigate potential threats. Issues arise as increased security infrastructures interrupt and redirect pedestrian mobility, reconfiguring traditionally 'safe' pedestrian and leisure spaces into 'unsafe' spaces under the pre-emptive atmosphere of unknown threats. This paper explores how im/mobilities arise through increased security during fireworks events in Brisbane, Australia. Using ethnographic observation and visual documentation of crowd movements, we critically examine the temporal alterations to wayfinding and mobility infrastructures. Although increased security serves to foster a safe and secure environment, we suggest that the altered mobilities and heightened visibility of security risks impacting on the overall festive atmosphere of the events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this creative mediation we explore measures of the coronavirus pandemic—unfolded through the seemingly simple act of 'physical distancing'—to show the myriad of mobility, wayfinding, and spatial orientations that shape the socio-material fabric of collective life. Physical distancing has mandated new measures of how people orient their body amongst other bodies in public space. In-situ measurements of spatial and affective registers attempt to alleviate possible contagions while adhering to health advice. The importance of measurement and the practice of measuring has never been as obvious and integral to daily life. However, the notions of measure—how one feels, moves, acts, thinks, and reflects—have been long imbued in the governance of collective goals, practices, and action. We highlight performative, sensory, and aesthetic responses to these new measures, suggesting these individualised performances of measure should be indicative of the sensory shifts required to tackle possible future crises and changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the differences in the ways we orientate, adjust and create new trajectories as we walk, wander and wayfind. Drawing on lived experiences of walking together and separately through inner-city walking paths in Brisbane – Meanjin, we offer a conceptual exploration of the relationship of unplanned movement, spontaneity and affective registers of mobility. Discussing specific glimpses and accounts of our walking, and moments where this drifts into 'wandering', we reflect on the episodes of wandering as something more than, or different to, purposeful walking. These are complex processes of kinaesthetic, visual registers, imagination, conjecture and anticipation, responding to sensory cues from wayfinding design. We suggest that wandering creates unanticipated trajectories that orientate and adjust movements differentially in untying itself from direction, simultaneously taking inspiration from the abstracted and often colourful wayfinding and mobilities designs that feature in urban spaces. As a conceptual intervention, these meanderings reflect on research across mobilities, creative methods and geographical research, as a tool for doing research rather than methodological revision. We consider the role of movement in urban landscapes and the encounters we have with wayfinding and mobilities design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air travel has been an integral part of contemporary tourism, but has been relatively under explored in terms of how it is visualised and represented as part of tourism experiences. This paper explores how the seemingly banal aspects of tourism – such as time spent waiting or transiting – are captured and represented through tourist photography. Reflecting on the process of creating a participatory artwork project, I show how tourists capture their interactions and experiences with an array of transit spaces that play a significant part of the journey. A participatory and creative methodology was employed that invited tourists to share photographs for public exhibitions. The paper explores how the photographs contributed to the artwork offer counter representations of high-speed and glamourized air travel, instead revealing a nuanced, mundane aesthetics of tourist photography and experiences of time spent in transit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]