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This paper draws on research with people from African, Caribbean and Asian backgrounds regarding perceptions and use of the English countryside. I explore the complex ways in which the category "rural" was constructed as both essentialised "and" relational: how the countryside was understood most definitely as "not-city" but also, at the same time, the English countryside was conceived as part of a range of networks: one site in a web of "nature places" across the country, as well as one rural in an international chain of rurals--specifically via embodied and emotional connections with "nature". I argue that alongside sensed/sensual embodiment (the non-representational intuitive work of the body), we need also to consider reflective embodiment as a desire to space/place in order to address the structural socio-spatial exclusions endemic in (rural) England and how they are challenged. I suggest that a more progressive conceptualisation of rurality--a "transrural" open to issues of mobility and desire--can help us disrupt dominant notions of rural England as only an exclusionary white space, and reposition it as a site within multicultural, multiethnic, transnational and mobile social Imaginaries. (Contains 4 figures and 1 table.)

We draw on a particular way of doing research – as volunteer practitioners based in community‐based organisations – to propose a relationship‐centred perspective on geographical ethics. Grounded in a wider rationale driven by socio‐spatial justice, politics of care, and emotional work, the paper reflects on praxes of doing geographical research as volunteer‐practitioners and considers how dimensions of relationship‐forging in community settings can translate to, and enrich, the agendas of research, teaching, impact, and collegiality in academic geography, even for those whose work does not unfold from community‐based partnerships. The paper makes a three‐fold call: for more nuanced recognition of the potential role of relationships in geographical working; for proliferation and nurturing of diverse academic outcomes; and for legitimisation of relationship praxes beyond normative forms of written outputs. We draw on a particular way of doing research – as volunteer‐practitioners based in community‐based organisations – to propose a relationship‐centred perspective on geographical ethics. Grounded in a wider rationale driven by socio‐spatial justice, politics of care, and emotional work, the paper reflects on praxes of doing geographical research as volunteer‐practitioners and considers how dimensions of relationship‐forging in community settings can translate to, and enrich, the agendas of research, teaching, impact, and collegiality in academic geography, even for those whose work does not unfold from community‐based partnerships. The paper makes a three‐fold call: for more nuanced recognition of the potential role of relationships in geographical working; for proliferation and nurturing of diverse academic outcomes; and for legitimisation of relationship praxes beyond normative forms of written outputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to better understand the role of emotions in academia, and their part in producing, and challenging, an increasingly normalised neoliberal academy. It unfolds from two narratives that foreground emotions in and across academic spaces and practices, to critically explore how knowledges and positions are constructed and circulated. It then moves to consider these issues through the lens of care as a political stance towards being and becoming academics in neoliberal times. Our aim is to contribute to the burgeoning literature on emotional geographies, explicitly bringing this work into conversation with resurgent debates surrounding an ethic of care, as part of a politic of critiquing individualism and managerialism in (and beyond) the academy. We consider the ways in which neoliberal university structures circulate particular affects, prompting emotions such as desire and anxiety, and the internalisation of competition and audit as embodied scholars. Our narratives exemplify how attendant emotions and affect can reverberate and be further reproduced through university cultures, and diffuse across personal and professional lives. We argue that emotions in academia matter, mutually co-producing everyday social relations and practices at and across all levels. We are interested in their political implications, and how neoliberal norms can be shifted through practices of caring-with. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]