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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.

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.

In this paper we speculate on ways of listening with the planet as a way of producing multisensory knowledges of climate change. ‘Listening’ is a visceral experience that helps us consider the intricate, deeply entangled relations between human and non-human worlds through multisensory attentions. We draw on Oliveros’ notion of ‘deep listening’ and methodological experimentation to explore and speculate about the effects of climate change in the polar regions. Such speculative practices are informed by audio recordings of the movement of iceberg and glaciers, sea ice measurements and satellite imagery of the Antarctic and Arctic. By experimenting with the mergers of scientific data and creative practices we suggest that practices of listening make experiences of multiscalar climate change in distant places visceral and immersive.

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 hig...

This article examines how biosecurity is monitored at the Australian border, and the implications this has on the personal belongings and materials of migrants. Drawing on interviews with Nepalese ...

The Working Holiday Maker visa encourages young people from 44 nations to live and work for up to three years in Australia, contributing immensely to the temporary migrant workforce in regional areas. However, the conditions they experience while completing 88 days of mandatory ‘farm work’ to apply for visa extensions often place them in vulnerable situations and states of immobility that are counter to the perception of backpackers as mobile. Types of accommodation specifically for temporary migrant farm workers are known as working hostels and in some cases the ways in which they are administered have perpetuated the precarious and immobile situations in which backpackers find themselves. This article explores the lived experiences of backpackers who have undertaken farm work in the Bundaberg region, a new ‘hot spot’ for seasonal migrant labour. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with 35 working holiday makers, the article advances the suggestion that recent shifts in hostelling accommodation practices and increased competition for agricultural jobs in the region place individuals in increasingly precarious states of immobility.

Everyday activities and routines, such as, cooking, cleaning, and shopping, draw attention to the changes, contrasts, and adaptive processes that migrants undertake when settling into new living arrangements and relationships. For those coming from countries with rigid gender hierarchies, such as Nepal, these changes and necessary adaptations to the new socio-cultural practices and more flexible gender roles, often magnify the emotional and relational experiences of migration. This paper explores how female Nepalese students living in Brisbane, Australia experience shifting gender roles and expectations. It expands on the scarce literature on female Nepalese migration, in contrast to the recent growth in females as primary visa holders. Drawing on a series of qualitative interviews and ethnographic reflections, we examine how the more mundane roles and duties of a household are negotiated by these students and their partners. We suggest that attention to the mundane, everyday negotiations of gender between partners and in shared households sheds light on the complexity of migration experiences for Nepalese students living in Australia.

Diagrams of COVID-19 inform individuals how to enact specific spatial, mobile, and bodily practices. This commentary employs a non-representational lens to show how certain aesthetics used in diagramming the virus may accentuate existing public feelings of uncertainty, emergency, or threat.

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.

‘Border hotels’ have come to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic as spaces of detention and quarantine. Despite the longer history of using hotels for immigrant detention, efforts to contain outbreaks have led to the proliferation of hotels used for border governance. Ad hoc quarantine facilities have been set up around the world acting as choke points for mobility. The use of hotels as sites of detention has also gained significant attention, with pandemic related restrictions impacting on access to services for detained refugees and asylum seekers. Inhumane conditions and mobilisations against these conditions have recently received substantial media coverage. This symposium initiates a discussion about ‘border hotels’, closely engaging with these developments. Contributors document the shifting infrastructures of the border, and explore how these sites are experienced and resisted. They draw attention to divergent experiences of immobility, belonging, exclusion, and intersections of detention and quarantine. In exploring different - and controversial - aspects of ‘border hotels’, this symposium theorises modalities of governance implemented through hotels. Following in the footsteps of the ‘hotel geopolitics’ agenda (Fregonese and Ramadan 2015) it illustrates how hotels become integrated into border regimes. In doing so, it contributes to debates on the material and infrastructural dimensions of bordering practices and specifically to the literature on carceral geographies, polymorphic bordering and the politics of mobility.

This article explores diverse ways of experiencing the city through an experimental field-based workshop supported by the Institute of Australian Geographers and this journal. The two-day methods p...

There is a long history of collaboration between artists and geographers, with creative forms of research and dissemination of findings taking shape as artworks. In addition, there has been significant push from academia for researchers to maximise their research in ways that cater to, and engage with, broader public audiences. Art and creative practices tap into this through formats such as exhibitions, performances and participatory workshops which draw upon arts-based research methodologies with which geographers are becoming increasingly engaged. However, with this enthusiasm to adopt art practices for research dissemination purposes, tensions can arise in determining the levels of collaboration and authorship between artists and geographers, especially when the artist is employed as a research assistant on the project. In this ‘In Practice’ article, we explore the tensions and challenges that creative collaborations produce with respect to copyright and authorship, specialist skills and the delicate balance of doing creative research as part of a research team. We argue that geographers and artists need to address these issues from the outset and revisit them throughout the research process, and we offer some suggestions for how art–geography research collaborations might best be negotiated.

This article traces stories of singular footsteps taken on a collective meandering through Brisbane city, as a pedagogical experiment in writing for geographers. The diverse encounters recounted he...

Recent “national security panics” demonstrate that aeromobility assemblages are more fragile than they appear. This fragility will become more acute as the growing global aviation industry ...

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.

This book delves into the everyday spaces, diverse mobilities and affective potency of weather. It presents cutting-edge research into the multiplicity of weather phenomena and analyses the lived experiences of humans in conjunction with contemporary issues, notably climate change. The book considers how everyday experiences of weather in the mundane lives of people are linked to broader changes in weather patterns and climate change. Heat, dust, ice, snow, precipitation, sunlight, clouds, tides and fog are states of weather that impact on the ways in which humans become intertwined with landscapes. Our experiences with weather are diverse and ever-changing, and engaging with weather entangles humans with mobilities, materials and landscapes. This book thus explores affective and sensory resonances, drawing upon a variety of theoretical, empirical and creative material to investigate how weather is perceived in different social and cultural contexts. Key themes focus on the mobilities generated by weather, the affective and sensual potency of weather, and the diverse cultural forms and practices that exemplify how weather is historically, geographically and artistically represented. Offering a social and cultural understanding of weather events, this book contributes to a growing literature on weather across various disciplines, including human geography and cultural geography, and will thus appeal to students and scholars of geography, sociology, humanities, cultural studies and the arts.

Air travel is dependent on transport infrastructures, stratospheric conditions, weather events, seasonal temporalities, and other planetary systems that the aircraft, and its passengers, are navigated through. Turbulence in air travel is a common weather phenomenon where the aircraft encounters differences in air pressures, temperatures, or jet streams. Climate change predictions indicate that turbulence will increase over the next decades from the likelihood of more extreme weather events, increases in storm activity worldwide, and disruptions to jet streams. For passengers aboard aircrafts, turbulence is a moment of disruption and unsettling of the usually smooth and sleek ideals of air travel. This chapter explores turbulence as a weather phenomenon that may attune air travellers to larger sensations of changing weather mobilities. Drawing on creative documentation from on-the-ground and in-the-air during a severe tropical low-pressure system ‘weather event’ in Australia, the chapter explores how the disruptive and confronting sensations might bring to the foreground the entanglements and impacts of increasing human mobility on larger-scale weather and planetary changes.

Prominent artists and activists have documented, collected and appropriated discarded materials of refugee journeys, such as life jackets, rafts and clothing, transforming them into largesc...

Emergency diagrams, instructions for evacuation, safety cards, and pictographic displays inform how and where mobile bodies should move in exceptional circumstances. During times of danger, insecurity, panic, and disruption, these informational diagrams guide the movements and behaviours of the general public. Yet in daily life, these diagrams go largely unnoticed, sitting in the background of transit spaces, vehicles, vessels, or aircrafts. In this intervention Barry and Adey reflect on the aesthetics of the emergency and transit diagram while examining creative approaches that appropriate those aesthetics in order to critically explore forms of migration governance.

This chapter explores how tourist bodies merge with nonhuman materials and the surrounding environment during multi-day wilderness walks. Drawing on interviews and photographs of tourists in Tasmania, Australia, the chapter examines the unexpected and at times haphazard embodied interactions that arise between tourists’ bodies while packing equipment and walking with hiking bags. These moments of flexibility and reconfiguration open alternative perspectives to the anthropocentric ideals of wilderness walks and the experience of being connected to nature, or seemingly isolated from the human realm. Building on notions of materiality and affect in tourism and mobilities, I suggest that these material-bodily assemblages play a significant role in how tourists can feel entangled with the more-than-human world.

In this article we ask: how might the significant turn towards creative modes of knowledge production bring together researchers, participants and audiences to disrupt bordering technologies that dehumanise asylum seekers? We focus on videos taken by asylum seekers in Darwin who express their everyday experiences of encountering and transgressing borders. As researchers, we use experimental editing techniques to make these transgressions visible in a society with a white majority culture. We argue, however, that these video techniques often work to privilege our creative agency as researchers, even though the aim is to illuminate different temporalities and visualities of the global refugee crisis. This article problematises this agency and attends to ethical dilemmas by revisiting the juxtapositions, montages, fades, distortions and vortexes we use to centre asylum seeker lives. These visual techniques are an attempt to respond to xenophobic nationalism and racially discriminatory immigration policies through forms of digital activism that transgress standard ‘borders’ of representation and the self/other borders of public debates. In our demand for social and cultural justice, we are inspired by work that uses the affordances of digital technologies to dismantle the rigidity of sovereign borders.

Exploring ways that our movements are mediated, imagined and performed necessitates transdisciplinary and creative research techniques. This paper examines the collaborative interactive artwork PAN & ZOOM to explore how performative and embodied experiences of spatiality and mobility can be induced and produced. The artwork amplifies mobilities instilled in the global languages of cinema, photography and mobile media to open up spatial affects and alternative experiences of movement. Audiences become participants in constructing movement experiences, where spatial and perceptive movements operate across actors, scales and sites. Using a variety of literature from mobilities, philosophy, creative arts, Actor-network theory and geography, the paper contributes to emerging discussions in mobilities on creative research and the capacity for arts to engage audiences through applied and practice-led techniques. We explore how media and art practices can induce new affective movement practices and percep...

Tourists experience a range of everyday practices that are subtle, momentary and mundane, which can be difficult to document. Finding documentation techniques that encourage hands-on and collaborative experiences can assist in gathering and producing a variety of perspectives from researchers and tourists. Using the Deleuzian concept of the ‘diagram’, this article examines how creative documentation methods can be used to explore everyday practices of tourists. From a creative arts and philosophical perspective, a diagram is a methodological tool that allows the tracing of relations through a range of techniques. Tracing the development of participatory artwork that uses a diagrammatic approach demonstrates how the experiences of both tourists and researchers can be fused. This encourages a wider perspective of how tourist practices are generated through interactive and affective registers. Diagramming is a creative methodological approach that can assist in tracing experiences and relationships that emerge in tourist studies.

Tourists are presented with a range of material and interpersonal interactions that often develop into collaborative and creative modes of knowledge production. There is a current push to acknowledge processes and experiences as forged through material relations, for which tourism processes present a range of examples. This article advocates that the study of tourism needs to take a postdisciplinary approach that merges practice and theory, using the process of packing a bag as the primary example. A rethinking of material relations presents affirmative, global, and nomadic encounters for a multitude of actors and situations. In the rigorous, daily process of packing, objects are transformed into fluid, malleable forms—as a mass of material that is being collaboratively negotiated. In this way, materially driven processes open up collective experiences that offer methods of creative knowledge production. Drawing on interviews and photographic documentation of tourists packing, this article demonstrates the potential for postdisciplinarity research that examines possibilities for collaborative forms of creative knowledge production.

Tourists undertake a process of re-orientation that is particular to each destination and respond to encounters with new and unfamiliar environments. Certain destinations, such as those with unique landscapes, nature or ecological environments, induce a socio-cultural imaginary that primes tourists for what kind of experience they might consume. Large, immersive landscapes and climates congeal with expectations of what each destination requires in order to navigate through it. Common bearings of distance and scale are skewed as tourists are positioned within immersive conditions that constitute the environmental surround. In such moments, idealised and preconceived tourist experiences contrast with the actual events unfolding and heightened sensory awareness intensifies the subtle and collaborative negotiations. Utilising my own first-person experiences while transiting within Nepal and Iceland, I reflect on moments where tourists re-orient with the environment in collaborative ways. I argue that by repositioning our individual expectations of tourist experiences in favour of transitions with the environment, potential arises for new co-consumptive and collaborative practices.

This chapter unpacks the approaches to creative measuring that work across many scales and dimensions of action, signalling the challenges and offerings that a creative project that surveys multi-scalar relationships entails. The chapter explores the mediation of technological systems that connect individuals to both local and global scales of movement. An emphasis on consumer technologies such as GPS enabled devices, online mapping software, and fitness trackers enable individuals to “know” their location and position in the world through various mobile, technological, and biological techniques. Examples are drawn from the authors’ creative artworks, experiments, and participatory activities that provide a wide range of approaches, sensibilities, and sites of intervention to and locate one’s position in relation to, and across, multiple scales.

This chapter brings the insights gleaned from artworks, philosophies, and critical examinations of the Anthropocene back into the imaginaries that operate in the everyday. Revisiting the three lenses of sensation, scale, and spatiality, examples of the authors’ artworks offer insights into reconfigurations of community, participation, and social practice, and the way art can come closer to providing practical solutions that imaginaries make available. The chapter explores how creative measures might be used to highlight and punctuate the sensations and registers of the seismic shifts, large and small, in the Anthropocene epoch. Mobilities become a type of practice, when informed and honed in art contexts, in which one can engage and use the intersections and interferences of measure to shift the boundaries through collaborative and collective daily life.

This chapter explores the seeming rigidity of the built/urban environment through a series of performative artworks that offer insight into modes of resistance (by individuals and infrastructures) to affecting and being affected. In part, the discussion aims to open up the automatic process of perception and action to a radical empiricist perspective. The chapter explores the potential for materials and structures that have historically stabilised human and nonhuman agencies, to come into complex interactions, self-organise, and acquire new trajectories. This involves designating the boundaries of the senses, the body–environment, and the “natural” and the urban, to recalibrate, if not undo them. The performativity of enacting measure/s is the key aspect of a creative approach to measure and contribute to the world’s ongoingness.

The introductory chapter sets out the notion of the Anthropocene, offering a broad overview of how it has been conceptualised within cultural geography, arts, humanities, and social sciences. The chapter explores how local and global scales and boundaries are re-positioned through movement and mobility, which in turn increases the need for attention to the way that humans interact with each other and the world. It brings the key methods and inquiries of the book into focus using them to explore this significant epoch of changes: art practice, mobility, and participatory geographies. The notion of “creative measures” is introduced as a way to recognise and counteract the precariousness of living in a world or multiple, unstable, and shifting measures are in need of a process by which to move through and adapt to this unstable ground.

This chapter unpacks the mobilities of increasing tourism that set up both corporeal and imaginative faculties, pointing towards the tendencies of individual desires and consumptive practices in the Anthropocene. A series of artworks are discussed that prompt corporeal, virtual, and imaginative mobilities as a way to guide a reconfiguring of the body–environment relationship. Drawing from participatory workshops with gallery visitors, the chapter explores the role of tourism and the imaginative potentials of mobility that influence and propel certain desires for movement in the Anthropocene.

After long periods of travel or feeling jetlagged, one’s circadian rhythm is disrupted, and the body is out of synchronisation with the local environment. Spending time in daylight, particularly at sunset or sunrise, assist in reorienting and attuning the (human) body to the environmental surrounds through multi-sensory registers. However, processes of gazing and photographing can easily lapse into a representational account of the ideal tourist landscape. In this chapter, time-lapse photography is explored as a mode of moving beyond representational accounts of travel. A creative artwork is discussed in which the sensations and relations between one’s body, the motion of the time-lapse photographs, and the planetary movements of the sun setting and rising become entangled in a non-representational account of these bodily environmental adjustments.

The final chapter concludes the inquiry into creative forms of measuring by proposing that if art offers a solution, it is also part of the problem. We curate a current snapshot of creative endeavours, such as the recent international climate meetings and artistic responses by Olafur Eliasson, which have dominated global discourses on the intersection of art and the Anthropocene. The challenges ahead include the way art too can be co-opted by the forces it attempts to mitigate. The approach offered by creative measures is pragmatic and realistic so long as the imaginary and indirect solutions are understood as potential, actual and direct solutions. The techniques and movements discussed throughout the book have become the bridge between working on the Earth, towards practices of working with the Earth.

Instructional diagrams encountered during transit, such as the aircraft safety card, employ a range of visual elements that direct us how to move and what actions we need to undertake. However, instructions are not always easy to decipher and comprehension rates suggest that there is potential for misinterpretation. The complexity of instructions and mismatching of visual techniques give rise to an aesthetics of transit that coordinates spatial experiences and movements. Using examples from aircraft safety cards and artworks based on this format, this paper analyses how ‘transit aesthetics’ can give rise to affective experiences of spatial and mobile relationships.