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In this paper I demonstrate the relationship between (sub)urban walking and worlding by employing creative analytical practice (Richardson and St Pierre, 2005). Auto-ethnographic accounts and qualitative data are woven into a single story to represent ‘personal and social meanings rather than simplifying and reducing to generalise’ (Parry and Johnson, 2007, p. 120). Walking, is often associated with storying (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008; Solnit, 2001) and specifically, I employ ‘worlding’ to illustrate how walking-with contributes to the emergent, embodied and relational nature of mothering as a more-than-human story in motion. I address how mothering worlds are made legible (Stewart, 2015) through walking-with a baby and other mothers. Even during the lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, our everyday affective and embodied encounters shape the worlds we inhabit. Haraway (2016) suggests worlding is not an individual experience but is relational, always collective. Indeed, Ingold and Vergunst (2008, p. 2) argue that walking is social, and ‘lives are paced out in their mutual relations.’ Fundamentally, walking-with a baby (in a pram or wearing in a sling or wrap) is an entanglement of bodies, a negotiated practice where bodies intra-act. Walking-with is always a multiplicity of ‘withs’ – mother-child-pram/sling-othermothers-landscapes-covid-rules-restrictions and so forth. Springgay and Truman (2022) states, the with is merely not additive, it is a milieu of relations. Middleton (2022), highlights that urban walking has been characterized as a positive and romantic experience which limits the possibility of critically understanding everyday walking practices of diverse users. The walking in this paper is far from romanticised, it is women’s everyday walkingwith their babies. It takes place in and through (sub)urban landscapes, and how we negotiate our maternal bodies through these spaces, at a very particular moment in time (Covid-19 lockdowns), is imbricated in our worldi

In this article, we disrupt extractivist and privileged individualised knowledge production by decentering the human ‘I’ to ‘we’ through storying. Inspired by LeGuin (2019) and Haraway’s (2016) narrative baglady figuration, we explore a Baglady storytelling praxis. This means putting to work posthuman theories with the more-than-human, where knowledge-making is generated through the intra-actions of our collective's storying. Starting with the provocation of locking and unlocking, we story to make sense of political and ethical affectivities that disrupt and interrupt everyday materialities and spatialities. From here, we speculate with movements of response-ability as “intra-activism” (Renold & Ringrose, 2017, 631). For us, storying puts in motion intra-action, speculation, calls to act, relationality, and feminist community building that we frame as intra-storying-activism. Making and re-making stories within intra-storying-activism navigates non-hierarchical post-authorship to re-imagine, speculate with, and trouble the human from extractivist positions. By foregrounding relationality as a multiplying storying, we create playful, dynamic, and generative spaces for knowledge-making as a collective that both welcomes and provokes calls to act.

The field of events management has been critiqued for being overly focused on operational and managerial concerns to the detriment of critical analysis of power and representation, of which equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) is an important aspect. This paper reports on an audit of the four leading events management journals over the period 2011-2021 to assess the current state of play in relation to engagement with EDI issues and consider whether this critique remains justified. After screening, 49 articles were included. Findings reveal that EDI remains a marginal issue in events management journals, often confined to special issues, with no evidence of increasing engagement over the review period. EDI needs to become more integrated in the core body of knowledge of events management to ensure that events research is socially useful to students, other researchers and practitioners, contributing to the development and reputation of the field.

This paper problematises notions of good/bad mothering by putting to work Deleuze and Guattari’s haecceity (2004). Focusing on babywearing, it presents an autoethnography of my experiences of becoming-mother during the Covid-19 pandemic. Using diffractive analysis (Barad, 2014) I analyse the entanglement of my experiences of babywearing, research diaries, images/selfies, the regulations introduced during the pandemic, and the ‘global cultural script’ (Kerrane et al, 2021, 1154) of being a good mother. It works towards a position of (k)not knowing (Osgood, 2019), being open to the unknown. Under the lens of haecceity becoming-mother is ‘thisness’ – a middle, knotting, and unknotting, ever emergent.

Book review of Doing gender in events: feminist perspectives in critical event studies by Barbara Grabher, London, Routledge (Critical Event Studies Series), 2021, 126 pp., £44.99 (hardback), £14.99 (ebook), ISBN 9780367639754

This paper offers a critical analysis of how urban place-making as a top-down or bottom-up action, involving organisational intervention or facilitation, is typified by problematic angles of approach. Instead, we evidence a flat ontological perspective, entering into urban assemblages to feel the chaotic and ever-changing forces that make places. Specifically, we use the Deleuzoguattarian lens of the refrain to employ a transversal analysis of the place-making inherent within an urban event - the Manchester and Salford Whit Walks; a Church of England procession that has been iterated for over 200 years. This reveals the importance of always-becoming place, characterised by ongoing repetition with difference, and embodied in the notion of Sometimes… Sometimes… Sometimes… We conclude that urban place-making is not something that can be simply started through organisational intervention, or facilitation of community-led approaches, but a process which needs to be engaged with from the middle. It’s not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it, you’ll see that everything changes. (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 25).

This paper rethinks dwelling as an active and emergent process through which (re)connections to place are valorised by humans collectively walking with each other in a recursive manner. We revisit Heidegger’s notion of dwelling, often criticised for perpetuating enclosure and stasis, by revealing the interconnections between dwelling and movement. Drawing on a two-century old religious procession—the Manchester and Salford Whit Walks—as an empirical example, our interpretive analysis is centred around three themes. First, we demonstrate how dwelling becomes embodied in performative and collective movement. Second, we examine how dwelling in this context is reinforced through repetition and iteration of that movement. Third, we show how such movement is reliant on repair and maintenance work, which facilitates the (re)emergence of dwelling. We contribute, therefore, empirical insights into how dwelling emerges from a movement through place which, in turn, cements a being in place. Furthermore, this article has important implications for thinking about how the movement of citizens through processional forms of walking can be a powerful tool for underpinning feelings of dwelling, and related concepts of sense of place and civic pride.

Drawing on the Manchester and Salford Whit Walks, a Church of England Whitsuntide procession, this research adopts della Dora’s concept of the infrasecular to interpret the interstitiality of the religious or civic nature of leisure experiences in the urban context. Processional walking at Whitsuntide originated as a pre-industrial custom that was simultaneously a religious and a leisure practice. However, with the decline of religion the meanings the Whit Walks have changed in a number of dimensions. Using the lens of infrasecular geography, this research explored the ways in which these Walks have remade sacred space in the secular city through an historical account of their evolution, interviews with participants and observation. The research re-emphasises the continuing importance of custom to contemporary leisure practice and through the infrasecular lens enables new insights into the dynamics of the historical spaces of leisure practice. The study concludes that religion remains an important influence on leisure and that the concept of the infrasecular merits further investigation in leisure practices.

his article explores consumers’ experiences of place atmospheres through a study into football matches, a context in which atmosphere is pertinent. While existing marketing literature concerning atmospherics largely conceptualises atmosphere as controllable, singular, and confined to the consumption environment and experience under investigation, we instead contribute a more spatially and temporally porous theorisation. Drawing insights from both consumer research and geography surrounding affect, embodiment and atmosphere, we unpack the spatial and temporal aspects of atmosphere in relation to consumers’ past memories, disrupted routines, and anticipations of future. The article contributes, therefore, to bourgeoning literature within marketing and consumer research regarding the consumption in – and of – places.

Cities have always been hubs for celebration and festivity, bringing people together to escape temporarily from the mundane nature of everyday routines. Festivals have often been bridges between people and places, linking personal geography with collective experiences and therefore increasingly of interest to cultural geographers. However, festivals also have social, economic, and political aspects that are constructed by societal influences of the time and place. This paper presents some of the key debates ongoing in academic literature across disciplines to demonstrate the contested role that cultural festivals play in urban settings and suggests that urban geography is critical to developing these debates. It is simply no longer possible to say that festivity is a simple rupture in the mundanity of everyday life of urban citizens; rather, contemporary cultural festivals now often exhibit complex and uneasy tensions between the socio-economic strategies of commercialized neoliberal cities and the cultural needs of diverse communities to gather and celebrate. By reviewing the development of festivals as part of the urban cultural economy utilising a geographic lens, this paper sets out how cultural festivals are now more often employed by cities for marketing, tourism, and other socio-economic benefits. We demonstrate that cultural festivals and cities have an ongoing relationship, which is now mainly commercialized and politicized, and this has diverse impacts on communities, urban spaces, and cultural identities.

his article explores consumers’ experiences of place atmospheres through a study into football matches, a context in which atmosphere is pertinent. While existing marketing literature concerning atmospherics largely conceptualises atmosphere as controllable, singular, and confined to the consumption environment and experience under investigation, we instead contribute a more spatially and temporally porous theorisation. Drawing insights from both consumer research and geography surrounding affect, embodiment and atmosphere, we unpack the spatial and temporal aspects of atmosphere in relation to consumers’ past memories, disrupted routines, and anticipations of future. The article contributes, therefore, to bourgeoning literature within marketing and consumer research regarding the consumption in – and of – places.

This paper offers a critical analysis of how urban place-making as a top-down or bottom-up action, involving organisational intervention or facilitation, is typified by problematic angles of approach. Instead, we evidence a flat ontological perspective, entering into urban assemblages to feel the chaotic and ever-changing forces that make places. Specifically, we use the Deleuzoguattarian lens of the refrain to employ a transversal analysis of the place-making inherent within an urban event - the Manchester and Salford Whit Walks; a Church of England procession that has been iterated for over 200 years. This reveals the importance of always-becoming place, characterised by ongoing repetition with difference, and embodied in the notion of Sometimes… Sometimes… Sometimes… We conclude that urban place-making is not something that can be simply started through organisational intervention, or facilitation of community-led approaches, but a process which needs to be engaged with from the middle. It’s not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it, you’ll see that everything changes. (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 25).