ABSTRACT This study illustrates how incarcerated Latinx people create alternative social worlds or queer worldmakings as they negotiate everyday life in prison. I explore how these queer Latinx worldmakings are created and lived through the formation of chosen families or familias and the organizing of family dinners. Latinx queer worldmakings are temporary productions of social worlds that facilitate navigating life in the present while being queer and Latinx to resist as well as reconfigure disciplining heteronormative and white supremacist processes. It is the process of performing and creating a present that is oriented towards the future. I argue that such queer Latinx worldmakings counter white heteronormative social-spatial norms and carcerality, while also providing important lessons on what it means to live, love, and make place in and beyond the prison. The Latinx incarcerated women participants queered prison life by engaging in informal economies, negotiating relationships with correction officers, and securing ingredients for family dinners. By using an autoethnographic/testimonio approach and conversations with an incarcerated family member and friends, I explore two ways Latinx queer worldmakings are enacted: the creation of chosen families, and the organizing of family dinners.

ABSTRACT 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 Public bathrooms are key sites for understanding gender identities, gender expressions, and sexual orientations that are out of the norm. Research has shown that they are places of discrimination but they also provide opportunities for transgression. Domestic bathrooms, however, have not received much attention. Through the experiences of 27 LGBT+ youth from Bages, an interior region of Catalonia, this research shows how the bathroom at home is a significant place where gender and sexual norms are reproduced and transgressed. Using a qualitative methodology, I examine how LGBT+ youth experience the domestic bathroom, both in the family home and their own home, according to their age, gender, and sexual orientation. The domestic bathroom is shown to be relevant in terms of gender performativity and sexuality and a place of privacy where gender expression is tested and sexual pleasure is enjoyed. The study sheds light on the understanding of how social norms around gender and sexuality work, destabilizing the conception of cisheterosexuality as something innate.

ABSTRACT The main aim of the following paper is to unpack the construction processes behind global architecture that have remained conceptually under-theorized and empirically unexplored. This is achieved by shifting the focus away from the brand-name global architects to the invisible, less prominent project architects employed in their celebrity offices. Based on the analysis of qualitative interviews, the paper conceptualizes project architects as key intermediaries and systematizes their embodied practices of intermediation enacted between design and execution. Project architects are revealed as key actors who negotiate between design ideas and the local contingencies, bridging between different sites of materialization. By introducing the conceptual lens of practices of intermediation, the paper explores how architecture takes its physical form, elucidating the micro-geographies behind construction processes. The construction of global architecture is hereby conceptualized as a ‘building event’, as a situated ‘performance’, during which professionals can transgress cognitive boundaries between design knowledge and execution expertise, and formal boundaries, defined by contracts, regulatory framework, and organizational hierarchies.

ABSTRACT Often considered the ‘birthplace of the blues’, the Mississippi Delta hosts a vibrant cultural economy based on blues music and culture. As this economy relies on embodied social experiences in place, health and safety regulations issued to combat the SARS-CoV-2 virus had dramatic effects on musicians, business owners, and other cultural workers. In this paper, we examine the impacts of the pandemic on the cultural economy of the Delta, focusing on the city of Clarksdale, a primary destination for blues tourism. Situating the Delta’s cultural economy and the blues music at its foundations within a broader historical arc of racialized struggle, we explore disparities in impacts of the pandemic on differently positioned individuals and groups. We argue that, while racial inequities continue to structure the Delta’s cultural economy, local communities’ responses to the challenges of the pandemic also demonstrate intergroup solidarities. Approaching these solidarities through Monica White’s conception of collective agency and community resilience, we conclude that collective responses to the challenges of the pandemic in the Delta illuminate the potential for people from relatively privileged and marginalized groups in the region to come together to resist oppression and potentially drive social and political economic transformations.

ABSTRACT Contemporary airport automation often takes the form of self-service interfaces which transform the work tasks of check-in and boarding. In effect, such interfaces redistribute substantive and complex service labour to passengers. This article rethinks contemporary automation through the lens of the interface and examines how such automation constitutes a spatially-extended and more-than-technological assemblage that reconfigures labour across the consumer-worker divide. Rather than drawing clear lines between agential humans and technical things, we examine human elements of the interface as also having technicity within the spatialities of automation. Drawing on interviews with passenger services personnel at the two largest airports in Beijing, China, we find that at self-service interfaces airport workers step out of the way to allow passengers to step up, interfacing directly with ‘back-end’ airport digital infrastructure previously limited to paid personnel. In place of routine transduction, the work of check-in and boarding agents becomes regulatory, i.e. assisting, trouble-shooting and understanding: the work that cannot be automated. This work includes handling those passengers that self-service interfaces exclude: passengers who stray from – or cannot adhere to – the form of the generic, skilled and legible PAX. In closing, we consider this paper’s implications for future research on automation, spatiality and labour.

ABSTRACT This article examines night-time bedroom soundscapes to highlight the significance of embodied geographies of home in understanding lived inequalities of housing. The article presents an analysis of responses (n =174) to the Mass Observation Project ‘Your Bedroom’ (2017) directive, in which UK panellists were asked about their bedrooms. The mundane, ordinary and frequent noise disturbance from neighbourhoods and neighbours is documented to contribute to an understanding of the sensory geographies of night-time domesticities. The article demonstrates that embodied experiences of night-time bedroom soundscapes, including sleep practices, are shaped by housing, including residential location, building type, and ownership/tenure. The article concludes by arguing that attention to soundscapes is significant in developing an embodied understanding of the inequalities of contemporary geographies of housing and home.

ABSTRACT This paper explores disabled people’s experiences of ‘everyday’ hate within and around their home. The characteristics of the home make it a particularly interesting site of analysis, as many of the features offer protections and risks simultaneously. Moreover, the home is a particularly important space within our everyday lives, particularly for disabled people who may encounter marginalization within other social spaces. In this article, I consider how encounters within the home shape the way in which the space is made, and how disabled people are able to be within them. I explore the home as a space where persistent and repeated violence can occur, which in turn, shapes how bodies come to occupy (or not), their homes and to what meanings the home takes on. In an attempt to explore this, I offer different conceptualizations of the home as a site of refuge, control and containment, avoidance, and resistance.

ABSTRACT During the COVID-19 pandemic, several jurisdictions have exerted controls over people’s mobilities as a way of containing viral spread. In Australia, international borders were closed for almost two years and internal borders were periodically shut and policed as part of strong public health measures implemented by federal and state governments. In this article, we discuss how Australians conceptualized risk in relation to border controls, drawing on a set of interviews conducted in 2021 in which participants were asked to recount their experiences of the pandemic. Our analysis builds on social and cultural scholarship to understand the symbolic meanings and socio-spatialities of our participants’ accounts of living in COVID times, in which they were confined within both national and internal borders. Our findings suggest three main socio-spatial imaginaries at work in participants’ accounts of life behind closed borders during COVID-19. The first imaginary is an idea of immunity as a spatial property, supporting the concept of geographic immunity. The second is an ambivalent distinction between Self and Other produced through borders hastily thrown up along state lines. The third is the experience behind closed borders of living in a state of ‘suspension’, whereby risk is provisionally held off spatially, yet projected into the future.

ABSTRACT The short-form video-sharing app TikTok is the fastest growing social media platform globally, particularly among young people, and the app is attracting significant academic interest. However, the voices of young people have been mostly absent from these debates. This article offers a qualitative study of how young people are using TikTok to make care-full digital worlds in and around Sydney, Australia, drawing on interviews with sixteen young people and bringing together literatures on geographies of care, digital geographies and TikTok practices. Research participants identified care-related themes in these interviews, including that they enjoyed using the app to nurture relationships, found that it facilitated greater awareness of their relative privilege, and provided support and opportunities to express themselves. These practices proved important forms of connection and self-care during COVID-19-related periods of physical isolation and disruption to everyday routines. But a lack of care was also evident, from other users and the app itself, suggesting tensions in how care is negotiated in this digital space. Young people articulated structural problems with the app and offered constructive remedies that are practical and feasible.