Parents are commonly incentivized to move to access better schools, but these moves are typically taken as one-time events. This study theorizes such education-led residential (im)mobilities as a long-term “course”—a continuous and rhythmic trajectory spanning the schooling period and beyond. Drawing on the literature on geographies of education, mobilities, and rhythmanalysis, we investigate how middle-class social reproduction is implicated in the rhythmic residential mobility and immobility trajectory spanning the schooling period, or schooling course, and how such trajectories intersect with linked lives, gendered/classed power geometries and urban (re)development. Based on forty-five in-depth interviews with varying stakeholders in Guangzhou, China, we show that successful cultural reproduction is achieved through a specific rhythmic residential pattern: moving to housing in a good school district before primary school and maintaining undisrupted residential immobility until junior high school ends. Residential immobility ensures stable learning environments and is strategically and proactively maintained. Women tend to sacrifice their careers to synchronize the everyday polyrhythmia within the household. Local people, often homeowners with rich local knowledge, are at ease and flexible in assembling the schooling course. The new locals and nonlocals, as “rhythmic aliens,” strategize housing-cum-schooling choices intensively but are susceptible to disruptions and inconsistencies. Educational restructuring renders the suburbs ideal for creating such school-driven residential eurhythm and balancing the manifold polyrhythms. Such education-led im/mobilities are essentially state-orchestrated to leverage suburban development. This study enriches the geographies of education by unpacking the rhythmic intricacies of residential im/mobilities throughout the schooling course and education’s roles in urban (re)development through rhythm (re)setting.

Information and communications technology (ICT) is increasingly embedded in the lives of migrants, creating new spatial forms that provide novel pathways for social integration. This study focuses on the leisure patterns of urban migrants in both virtual and physical spaces and further analyzes relationships between leisure patterns and social integration and its influencing factors. Using a weekly leisure activity diary of urban migrants in Guangzhou, China, we identify three leisure patterns based on the leisure activity locations and companions: virtual-solo, virtual-physical balance, and physical-partner. Both the virtual-physical balance and physical-partner leisure patterns significantly promote social integration among urban migrants. Additionally, there are notable differences in the influencing factors of these two patterns that facilitate migrant integration: The virtual-physical balance pattern is affected by home space, whereas the physical-partner pattern is influenced by the residence location and companions. This study conceptualizes the leisure patterns of urban migrants in virtual and physical spaces and explores their impact on social integration from a lifestyle-based lens, thereby expanding the existing geographical literature on virtual-physical spaces and social integration. The findings provide a crucial foundation for developing spatial policy interventions aimed at helping urban migrants better adapt to urban life.

The speculative urbanism literature predominantly examines intersections between global financial capital flows and urban transformations, wherein financial or economic speculation seeking to maximize financial capital accumulation significantly shapes urban transformations. This literature has paid insufficient attention, however, to the movement into the digital age and the rise of platform economies. Specifically, social media platforms could shape the flow of information, attention, and capital across different places, thereby empowering social media traffic to have significant influences on urban transformations. Against this backdrop, through a case study of Zibo in China, this research investigates how an unprecedented social media traffic boom motivated diverse actors—the local state, influencers, investors, and local residents—to engage in different urban speculation behaviors. Through such speculative activities, these “speculators” leveraged social media platforms to accumulate social and cultural capital, which is then sometimes converted into economic capital, ultimately shaping urban governance, economies, and everyday life. This research’s theoretical contributions are threefold. First, it better situates speculative urbanism in the current digital age. Specifically, it reveals that digitally mediated capital accumulation and conversion through social media platforms can serve as a new driving force in encouraging speculative urbanism. Second, it shows that diverse actors, not only powerful actors, could participate in urban speculation. Third, it broadens our understanding of the motivations of urban speculation beyond economic and financial, to also include reputational, political, and sociocultural speculation.

This article examines how kalo (taro) cultivation in Hawaiʻi embodies aloha ʻāina (love of the land) as a dynamic form of Indigenous resistance and cultural preservation. Drawing on ethnographic field work conducted between 2014 and 2025 and using a systems-thinking approach integrated with the Hawaiian epistemological framework of lōkahi (harmony/unity), we analyze how kalo cultivation simultaneously serves as an agricultural practice, keeper of cultural memory, and cornerstone of Hawaiian identity. Our research demonstrates how kalo farming interweaves spiritual beliefs, water management practices, family structures, and contemporary activism into a cohesive form of living resistance against Western colonization. By examining kalo’s role across these dimensions, we reveal how traditional agricultural practices can effectively bridge Indigenous cultural preservation with modern environmental challenges while fostering global connections with other Indigenous resistance movements. This analysis contributes to our understanding of how place-based cultural practices can simultaneously preserve heritage, promote environmental sustainability, and advance Indigenous sovereignty movements.

Given the challenges in theorizing and defining spatial justice in an increasingly data-driven society, this article explores the potential of framing spatial justice and the right to the digital city within non-representational geographies and posthuman theories. It turns to these frameworks as sets of theoretical tools (nonhuman agency, affect, and information moving across physicaldigital, or blended, spaces) unveiling how differences for exclusion are reified in digitalized urban contexts.

Across geographic contexts, COVID-19 lockdowns represented a significant shift in working practices for office workers. In Canada, approximately 40 percent of the working population was working from home by March 2020, with a figure as high as 80 percent in some office-based sectors. White-collar employment-based work overlapped in new ways with unpaid socially reproductive work in the home that, while school closures continued, created additional challenges for parents. Although today some firms are demanding returns to the office, others continue to allow working from home for some of the work week. This article examines interview data with high-status office workers in Ontario, Canada, who began working from home for the first time in March 2020. Contributing to cultural and feminist economic geography, it uses the concept of attachment to analyze how employees experience working from home and the possibility of returns to the office. Many described this shift in emotional terms, exploring how their feelings about office and home changed. Attachments and detachments—to the office and to other objects—were complex, overlapping, and ambivalent. I argue that the shift to working from home represents an opportunity to better understand the cultural and economic significance of the office as the assumed normative location of white-collar work.

Disorientation is a critical emotional and embodied dimension in the slow violence of the UK government’s asylum policies. This article focuses on young asylum seekers in Newcastle-Gateshead, UK, and examines their everyday experiences of the “politics of disorientation.” We demonstrate how the effects of overlapping bordering practices can result in dynamic disorientations that ebb and flow but nevertheless endure in the lifeworld of asylum seekers. First, we highlight how the enforced dispersal of asylum seekers around the United Kingdom can trigger multilayered feelings of disorientation. Dispersal destabilizes orientation to space, relations with others, bodies, and life directions, triggering what we call dispersal disorientation. Second, we argue that asylum policy can impede key aspects of the transition to adulthood for young asylum seekers, contributing to intense feelings of disorientation. Finally, we examine how asylum seekers carry out reorientation work through their everyday strategies, alongside the support of voluntary and community groups.

Geographers are increasingly called on to tackle complex social and environmental problems and link knowledge production to action. Building on coproduction and participatory action research approaches, this article makes a case for using Transformation Labs (T-Labs) as a methodological platform for engaging diverse stakeholders in knowledge coproduction and emphasizing the interconnectedness and complexity of contemporary urban sustainability challenges based on nonhierarchical communication. The insights presented in this article stem from a larger transdisciplinary project that focused on community-based, participatory action research in Gurugram, a satellite city of New Delhi. Through iterative engagement activities, the T-Lab process provided spaces for engaged communication between different stakeholders and moved beyond information sharing to encourage collaborations between communities and other stakeholders to co-design solutions to specific water management issues in the city. We argue that designing T-Labs as a communicative space for knowledge coproduction and co-designing solutions enables geographic communication to be viewed as a relational activity to foster a more collaborative and democratic approach to communicating and engaging with complex sustainability challenges.

The article addresses the contribution of short vertical films (SVFs) in geographic research contexts. We focus on their potential for countervisibilities and the ethical challenges they pose in fields of potentially higher vulnerabilities, such as migration. This research adds a hands-on perspective to film geography, examining the role of SVF in the study and dissemination of research(ed) practices. Accordingly, we address three inquiries: (1) how SVFs reshape visual logics for online platforms and how they can be integrated into mediatized public geographies; (2) how SVFs serve as a reflexive instrument for exploring visibility dynamics and the grammars of seeing and being seen in the public sphere; and (3) how subaltern groups might benefit (or not) from engaging in SVF projects. Considering our own research with film-based methods in the field of migration studies, we address the potential and challenges of using audiovisual media for geographic inquiry and discuss ethical considerations involved in a reflective and critical approach to the medium and the messages it conveys.