This article aims to deepen and extend theoretical understanding of mobility by exploring some of the mechanisms by which it operates. It introduces the concept and practices of ‘tacking’ as a frame for examining the creative processes of navigation and improvisation through which people approach and reflect on the irregularities and uncertainties of their everyday rounds, enacted or otherwise narrated as spatial biography – lives conceived in mobile-spatial terms. ‘Tacking’ also travels beyond this frame of reference, i.e. it is ‘good (...) to think with’ across different substantive contexts of social interaction. Tacking suggests ongoing adjustment and modification that respond to shifting circumstances and may create new facts on the ground, which elicit further adjustments. (shrink)

This article conceptualizes the British Empire as a spatial arrangement created and sustained in the everyday activities of women. Focusing on the work of Jane Waterston – a missionary and doctor working in South Africa – and Mary Kingsley – a traveller and political lobbyist – it argues that women played an important part in fabricating the social relationships and practical activities of empire in their daily lives. Women also contributed to the spatial configuration of empire in their journeys back (...) and forth between Britain and various parts of the empire. It argues that women's routes and journeys connected parts of the empire with each other and with Britain as they, along with sailors, traders and adventurers, wove the diasporas of privilege. In making places and the connections between them, women also made themselves and their lives in new terms. In making use of the maps of territorial expansion in making themselves and their lives, the women featured in this article also contributed to forging versions of white British subjectivities which bear the imprint of empire. (shrink)

_Race, Discourse and Labourism_ argues that the commonwealth of socialism is founded upon a well-concealed history of brutality and repression. Caroline Knowles details the historical conditions of the emergence of race through Labour's dealings with Indian independence negotiations and anti-semitism in the thirties, and the effects of this on the conceptions of black citizenship, multi-racialism and black representation in labour politics.

The flip-flop trail is an object biography. It follows the translocal journeys of a pair of plastic sandals, unpacking the lives and landscapes hidden in the plastic. An important shoe-infrastructure enabling human mobility, flip-flops work as an offbeat proxy for globalization too. They proffer empirical footings in translocally-connected worlds in which people and the social textures and terrains of their everyday lives come to the fore, in place of economic processes and commodity chains favoured in hegemonic versions of globalization. These (...) reduce globalization’s complex social forms to the grand narratives of the logics of capital accumulation, implicitly naturalizing it, if critically, as inevitable, entrenched and robust. From the vantage point of the flip-flop trail, globalization looks rather different. It is more fragile and shifting, generating multiple forms of uncertainty in the lives and landscapes it simultaneously sustains and undermines. (shrink)

In dialogue with Bishop and Phillips’ concern to establish what the category of the urban might mean in the context of megacities, this piece offers four provocations in the spirit of developing their analysis. The first is the need to attend to the specifics of megacities; the second insists on the importance of including those who navigate them in the analysis; the third is a concern to unwind different forms of urban traction, and the fourth is a need to be (...) mindful of the intersecting logics of translocality. Drawing on my own empirical research into the urban translocalities drawn by the flip-flop trail, it concludes that globalization is less solid and more fragile and shifting than many of its theorists suggest. (shrink)