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Mega‐events like the Olympics and the football World Cups remain popular around the globe, regardless of their record of damaging host cities and societies. In parallel, research on mega‐events continues to grow across a range of disciplines, including geography. Much of this literature remains fixed at global levels of analysis. In this light, mega‐events suffer from a double problem: their planning and articulation too often cause harm to cities and societies and, simultaneously, research on mega‐events focuses too much on the macro. This paper endeavours to address both problems by proposing to make sense of mega‐events by thinking through the minor. This concern valorises micro scales and marginalised people, those who most often lose during mega‐event hosting. The paper argues that geographers are uniquely positioned to conduct nuanced mega‐event research across a globally diverse range of political‐economic contexts, and calls for more geographers to contribute to this project in a move towards a critical geography of mega‐events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a version of the Eurasian Geography and Economics sponsored keynote paper presented at the Cities After Transition (CAT-network) 10th International Urban Geographies of Post-Communist States Conference, hosted by the Department of Human Geography, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia in September, 2023. Given the numerous overlapping crises that threaten life around the globe at every scale, this paper questions the relevance of status-quo approaches to geographical inquiry, beginning from but not limited to Central and Eastern Europe. In the context of so much urgent and ongoing need, the paper posits that a refinement of conceptual, methodological, and ethical commitments is necessary if we wish to do work that matters. It proposes a series of keystone sensitivities: humility and the appreciation of difference, relevance and the appreciation of the moment, and scale and the appreciation of the everyday. The paper presents the theoretical commitments underpinning each of these keystones and then suggests a menu of practical moves to inform future research and ground academic work within the urgency of the present moment. Ultimately, the paper aspires to break out of the limitations of regional container thinking and instead puts into practice the notion that theory can be generated anywhere, rather than only from select sites in the dominant Anglo-American circuits of knowledge production. On this foundation, the paper attempts to make meaning from difficulty, and offers theoretical and practical suggestions for scholars to do ethical and relevant work in this era of existential crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Europe and the wider world struggles with the COVID-19 crisis, I unpack the impacts of the pandemic on the small, wealthy, and diverse nation of Switzerland. Though deeply intertwined with capital flows and global scales, I eschew a high-level view and instead present an analysis from the ground, informed by minor theory. This micropolitical view enables a nuanced understanding of how the city and the nation are produced in daily life, while the pandemic allows an exploration of what occurs when these processes are interrupted. This investigation reveals unique, situated cartographies of everyday experience that, under pressure of lockdown, reconfigured according to individual, cantonal, and national circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]