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This paper explores the experiences of three Bangladeshi migrant workers who are the sole inhabitants and custodians of a former Maldivian island resort. We show how they currently remain in a state of indeterminate standby as the future of the resort remains uncertain, put in this state of limbo by the capacity of the resort's owners to exploit their disposability and manipulability. We investigate the rich material and sensory qualities of the island, and investigate the everyday practices that characterize how the men live and work there. First, we illustrate how the island remains haunted by the workers and tourists who formerly inhabited this space, since much of the resort infrastructure remains. Second, we explore how the buildings and things on the island are unevenly intact, in a state of partial ruination. Third, we discuss how the inexpert daily maintenance practices undertaken by the three men focus on certain areas but neglect others. Finally, we emphasize that despite their uncertain future, the men endeavour to create a stable, convivial and pleasurable island home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Public' toilets are crucial to our social and geographical landscape, and access to them has become prominent in recent public and academic debates. Drawing on a qualitative study based on 25 daily diaries and follow-up interviews with people living with the common health condition irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), this paper explores toilet access through the lens of mundane mobilities. Planning journeys, mapping toilets, a reliance on commercial toilets and intersections with travel were key themes emerging from the study. Through the lens of IBS, we see how navigations of seemingly everyday mobilities are problematised through the bodily precarity of unpredictable symptoms intertwined with the availability, comfort and knowledge of 'public' toilets. This paper works at demonstrating the interdependency between everyday mobilities and toilet access. IBS offers a particularly useful insight in which the common but often hidden nature of the condition demonstrates the multiplicities of 'public' toilet access and how the unpredictability of access meets with, and is embodied, by those with the condition. This paper contributes to interdisciplinary toilet scholarship by engaging in mundane and embodied geographies and centralises toilets as a site of connection for those studying everyday mobilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for the inclusion of aircraft noise in considerations of everyday rhythms. Informed by Lefebvre's rhythmanalytical thinking, in conjunction with sound studies and affect theory, the article expands the literature concerned with the conflicts and confluences of rhythms in everyday life. Building on in-depth interviews, it presents first-hand accounts of the experience of aircraft noise from the perspective of anti-aircraft noise activists in New York City, to demonstrate how rhythms of aircraft noise may come to set the pace of everyday life and how interviewees negotiate their imposition. It particularly attends to the embodied experience of aircraft noise and its effects on sleep. Through combining conceptual thinking and empirical findings, the article discovers aircraft noise as an instance of power, which may order and disorder rhythms and everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies a group of female sex workers and their ambivalent experiences of home in Dongguan, China's so-called sin city, before the local government technically cracked down on the city's sex industry in 2014. It has two objectives. First, we explore these workers' life journey: spatially from their rural hometown to Dongguan, socially from domestic migrants to sex workers, and subjectively from poor persons to extravagant spenders. Through this journey-based perspective, we show that the departure from one home opens a door to another home, but the door to the sex industry engulfs our respondents into a perpetual condition of unhomely life. Second, we analyze sex workers' practices of (un)homely life in various spaces of working (sauna), dwelling (rented apartment), and consumption (shopping center) in Dongguan and their imagination of a new home. We argue that home is a liminal space of ambivalent experiences that revolve around dichotomous distinctions between privacy and publicity, friendship and segregation, marginalization and belonging. This paper contributes to the critical geographies of home by incorporating these ambivalent experiences of home into sex workers' life journey of leaving and making home in the context of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the lifestyle migration of Houniao ('snowbirds'), who are mostly retirees from north China. Drawing on the case of Sanya, a tropical city, it explores the emplacement of the Houniao and the displacement of local elders, and interrogates how everyday practices and contested meanings assigned to lifestyles are embedded into the reconstruction of their linkages with place. The Houniao enjoy privileged status and their mobile life is considered progressive and modern. They experience alienation in Sanya due to cultural differences and their disinterest in integration, but facilitate their emplacement through the reproduction of familiar sociocultural networks at the beach during everyday leisure routines. In contrast, the traditional life of local residents is deemed passive and outdated by the Houniao and the local government. Local elders constitute a minority in seaside recreation and, despite their host identity, constantly feel a sense of displacement. This paper contributes to understanding lifestyle migration by unpacking lifestyle practices and their relationship to place, something which has not been fully examined in extant studies. Its focus on the Chinese Houniao also enriches the analysis of the multiplicity of lifestyle migration and internal Chinese migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies a group of female sex workers and their ambivalent experiences of home in Dongguan, China's so-called sin city, before the local government technically cracked down on the city's sex industry in 2014. It has two objectives. First, we explore these workers' life journey: spatially from their rural hometown to Dongguan, socially from domestic migrants to sex workers, and subjectively from poor persons to extravagant spenders. Through this journey-based perspective, we show that the departure from one home opens a door to another home, but the door to the sex industry engulfs our respondents into a perpetual condition of unhomely life. Second, we analyze sex workers' practices of (un)homely life in various spaces of working (sauna), dwelling (rented apartment), and consumption (shopping center) in Dongguan and their imagination of a new home. We argue that home is a liminal space of ambivalent experiences that revolve around dichotomous distinctions between privacy and publicity, friendship and segregation, marginalization and belonging. This paper contributes to the critical geographies of home by incorporating these ambivalent experiences of home into sex workers' life journey of leaving and making home in the context of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines commentary as a mode of speaking that has not received sufficient attention by social and cultural geographers. In contrast to a representational understanding of commentary, where commentary is the expert interpretation of an environment, this paper develops a more passive understanding of commentary where the commentator is a figure through which the affective, material forces that constitute environments become expressed. Based on qualitative fieldwork in Sydney, Australia, the paper examines three modes of everyday commentary related to commuting. The commentaries of reportage, anecdote and autoventriloquy each demonstrate in different ways how the affective, material environments of commuting become spoken. The paper shows, first, how commentary is a constitutive rather than derivative aspect of the experience of commuting. Second, it shows that commentary is an expression of affective, material environments, rather than either the willed self-expression of the speaker, or the manifestation of socially and historically contingent discourses. Third, it shows that commentary can both close down and draw out specific affective, material environments. Fourth, it shows how commentary modulates the powers of existence in the zone of the commute, transforming the affective possibilities immanent to different situations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents findings from an ethnographic case study in Germany investigating the relationship between shopkeepers and customers of small grocery stores owned by immigrants. The focus is on social practices within the shops and how those engaged in these activities make sense of them. Shops become meaningful through shared practices that revolve around selling and buying. However, this process is complex and not without conflict. Moving through the themes of belonging, remembering and socialising, I will show how the everyday lifeworlds of customers and shopkeepers, including their aspirations, expectations and uncertainties, intersect and how the shop emerges as a meaningful space through negotiation. Rather than looking at cultural differences alone, it is concluded that there can be significant other ways to understand multicultural places by focusing on the multiple ways that consumers engage with so-called 'ethnic' enterprises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under German colonial rule and the British mandate, Dar es Salaam was a racially segregated city. The means of segregation were a series of building ordinances that established varying standards of construction in the city's neighborhoods. A result of these ordinances was the concentration of expatriates—those people living outside their home country—in two areas of the city: the City Center and the Msasani Peninsula. Using qualitative survey and interview data with fifty expatriates in contemporary Dar es Salaam, this paper demonstrates that segregation persists in spite of postcolonial efforts to desegregate the city. In fact, segregation in contemporary Dar es Salaam affects more than just residential patterns; all aspects of expatriate everyday life are overwhelmingly concentrated in these two urban areas. This paper engages with colonial city and expatriate literatures to identify the lingering effects of colonialism and the various ways that residents perceive and transform urban space. Several explanations exist for the persistence of this segregation. These two areas historically housed expatriates and thus contain desirable urban amenities such as supermarkets and shopping malls. These areas also offer expatriates the comfort of living among other expatriates in a perceived safe environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the domestic garden is experienced as an intimate place in everyday life. With reference to Bachelard we seek to analyse prosaic pleasures and enchanting encounters that are revealed through multi-sensorial engagements and emotional attachments within the social/natural world. In particular we focus on three modalities of the everyday: work or tasks involved in gardening; that is, sensuous and embodied experiences explored through the notion of haptic perception; 'cultivation' in the sense of taking care of the garden, as well as caring for the self and others; and emotional attachments invoking body/place memories, especially of childhood gardens. To illustrate these themes we use garden narratives drawn from the Mass Observation Archive (MOA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores homeless men's visits to a public library. It shows how homeless men identified the library as a space for safety and social participation, at a time when the regional newspaper published an item questioning the appropriateness of their presence in the library. The news report promotes universal narratives that would exclude homeless people, showing the intimate relationship between the symbolic space of news, the material space of the local library, and the lifeworlds of homeless men. We report fieldwork in which we interviewed homeless men, library staff and patrons. In addition, we worked with journalists on follow-up articles foregrounding the positive function of the library in homeless men's lives, and to challenge existing news narratives that advocate the exclusion of 'the homeless' from prime public spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilising de Certeau's concepts of daily life and his delineation between strategies and tactics as everyday practices this paper examines the role of informal economies in post-Ukraine. Based on 700 household surveys and seventy-five in-depth interviews, conducted in three Ukrainian cities, the paper argues that individuals/households have developed a wide range of tactics in response to the economic marginalisation the country has endured since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Firstly, the paper details the importance of informal economies in contemporary Ukraine while highlighting that many such practices are operated out of necessity due to low wage and pension rates and high levels of corruption. This challenges state-produced statistics on the scale of economic marginalisation currently experienced in the country. By exploring a variety of these tactics the paper then examines how unequal power relations shape the spaces in which these practices operate in and how they can be simultaneously sites of exploitation and resistance to economic marginalisation. The paper concludes pessimistically by suggesting that the way in which these economic spaces are shaped precludes the development of state policies which might benefit the economically marginalised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]