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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]

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]