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The collection of papers we have put together for this special themed section originally emerged from a desire to explore how the rapid and wholescale transformation of everyday spaces brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic might change, challenge and shift experiences and understandings of the gendered body. Since 2020, we have witnessed and experienced the dramatic alteration of everyday mobilities and a concurrent reconfiguration of spatial and embodied relations. The pandemic, and responses to it, has transformed the locations in which subjects routinely situate themselves, and the quotidian bodily practices they participate in, with immediate and lasting impact. Such a moment called for a revisiting of established theoretical and methodological paradigms in feminist geography - many of which developed from within the pages of this journal - which understand the relationship between space and the gendered body to be a mutually constitutive one. If the gendered body is understood as a processual assemblage shaped by the spaces within which it is formed, what do such radical spatial reconfigurations of embodied relations mean for gendered subjects? These papers, then, represent an opportunity to revisit and reflect upon core debates about gender, embodiment, and space in feminist geography, understanding the pandemic via a gendered lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an ethnographic case study of a private television newsroom owned by a newly merged and dominant media company in the small and highly concentrated media market of Flanders (Belgium). Through ethnographic observations and interviews along with desk research and surveys, carried out throughout 2020 both physically and virtually, we operationalise a previously developed model for pinpointing changes inside newsrooms. Our study shows once more that when newsrooms are confronted with changing circumstances, in this case, due to a merger, contemplation about how to address these changes happens largely behind closed doors on the management level, in the meantime leading to frustration amongst employees fearing that their professional identities and practices will be absolved in the newly to be created company structure. Involuntarily, our field study was affected by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which we turned into an opportunity to explore the methodological consequences for ethnographic observations that in the future are bound to be taking place in increasingly hybrid newsrooms and other work settings. Finally, we highlight the importance of studying both physical and virtual spaces in which journalists produce news content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst NHS Health Service management is usually characterized by hierarchized bureaucracy and profit-driven competitiveness, the COVID-19 pandemic drastically disrupted these ways of working and allowed London-based non-clinical management to experience their roles otherwise. This paper is based on 35 interviews with senior non-clinical management at a London-based NHS Trust during 'Alpha phase' of Britain's pandemic response (May-August 2020), an oft-overlooked group in the literature. I will draw upon Graeber's theory of "total bureaucratization" to argue that though the increasing neo-liberalization of the health-services has hitherto contributed toward a corporate mentality, the pandemic gave managers a chance to experience more collaboration and freedom than usual, which ultimately led to more effective realization of decision-making and change. The pandemic has shown NHS managers that there are alternatives to neoliberal logics of competition and hierarchy, and that those alternatives actually result in happier and effectively, more capable staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars mobilized their efforts to address its far-reaching societal problems. With mobility restrictions being front and center of the pandemic, a new cohort of transportation science was developed within a short period of time. Here, we examine more than 400 studies related to COVID-19 published across transportation journals during 2020 and 2021. The aim is (i) to scope this newly developed segment of transportation research, (ii) outline the diversity of pandemic-related issues across various divisions of the transportation field and (iii) provide a roadmap for the future of this line of research. Common themes are identified and existing congruence and discrepancies across findings are discussed. Results show that although conventional methods of transportation research were adopted in virtually all COVID-19 studies, no pre-pandemic study was particularly instrumental in the development of this segment of transportation literature. The COVID-19 segment appears to have developed its own independent knowledge foundation, in that, it does not systemically and frequently look back at any particular pre-pandemic reference. Potential impacts of this newly developed segment on the metrics of transportation journals are quantified and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]