In this special section we ask the question, “How can visual ethnographies that focus on sensory inhabitations of place make us attentive to diverse worlds?”

This paper focuses on multisensory experiences of open-air Asian-style markets in Darwin, a tropical north Australian city. Participatory photography and poetry provide insights into the potentialities of city life that refresh bodies of colour with different histories and geographies of racialisation.

How do photographs help us visualise absence in deathscapes? This paper argues for a more involved and aesthetic approach to visual methods and the photography of death and memory.

Colonial imaginaries fix, obscure, and exclude practices of Indigeneity that disrupt settler-normativity. Beyond the colonial frame, this paper amplifies practices of inhabiting the beach that exceed representational critique and stimulate other ways of authoring place. This paper looks for an activism that resists settling on colonial ways of knowing place.

While there has been a significant rise in the number of city rankings and indexes, as well as increased scholarly interest in comparative urban analysis, how they are shaping the ‘global’ imagination of those driving urban policymaking or how they shape global city thinking is still little understood. Drawing on correlation analysis of global city discourses in Dubai, Singapore, and Sydney, this essay illustrates how city rankings relate to the ways we speak of global cities, and what comparative imagination might underpin this relationship.

In this paper we introduce the concept of the “city-island-state” into discussions of urban island and city-state precariousness, vulnerability, and wounding, recognising the criticality of an interconnected approach, embedding “city” and “state” within “island(ness).” Through the lens of Malta and the indicative example of the COVID-19 pandemic, we recognise that while all small island-states, cities, and city-states are vulnerable to wounding, this becomes particularly acute when considering the three together within the complex, interconnected, and precarious global system of flows, connections, and dependencies within the current financialisation phase of neoliberalism. We conceptualise this as a multi-level “wounding cascade” through which it is apparent that if the “city” is wounded, then the island and state are both wounded.

This paper draws on Felix Guattari’s evocations of the “cosmos,” toward a new subjective cartography. We invent the concept of “cosmic subjectivity” to grasp subjective processes as machinic productions, which draw on alternate ontological universes. Through three science fiction films – War for the Planet of the Apes, Blade Runner 2059 and Arrival – we explore the potentials and complexities of opening subjective production to the indeterminate forces of these ontological universes.

Early encounters with dynamic Australian beaches are shown to enamour attachment to these spaces. Concepts in psychoanalytic geography and psychology are drawn on to explain such attachments.

Geographers have a long-established research interest in the ways infrastructures shape urban flood vulnerability and how urbanites cope with urban flooding. In this paper, I contribute to this literature by exploring the vertical city during an urban flooding situation.

This paper presents an autoethnographic account of routinely monitoring personal exposure to air pollution using a portable sensor, whilst reflecting on self-tracking and the “Quantified Self” (QS) movement's objective of “the optimal self.” By exploring how this otherwise absent data may induce behavioural change and encourage individuals and their networks to minimise pollution exposure, this paper raises important questions about the role of the QS and such monitoring devices in addressing urban air pollution and creating a sense of collective accountability to the environment.

This paper proposes a greater engagement of geographers with the socio-ecological imagination, understood as a means for activists and scholars to envisage just and sustainable futures beyond ecological crisis. Drawing on qualitative research, I uncover dominant oppositional tendencies within young environmental activists' narratives of socio-ecological transformation and an under-development of alternative imaginaries. I explore the major barriers to imagining alternative socio-ecological futures in the current era of multi-dimensional crisis.

This paper addresses issues of academic stress and anxiety that are exacerbated by the increasing neoliberalisation of academia. Our central argument is that self-care may be regarded as a radical act that can push against the interests of the neoliberal university. We illustrate how researcher self-care can be engaged as an active process that operates to create and inform change within our communities through recognising ourselves as networked actors, rather than self-contained individuals as the neoliberal ideology would have us believe.

Focusing on the recent transformation of urban food markets in the UK, this paper applies a practice theory perspective to analyse the social practices involved in the making and doing of urban food markets.