The Emotional Geographies of Being Stranded Due to COVID-19: A Poetic Autoethnography of an International Doctoral Student

This poetic critical autoethnography paper studies my own experiences of disrupted mobility as a Vietnamese doctoral student in New Zealand who was stuck in Vietnam. Through the lens of space and place, I investigate the issues of sense of belonging and sense of place that were reconfigured in different spaces. The article highlights my agency to reinforce and reconnect with my sense of belonging. As the article focuses on immobility, it challenges the mobility bias in international education scholarship, arguing that new forms of mobility can be produced out of immobility and that identity reconstruction can be enabled through respatialization.

“Daddy, Help Me; I Forgot How to Make a New Friend”: Emotional Geographies of Youth Sport in Pandemic Times

In what follows, the author directs attention to one slice of pandemic life and its interplay across the emotional geographies of childhood, parenthood, work-life balance, lockdowns, stress, mental health, and youth sport, for it is in these private if banal moments that the “everyday” experiences of the pandemic are made real—and reveal the tensions and dilemmas that individuals tried to negotiate—to differing levels of success.

Beyond the Studio: Embedding the island in music production on the Isle of Eigg

Over the last four decades a number of recording studios have been developed on small islands. The first group of these were in warm water locales, exploiting the standard appeal of the tropics as places of rest and tranquillity. More recently a number of studios have developed in cold water islands, promoting the natural environment (and sometimes less than temperate weather) as encouraging reflection and creativity. This article analyses one aspect of the latter, in the form of the Visitations artist- in-residency programme run by Lost Map Records on the Scottish Isle of Eigg. Several of the musicians who have participated in residencies collected sounds from around Eigg that were embedded in original compositions. This has involved the extension of the studio space into the landscape in a process that stands in contrast to the traditional role of studios to insulate recordings from the external world. This article identifies that the first series of Visitations residences produced musical engagements with Eigg that represent the emotional geographies experienced by the musicians in relation to the landscape, providing more locally grounded projects than those produced in more traditional studios on warm water islands.

Representation of European Utopia and its Discontents in the Films of Fatih Akın

In this article, I contemplate the questions of “Europeanness” through the prism of Fatih Akın’s films. His works can be considered as being representative of European urban cinema, as he skillfully questions “European identity” through the cosmopolitan urban landscape and multicultural identities he employs. Such scrutinization of identities, be it on the level of individual, national, and/or postnational, are emphasized by the sampling of various eclectic music genres. Just as the identity of Europe has been shifting, Akın’s filmic representations have been successful in capturing the postindustrial cityscapes of certain European cities. Moreover, through the music and sounds he deploys, Akın opens up a “third space.” This unfolds through his cinematography, which aurally and visually reflects on cityscapes, immigrant and nonimmigrant identities, as well as emotional geographies created through his various subjectivities. Such a third space is also constituted by the flow of desire of his characters through their temporal displacements between (European) cities such as Hamburg and Istanbul, and their attachments to “places” through music. I thus discuss how Akın engages with the meaning of “Europeanness” and European identity in relation to the “Other,”—in other words, how this director tackles the issue of identities through the socio-political and cultural spaces of his protagonists. This also overlaps with how he utilizes music in his movies, as well as how he represents the idea of a utopia and dystopia through the social world of his diasporic characters.