In this editorial, our managing editor writes with an update for our readers, authors, and reviewers, and a critique of the global capitalist labour conditions that have long marred the peer review system, and have been exacerbated in pandemic times.

Drawing on an analysis of government records obtained using Access to Information and Privacy requests, key informant interviews, and a three-year engagement with land defenders and allies, we demonstrate how property and jurisdiction carved the contested space into distinct spheres of settler governing authority.

This article investigates what the double life of Apitatán’s mural reveals about the politics of visibility in Quito at a critical moment of consolidating political rights for the country’s LGBTQ community.

In this article, I think of Berlin’s techno club Berghain as a form of relational aesthetics where encounters mediated by tactile sounds, labyrinthine architecture, and libido-enhancing drugs create an unusually porous sexual subjectivity.

Media representations such as the documentary ‘Undercover Mosque’ that aired on a British television channel in 2007 is a poignant example of how the banal, everyday life of religious spaces can be folded into – while also give succour to – such narratives.

Building on a case study of the city of Halba (Lebanon) where it maps a process of contingent encounters through which disparate resources, individuals, and groups are stitched together to generate large-scale housing projects that shelter refugees, this paper demonstrates the importance of studying displacement through a grounded reading of the spatial transformations it implicates.

Based on interviews conducted between 2016 and 2019 with resettlement agents, service providers and Iraqis resettled in the U.S., we argue that the condemnation of “expectations” (that is, realistic hope) coupled with the demand for refugees’ gratitude means that Iraqis resettled to the U.S. are asked to sustain a “hope against hope” for the fullness of American futurity, even in the face of its collapse.

In this article, we analyze the transformation of refugee governance in Kenya under the auspices of the War on Terror and consider how counterterrorism has become a way of governing both refugees and precarious ethnoracialized citizens.

Drawing on the theory of the Paradigm of Governing and the Paradigm of Dwelling by the philosopher Fernández-Savater, this paper attempts to theorise a spatial politics of care through an ethnographic analysis of three grassroots initiatives – a social kitchen, an accommodation centre with refugees and a community centre – set up in Athens (Greece) as a counter-response to the crisis politics via austerity enforced in the country (2010–2018), as well as to the renewed EU border system (2016).

The article explores cartographic and statistical registers of poverty as geo-legal technologies operating across shifting visual economies which structure ways of seeing and concealing ‘the poor’ in the urban landscape.